Marketing is how you promote and sell your products or services, from market research to messaging to advertising. This page collects the frameworks, videos, and resources we point CEOs and marketers to. Start with the videos, then work through the readings and tools.
Watch the 6 Videos
Video 1 of 6: The AIDA Model: What It Is and How to Use It AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action, the stages a buyer moves through on the way to a purchase. The model is usually credited to advertising pioneer E. St. Elmo Lewis in the late 1890s, and it remains a quick check for any ad, email, or landing page
Video 2 of 6: Intro to Digital Marketing in 5 Minutes A quick primer for anyone new to digital marketing
Video 3 of 6: The Most Valuable Digital Marketing Skills, by Neil Patel Digital marketer Neil Patel on the skills worth building
Video 4 of 6: Life's a Pitch: The Wide World of Collateral, by Sean Sutherland A look at marketing collateral, the materials that support your pitch
Video 5 of 6: Porter's Five Forces That Make Companies Successful Harvard professor Michael Porter introduced the Five Forces in 1979 to explain what shapes competition in an industry: rivalry among existing competitors, the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, and the threat of substitutes. Knowing them helps you decide where and how to compete
Video 6 of 6: The Best Marketing Strategy Ever: Steve Jobs' "Think Different" Speech In 1997, shortly after returning to Apple, Steve Jobs told employees that marketing is about values, then introduced the "Think Different" campaign and its "Crazy Ones" ad. It's a lesson in leading with what you stand for
10 Required Readings
- 274 Powerful Hooks. A swipe file of opening lines. Every message needs a hook, a story, and an offer, and this list gets you past the blank page.
- Marketing vs. Promotion by Seth Godin. Godin separates the two: marketing creates the conditions for a story to spread and helps people get where they want to go, while promotion is a push for attention. If you rely on interruptions or tricks to get noticed, you're leaning too hard on promotion.
- 7 Copywriting Frameworks That Sell by Neal O'Grady. A LinkedIn post outlining seven structures for writing copy.
- 9 Valuable Lessons Joe Polish Learned About Marketing. Lessons from marketer Joe Polish.
- 10 Ways to Not Screw Up Your Marketing by Toby Howell. A short thread on common marketing mistakes.
- Why Marketing Flywheels Work by Rand Fishkin, SparkToro. A flywheel is a repeatable set of tactics that reaches more people, or costs less, with every round, so each effort gets easier. Without one, you're pushing a boulder uphill, spending the same effort for the same return. Fishkin's advice: start small with one tactic and build from there.
- Subject Line Generator and Headline Analyzer. Our roundup of free tools to generate and score headlines and subject lines, plus Copyblogger's Four U's: useful, urgent, unique, and ultra-specific.
- How to Align Your Content Strategy to Your Brand and Marketing Strategy by Andreea Macoveiciuc, School of Content. A diagnostic guide for content that isn't performing: get clear on positioning, narrative, and audience first, then audit for content that's off-brand, underperforming, or missing.
- Book Summary: The Last Safe Investment, our summary of the book by Bryan Franklin and Michael Ellsberg on the interpersonal, creative, physical, and technical "super skills" that pay off for life. Several of them, like selling, storytelling, and copywriting, are marketing skills.
- Who's Your Villain? from The Content Strategy Reeder. Your villain is the problem standing between your audience and success. Your audience is always the hero, and your company plays the sidekick that helps them win.
10 More Resources
- Seth Godin's daily blog. Short daily posts on marketing. Highly recommended.
- The Content Strategy Reeder. Dozens of practical articles on content strategy.
- 50+ Creative Resources from Booooooom. A curated list of articles and tools for creatives, from pricing your work to negotiating with clients.
- Your 1-Page Marketing Plan. Our download based on Allan Dib's framework, which breaks marketing into nine activities across three phases: before (turning prospects into leads), during (turning leads into customers), and after (turning customers into raving fans).
- Landing Page Template. A fill-in-the-blank model for promoting your product or service on your website.
- Book Summary: So What? How to Communicate What Really Matters to Your Audience, our summary of Mark Magnacca's book on framing every message around the benefit to your audience.
- 4 Principles of Marketing Strategy by Brian Tracy. A 25-minute video.
- Yep. A tool for building a landing page and collecting signups in about 15 minutes.
- How to Increase Your UX Skills. A Hacker News discussion where practitioners share how they learned user experience design. The most common advice: watch real people use your product.
- 105 Words to Infuse Your Content With Emotion by Josue Valles.
Get Help With Marketing Leadership
If you need senior marketing leadership without a full-time hire, read what a fractional CMO does or Talk to our Team. And when better marketing fills your pipeline faster than your team can close, fractional sales leadership can help you convert it.