I have all sorts of practical advice for your 2018 marketing plans:

• Audit your marketing for 2017. Check your ROI and where it’s greatest. What went right and what could improve?
• Reach out to your customers. Offer gift cards in exchange for feedback.
• Survey your almost-customers. Ask what you could do better.

But none of those will do you much good if you miss the bigger picture, the greater message, the whole point of your marketing: the people who will pay for your product. Your people.

Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, thought leader, blogger, author  and the Internet’s resident marketing guru. The Internet has lots of great thought leaders in marketing, but I think that Seth Godin is the most insightful. He did a Q&A on Tim Ferriss’ podcast and was asked what most marketers do wrong.

Here is part of his response:

Nike did not invent the running tribe. There were already runners before Nike showed up. What we do when we lead a tribe often is we find people who are already connected and we merely show up to lead them.

For most businesses, we don’t even lead them. We merely service a tribe that already exists so that when you find a group of people who share an instinct, an interest, a connection, a leader, a goal, you give that group of people something with which they can take action.

The way I abbreviate that long sentence is “people like us do things like this.”

People like us do things like this.

It’s easy to get stuck thinking about marketing tactics and platforms. How should you tweak your Facebook strategy to get more engagement? What influencers do you tap for your next campaign? Should you post 3 times a day on 5 networks? Or do 5 times a day on 2? Which should those be?

None of those questions do you any good if you don’t know the who. Who are you trying to reach?  And why do they care about seeing your posts?

Your job as marketer is to answer these questions. Answering these questions will help you tap into the tribe that will buy your product.

Study your market. Understand them better than anyone else. Get why they do things the way they do.

Then, craft your marketing strategy.

Prove That You Get It

I wrote a post last month about the eggs that understood me.  They could have a more expensive business model because they could charge a high price for eggs. And they could charge a high price because the company understood that people like me would pay for them.

As you craft your marketing strategy for the coming year, audit your 2017 marketing, survey your customers and almost-customers, find which social media platforms your audience hangs out on and which influencers they rely on for product advice. Then, craft your strategy around them.

Not around platforms, but around people.

Your people.

In November, the New York Times reported what was maybe the most shocking story they’ve done all year.

An old, damaged painting was sold at auction, among a fierce and lengthy bidding process–let that sink in for a moment before you continue reading–for a hefty sum.

Hm, no. Law school debt is a hefty sum. A mansion in Beverly Hills is a hefty sum.

This painting?

Sold! To the highest bidder for $450.3 million.

$450.3 million! I’m not even sure how one person–never mind 4!–can produce that kind of check and not have it be for a small island, or at least some sweet Manhattan digs. A painting?

Here’s what (also) caught my attention, though, and why I’m sharing this here today, emphasis my own:

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” considered either the most important old master work to be auctioned in a generation or a damaged painting hyped by savvy marketing, sold on Wednesday night for $450.3 million with fees, a record for any work of art sold at auction. It far surpassed the sale of Picasso’s “Women of Algiers,” which fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in May 2015.

Now that’s an interesting line. A painting beat out Picasso–by a lot–and it might not even be a master work by Da Vinci? Is it really fair to put this on the marketers?

But Christie’s marketing campaign was perhaps unprecedented in the art world; it was the first time the auction house went so far as to enlist an outside agency to advertise the work,

Aha!

creating a video that includes top executives pitching the painting to Hong Kong clients as “the holy grail of our business” and likening it to “the discovery of a new planet.”

A new planet? Are you even kidding me? Savvy does not even begin to cover the savviness of this marketing team. How on Earth did they pull that off?

I’ll tell you how: they knew their market! They knew that if there was any chance at all that this could be a real Da Vinci, then it was virtually invaluable–there would be almost no limit to what a serious art collector would pay to have it in his or her collection.

They pulled out all the stops.

They told a story that resonated with that audience.

They pulled off one of art’s most successful marketing campaigns in history.

I love this story!

When we talk about knowing your audience, this is what we mean. Price doesn’t matter. If you have something that someone wants, and you communicate its value to them, there is no limit to what you can do with that.

I mean, don’t be an ass about it. Don’t run the great name of marketing through the mud by manipulating your audiences just so you can go swimming in your piles of money.

But if you have an amazing product, it deserves an amazing story. Tell it. Because your customers want it.