Dynamic Copywriting

What is Pico Marketing?

I'm writing this in response to a very interesting article Peter Jakob wrote called Are You Pico Marketer?, on his blog, B2B Marketing - Open For Business, which was itself a response to an article he read from Velocity.

To use a baseball analogy (Peter Jakob and the folks over at Velocity are British, so baseball analogies probably aren't the first things that come to mind for them), Pico Marketing means concentrating on hitting a lot of singles and doubles rather than always trying to hit a home run at every at bat. A team that gets more men on base with small hits generally wins more often than a team that lives or dies by the long ball.

Another analogy used by Velocity, and quoted by Mr. Jakob, is the Monopoly metaphor. The player who owns Boardwalk and Park Place will probably not do nearly as well as the player who owns a lot of little properties all over the board.

So back to Pico Marketing. Since I finished writing my ebook, The Plot Thickens: Why Case Studies Create New Customers, I have been trying to promote it by contacting bloggers I respect, emailing various individuals who I regard as thought leaders, and issuing online press releases.

I've also mentioned it on my Linkedin profile, written one article so far on ezinearticles.com, commented on blogs, and set up a Squidoo lens called Case Study Writer, and on and on.

In other words, I am taking a lot of little actions to get the word out about The Plot Thickens: Why Case Studies Create New Customers (I'm buying up the little properties on the Monopoly board and hitting singles). I am finding that promoting the ebook is as much work as writing it was (sigh).

I really can't afford to conduct an expensive paid advertising campaign for an ebook I am giving away to promote my case study writing services (in other words, I can't buy Boardwalk and Park Place).

But this is what it takes these days. I am already at the top of Google for the keyword, "marketing with case studies," (don't be too impressed, it is not a phrase that gets a lot of hits). But "marketing with case studies" is one of the long tail search terms I'm going after.

Having said that, search engine rankings come as a result of a lot of little things done all over the internet. From Facebook to MySpace to YouTube to Digg, little mentions from a lot of places get Google's love.

So will all this effort succeed? I sure hope so!

I guess you could say I am conducting my own case study on Pico Marketing. I'll keep you informed of my progress. Watch this blog to see how I do.

COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown