Improving the customer experience isn’t only about getting more customers; it’s about lowering the risk of losing your customers to your competitor. On average, 47% of customers would take their business to a competitor within 24 hours of a poor customer experience. That means if your customer experience isn’t up to par, you risk losing one out of every two customers you already have, not to mention the opportunity cost of visitors who were discouraged before purchasing.

Here’s how to use marketing to improve your customer experience.

Build Your Marketing Plan Around Lifetime Value (LTV)

Short-term marketing approaches often neglect the customer experience and create a transactional relationship with customers who could potentially become loyal lifetime users of your product. A report by Econsultancy noted that 64% of companies rated customer experience as the best tactic for improving the customer lifetime value.

Simply put, if you offer your customers enough value to stick with your brand, they will be worth more in the long-run. A marketing plan built around long term value (LTV)  focuses on improving the customer experience at every possible interaction. Each touchpoint is an opportunity to add value and convince users that they will make the right choice shopping with your brand.

This is a no-brainer for subscription-based businesses, but it still has practical applications in virtually all types of business. A higher LTV means more profits, and, since previous customers have a 60 to 70% chance of converting and are cheaper to market to, your overall profitability will greatly improve.

Your marketing plan should be focused on building a personalized relationship with your customers. Customers want to feel special, and, if their needs are met, they will be happy to start and continue doing business with you.

Customer Retention Is Key

So many businesses focus their marketing efforts on customer acquisition while turning a blind eye on creating a better customer experience for the customers they already have. The average eCommerce store commits over 80% of their marketing budget to customer acquisition, and retention is left on the back burner. While new business isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there is a wealth of potential within your active customer base.

Loyal customers are worth up to 10x as much as the first purchase they made with you, and they are more likely to shop with you again than new customers. A customer is 27% more likely to return to your store after the first purchase, and 54% more likely after the second purchase.

Focusing your marketing strategy to improving the customer experience for your existing customers has the potential to substantially improve your bottom line profitability. Dropping your customer churn rate by a mere 5% could increase your profitability by anywhere between 25 to 125%.

Using Marketing to Test the Waters

A good marketing strategy is enough to get your brand and business some exposure, but, if you set the end goal at just awareness, you won’t really understand what components of your business customers like, and which ones they don’t.

In the Lean Startup, Eric Reis notes that instead of devoting the majority of your budget to a sudden “showtime” moment, it should be devoted to finding a product-market fit. A product-market fit is essentially when your business and products are paired with demand in the market based on real-world experience.

This lean startup methodology can be used to A/B test tweaks to your business model and customer experience. No matter how good you are in your ideation phase at creating a service or product customers want, there will always be intricacies that can be tweaked to ensure the best customer experience.

Perhaps your landing pages aren’t engaging enough to lead traffic to your subscription box, product pages, or other CTA? Split-test to find out which type of landing page works for each specific goal.

Your marketing can be used to improve your customer experience, and the holistic customer experience data you receive can be used to refine and perfect your marketing strategy.

How to Use Marketing to Improve the Customer Experience (CX)

The goal of a long-term customer experience focused marketing plan is to create a seamless customer experience on multiple channels that rewards customer retention with more value and entices new customers to become lifetime users. Customers can engage with a company through a multitude of different ways.

For example, they could walk in a physical location, scroll through their website, and check their Facebook page in one five-minute period. Since the customer experience could potentially be anywhere, your marketing must ensure that your business is showing its best face on all channels.

The first step to creating this plan is to understand your buyers, and this doesn’t mean going through customer research and white papers. This step involves actually speaking and interacting with your customers to understand what drives them. In doing so, you’ll understand critical nuances that could greatly improve your strategy that would otherwise be missed.

Your competition likely has access to the same research and resources that you do. Going the extra step to understand your customers at an intimate level is an excellent way to make use of phenomenal resources otherwise neglected.

The next step is to audit your existing marketing and customer experience processes and look for ways to reduce wasted costs and simplify the CX process. All additional unnecessary steps in the customer experience process can range from being mild frustrations or entire reasons customers will abandon their cart or move to a competitor.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, in order to improve the customer experience, you must understand the buyer scale. At one end of the scale, you have the value offered. On the other end sits the cost, risk, and effort. At every step in the customer experience, customers are actively weighing that scale.

A seemingly flawless customer experience could be ruined by a single off-brand marketing message, and a creatively refreshing marketing message could be ruined by a poor customer experience. Place your company on the better side of technology and focus on creating a positive synergistic relationship between your marketing efforts and your customer experience.

