Seth Godin’s 3 Tips for Becoming a Better Marketer in 2021

Have you noticed your marketing metrics stagnating or trending in the wrong direction? Has the issue worsened in the last year?

If so, you’re not alone. Your audience is likely experiencing fatigue thanks to a constant barrage of ads, emails, pop-ups, sponsored posts, and more. The widespread reliance on remote work brought about by COVID-19 has exacerbated these trends. As a result, customers are growing increasingly weary of the many tactics and mediums marketers traditionally use to target and engage with them.

Best-selling author, entrepreneur, and speaker Seth Godin has some great insights into how marketers can build stronger relationships with customers and create content that their recipients actually want. In this keynote from our on-demand virtual event CONNECTED, Sendoso CEO Kris Rudeegraap talks with Seth about how to become a better marketer for your audience by focusing on trust, coming from a place of empathy, and finding ways to stand out.

3 Tips to Help You Become a Better Marketer from Seth Godin

1. Don’t Just Grab Attention—Build Trust

Think for a minute about how it feels to constantly have your day interrupted with emails, ads, and text messages that you didn’t ask for. Businesses are continuously trying to steal the attention of unwilling customers, and those customers are growing tired of it. And in today’s competitive digital marketing arena, it’s becoming easier for customers to simply ignore unwanted marketing messages.

According to Seth, you can avoid this by developing trust with your audience. Know who your audience is on a deeper level. Serve them only the content they have asked for, when they ask for it. Twenty years ago Seth coined a term for this—permission marketing—after observing that marketers were not spending enough time focused on personalized, relevant messaging.

When building trust, Seth also emphasizes creating content of value. Make sure that every form of outreach and content you wish to send to prospects and customers is of high quality and relevant to that audience. Don’t be afraid to say no to distributing low-quality emails or assets that you know the customer doesn’t want. As Seth puts it, “attention is only worthwhile if it leads to trust.”

2. Have Compassion and Create an Emotional Connection

Marketing teams often rely on the concept of a marketing funnel when building connections and trying to convert prospects into customers. Yet Seth points out that the funnel is in fact a poor analogy—you’re constantly losing the attention of your prospects to competing ads and emails.

To capture the attention of your customers, you need to spend less time thinking about your end goals and more time considering their needs and wants. Stop focusing on how many people have entered the funnel and continuously throwing content at them to recapture their attention. Instead, consider what it might look like if you started from a place of compassion rather than a place of collecting leads.

What are the specific problems that your business helps customers solve? How can your business make the lives of your customers easier? These are the types of questions you should ask to help you rebuild your marketing strategy from a place of understanding and community.

As Seth explains, “great marketers rely on empathy, connection, and emotional labor instead of attention-stealing ads.”

3. Be Remarkable to Stand Out

For many businesses, the marketing team runs the same way it has for years and uses the same tools and processes to meet the same metrics. But that approach is not just hindering your marketing team, it’s hindering your entire business. Seth says that “playing it safe is the riskiest thing you can do in business.”

To market effectively today, you must be willing to shake things up and do something that gets people talking. In today’s bustling online world, one of the only ways to truly stand out is by doing something different that no one else has thought of. Create a product or service that’s worth remarking on—then build a complementary marketing strategy that plays on the individuality of your business. And don’t forget to earn your audience’s trust and build personal connections with them along the way.

Want to hear more about Seth’s tips for effective marketing in today’s digital-first world? Register for the on-demand session to check out the full conversation between Seth and Kris.