Marketing 101 – We Teach Too

03/01/2021

By Bryan Mann-Entzel
Creative Lead, Strategist and Brand Storyteller at Greater Thought Marketing+Design

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

This quote has many applications in daily life but resonates with me when I think about what I do for a living. Whenever I start working with a new client, I see it as my task to earn their trust. Demonstrate that not only do I know my stuff, but that I can provide them with a personal value by helping them learn from what we are developing together, so that they can go back to their team and talk in an informed way about the work that is being done and why.

Marketing in a lot of ways is like church.

In Marketing, we are creating a community for a brand by informing people what the brand is about… The WHY of said brand. WHY do you exist? WHAT the brand does is typically pretty easy; it is usually the business sector it is in. But then we get to another hard one for many… and as an agency, this is often why we are involved in the first place. HOW do you do this? Not everyone in business wants to hire someone, and hand over control to an agency, firm or consultant. That brings me back to the quote I opened with.

“Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” I have worked with a number of people in my career where the right solution for them and their business, was for me to work directly with them and teach them what I do. What does that mean? Well, it is more of a journey together through that on-boarding and discovery process.

The Greater Thought team has from its inception said we are different.

If a client of ours wants to learn and understand how social media marketing works, or why web design and SEO are done with certain specific standards, we will teach them. If they want to become proficient enough to get into WordPress to make their own edits to the website, we will teach them. If they want coaching on merchandising and doing signage for their store, we will teach them. It is my experience that, developing this trust, and bringing them along on that journey yields a better result because we end that teaching process having created the work together. They may go on their way and if that is the case, that learning was the assignment for us. On the other hand, they may decide that they trust us even more and want us to be the one to do the work. Now they are better informed of what we do, what they have paid for, and have a better understanding of their own brand’s position in the marketplace. That for me, is pure gold.

If you are grappling with how to get traction, whether that is branding, websites, social media marketing, positioning and strategy, or anything else; maybe our Marketing 101 approach is a better solution for you.