Ronald Dod: CMO And Cofounder of Visiture.
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Ronald Dod is the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-founder of Visiture, an end-to-end eCommerce marketing agency focused on helping online merchants acquire more customers through the use of search engines, social media platforms, marketplaces, and their online storefronts. His passion is helping leading brands use data to make more effective decisions in order to drive new traffic and conversions.

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I know I said that I'm going into this challenge by myself. I didn't announce it to my groups, as of the writing of this blog post I haven't even told my VIP group about it. I'll be emailing them about it soon.

But that doesn't mean that you just get to sit back and watch and read only. I would like you to get something out of this challenge too, a large percentage of the videos and content I'll produce over the next 99 days will be to teach you and share with you tips, tricks, methods and techniques to help you make money.

So while I'm doing this challenge by myself, you have to do something for me, well, for you really. All I ask for now, is that you subscribe to my YouTube channel and to my VIP email list. This will help you not miss anything and also make sure that you get all of the tutorials, or discounts or insights that will make you more money, save you money or help you start a business.

If you have any questions you want me to answer in an upcoming blog post or video, please send them to me. To send me your questions, join the email list and reply to one of my emails and let me know you'd like me to answer a question.

By the way, did you notice my new introduction in the video? I just made that. I'd love to get your feedback on that as well.

The post Your Turn to do Something 100 Day Challenge, Day 2 appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I'm more pragmatic than that and I believe that we are the architects of our own destiny. For better or worse, we are mostly responsible for where we are today.

This is the truth, but many don't like to hear it. Instead many people blame someone else, something else. And I get it, we are egotistical beings and generally we believe that our way is right, we can't be wrong so everyone else is wrong. They "just don't get it" or they simply are "out to get us."

It takes some effort to work against this and to really look inside, to look within and to know thyself as I call it. As I was thinking about this, I decided to post a proverb to Instagram. This was something that I heard years ago.

As you read this, remember the title of this post... If it changes you want, then change you must. Get out of your head, put your ego aside and try something different.

This is what I posted:

Sometimes we are stuck in our own head, our own ways. We feel that the world and everything in it is out to get us. Nothing works!

They're conspiring against me! But I invite you to look at things from a different perspective.

Perhaps it is that in these moments we need to put our egos aside and look outward for guidance, for a different way. They say that you can't solve a problem by doing the same things that created it, so maybe we need to learn something new, change pace, change scenery, change thinking.

As I was reflecting on this, this quote came back to me. Someone told me it a long time ago when I had an "aha moment," and I said "I get it now! tell me more!" to which my friend and mentor at the time replied: "When the student is ready the teacher will appear."

If you aren't ready to change, from within, you will never find the ways to change. Opportunities will pass you by unnoticed, and what could have been will remain obscured by your thoughts of how it should be.

A post shared by Oscar Gonzalez (@notagrouch) on May 25, 2017 at 4:26pm PDT

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It makes me feel old, but also makes me want to stay current and pay attention to what the younger people are into --oh geez I sound old too!

photo by Joe The Goat Farmer via CC

In any case, I get a lot of good business insights from Adam Grandmaison's commentary and thoughts from his vlogs and podcasts. He's also a pretty good interviewer. One of the latest videos/podcasts I got a chance to listen to was the interview with Ryan Holiday.

Ryan Holiday is the author of a very popular book about marketing called: Trust me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. We have discussed this book in many groups I belong to and it's always an interesting talk.

It's very interesting to listen to Ryan talk about how the media finds, promotes and elevates certain stories. He shares some of his experience in writing other books, being super successful before 30, and also explains how his marketing agency works.

There are so many lessons to pick up from this for any online marketer. I recommend you watch the video, or at least put it on the background and listen to it.

I have to say that I'm not completely on board with his thoughts on working for free, but I do agree that creative types need to work for free until they don't have to. Pay attention to that part of the podcast.

As a side note, I recommend you check out the No Jumper Youtube channel (or podcast) for some interesting, raw and honest opinion on business, marketing, social media and pop culture.

Ryan Holiday has now published a few more books, in total he has published: Trust me I'm Lying, Growth Hacker Marketing, The Obstacle is The Way, The Daily Stoic and Ego is The Enemy.

