The Principle of Back To The Basics [Part 5 of 6]

“They just don’t make music like they used to!”

We’ve all hear someone say that before.

For you, it might be the good old days when musicians kicked over their amps and smashed their guitars. Maybe it’s back when you could still understand the lyrics in the song.

Some of you might reminisce back to when you could actually dance to dance music. Still, some may remember times when rappers didn’t need a singer to support their lyric. They just stood alone and rapped.

No matter your style of music or the generation you grew up in, we all get nostalgic about the style of music we listened to when we were young. This music often becomes the standard by which we measure other generations of music.

I guess it reminds us of the time when the rules of life were simpler, and the world was easier to understand.

As a young person, I saw life as black and white with little room for shades of gray, but as I grow older, I am beginning to understand that there is much more gray in the world.

Life gets more complicated as we get married, have kids, get a mortgage and start to advance our careers. We can start to long to go back to the time of our youth when everything was simpler. These songs have a way of taking us back, and that is probably why we feel so strongly about them.

As a marketer, we should always go back, way back to when life was simpler. When life was black and white with little room for shades of gray. Marketing is simple. Marketing is not complicated.

Today, marketing can seem really confusing with all the new tactics we find on a daily basis. We can feel we need to master it all to get great results, but the opposite is true.

If we follow the Principle of Back to The Basics, it will remind us of the days when marketing was much simpler and easier to navigate. Those are the days the successful internet marketing gurus are still living in, and you need to return.

Less Is More

If you try to execute too many marketing initiatives simultaneously, you will not excel in any of them. You need to focus in on a few core strategies and become excellent at them. Mastering these few strategies will give you a better return on investment than trying ten tactics and doing poorly in all.

Focus is important in marketing, and that is why the highly successful internet marketing gurus are excelling. Focus on a few tactics, optimize them until your conversion rates are as high as possible.

Marketing Fundamentals

Below are just a few of the tactics you could use to attract new prospects:

  1. Webinars
  2. Blogging
  3. SEO
  4. PPC
  5. eBooks
  6. Conversion rate optimization
  7. Landing pages
  8. Marketing automation
  9. Content marketing
  10. Email marketing
  11. Video marketing
  12. Social media

Of course, there are many more, so it is easy to get overwhelmed with which tactics to use. I have found the tactics will come and go, but what stays the same are marketing fundamentals. These fundamentals work when applied to any of the tactics above, but they have also worked across the generations. They were used it the 1950s, 1970s,  1990s and are still being used today.

Fundamentals like:

  1. Focusing on a niche
  2. Finding your niche’s #1 pain
  3. Solving their #1 pain
  4. The psychology behind copywriting
  5. Objection handling
  6. Testimonials

These fundamentals and more should be applied to each tactic before you ever start designing the campaign. If you miss this step, you remove the power behind the tactic.

These fundamentals and tactics work together like a car. The tactic is the body of the car. The body of a car makes them attractive to a car buyer. The buyer will often choose a car by the way it looks. These tactics also attract the attention of the prospect.

Marketing fundamentals are the engine of the car. It is what drives the car and what makes it useful. The purpose of the engine is to get the driver from A to B while the body makes them look good while driving.

Marketing fundamentals like the engine move the prospect towards the sale. You can swap out the body of the car to attract a different type of prospect, but as long as you have the fundamentals right (the engine), you will always be able to move the prospect towards the direction of the sale.

Conclusion

Marketers today often forget the Principle of Back To Basics. They are too interested in the shiny new tactics and don’t have the respect for the fundamentals of marketing.

The successful internet marketing gurus do have this respect. They are students of the basics. They learn them; they apply them, and they succeed by them.

You should go back and listen to the music of your youth. I hope it takes you back to a time when life seemed simple. A time when you saw the world in a much simpler more basic way.

Remember those times because this worldview is what you need to excel at marketing today and in the years to come.

Make marketing simple again. Go back to the basics and see your campaigns succeed as you apply the basics to each new online tactic you try.

Let me know in the comments below if you believe that the Principle of Back to Basics is one of the keys to online marketing success today.

This is the fifth post in series The 6 Unspoken Reasons Internet Marketing Gurus Are So Successful.

You can read the other five reasons by following the links below:

  1. Part 1: The Principle of Sustained Hard Work
  2. Part 2: The Principle of Networking
  3. Part 3: The Principle of Salesmanship
  4. Part 4: The Principle of Execution
  5. Part 5: The Principle of The Basics
  6. Part 6: The Principle of Timing

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