Welcome to our series Digital Marketing in a Noisy World. This content was originally presented in our breakout session at Breathe Christian Writers Conference 2015. (Check out our Prezi here.) We hope this information is helpful and encouraging for you. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or contact us.
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What is Marketing?
By Lindsay Gustafson
Effective digital marketing doesn’t just happen. With so many options and noise in digital spaces, adopting a marketing orientation is critical to your digital hygiene. Or a mess will happen and you WILL go crazy.
Digital Hygiene – The daily practice of clearly communicating your art to a dedicated tribe in digital spaces.
We will discuss and help you think through WHY and HOW to leverage your content, build your digital platform, and connect with people who want to engage with it, as well as review the best practices of digital marketing options.
What is Marketing?
Evil. Expensive. Narcissistic. Hard. Self promotion. A waste of time.
These are all things I’ve heard from AUTHORS about marketing. (And you likely have similar feelings.)
Google ‘Marketing’ and this is the definition you get: The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
Ask the American Marketing Association and they will tell you this: Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
I don’t know about you, but first, I don’t really understand these (WHAT does this look like for me? HOW do I do this for my book?). And second, I don’t really want to do them for fear that I will come across as a sleazy salesman.
We need a to define a new way of marketing that FITS into this digital world we find ourselves in today.
Enter: Content Marketing
With the development of digital spaces came the onset of content marketing:
Content marketing is an approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. – Content Marketing Institute
Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers (build a tribe!) by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior.
All the digital marketing tools (website, social media, digital ads, etc) are amazing tools to be used by a writer! It is another venue (other than a book) to produce good content the author is passionate about and wants to bring others into. No time in history has an author (specifically) had such a opportunity to publish freely and influence BEYOND readership of a book. What author wouldn’t want to take advantage of that?
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Leveraging years of experience in marketing, the publishing world, non-profit development, and a passion for gathering tribes, Lindsay is co-owner, chief marketer and queen of detail of Apricot Services. When she’s not in the virtual world she can be found laughing with her husband, 2 kids and dog.
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Thank you for joining us on this series. Tune in next time to learn more digital marketing tips.
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