Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit

"Interestingly, and paradoxically, as the production and distribution of content has become more commoditized, this means that the value of original, high-quality content continues to increase."

"It is the strategic use of content that will not only build audiences and drive the creation and retention of customers; it will do so at a profit."

"One of the biggest benefits that marketers so rarely realize is how, by actually slowing down the process of marketing, by focusing on providing consistent value to your most engaged customers, we can increase the average value of those particular customers. They not only tend to purchase more products, but can also find additional value so that you don’t have to discount as much."

"This story is, broadly speaking, why ROI is the wrong kind of metric to use for whether marketing is worth doing. The simple fact is this: Marketing, as we know it, isn’t an investment. It’s currently a cost that sometimes, in total, provides benefits for the money spent."

"This is not just a marketing tactics transformation—this is a business transformation. This is looking at marketing as a business model—a profitable investment that is meant to provide access, and accumulation of attention and loyalty from a true investment: an audience."

"Create a loyal audience. Once we learn the deep-rooted needs of that audience, and we deliver value to the audience consistently, and the audience (reader) becomes a fan (subscriber), we monetize that relationship in multiple ways."

"The investment math is very simple. We try to maximize the reach of our message (the thing we want to persuade audiences with) and try to minimize the frequency (or the inherent cost) of doing that very thing."