The Marketer vs. The Technician
You’re involved in a competitive online battle going on in your niche and there’s a good chance you’re not even aware you’re one of the competitors.
Imagine two entrepreneurs – one is the Marketer and one is the Technician. Assuming they’re selling a product or service of comparable quality, which one do you think will be doing better (5) years from now?*
It’s a safe bet that the Marketer will be doing significantly better than the Technician. Why? Because the Marketer is focused on, maybe even obsessed with, identifying the wants and needs of a very well-defined customer. They make sure that their products & services are continually promoted as the solution to those needs & desires.
The Technician, on the other hand, is focused on delivering a quality product or service first and marketing second. This is true even in the quality of their writing. Their attitude is one of: If I build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to my door.
If you want to really thrive online, you must understand the battle the Marketers are waging in your niche and work to embrace and/or counter their advantages.
True Marketers are market demand specialists in that they create a market demand for their products and services. Their weapons include an arsenal of metrics, analytics, research, surveys and skillful copywriting. Their battle tactics include plenty of campaign planning and management coupled with fast execution and follow through.
True Technicians are product specialists in that they create and polish a product or service that best suits the needs and desires. Their weapons are limited to the quality of their product or service and the inherent demand that generates. Their battle tactics include product/service improvements, technical innovation, word-of-mouth advertising and genuine expertise.
So let’s look at the difference between how a typical Marketer writes articles versus how a Technician writes articles:
Typical Marketer
- Leaps to quickly quantify the metrics behind how success will be defined
- Determines what specifically must happen in terms of quantity and quality of article production
- Does keyword research to project market size and depth of possible impact
- Plans deployment, syndication and follow-up to ensure the articles in their inventory are an appreciating asset that reflects favorably on their enterprise and brand(s)
Typical Technician
- They will normally do some comprehensive research, and as a result create too many words per article
- They obsess over the proper use of language, spelling, grammar and sentence structure
- They generally produce very high quality articles; which often comes at the price of low article volume and limited marketing impact
It’s fairly obvious that to be truly successful in your online marketing efforts, you need to be a Technician who writes and thinks like a Marketer. You must produce a large quantity of high-quality articles that reflect well on your brand while at the same time dominating your niche using numeric metrics (rather than gut feelings) to advance your market position.
The TECHNICIAN’S Task: Take a fresh look at your article writing & marketing strategies through the eyes of the analytical metrics-driven Marketer. See the building of your article writing inventory as part of a campaign or a series of campaigns designed to achieve very measurable objectives in terms of lead generation and traffic attraction.
The MARKETER’S Task: Give one piece of article writing advice to non-marketer Expert Authors to help them see the world through your marketing eyes. What would you recommend?
* Does this blog post look familiar? It should. It’s a slightly modified version of a post written by Chris back in May of last year. It got a great response then and we felt that with a few tweaks it was even more apropos today. We hope you’ll agree.
Dr. Schwenk, Diane, Josef and Lance,
At the risk of sounding wishy-washy, you’re ALL correct. Expert Authors need to decide for themselves what is their desired outcome for their article writing efforts. I’m familiar with a Nigerian poet who has no desire for money – he simply wants to have his poems published on the web. For others, there is an extreme passion for the technical accuracy of their articles and the income-generating potential takes a back seat by choice. Still others have no desire for quality and seek only to make money – these are the folks that Lance eludes to.
However, the vast majority of our membership falls somewhere in the middle. They are entrepreneurs who wish to market their business in a effective, relevant and meaningful manner. They truly seek that balance between technician and marketer that can be so elusive. It’s these people who will benefit the most from the balanced approached we’re endorsing here.
August 26, 2009 at 8:38 AM[Reply]