He has generated so much money that he could buy himself an entire country however, he prefers to continue living in the same house that he bought 50 years ago for 31,500 dollar. He defines it as “leading an austere and calm life” and this indeed hides a good part of his success.
So Warren Buffett is a philanthropist and entrepreneur, a man that for most is the best investor of all times and a true genius of finances: and according to the magazine Forbes he has spent more than 15 consecutive years securing the podium of the riches people of the world.
But additionally he is also the person that could probably teach you not only about how to achieve successful business but also on digital marketing.
As he says himself: “If you are part of the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe 99% to the rest” It is precisely for this reason he doesn’t hesitate in sharing all the secrets that have helped him reach success with anyone who is willing to listen.
We have compiled the secrets and have summarized them into the 6 most powerful lessons from Warren Buffett on business so that you can adapt them to your digital marketing strategy.
Additionally, we are going to share with you Buffet’s favorite way: through phrases he has left for history. Shall we continue?
Warren Buffett: how the best traditional investor can help you prevail in digital marketing
We agree that Warren Buffett doesn’t need a cover letter – the Internet is full of hundreds of articles about him, there are dozens of books that carry his name and his successful case is studied in universities in the entire world-.
But if you are still asking yourself what can someone like him teach you about online business and digital marketing then we are going to sum up some of his most significant achievements so you know who is behind the 6 lessons that we are going to share with you.
To explain it in a quick and easy manner, Warren Buffet almost began doing business before walking.
His first investment was when he was six years old, when he started to resell Coca-Cola bottles for 10 cents when he was only buying them for 4.6 cents. So for this he couldn’t imagine that some forty years later he would have a total empire under his feet.
He bought his first stock at 11 years old – and regrets having started so late!- at 14 he bought a small farm with his savings from delivering newspapers and at 26 he created his own investment company, Buffet Associates Ltd.
When he was 35 years old he bought a textile firm on the boarder of bankruptcy called Berkshire Hathaway, and not only did he succeed in transforming the company into a prosperous company of more than 270,000 employees but it grew so much that he is now the owner of 60 other companies and the forth most valuable firm traded in the United States.
So that you have an idea, it’s just ahead of Apple, Google and Exxon Mobil.
It’s even ahead of Microsoft! (Will use this as a strategy to destabilize Bill Gates every time they play bridge?).
Now, at his 85 years of age he has a valued fortune of more than 67,000 million dollars– even though the maximum salary that he gets himself is 100,000 dollars annually- and all of this is thanks to his huge knowledge and amazing success in each one of his investments, earning him the nick name of Omaha Oracle in reference to the city where he was born.
He is constantly searching for new investments; he has a great mind for business and posses stocks in Disney, Nike, Mc Donald’s, IBM and American Express. Wow! And curiously he has never traveled in a private jet even though he is the owner of a major world company of private planes.
Don’t worry, its normal after reading all of this that you think Warren Buffett only remains to discover the secret formula of Coca-Cola, but even that can’t take away his dream: in 1988 he started to buy stocks in the company and today has more than 400 million stocks which gives him 8.8% of the company. Not bad for a boy that started selling Coca-Cola bottles, don’t you think? 😉
So now that you have sufficient reasons to want to learn the lessons from Warren Buffett for online business and digital marketing, we’re going to look at them in detail.
Maybe this won’t help you take his spot in the ranking of millionaires, but surely his quotes will leave you lessons impossible to forget.
The 6 most powerful lessons from Warren Buffett on digital marketing
1- “Do what you are passionate about. If you do this there will be little people to compete with or that run as fast as you”
Or in other words: if you are going to create a company, choose a market and business that you are passionate about.
All of us are good at something or doing a particular thing better than the rest, so find your passion and convert it into a business.
As Buffet says, “the best way to be exceptional is to act with passion” and if you continue creating a business that you are passionate about it will help improve the lives of people, your days will be much happier, fun and productive.
Not to mention that there’s nothing more motivating than getting out of bed every morning with the certainty of knowing that you could dedicate yourself to what you love, totally for free and gain money from it.
