What is the most important thing you need to succeed in marketing? Come on in, I'll tell you. :)

You veterans of marketing will know this, but a lot of new people may not.

What is the most important thing you need to succeed in marketing?

• It isn't technical skills.
• It isn't systems.
• It isn't creativity.
• It isn't a mailing list.
• It isn't traffic.

Those are all important, of course, but they're not the most important.

If you strip away all the processes, tactics, and technicalities, at the core of marketing, you'll find two essential ingredients. Ignore them at your own peril, because most who do fail. Sometimes spectacularly.

At its core, the essence of marketing is this:

Identifying your customer's wants and needs and providing them with what they already want and need.

It's extremely difficult to create desire. It's much easier to fill a desire that's already burning.

Good marketing focuses on the customer, and treating them as normal people instead of targets of opportunity, and on delivering value to them based on what THEY already want and need.

Read that previous sentence again, it's that important.

As marketers, we're in the people business. The more you know about the people in your market niche, and about people in general, the better you will likely do. The more you know about what these people want and need the better you will likely do.

How many of you have been focusing on everything but the actual people you're trying to sell something to?

When you focus on people first and on delivering value to those people based on what they already want and need, and then apply marketing principles to get their attention, you'll be steering your marketing efforts in a profitable direction.

What do you think?