This is the post on Dan Pink’s new book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, take a look.

Your Marketing Machine: Career Secrets converted to Your Marketing Machine

901 Blogs: Smaller Indiana

In 1960, E. Jerome McCarthy introduced the 4 P’s of Marketing as a way to describe the mix of factors required to successfullymarket a product. McCarthy labeled the 4 P’s as Product, Price, Place (distribution), and Promotion. The idea was that if youcould identify the right combination of these elements, your marketing would succeed. Since then, many have proposed that there are really 5 P’s, suggesting Positioning, Packaging, or People as additions to the mix.

Maybe it should be replaced by the 5 B’s of Marketing?

1. BE Real Your marketplace is crowded with competitors, and your prospects are
besieged with marketing messages. For your message to find its way through all this noise, it must be exactly on target. In any field, it’s not enough to simply describe what you do. You must be able to tell your prospects exactly how your work helps them solve problems and reach goals, and the benefits and results they can expect to see from it. What this targeted messaging requires is that you become very specific about not only who your offer is for, but what it will help them do, and why your solution is the right one for them.

2. Be Pulling vs. Pusing…In the classic marketing formula, the emphasis was on promotion — pushing your message out to the world at large. You need to pull toward you exactly those clients you want. Push-style marketing includes cold calling, unsolicited mail or email, paid advertising (online and off), promotional events like trade shows, and some forms of PR, like blasting out press releases. Pull marketing, on the other hand, is focused on building affinity and connections. To attract clients in your niche, you might develop referral partnerships, become visible at networking events, get booked as a public speaker, have articles published or build a content-rich website. You’ll find it much easier to make a sale when clients contact you as the result of hearing about you from someone else, or after sampling your expertise for free.

3. Be interesting…You must position your business in the mind of your prospective clients as the best possible choice for exactly what they need. Broadcasting a muddy or generic marketing message won’t be enough. Your clients need to understand “what’s in it for me?” Be the place they go when they need something. 4. Be there.. Clients are wary — and justifiably so — of committing to spendhundreds or thousands of dollars on something they haven’t been able to experience in advance. Without tangible evidence to go by, they base their decision on how much they trust you. A significant portion of your marketing activities should be aimedat increasing your credibility. But one of the best ways to build trust is also the simplest. Allow clients to get to know you, be part of their everyday life. Use of your website, services, ideas and advice that you can offer are all important mixes.

5. Be Fast… In today’s world, the most important. The key is hitting the right client at the right time with the right product in the right way – the first time, because you may not get a second time. You have to identify their need or problem, provide the solution, understand the resources needed and the decision process they will use. You have to have a process in place for doing this or the process itself will lead to slow and inaccurate decisions. Effective companies have processes that drive decisions, not delay them.

And this is all marketing!

This will probably be the rage for all the leading edge marketers this year. And the truth of the matter is that Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch is one of them. Even though the basic principles of DTM our sound for any company. The tools change on how to use them. Where we once we carved things in stone, now we are wireless. And more and more of us are going there. Even though people are still buying things carved in stone, we must be always changing an dmoving forward. DTM is on the front of the curve thanks to John Jantsch. Though it does not enable us to see the future, it does make it much easier for us to recommend certain courses of action.

John posted this list several weeks ago in his blog and it is a good guide to review. You will hear about them all year, I promise..

John also said: “Social networks are something that I believe small business folks should tap. Some offer small businesses more than others, but you’ve got to get in there and find ways to use these growing resources. One of the ways to get started or more involved is to connect with people you know and trust. Here’s a list of the social networks that I use the most and links to each that will allow you to follow, friend and connect with what I’m doing on each. Check them out and connect with me if you wish.”

LinkedIn – Business networking
StumbleUpon – Web site sharing
Flikr – Photo sharing
Slideshare – Slide presentation sharing
delicious – Bookmark sharing
Facebook – Social networking
Twitter – Micro blogging
Workbench – Duct Tape Marketing community
YouTube – Video sharing
Digg – News sharing

These are some cool tools to play with. Review them all but my advice is to take one or two and stay with it.