When it comes to marketing, there’s no comparison between Seth Godin and me. My formal background is in website design, computer programming and systems analysis. But I’ve developed a flair for content creation and building a system to help other solopreneurs who are overwhelmed and easily distracted.
Marketing is something I never enjoyed until a couple of years ago. Now that I’m steadfast in my business pivot, I’m enjoying it even more. Just from the idea that marketing is all about experimenting.
The book is small, so I read a minimum of 20 pages per day or 1 chapter. I also played the audiobook version at 1.7x speed (part of my memory retention process).
After each chapter, I journaled some notes and thoughts, and I’d like to share a few of those with you today.
I’m going to outline some key takeaways and some “meh” moments from the book in order to keep this article short.
- Marketing is About Change: this really stood out for me and the idea of making a change, not coercing people, but serving them, being truly helpful and taking them from their current state to a desired one. This I really jived with because the “stages of awareness” is something that’s covered quite intensively in Copy School, so this resonated with me.
- Smallest Viable Audience: this is something that’s been in the last few books I’ve read, so reading Seth explain this concept made it even easier to drill it into my brain. Screw the masses (my words) and focus on the smallest viable audience and serve them well.
- Empathy: Understanding your audience’s dreams, desires, fears, and needs is important. Well, crucial in fact. I get this part and I have it built into my ideal customer profile aka Avatar.
- Minimum Viable Product: launching early, getting feedback, analyzing and adjusting. Rinse and repeat. I’ve been working on this already and found Seth’s explanation really easy to understand.
- Permission Marketing: there was quite a bit of discussion on this and because I’ve already learned this from various sources, I found myself glazing over this part. But, because there may be some new angles and perspectives to learn about, I went back and re-read it and was done with that chapter.
- Trust and Tension: this was interesting as I’ve never heard that process worded this way. Creating a sense of anticipation with the audience while ensuring I deliver on the promises to maintain trust.
- What really stuck with me: Know yourself, know your product, know your customer. Always be testing, making it better.
- Lack of Examples: whenever I read a non-fiction book, especially for business, I want to see examples. It helps me to understand the theory and then see it visually. There were a few case studies, but many of the topics discussed could have used examples. Such as the “positioning exercise of X and Y axes”. I was hoping it was going to be more of a step-by-step, tactical guide, which it’s definitely not.
- Repetition: some ideas were repeated many times, which I could have done without.
- The Funnel: this chapter I was anticipating to be exciting, and it was the exact opposite. It wasn’t a bad chapter, but I was hoping for something different.
- Use of the Word Tribe: The word Tribe was used a lot in the book and could be construed as a racially sensitive word, and it’s such a cliché in marketing. It would have been just as easy to use the word “community”.
- Last Chapter was Messed Up: I don’t know where it went wrong, but the chapter in the book didn’t match the audio version. The audio version changed the order of the first and second parts of the chapter.This threw me for a loop.
- Miscellaneous: A lot of theory and some industry language that went over my head. I’m not saying this is bad. If you’re a professional marketer, this would have made sense to you, but some words he used, I had to look them up. Maybe I’m not the ideal reader for this book.
- What I Ignored: the chapter about ads — read it, held no interest because I will not be running any type of ads on social. If running ads interests you, this will be a good chapter for you.
Summary: In the end, I’m glad I read the book, and although some parts were basic, and some were so abstract, I had to look stuff up, I did learn how to approach my ideal customer and community of people I’m serving.
I did catch a few ah-ha moments in the chapters about the minimal viable audience and minimal viable product, and this is where I took the most notes. Lack of examples was fine in this case, since I already learned about it in the book Company of One by Paul Jarvis.
And the book validated my belief that “I’m not for everyone, nor do I want to be”.
The premise of the book to me felt it was targeted to more of an agency type of marketing reader. Not a Solopreneur, hence my “meh” feeling.
I wouldn’t recommend this book to you if you have ZERO marketing knowledge. But if you have more than the basics understood, you’ll get some true value from this book.
If you’ve already read it, what’s your take?
Until next time, stay inspired!
Gisèle
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