I hope you enjoyed this post, I'd love to hear your feedback on the comments down below or on social media. If you think this would be useful to somebody else I'd greatly appreciate it if you could hit one of the social share buttons and pass it along for others to enjoy and learn from.

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I decided to share this here with you because there's a bit of a marketing lesson here. Sometimes success depends not just on the quality of the product but on the perception of it.

Some accounts say that Mondavi used the Fume blanc name instead of Sauvignon blanc because Sauvignon blanc had a muddied reputation. Other stories say that Fume blanc was created to reflect a variation of the traditional Sauvignon blanc wine.

Whether Rhonda in the video or the other versions of events is correct, the fact is that Fume blanc didn't exist before Mondavi decided to sell this wine. Fumé Blanc was just created to change the perception of an existing product to make more sales.

That's brilliant marketing!

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Why so many posts about @starbucks recently, Oscar? Go read my blog post about it. That will explain it.

And did you see my stars? #starbucks #business #coffee #latte #cascara #socialmedia #marketing #businesssuccess #newblogpost #businesslessons #gamification #starbucksrewards

View on Instagram

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The Integrated Marketing Forum last year was all about mobile marketing I learned a lot of stuff. The most interesting thing about it is that many of the presentations that came up during the event were exact in predicting trends and digital marketing activity going on today.

The geolocation and geofencing stuff were the most interesting topics for me at the time, and now we have Snapchat and other apps leveraging geolocation and geofencing heavily. Beacons are hot, and all this stuff is just in the nascent stages.

Obviously, mobile first was important in 2015 and it's even more important now with social media sites and search engines favoring mobile websites over non-mobile websites.

The Integrated Marketing Forum is a must-attend event for any marketer looking to find out about the cutting edge techniques and technologies.

The topic of this year's Integrated Marketing Forum is Digital First

Just like last year's mobile focused sessions, these years sessions promise to educate you and enlighten you in the digital marketing space. This year's topic is Digital First.

It doesn't matter where you live, you have to make an effort to attend. But especially if you're in Southern California, Orange County and even in Northern California and surrounding areas. Get to this event.

Who's going to be at The Integrated Marketing Forum?

Oh, you know small companies that you probably never heard of with names like: Dollar Shave Club, Samsung, Adestra, Southwest Airlines, Google.

The price of attendance is negligible when you consider the value you'll get and the stature of the speakers.

Who should attend?

The event is for and by heads of companies, marketing managers and anybody in charge of business development and sales. In addition to learning from some of the big players in the digital marketing space, there are many opportunities to network with other attendees to share and discuss ideas.

If you're a social media manager, if you're in charge of sales, marketing campaigns, if you're an executive in sales, leadership, marketing and even operations, I suggest you attend. Clearly if you are the owner of the company you should be there.

How do you attend?

Just head over to their website and register. If you want to save some money, use the code NOTAGROUCH when you check out and you'll save $15.00.

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In this episode I talk about blogging for business. Some tips, and what's the difference between a blogpost and a product listing. Also, why most businesses fail at blogging.

I talk about TV, radio and the internet and how advertising has evolved and how you need to adapt to it in today's social media world.

Blogging helps with your business if you do it properly.

A blog can be a reason for someone to visit your website and give you some mindshare. It's really good to use a blogpost to tell a story but not great to sell a product.

If you need a blog started, then I recommend you take a look at this guide on how to start a blog all by yourself, in about 30 minutes.

The post Driving with Oscar – Episode 4 – Blogging for Business appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

SEJSummit is a conference featuring some of the top experts in enterprise level SEO. Hosted by Searchmetrics and organized by SEJ, this conference was extremely valuable in terms of networking and learning. The thing that makes it different than other similar industry events is that it is geared towards enterprise level SEO.

Big numbers, big traffic, multinational companies, multi-platform online presence management and things that are generally out of the reach of most SEOs. When it comes to analyzing data, big is awesome.

Usually enterprise level SEO means lots, and lots, and lots of traffic and really fun budgets. You get to try things and test things and you get results quickly. You can run A/B tests like Neil Patel suggests and get almost instant results.

By the way, Neil was one of the speakers. If you are a digital marketer of any kind, you should know who Neil Patel is. Another notable name was Jordan Koene. The presentations by Neil and Jordan were probably the most insightful and useful out of the event, but the other speakers were great too.

Mindy Weinstein taught us about making stories relevant and personal when you need to write content for "boring" industries. What I really liked about her talk is that she taught us how to do it at the same time she presented. She used a personal story to draw us in to her presentation and it worked beautifully.

