Todd Taskey

An entrepreneurial business owner, Todd Taskey has more than 25 years of finance and investing experience. Prior to founding Potomac Business Capital, Todd was a founding investor, board member or management team member to five other business ventures. Armed with the insight from his past successes and failures — and ongoing conversations with growing business owners and entrepreneurs — Todd provides market strategy and finance advice via his Wrong Question blog and national public speaking tours.

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Stopping your marketing and advertising is not the answer, so the search for a better solution begins.  Perhaps we need to begin with a Better Question:  Why did my advertising ever work?

Seth Godin put this question into historical context which is very helpful when analyzing this question.  You can read “All Marketers Are Liars” (strong recommendation) or get the highlights from a seminar presentation last month.

Once you “get it” you realize that relying on interrupting and/or annoying people as the core strategy to grow your business is flawed.  You will always be disappointed with the results of your advertising and business marketing if that is the most creative solution you can develop.

A successful business development strategy may be the most important ingredient to your long term success.  So, at this point you have two options.  First, become part of the conversation, interact with customers and prospects.  Let them find you.

Proper internet marketing is very good way facilitating this process.  To be successful you need to realize it is a process, you’ll need to spend a bit of time to find your voice and engage your audience (future customers), just like you do in the real world.   You’ll want this to happen overnight, but it cant.

In 5 years all businesses will have a regular strategy to become apart of the conversation their clients and prospects are having.  It will be common sense like a listing in the yellow pages was 10 years ago.  For now, it is still an innovative concept and a powerful tool to grow your business.  There are a couple great tools I’ll outline in my next blog.

Option two, entertain.  Do you want to see the future of advertising?  Take a look at these two videos:

 I loved and watch the entire video.  I told others and forwarded them to friends.  Other than the Mac v PC commercials, I can’t remember the last one on TV I watched completely.  Did you also notice they did not mention the product?  In fact, the Post-It is not even a commercial (or is it?).

Both of these are great business development options.  However, it is far easier and more effective for most business owners to engage in the existing conversation than develop creative web videos.

What is the future of business marketing?  Don’t advertise, entertain.  Don’t interrupt, intrigue.  Don’t annoy, engage.  You’ve got a 5 year head start on your competitors who are slow adopters, how will you handle this opportunity?

PS: I’m finishing research on great tools that will allow you to engage intrigue and engage.  Results on next post.