Marketing expert, John Wall, shares marketing strategies based on the research of Gabriel Weinburg and Justin Mares, as well as his own _+ decades of expertise.
21 basic channels to get more business, categorized in 3 buckets
Traction diagram
4 major areas help get business in the front door
- product The idea that you can bake features into the product so that it can spread on its own. Viral components that people get excited about.
- Awareness: classic marketing functions
- Advertising, PR, social media marketing
- Jenny Dietrich came up with PESO model
- PAID, you can go buy traffic (basically advertising)
- EARNED by getting in the news or in front of influencers (basically PR)
- SOCIAL
- OWN – publish your own stuff; website, blogs, youtube videos, put out any content you want without Great way to get your message in front of lots of people while having full control over it.
- Marketing analytics: being able to measure what’s going on and take advantage of your data are two different areas.
- Sales: talking directly to prospects and Best way to get the most advantage out of the dollars you’re spending and time you’re investing
The traction diagram allows us to visualize the 21 discreet channels
The other thing that the Traction research found was that there’s diminishing returns on this. So pick 3 of these tactics to be primary marketing efforts.
People spread themselves too thin and if you’re working on too many, you’re not getting the returns you could be. Returns are not linear; in fact they’re often exponential in marketing.
With most marketing campaigns, the more time you spend
Helpful to spend time getting the lay of the land, developing gut, increasing efficiency to determine what works vs doesn’t as you put time into limited buckets
What’s going on in the advertising world?
- Search engine ads = straightforward. Figure out what key words people are searching for, spend money to ensure you come up top of the list. Spend money, get traffic, really straightforward. Marketers love this because it’s instant results. You turn the spigot on today and know where the money you spent is going. Second tier search engines (like Bing) are very affordable. Anything you do on Google can be copied and pasted without burning budget because you won’t need Whatever works on Google will work on the other ones.
- Social/display ads = anywhere else on the internet that’s not a search All sorts of places you can place ads and have partnerships. You should already know who in your space who are the influencers, organizations, associations, etc. same thing: throw some money at it, get some traffic.
- Offline ads are still important for many industries. Especially if your product has a geographicfocus, billboards are still Digital content such as airport billboards or taxicabs. There’s all sorts of stuff so if that’s something that might fit
PR
- Most people don’t get into PR until they’re at the half million mark
- Three basic PR buckets
- Targeting socials: having someone chase influencers in your vertical who have large platforms and lots of followers. Often involves giving free products to try to get them to talk about you. It’s the same process as traditional media but they’re different targets in the digital space.
- Targeting media: same thing except there needs to be awareness of traditional media (publishers, newspapers, TV, etc)
- Unconventional PR: skydiving at a baseball game or serving coffee outside the statehouse when the accountants are lobbying. Crazy stunts and programs that gain attention. Every now and then you manage to strike a vein of gold that nobody’s looking at. Can be a great way to just jump in and start discussions.
Social media:
- Have your social media brand protected. Set up an account on every social media network with your name so that nobody else can grab You don’t want a competitor to have your name
- Talk to customers and prospects and find out where they spend Certain platforms like TikTok are very finicky in their demographics
- Facebook, instagram, and threads are all tied You can work on one platform and get reach across all of them.
- Know your For instance, the people who use pinterest use it a TON and spend lots of time there.
- Linkedin is super expensive but if it’s the right vertical you can have great If you have a hunch it might be for you, it’s worth testing because when it works, it works. It’s all professionally focused and it’s execs, so that’s the fastest path to decision makers.
- Dumpster fire right
Content marketing:
- The big one is email “Email is still the king.” If you have your own email list, you control it. You can have direct dialogue with customers that you don’t have to pay for.
- Everyone’s expected to have a presence as far as text, audio, and video on your own website
- Expected presence on major distribution channels like youtube. Youtube has been massive on every For many demographics, it’s the number one search engine. Anything there is worth doing.
- Messaging apps are an merging space Nobody likes getting texts from businesses. Only works when there’s direct investment from customers and personal involvement.
- Events
- Speaking engagements: Becoming a speaker at industry Talk about what you’ve got going on. It’s a great way to get free access to audiences all over the world
- Trade shows: Showing off products at exhibitions. Huge range. Some are free, some are coveted and require a million dollars per Depends on the shape of your industry and market.
- Community building. Goes hand in hand with email. Start building a group of customers and prospects that meet virtually, or better yet, in person so that you can have discussions and get That’s a great way to get in front of people and keep things moving.
