Introduction

Marketing is something everyone does throughout their lives. In childhood you may have been selling candy bars to raise money for school. That was marketing. Trying to pick up a date? That is a form of marketing. Working to grow a business? That requires marketing. Marketing is the effort of getting someone’s attention and motivating them to take your call to action. 

Marketing is something we have been doing as a company since 2014. I (Kevin Adelsberger) love marketing. I love the challenge of it, the creativity of it, and the reward of helping someone solve the problems their organization faces. 

There has never been a better or more complicated time to be in marketing. Even for us in the marketing industry, it’s easy to get lost in all the options (sometimes even within one platform.) 

The simplest definition of marketing that I have is this: Marketing is the effort of getting someone’s attention and motivating them to take your call to action/goal. This also applies to this book; it has three goals: 

1. For new staff at Adelsberger Marketing, the goal of this book is hopefully to grab their attention and cause them to get a better grasp of the way we approach marketing. We want to prepare them for meetings and strategies for our customers. 
2. For potential customers, the goal of this book is to grab their attention with a free resource and either:
   (1) get them to sign up for our email list which provides us an opportunity to market to them repeatedly and keep us on the top of mind or
   (2) look through this book and realize that marketing is a huge operation and know it is something they need help to do. Additionally, if they realize they need help, they see this book and think, “if they know this much, they are the right people to go with! And even – If they are sharing this, what aren’t they sharing?” 
3. For SEO, one of the more recent strategies for search engine marketing is building content clusters that help express subject matter expertise to Google. The goal of these expert content clusters is to help us continue to rank well and potentially rank higher than our competitors so that we can win more business. 

All three of these goals help further our business 

 and give us a great place to start talking about marketing. During the rest of the book we will talk about all aspects of marketing in our world today. 

I wanted to open with some general thoughts to set some mental framework for the rest of the book. One of the age-old questions we wrestle with is: Where does marketing start and sales take over?