I went to the Santa Monica event because it is close to me, but the SEJSummit is coming to Dallas, San Francisco and even London to name a few of the upcoming locations, visit the official invite page (click on the image above).

Sometimes when you go to an industry event like this one, you'll find yourself overwhelmed with information. You feel like you just put your mouth to a firehose and if you take in one more drop you will explode. This feeling generally leads to analysis paralysis and you end up going home with nothing but a spaghetti of new ideas; pages and pages of notes about cutting edge tricks and tips and possibilities that never materialize.

Not at SEJSummit, the format was terrific. One track was all that was needed. Speakers come up quickly without a whole lot of hoopla in between. The key element that makes this a must-attend event for 2015 is the focus on delivering three takeaways.

We have limited time; we need deep knowledge but also actionable steps. This is why the summit was outstanding.

SEJSummit-mindy SEJSummit-Stephan-spencer SEJSummit-Srinivas-Rao SEJSummit-debbie-millier SEJSummit-no-boring-story SEJSummit-neil-patel SEJSummit-lunch-marriot-santamonica SEJSummit-2015-santamonica

See all the photos here.

Each speaker is required to present their talk in a 20 minute time slot (strict) and they open up by explaining what they will share with us and at the end there are 3 takeaways.  The three takeaways are easy to remember and note down, and then, expand when you get back to the office and really put things to action.

SEJ made sure that these three takeaways are actionable, impactful and memorable. Each speaker did a great job and kept the audience engaged. I wasn't the only one that felt this way because the room stayed full until the very last presentation.

If you want to learn about SEO from an enteprise point of view, you should make your way to one of the SEJSummit events. It doesn't matter if you are in-house SEO for a large company or an Agency managing enterprise clients, you have to make it to one of these. Oh yeah, and did I mention the event is free? What?

The post SEJSummit 2015 at Santa Monica by Searchmetrics and SEJ appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Did you know you can add apps to Gmail? Well, if you didn't know now you know. You can in fact add apps to Gmail. The two I use the most are Rapportive and Streak.

Today I'm telling you about Streak. Streak is a CRM that sits on top of Gmail and it helps you manage your conversations. It's a CRM component that enhances Gmail. Find it at Streak.com

The way that it works is simple and it is better explained in video but I'll do my best at explaining it on text as well. When you decide to track the activity with one person or project, you can create a box that will hold notes, emails and other relevant activity.

You can review that activity at anytime, and this object, the box, can be moved along a sales funnel or recruiting funnel or any kind of funnel you want. Streak calls them pipelines. Enough of me talking, why don't you just watch the video. It'll make more sense.

You can find more about them at Streak.com and two features I want to highlight that you'll love about this app is the email tracking feature and the schedule for later feature. Really killer, really useful for running businesses online.

The post Streak, a CRM for Gmail Quick Video Tour appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

You don't have to break your budget with marketing and advertising. You can use so many inexpensive and out-of-the-box strategies to get your brand out there and discover what works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-SzOBmy338

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A huge mistake I see by people trying out their e commerce shops is to offer discounts. They offer coupons, probably because shopping carts today have very easy ways of integrating coupons into their checkout systems. And people think that by offering coupons they'll attract more customers. And all of these reasons are probably partially true.

But the biggest mistake I see is that the coupons are crap. When you're offering something online, and you're not known, you've got no brand, you have to believe in what you're doing. So much so that you should almost give away your first product for free. After All, wouldn't you give away your first product if you knew that the customer will come back for more products after? That should be your mentality.

Give away a taste, a freebie then sell more products to that customer. Find out more about them, learn why they wanted your product, how can you make it better? The first product is often called a loss-leader. So why not go balls out and give a 50% off coupon? or a $60 off from your first $100.00 purchase? Now those would be coupons that get my attention! And I'd be happy to Tweet, Facebook, share and Google+ the crap out of that offer, bringing you more clients.

I'd even send an email out to my friends or family members that might be interested in that offer. And guess what? You have now attracted the attention of buyers willing to spend some money to get your product.

I believe another reason that people do the crappy 5% or 10% coupons is because they're too lazy to figure out how to market to them again. Here's the secret sauce to that... email marketing. Before you give away a product or offer a 50% discount like I am suggesting, make sure you have a sytem in place to help you promote more products or services to that customer. Get them to share their email address with you and then use it!