- Offline events: anything in real life space is better for getting feedback and insight
Marketing analytics:
- Search engine optimization is falling off the list. Once considered core competency, the problem with this is that the search engines are so good that really, your main focus shouldbe making If your content is the best content out there, you’ll get the web traffic. Unless you’re spending a lot of money on ads, you’re going to have trouble getting organic traffic. Basically, the key is just spending money. If you want to come up first, you need to throw money at it. If you’re not, it will get thrown to somebody who is. If you’re going toe-to-toe with Spotify, Spotify is always going to win. Because they’re spending more money than you.” It used to be all about the quality of content, but unfortunate it’s more about money now. SEO probably shouldn’t be on your list.
- AI marketing Just having analytics can give you insight as to what programs are working, but also leveraging customer information for advantage. “Amazon knows that I spend money on audio gear
Product marketing: most interesting and most important
- Engineering as marketing. The idea that if you can bake anything into your product that requires contact with other customers or prospects, the thing can sell Example: the iphone tap to trade contact info. Everybody will learn about that function when someone shows it to them. By using that tap to trade business cards, someone else is now aware of that feature. So every time it gets used, it extends itself. Any product where if you can tie in some loop to other customers, then it will spread on its own. That’s the best investment you can make.
- Existing platforms is neighboring. If your product works within some other ecosystem. Lever swimming pool testing company. If you can partner with HTH, the people selling the chemicals, they already have customer lists, they don’t have their own testing tool, you can instantly open a market and get access to customers. Instead of spending thousands of dollars in advertising to get those customers, you could get them after one steak dinner with the VP.
Sales:
- Direct sales: getting in front of prospects and customers is the way to do it
- Business development: related to existing platforms, it’s where you’re trying to partner with similar products or services, places that would make sense
- Affiliate programs: a prospect who’s so good that you’ll let them sell it and pay them to bring the deals to you
Lots of channels to choose from, DON’T DO ALL OF THEM. you go down the list, pick the three that you feel have the best investment. Then you want to get into a monthly cycle of assessing the three you’re doing, what’s working, do you pour more resources or scale back? Is it time to swap one out? Every quarter, look at the results and decide how and whether to proceed.
That will work for you until the point where you decide to take on staff, then you use your data to hire people who can specialize in each channel. At every Fortune 500 company, there are entire departments for each of these 21 channels and they’re basically pitted against each other to fight for budget
That’s the two year marketing MBA crammed into 20 minutes.
How a pre-revenue startup gets out the door:
Everybody’s gotta have a web presence. Everybody’s doing direct sales and having as many personal conversations as possible. Some folks even say you should be spending 50% of your time working with customers.
So really, with a startup, you kind of only have one arrow to pick. Email is the most dependable one. After sending two or three monthly emails, you know what it can do and how well it works.
The biggest challenge for early stage companies is just that you don’t have enough time to spread over all of this stuff. Direct sales and communication are already ⅔ of the battle.
Come up with one unique message and test the same message across everything you do. What phrases and parts of the pitch resonate the most?
Your first statement should be: you need to break through somebody’s suspicion and apathy. Those are the two big things. One challenge is someone just doesn’t believe you because you’re trying to sell them. And the other is, they just don’t care. They have 50 million things going on. So put forth a bold statement. If i tild you that we could reduce your expenses by 75% in two weeks, is that worth you taking ten more minutes to learn about? Say something that’s a little bit too good to believe, and then challenge that and say “if i told you i could do that, would you want to spend more time learning about it?”
“Nobody wants to be the ‘flexible, integrated solution’ because that’s too many buzzwords. Find something dead-on.”
People make the mistake of falling in love with their own product and its features. What you really want to do is talk about how it impacts a customer’s life.
Pitching value and the way it changes the lives of the prospects is more important than talking about some product or feature when the prospect isn’t yet sure if they want to buy the thing.
So many sales efforts are pathetic. You really have to be willing to take a different approach. Remember that you’re doing amazing work. You’re changing the market and doing something that nobody’s seen before. Go in with that mindset. You have a story to share, and others will be excited when they hear it.
Don’t think of it as much as selling, but as getting them to join you on your voyage to some place new and exciting. That’s a pitch that will resonate and move you forward.
- Meta is a 3-for-1: Meta owns three major global platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.The interconnectivity of these three spaces, as well as their broad audiences, can make it a simple entry point for building social media awareness without worrying about customizing campaigns to different apps.
- LinkedIn is high-cost, high-reward: Advertising on LinkedIn can be enormously expensive, but for the right company it delivers highly efficient results. Its professional natureand common usage amongst executives means LinkedIn is often the fastest way to interface with decision-makers who can help your startup grow.
