Marketing Highlights

Make 'Em Laugh

"Most marketing campaigns fall down because they're specifically designed to sell products and generate leads," says David Meerman Scott, viral-marketing strategist and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. A better plan, he says, is to back off the sell and amp up the entertainment.

Be a Guru: Part I

Whether you sell real estate or fix teeth, you know a whole lot more about your business than your customers do. Attract attention by sharing that expertise.

Stick to a Shtick

Some brands are so dialed in to a customer base--its history, interests and aspirations--that the marketing effort smacks more of a celebration.

Connect With Customers by Making Them Stars

This is a less costly twist on MicroBilt's make-a-video strategy, with a dash of social-networking spice thrown in. Talented or not, people want to share their art, stories, even their hopes and dreams. Give them an outlet in exchange for sampling your product or service.

Connect With Customers by Making Them Stars

This is a less costly twist on MicroBilt's make-a-video strategy, with a dash of social-networking spice thrown in. Talented or not, people want to share their art, stories, even their hopes and dreams. Give them an outlet in exchange for sampling your product or service.

Tweet (No, really, we mean it.)

By now you've heard about Twitter--that curious, strangely addictive social-networking technology that facilitates the exchange of torrents of severely truncated messages (140 characters max) among millions of users. You may have read that it's a waste of time--and in many respects, that's true. What's also true is that Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool. Here are 21 compelling ways to use it.

Work the Press

Mentions in the news media offer what traditional marketing and advertising can't: exposure with implied credibility. While PR is nothing new, plenty of companies (and PR agencies) still don't get it.

Be a Guru: Part II

Disseminating data and white papers is nice, but ultimately connecting with customers is what counts.

Get on the Menu

If you can, let others do your marketing for you.

Host a Virtual Trade Show

Traditional trade shows are a convention-center-sized hassle--and they cost a lot to boot. Add up booth rental and presentation time-slot fees, advertising, promotional doodads and travel expenses (never mind the lost time away from the office), and a company's tab can rocket up to $100,000 per show. Hence the rise of virtual trade shows, designed to look and function like the real thing but that play out in real time in cyberspace. Entry fee: just $3,000 to $8,000. Better yet, you don't need to be a computer wizard to participate. Here are nine steps for getting the most out of them.

Meet the Neighbors

The rise of online networks plugged into specific local communities is a huge marketing opportunity for small businesses.

Build a Board to Buff Your Rep

Small businesses are short on a lot of things, credibility included. The higher your profile, the more clout you'll have with suppliers, partners and customers. A board of advisers can help.

Light up Their Inboxes

E-mail marketing has been around for years, but the tricky part remains getting people to open the messages in the first place.

Bake It in

Marketing shouldn't be an afterthought--it should be an integral part of the business concept and execution strategy.

Barter for Exposure

By now, everyone knows that the more people who link to a Web site, the higher it appears in Google's search results. That's where all those trigger-happy bloggers come in.

Cozy up to Celebrities

Think celebrity sponsorship is the solely province of companies with huge marketing budgets? Think again.

Wipe Off the Lens

If all else fails, take another hard look at the market and its willingness to pay for your product or service. Cost: Market surveys can cost up to $10,000, but there are some cheaper online options. Zoomerang charges $600 for a year subscription to its surveys service; Survey Monkey offers subscriptions starting at around $20 per month or $200 a year. Focus groups? Perhaps $100 for food and drinks.

Fool article October 2009: Power of Influence

The Power of Influence

By Jennifer Schonberger
October 20, 2009

A Southern comedian of the 1960s, Brother Dave Gardner (not Tom's brother, David Gardner!), said that you can have a great product and the public might beat a path to your door -- but advertising helps. And advertising is marketing.

A company can produce a good product, but if it doesn't market it well, the product could be a flop. Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), for example, along with Coca Cola (NYSE: KO) and Ralph Lauren (NYSE: RL), are smart marketers.

Robert Cialdini, who recently visited Fool HQ, says we need to get real when it comes to how we're marketing our products -- and part of getting real is admitting weaknesses upfront.

Cialdini was the regents' professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, founder and president of consulting firm Influence at Work, and author of the book Influence. His latest book is Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive.

In his well-known book Influence -- a book about influence and marketing -- Cialdini lays out six principles of influence as they pertain to the psychology of marketing:

• Reciprocation
• Commitment and consistency
• Social proof
• Authority
• Liking
• Scarcity

During Cialdini's visit to The Fool, we delved into the principle of authority -- the notion that we defer to people with authority. Someone who has expertise -- credentials, background, or experience -- that one can use to take shortcuts to make an informed decision.

But it turns out that expertise alone doesn't define the "optimal authority," according to Cialdini. The optimal authority is defined not only by expertise and knowledge, but also by trustworthiness. "It's very important to try to establish both of those components in the eyes and minds of an audience before we try to be influential," he said. "If those two things are present in the way someone registers us, we have become the single most powerful authority, or communicator that social sciences has ever uncovered."

Establishing trust
Cialdini points out the obvious: that the first is easier than the second. You can represent your background credentials, experience, and years on the job fairly quickly. Establishing trust can take a period of time traditionally. But what if you don't have weeks, months, or longer? Is there anything you can do to produce instant trust? Cialdini says there is.

The secret is to produce your weakness before your strength. The concept was developed by the advertising community, which has to introduce new products or services to markets that have no history with those products and services.

The most savvy of them will mention a weakness in their case before they present the strongest argument in favor of their case. As counterintuitive as it might sound, Cialdini says it establishes them immediately as being credible and trustworthy. "There's no special reason for people to believe our most positive claims unless we've demonstrated our trustworthiness," he said. "So the place the moment of power actually exists most propitiously for us is in the moment after we mention a small drawback or a weakness."

Cialdini points to Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK-A) letter to the shareholders as an example. He notes that in the letters, Warren Buffett first describes something that went wrong, but then follows that with the things that went well.

The power of 'but ...'
According to Cialdini, the word "but" says to recipients in all human languages to take the information they just received, put it away and focus your attention on the next thing I'm about to say. "This is why we want our weaknesses before the word 'but' and our strengths after," he said. "The weakness has to go first, otherwise you don't get the proper focus on the strength."

The top marketing campaigns of all time employed this strategy. He points to Volkswagen as an example. Each ad began with the same statement "We're ugly, but ..." Then they talked about gas economy, reliability, and availability of parts through a network they had set up. Other examples, according to Cialdini, include, Avis' "Avis, we're No. 2, but we try harder;" and Loreal's "We're expensive, but you're worth it."

Madoff's use of Cialdini's principles
Oddly enough, Cialdini's six principles can be applied to Bernard Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Madoff used several of Cialdini's principles, but for evil instead of good. He used the authority principle because he established himself as an expert in the area of investing. Madoff presented himself as trustworthy through serving as chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange.

He also used the principle of social proof, that people want to follow the lead of those around them like them. As Cialdini points out, the recruiting always took place among individuals in their own network groups where people knew one another and let the message come from their colleagues instead of from somebody who is trying to sell a product or service. Finally, Madoff used scarcity, says Cialdini, noting that there were limited availabilities to gain access to investing with Madoff, which made those opportunities seem more valuable and exclusive.

Cialdini says there are two lessons can be learned from the Bernie Madoff saga. One is the power of these rules. The second is that if you used them the way Bernie Madoff did -- dishonestly -- the whole thing crashes down. "It's not sustainable if used that way," he said.