Permission Marketing

Permission Marketing explains why nobody pays attention to TV commercials and flyers anymore, and shows you how in today’s crowded market, you can cheaply start a dialogue with your ideal customer, build a relationship over time and sell to them much more effectively.

Man, looking back, marketing in the 1950’s must’ve been a dream. Color TV became available on a big scale and people’s eyes were glued to the tiny boxes in their living rooms.

This era and the following 50 years were mostly coined by what’s called Interruption Marketing. It works exactly like it sounds. As a consumer, you’re being interrupted in whatever you do and told: “Hey! Watch this soap commercial now!”

Why did it work so well for so long? Because peoples’ attention was already there. When you’re watching Little House On The Prairie anyway, you might as well sit through the 5 minutes of soap, cooking and car commercials.

Huge companies like Procter & Gamble used interruption marketing for decades to target as many people as possible. Whether they were a good fit for their products wasn’t important. If you reached enough people, you’d make enough sales.

But not anymore. Interruption marketing is dead. There are ads plastered on supermarket floors, car roofs, gigantic walls and bus stands, and we see…none of them.

We’ve long crossed the point where huge companies market so much to us, that our brains have decided not to pay attention to any of it, because it’s too much information to even filter.

You can save that money you were going to spend on posters and flyers, Seth has a better idea.

We now live in the age of Permission Marketing. Not only does it sound a lot nicer, if done right, it’s also much more effective than the old ways. Here’s how it works: You invite people to learn more about your product by making a unique offer. You start talking to the people who accept your invitation on a regular basis. Once you’ve established a relationship, you can ask for a sale. If you know your marketing 101, you’ll now instantly think of email marketing, but that’s by far not the only use case, just the most popular one. For example, you could do permission marketing in a TV commercial by describing your product and then inviting people to learn more on your website, call a phone number, or send you an email. You’re still making the initial contact, but then you put the ball into the customer’s hands and say: “Your turn.” This empowers people. Instead of being forced through 30 seconds of airtime, they now get to choose. They can contact you and take you up on your…