adammclane.com

I consider the folks over at Simply to be my friends. I will admit that when I first started to get to know them they were a bit intimidating. But they are great folks that any youth worker should get to know.

They are a couple of year’s into a competition with Youth Specialties for convention dollars. YS has run the very popular National Youth Workers Convention for years and then Simply partnered with another publisher to create the National Youth Ministry Conference. Let me make a quick observation about Simply’s marketing efforts.

YS has found an edge (in the Seth Godin kind of way), their conference goes after the arts and goes after social justice and those types of things. From a marketing standpoint that’s their angle and they are doing quite well with it. The Simply/Group folks have found a different edge as they try to catch up to YS. They are going to appeal to their audience with silly stuff and videos like the one below. They must have discovered that this is what their audience likes.

When it comes to marketing, there are two initial things that have to be done before you can succeed.
1. Define your audience, including what they like.
2. Define your competition

HT to Andy

This post was edited on 2/27 to clarify what I was saying a little better. It could have been misinterpreted, and for that I’m sorry.

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