-- Believe me, this is cheaper than any advertising campaign you can concoct. Do it. Next time skip the bullshit 10% off coupons. Give them something to chew on, something substantial. And milk it. Ask them questions, ask them to share the amazing offer in social networks, and follow up with them by offering other products that will also benefit them. That's how you do business online and how you acquire new customers.

The post Giving out coupons? Don’t be a cheap ass. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

• What will I learn?
• I already have a home based business, why would I need to attend?
• What else is going on?

So here are the answers:

By attending the Home Business Summit in Long Beach, you'll learn about traffic generation, email marketing, online advertising and traffic conversion. In other words, you'll learn all the stuff you need to make your business grow online. These are the ingredients that most homem based entrepreneurs miss. Many of them will never find out how this works and will eventually close their business, it's a sad thing really because the techniques aren't rocket science. So you'll learn a lot about generating quality traffic for your site.

John is specifically going to cover how to brand yourself, brand growth and how to be an expert in your field.

Friday night, we'll have a cocktail and hors d'oeuvres mixer and networking. Then the next day is a full day of intense learning. Lunch of course, then at night we have the VIP party.

Sunday will have a half day session and will cover more learning.

I'm not as eloquent as I'd like to be and I'm also a newbie at this (even though I've been doing it for a long time). I'm one of those people I mentioned earlier. I have been doing so much stuff that should generate money but for the longest time, it didn't make any money. I didn't start making money with my online ventures until I learned several techniques and methods from John himself. These techniques were so "obvious" after looking back at them, but they weren't obvious when I was looking for them.

But I'll let John give you the answers to these questions. I asked him on video during our Saturday lunch in Irvine. Watch the video, it's only 2 min long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dB2sW1OkTI

[gravityform id="9" name="Join Me For Free at the Home Business Summit"]

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During early 2000s blogs began emerging as a self-publishing platform and that made it very simple for people to post and share information without having to have a deep understanding of how the Internet works or how websites worked. You could also communicate with the author of a blog by leaving comments. Since then we have seen a tremendous explosion of new ways of communicating, from Friendster (long gone), to MySpace to Facebook and now things like Pinterest and Instagram. These websites, or applications, or even more specific, social networks, allow you to interact with other like minded members in a fun, casual, social kind of way.

Social networking is nothing more than a community building experience. Hundreds of years ago, even thousands of years ago people gathered at coffee shops or at bazaars and other local hot spots. This is where you would meet with neighbors and friends to discuss the latest happenings for things that were important to you. You could trade, and do business. You could learn about the family that moved into town, or the new shop that Bob opened up, and other things like that. These gathering places also allowed for people to learn about news worthy events happening somewhere else.

Then the press came along, and as time went by the press became more popular and inexpensive. It became easier to read pamphlets and billboards and even newspapers that allowed the greater distribution of news and information. But Newspapers were mostly a broadcasting mechanism. Then came the radio the radio was great because you could listen to stuff without having to read anything. Same thing happened with the TV. Television came along, and --if you could afford one-- you would sit around the television with the family and watch your favorite program. Then the Internet came along.

The Internet broke all boundaries and what had been the traditional evolution of broadcast media, with the advent of websites, forums and chatrooms you could now connect with people and have a dialogue real-time. The news came to you from various sources but you could actually interact with the sources, comment send an e-mail back. Social media is essentially, the interactive communities where people gather online for a particular purpose.

Social media is not anything new, social networking is the new either it is just a new format of doing the old things. Yes perhaps technology has advanced the interactions we have with other people in significant ways. For example you can take pictures of where you right now are and share them instantly on Facebook; you don't have to setup a camera, take the film, develop it and then mail it to your friends. Who would do that anyway!? You can tell all your friends where are you going to be tomorrow so that they can come and visit with you; no need for invitations 2 months in advance. You can do many new things with technology, but the essence remains the same. Social media meets and fulfills a basic human need; the need to connect, the need to matter, and also to know what is happening in the world that matters to you.

Social networking is the activity of using social media to share, to learn, to discover, and to interact with all those things that matter to you. You can learn about political change is happening across the world, you can find your favorite artists and what they're up to. You can share a picture of your latest vacation spot your friends, and you can find about the latest adventures your friends are up to simply by looking at your Facebook timeline. But a much more important shift has taken place, and it is important for business to understand this. Social networking and social media have brought the consumers to the doorstep of the producers. If your company makes a widget, you can count on the consumer of that widget to have a voice that can benefit you or hurt you as a company. It is important to understand how social media has been changing business and will change the next century.

Social networking is bringing down the geographic boundaries that we've had for thousands of years. In the old days I would ask my neighbor what he thought was the best coffee maker and why, then I would go out and buy *that* coffeemaker because he suggested it and I trust his opinion about coffee. In similar fashion I would probably book a vacation based on where my friends have vacationed before and whether they had a good experience at that location are not. The examples can go on and on, and they span pretty much every single field you can imagine. The difference now is that I can go on Facebook or twitter or pinterest and ask the same questions but instead of one or two answers I may see 50 different answers. Various opinions, feedback, pictures, videos, and even reviews will be the factors that weigh into my decisions. As a business it is important that you understand how all of these elements affect the purchasing decisions of the consumers in your marketplace.

Even more important than understanding the psychology and the reasoning behind a purchasing decision, it is the ability to use these tools to your advantage to maximize your time and enhance your product offering. Over the next 30 days and beyond I will teach you how to use these tools. The course you are about to start is not about theory of content, and engagement, and sentiment and all that stuff that the purported social media gurus tell you about. Stop listening to the "gurus" and "experts" and start doing!

If you want to learn more about effective marketing theories, and how to change your message, how to connect with the hearts of your audiences, then I recommend you go read books and blogs by the top marketing and social media people in the world; people like Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mary Smith, Amy Porterfield, Jay Baer, and learn what they tell you about engagement, about theory and how to really connect with your audience; about how to stand out. For now, this month I will share with you the tools, tips and tricks and techniques of using social networking tools to maximize your use of social media.

The post Social Networking and Social Media. What is it? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

For all this time, I've been telling everyone, yeah, go ahead, get MailChimp. Build your list, send them emails! Ya! Sell them stuff. And then John tells me this. I'm like STFU. No way that Mailchimp doesn't allow affiliate links. So I tweet it out and I wasn't the only one surprised. Go figure.

@notagrouch oooooh noooo, really? That puts a crimp in my Valentine's Day push.

— Mona Holmes (@cookthisgetlaid) January 30, 2013

This morning I went to check to make sure it was true. And it is, no affiliate links allowed in MailChimp and if you use it like that you'll likely be banned and locked out of your emails, data & list. Better get your butt out of there if you care about making any kind of money from your website.

So here's proof, and it's true. What sucks is that it's not just affiliate marketers that are affected, but other industries as well. I have a friend that is a kick-ass work-at-home mom blogger and even she is banned from using Mailchimp. Seriously MailChimp, that's not cool. Punish all for a few?

Well anyway, I'm moving on to the industry standard Aweber. Not sure why I took so long.

The post It’s True. MailChimp Does Not Allow Many Links appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I didn't want to be. Fast forward to today and the same exact thing is true for me being a marketer. I am one, always have been and always will be. This means that I accept this as it is, I am a marketer and a sales person. Over the past few days, I've helped a few people come up with new ideas for their businesses. Ideas that could and should revitalize their business. I do this all the time, but I always felt that other people were just lazy and didn't want to think about the ideas.

It was effortless for me to come up with these ideas to help them out. It is what I always do and have been doing. I guess it isn't easy to recognize that some of our talents or gifts are valuable to others. When I say "I am a marketer" I mean that from a DNA point of view. That is in my bones, I am always thinking about stuff that turns out to be marketing. I am not saying I am a good marketer, but I just know I am a marketer.

During Affiliate Summit West #ASW13 someone I admire and recognize as a leader mentioned to me that I should be a full-time marketer instead. Funny they should say that because I've been working on this since the summer. I've been realigning my vision and goals with my interests and natural gifts.

In fact a few years back when I was visiting with a good friend from my church days back in Highschool, he said jokingly as I approached: "Oh no, here comes Oscar what are you going to sell us today" -- and everyone chuckled. I replay that moment in my head all the time, that was one of those tiny pivotal points in one's life where something just clicks.

So I am a marketer. And with that, I officially announce that in line with my new rebranding of my site, I am a marketer and will be doing a lot of that to help my make money and build wealth section.

Remember, know thyself! -- Learn what and who you are. Understand why and what it means. Move forward full throttle, unrestricted.

The post I am a marketer. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But you be the judge. Would you spend your advertising dollars in something like this? You can see these live at the MGM Grand.

