- Hey everyone, Nicholas
from GrowthMarketer here. And in this short video, I want to tell you about a concept called First Principles Thinking and how it applies to the
work that marketers do. Let's jump right in. (intro music) So you may have heard of First
Principles Thinking before, but if not, this is a quick definition. It's a way for us to break
down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble
them from the ground up. Now, this is not specific to marketing. This is a concept that's been
around for a very long time, and it's applied to a whole
bunch of different industries and different ways of working. And this is something
that I think marketers can benefit from. If we also learn to adapt
First Principles Thinking because so much of what we do as marketers is really just a collection of
these tiny little challenges and if we string them
together in the right way with the right strategy
and the right tactics and the right tools and processes, then we're going to have
significant results. And that's really why it's important to think with this first
principles mindset. And in fact, Elon Musk is a fan
of First Principles Thinking this is a quote from him, he says, "I tend to approach things
from a physics framework and physics teaches you to
reason from first principles rather than by analogy." So no matter what you think of Elon Musk with his different views, he's definitely been able to
accomplish a lot of things with all of his different
companies and endeavors and part of that is attributed
to his application of First Principles Thinking. So let's see how we can
apply the same principles to the work you're doing as a marketer. So as an example of how to apply First Principles Thinking to marketing, let's look at SEO or
Search Engine Optimization, probably the most common
thing that people think about when they think about
marketing in general. And when you look at SEO,
it can be overwhelming because there's so many
different moving parts, but really there's just
three main categories or buckets that you need to think about. You need to think about the content, the architecture and the backlinks. So real quick, without
making this an SEO video, let me explain what that
means in a little more detail. If you want to learn about SEO, first, you have to figure
out what type of content will you be publishing. The content is crucial, because you need to
answer the search query that the visitor may have as they're searching on Google. And then secondly, you need
to figure out the architecture for where that content lives. Most likely it's going
to be on your website, maybe on your blog. And so you need to make
sure that the page is built so that it's going to load quickly. It's going to pass all of
the new performance tests that Google has come out with, with Core Web Vitals. It's going to have the proper
meta-tags and descriptions and the proper link structure. It's going to have internal links and everything will be
set up under the surface so that you have a strong architecture for where that content resides. And then finally, there's Backlinks. This is often what people think of first, when they think about SEO, "Oh, I need to get more backlinks", but really it's just one of several different components of SEO. And so backlinks obviously
are very important, but they're not the be all end all. And so when you get backlinks, this is going to send those
signals back to Google to say, "Hey, this is authoritative
and relevant content that should be shared and trusted." So you see how, if we just learn about content
architecture and backlinks, and we put it all together, we've basically learned about SEO. And it's a lot easier when
we break it down like that, using First Principles Thinking
then if we just try to say, "Hey, I want to learn everything
there is to know about SEO and it's overwhelming and I
don't know where to start." Let's look at a few other examples of First Principles Thinking
applied to marketing. So for this one landing pages. Let's say you want to build
landing pages that convert, but what does that mean? Where do you even start? Well, using First Principles Thinking you would break down
what a landing page is and what it needs to have by
thinking of the framework, the offer, the audience and the messaging that goes
into that page experience. So the framework is similar
to what we were talking about with the architecture for SEO. It is the structure of the page. So this talks about
the design of the page, where it's hosted, how quickly it loads, the usability of the page, where all the different elements are. It's the skeleton of the page. Then we have the offer. In my opinion, the most important part of
a landing page is the offer. This is what you're providing, whether you're selling something, whether you're offering
something for free, whether you're asking for someone to provide their email address
in return for something, or you want someone to click a button, or call a phone number, that's your offer and the way you position
that is extremely important. And this is one of the
best things you can test on your landing page. Next, you have the audience. Do you know that if you just
take a current landing page and you show it to two
very different audiences, you could get wildly different results. So the audience is very important when it comes to landing page testing, to make sure that you're
leveraging the correct audience with the right messaging. And that brings us to messaging, the fourth component
of a good landing page. You want your messaging to be dialed in. You want the tone to be perfect. You want it to be a strong message match between wherever someone's coming from, whether it be an ad or an
email and the landing page and all of that should
be a cohesive experience for the visitor. So you see how using
First Principles Thinking, instead of thinking about landing pages as this overwhelming thing, we've broken it down into four components, and it's a lot easier now to think about what we need to do to get good results. We'll do a few more examples. So you get the concept here. So this one is email deliverability, one of my favorite topics. And if you think about
how do I get my emails to get to someone's
inbox at a higher rate, and how do I make sure they
don't end up in the spam folder, well, email deliverability
can be very complicated. Probably more complicated than anything else we've talked
about so far in this video, but really you got to think
about the email content, the inbox activity and
your sender reputation. So without going into too much detail, the email content is what
does your message say? What's the subject line? What's the pre-header text? What is in the actual body of the message? Then inbox activity is what are people doing once
they receive that email? Are they flagging it as spam? Are they opening it? Are the replying? Are they clicking on links? Those are signals that the internet service
providers are looking at and then their sender reputation. You can use a tool like
Google Postmaster Tools to see what does Google
think about your reputation and how can you improve that. And that's just one of many different ways to try to improve your sender reputation. And finally the last example of First Principles Thinking for marketers is let's say you want to
grow your TikTok following, really this applies to any social channel. I'm just going to pick TikTok because that's one of my
favorite social channels at the moment. If you want to grow your
following on TikTok, really got to focus on
having amazing content, creating a high level of engagement, both in your videos and engaging
in other people's videos. And then the timing of
when you're posting, how frequently you're
posting that type of thing. So there you have it, hopefully these examples
have helped you understand how First Principles
Thinking can be applied to the work you're doing as a marketer. And they'll help you understand
some complex concepts in a lot simpler terms. All you have to do is break them down into the component parts. Now, if you found this video helpful, go ahead and give it a like, and subscribe to my channel for even more marketing
tips in the future. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video. (closing music)