And when you have this business, define your company’s cornerstone as the model business, your market niche, your brand and the products or services that you are going to offer.
2- “A friend of mine spent 20 years looking for the perfect woman, unfortunately when he found her he discovered that she was looking for the perfect man”
This phrase is comical but hides a huge truth: a lot of times we go wrong when defining the targets and our marketing strategy.
So the same thing doesn’t happen to you, study your market profoundly – and that also includes your competition– because the more you know about whom you are targeting the better you can focus your digital marketing strategy.
Listen to your audience, look at what they say through social profiles, interact with your audience on social media and know everything you can about them because this way you will know your targets better and will be sure that your strategy reaches the correct people.
But never forget your values or your principles only to gain more ground in the market, otherwise it’s likely that the same thing that happened to Ikea happens to you; they “thought” by eliminating all the women from their catalogs in their Saudi Arabia campaign it would be equivalent to adopting to the country’s culture but in turn they received hundreds of criticism, the brand had to apologize and was left with no choice other than to agree that the use of Photoshop for removing feminine images goes against their principals.
3- “No matter the talent or the efforts, there are things that come with time. You can’t create a baby in a month by getting 9 women pregnant”
We all love immediacy, being able to have all the results here and now without having to wait for as soon as possible. But in marketing things don’t function this way and lamentably there are actions no matter how fast we implement them, they need time to produce results.
Learn to respect time and think that wanting to speed up the results can lead to making errors that could have been avoided and that they can stagger your digital marketing strategy.
This is something that happened to Apple when they decided to eliminate Google Maps from the devices in favor of their own map application, they rushed into wanting to offer their own service when it wasn’t 100% presentable and the case ended in the dismissal of an executive and the public apology from the president of the technology giant. Among other things by presenting a product that’s quality is barely questionable:
4- “For some reason people pay more attention to the price than the value. The price is what you pay, but the value is want can change”
This is a golden rule that you should always have present: the price should never be important if the value justifies it.
Buffet can always remind us of what he learned from is teacher Ben Graham: “the price is what you pay; the value is what you receive. Be it that we are talking about stocks or socks, I like to buy things of quality when possible”.
This is one of the best lessons you can learn from the finance genius:
if you work to offer a good product or service, people will want to acquire it without price being the main factor for deciding to get it or not.
In this section, persuasion techniques for gaining clients also play a very important role so focus your digital marketing strategy on highlighting the value of your product or service. It takes time for results but they can be spectacular.
For example, following with another one from Apple, did you ever consider five years ago buying a watch more than 500 dollars? Probably not, but again came Apple releasing an invention called Apple Watch and in less than a year they convinced 21 million people that they needed it. Question of value?
5- “Spend 20 years creating a reputation and destroy it in 5 minutes. If you think about it you would do things differently”
Very important: take care of your image, the image of your company, the image of your brand.
In reality every digital marketing strategy needs to be constantly focused on building and improving the brand’s reputation, otherwise the strategy won’t work.
Brand image is vital for all companies, and carving out a good image is the result of constant work.
For this you must take a lot of care of the image in you digital marketing strategy that you are giving your audience in each one of the actions.
For example, a series of social media errors that you shouldn’t commit exists and can affect the reputation of your brand, like what happened to O2 UK in this example we show you:
6- “Games are won by people who focus on where they play on the field, not the score board”
It doesn’t matter if your current strategy is not bearing fruit now, because the result that matters is not one game but however the final championship.
Focus your long term strategy and then implement day to day actions that can help you get closer to your final goal.
And it doesn’t matter if you spend a lot of time reading and investigating, because from here you are getting new ideas and processes to implement in your marketing strategy. Thus being, Warren Buffett states he dedicates 80% of his work day to reading – and it doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong, right?-.
What did you think about these 6 business lessons from Warren Buffett that you can apply to your digital marketing strategy? Which one of them caught your attention? Tell us!
And don’t forget to share this post with all your contacts… We all can learn something! 😉