Nuts & Bolts

SIMPLE! Imagine a nut which has 6 sides, you give each side a label, 4 of which are the methods above. You turn the nut onto a bolt to tighten it with your fingers. This represents you cranking out each of the fur methods above. At some point it gets to hard to turn with your fingers alone. This is when you need leverage (a spanner!) This extra leverage is the other two remaining methods.

Leverage 1. Incentivise people that know you (warm) to promote your things. Think referrals, loyalty programmes etc.

Leverage 2. Incentivise external people to promote your stuff. This can be agencies, affiliates, other businesses etc.

The game is to do all of these things consitantly over and over. Tighten the nut down as much as possible and then move onto another nut, another variation of the 6 methods.

That’s it, that, in a nutshell is marketing. All tools, tactics, strategies, platforms etc just help you do one of these 6 things.

So it’s important to understand this and recognise that everything comes downstream of this and not to get hung up on a single thing because you need to be doing all of these methods correctly.

Below I go into more detail about each of these methods and how you can apply them to your business quickly and easily:

COLD

Nobody likes being cold called, especially if it’s some monkey reading off a script claiming to be from your mobile network provider to sell you a new deal. However, don’t ignore cold outreach especially when you are a start up as you don’t have many options. I’m not suggesting calling random people or going door to door knocking peoples doors there are better ways. The key is to do your research on your target market so you know their pain points and then hunt down people who you know fit your audience.

Best Practice:
Find contact details for your target market. You can either pay for databases or you can manually scrape the data both from the web or offline. Once you have some form of contact method do some research so you when you do reach out you don’t sound like an idiot reading from a script at it shows you have made an effort and you can personalise your approach. For example:

warm

These are people that know you in some way and would at least recognise your name or brand if you reached out to them. These are you existing customers, old customers, your personal network or even your friends and family. This segment will be easier and cheaper to convert as you already have some kind of rapport with.

Best Practice:
Treat this audience with care is it is one of your most valuable stay in touch regularly but don’t spam them constantly. Be sure to provide value and keep them in the loop with what you are doing. Use your CRM to keep track of your interactions their engagement so you can tailor your communications.  Segment this audience into subsets so you can nurture the contact through your funnels. For example seperate out paying customers, subscribers and general contacts and use a good CRM to provide further insights like E-com data, open rates, click through etc.

Content

So both warm and cold outreach is a form of direct one to one communication even if you are sending out mass emails. The next area to focus on is creating content to be delivered at scale to a mass audience. Typical examples would be organic social media, podcasts, Youtube videos, blogs, articles and other publications.

Ads

This is another form of mass communication except this has the potential to really scale and if done correctly can be the money printing machine. However, unlike the first 3 methods this has a direct cost and can be the fastest way to burn money if you don’t know what you are doing.

Internal leverage

Now we are getting to the advanced level, think of the spanner turning the nut the reason it’s easier than using your fingers is because of leverage. Basically you increase your output for every unit of effort you put in. You can leverage people that are internal to your business to help you get sales on your behalf. How does this work in practice? 

External Leverage

Exactly the same principle as above but applied to people external to your business. This would be other businesses, influencers, sponsors etc

recap….