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Not only is this my first time at Affiliate Summit West, but I get to hang out with John Chow and meet his baller friends too. Tomorrow we're heading to the Las Vegas Speedway to race in Ferraris and stuff like that. An event put on by All Phase hosting and DK from the thinktank party I went over the summer. This should be fun.

If you are going to be at ASW, perhaps you can still get in to this cool event. I applied to race too but doubt I'll get in - More info on how to attend the racing event is right here http://www.johnchow.com/come-race-me-at-las-vegas-motor-speedway/.

I'm looking forward to meeting some of the big names in the affiliate industry. I've met tons of people last year during the summer. These people pretty much inspired me to shift my business model around a bit and over the past few months that's exactly what I've been doing.

In fact, my business partner and I are working on our very own product which will launch in the next month or two. So meeting people like Shoemoney and talk more to DK and other big names in the industry. I feel extremely lucky to be able to be here and hang out with them so I'll try to do this event justice and blog about it while I'm here and then give you a recap.

I'll be tweeting and checking in to a lot too if you want to follow me on Twitter or Foursquare. I'm also going to try to live blog, but not sure if that's going to work well. we'll see!

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I've been posting a few items on eBay, here and there. To get rid of stuff we don't need and to make room for new things we'll need soon.

I got this email from eBay today which really just reminded me of how old I really am. Ha! but it's been a fun 11 years eBay, looking forward to the next 10. We shall revisit this. How will the auction systems, methods and delivery will have changed by then? It certainly has changed a lot since 2001.

What's funny is that I dont think I've sold over 100 items for myself since then. But it's been very useful when I want to buy something that I can use even if it's pre-owned or to sell those items that just clutter up your home. With the announcement and realization of our soon to be addition, de-cluttering is our number one priority right now.

Trust me, we have a lot to do.

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Simply, you need to do it and learn some of these great insights.

The book is available for free at The Zero Moment of Truth (PDF, Kindle, Nook, ya-name-it)

These are some of the more memorable quotes and some of the interesting figures:

70% of Americans now say they look at product reviews before making a purchase.
83% of moms say they do online research after seeing TV commercials for products that interest them?

Talking about customers and how we buy stuff...

They browse, dig, explore, dream and master, and then they’re ready to buy with confidence. And what they learn, they share with others. ~DINA HOWELL

How the whole "Zero Moment of Truth" came to be, actually based on P&G's First Moment of Truth, that moment when you're standing in front of the shelves at the store and will pick between one brand or the other.

This moment was so important to P&G that they created a position titled Director of FMOT, and tapped Dina Howell to fill the job. And The Wall Street Journal found it so influential that they put it on the front page.

Oh but You think your business is different. Think again... I've been telling EVERYBODY for years that they need to be in this space, that they need to know what's going on and get involved. Some people listen, most tell me something like "my product doesn't sell well online" or "my service is different" You must reconsider that position, now.

If consumers will do research online for houses and health care, they’ll also do it for Band-Aids and ballpoint pens.

Although sometimes I hate the inconvenience of this, the truth is that we're a selfish society, and we want things right now and right here. Mobile is the key to the future of marketing and people want to talk to you when they feel like they want to talk to you. You must be engaged and available to cater to this; if you aren't someone else will be.

It really is understanding that you must be present in a conversation when they want to have it, not when you want to.

Reviews are huge, important if you want to be the company that a consumer chooses to buy from. Good reviews are awesome, but bad reviews are good too, for they give you authenticity. And people don't necesarily buy based on strangers' reviews, but rather..

People look for others who have been in the same situation as they are now.

And

They make decisions based on the opinions of people like themselves

The entry barrier for people making reviews is virtually zero now...

Yes, people take the time to leave messages online about how much they love Scotch Tape. That’s because the effort is down to zero. You would never get in your car, drive to the library and walk up to the second floor and ask a sleepy librarian for Consumer Reports before buying a 39-cent ballpoint pen. The effort and the item are imbalanced. But now there’s no friction. You can pull out your mobile phone and look it up — or leave your own opinion — on the fly.

Other things I learned...

• Things change, but the mental change within us also breaks boundaries. Read the part about the 4 minute mile. Amazing.
• This new model (even though it isn't new, just mainstream) is applicable to business to business and business to consumer type of enterprises.
• Mobile searches on Google doubled last year.
• Find Your Zero Moments
• Answer the Questions People Are Asking

What are your thoughts on the whole thing? Are you already implementing the ZMOT principles?

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