Seth Godin Speaks to Me

A couple of days ago I attended the PartnerUp and Deluxe leadership meeting where we had popular marketing guru Seth Godin as a guest speaker. If you ever get the chance to hear him speak, please do so…and take notes! It will be well worth your while, trust me.

Seth’s presentation was full of energy, but more importantly it had a message that all small business owners should take a second to really think about. There were actually several good points, but the one that really stuck with me was the idea of interruption marketing vs. permission marketing.

So many businesses are guilty of interruption marketing. They send out direct mail or telemarket their customers to death. They think that if they interrupt the lives of total strangers enough times, these people will eventually break down and buy from them.

For many years that’s the way it worked, but what Seth was alluding to in his speech is that times have changed. This old model doesn’t hold up anymore. Instead, businesses need to start engaging in permission marketing. Permission marketing really is a simple concept. It’s about building relationships with your customers, or as he puts it “turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.” Permission marketing cuts through all the clutter that consumers are bombarded with everyday and enables them to take ownership in how they are marketed to.

Even though it is a simple idea, there’s a lot more to be learned about the topic to gain a full understanding. For the full effect you really need to read Seth’s book, titled “Permission Marketing.”