Late last month, I wrote a post called Three strategic pillars for 2011, where I explained the different themes I would be pursuing on the blog over the course of the year. One of them – Curate – was about finding and sharing content from different thought leaders, writers and entrepreneurs. I first thought that this would be only be via video interview but as it has turned out it will be via a combination of text, audio podcast and video.

First up in the series is an interview with Grant Leboff, author of Sticky Marketing, that just came out on January 3rd and is already high in the Amazon charts.
A quick summary of the interview:

• Grant believes that marketing used to be tactical but now it has become much more strategic and needs to be embedded into the very ethos of the business
• Sticky marketing is not about websites but is about getting people to to come back again and again to your business
• His top tips include:
  • Realising that it’s not about you it’s about the customer and that in everything you do or say for your customer there has to be ‘value’ in it for them. He recalled the famous quote from John F Kennedy’s inaugural address when he said “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country’ and believes that business should be repurpose this to be “Ask not what your marketing can do for you – ask what you can do for your customer’.
  • Secondly, he said that every purchase is triggered by an event and that if you can understand the event then you can generate content around that context to better engage with your customers and earn a table at the purchasing table. He went onto repeat that it’s not about your products and services but is about the customer event.
• We went onto to discuss his new Sticky Marketing portal and broader business issues but I’ll leave that to the podcast for you to find out more about.

About Grant Leboff (taken from his LinkedIn profile)

Grant Leboff is one of the U.K’s leading Sales and Marketing experts.
His first book, Sales Therapy®, introduced businesses to a new and highly effective Sales philosophy. It made the Amazon top 10 bestseller list on publication and is one of the top selling books on Sales in the UK. It is now available worldwide.
Grant’s next book, Sticky Marketing, provides companies with the new principles of marketing so they can thrive in a Web enabled world.
Grant’s main focus is to address the massive changes that are taking place in a world that is constantly being introduced to new technologies and an evolving World Wide Web.
The old sales and marketing models are now obsolete. Grant provides businesses with Sales and Marketing strategies to be successful in this new environment.
You can pick up a copy of Sticky Marketing at Amazon here, connect with Grant here and here on Twitter, check the Sticky Marketing portal here and find out more about him here on LinkedIn.
Let me know what you think of my first delve into the world of multimedia in the comments below.