Today is the episode on marketing today. Marketing, I&#39;m gonna break it all down into two parts. Originally I thought this was going be one piece, but it turns out that it&#39;s just too big. And one of the things, and reason that I want to separate it is, there&#39;s not just what&#39;s going on today. As I&#39;ve mentioned many times, technology is moving just so fast that we really have to plan, or at least be aware, of what&#39;s happening towards the future. So, we will be taking a look at a second part next week, and this week we&#39;re talking about what&#39;s going on today, what you can do.

Now, marketing is different than it has been years ago, not in the sense that the customer has changed at all, not at all. However, everybody is able to focus so much better, and refine their marketing to such a degree, because of all the information available today, and the new ways of marketing that are available today. So you have to really know your customer better, and that&#39;s where, really, marketing today starts, and begins very much with customer service, customer satisfaction, and learning from those experiences and those customers.

This will all give you the ideas, of course, on how to attract many new customers and expand your market greatly, but the idea is to first understand them well through those means. Now, that means leveraging your community, networking with the customers, whether you have groups or information or whatever, run competitions. That is, if there&#39;s any way you can put together some sort of competition, or experience, or something that the customer can have with your product or with you, that can be a great way to both build loyalty and gain information. Starting off today, YouTube, webinars, et cetera, you don&#39;t want to waste time, or other people&#39;s time, but you see so much about how you can turn around and learn just about anything on YouTube today, or eHow, et cetera.

So one of the ideas is, of course, to put some out on your own. Yes, there may be others out there. Can you do it better? Can you do it well? Can you do it in such a way to demonstrate your product and how to use it; not selling at all, just engaging with the customer so that you become an authority. If you become an authority, or at least thought of as an authority, particularly if you&#39;re in a local area, you become more attractive. If you&#39;re worldwide, it&#39;s the same thing. So the idea is to give it away for free; that is a free class, free seminar related to your product, doing a demo.

You could be a local hardware store. Recently, interestingly, and that&#39;s why I mention it, I was asked how could they survive. They were talking about, you know, there&#39;s Lowe&#39;s and Home Depot, and how are they gonna survive. Well, first of all, keep in mind, they probably can&#39;t survive on price. So what do they do? They have to have other dimensions; know and understand your customer well, maybe you can survive or do bet

103 – Marketing Today; Social Media and Customer Focus

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