- Hey, it's Rick Kettner
here and in this video, we're gonna explore the
best marketing strategy for promoting a new
business or a new product. Essentially, we're gonna be
looking at a simple method that you can use to
choose and execute on the best marketing
opportunities for your specific business. Now, this is a follow
up to a previous video that I published on 33
ways to get more customers. You can find the
link to that video in the description box below. And of course, if you're interested in
learning more about how to build and grow your business, then I recommend that you
subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications
so you don't miss out on future videos. But let's get into it. The number one reason why
new businesses fail is that they don't attract
enough customers. And the reality is a lot
of businesses make it through the other stages like coming up with a brand
name, coming up with a logo, even building out a
basic product or service, but unfortunately, many
of them fail when it comes to actually attracting prospects and converting those
prospects into customers. So that is the entire
focus of this video. We're gonna be going through a simple four
step framework called the bullseye framework. This is from "Traction"
by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. A really great book for
startups that are looking to attract customers
to their business. And this is a simple like I say, a four step process that you
can use to attract customers. The very first step is to
brainstorm marketing ideas. So what you wanna do
here is you wanna go through all the different ways that you could possibly attract
customers to your business, and you wanna come up
with realistic scenarios for how you might execute
on those opportunities. Now, I mentioned earlier that I recently published
a video covering 33 ways to get more customers. You can go through that video, that's 33 different
marketing channels that are covered in that video. And the idea here, even though we're not gonna
be pursuing all 33 channels at once, we'd be spreading
ourselves way too thin. The idea here is to come
up with realistic scenarios for each and every
one of them just as an exploratory process. So, for example, if you go down the list and
you see content marketing, you wanna come up with
a realistic scenario for how you might promote your business using
content marketing. What kinda articles
could you create? What kinda videos? Would you create a podcast? You wanna explore exactly
how you might pursue that opportunity if
you absolutely had to. And then you wanna do the same as you go down the list
with search advertising, social advertising,
hosting live events. You might consider, would
you host a local meetup, a small meetup group with
enthusiastic customers, or would you try to put
on a big fancy event and invite other speakers? Whatever the marketing
channel might be, the idea here is to simply
explore the possibilities to reasonably brainstorm
what you could do if you absolutely had to pursue the various different
marketing opportunities that are out there. And the reason why this is
important is because oftentimes, businesses get stuck in a rut where they really only
pursue marketing channels that all of their
rivals are pursuing. So if you see another
potential competitor using search advertising, you might be
tempted to just say, "Okay, search
advertising is the way "that you market
this kinda business." And that really
limits your options. And unfortunately, when you
follow that kinda strategy, you're actually playing into
your competitor's strengths and you're pursuing a channel that is already gonna
be competitive, right? So by its very definition, the most popular channels
may not necessarily be the best opportunities. Sometimes they are still, sometimes they aren't. So, that's the entire
point of this first step is to actually explore what
you might do if you had to pursue different channels
in order to just flush them out and see what
might be possible. Step number two is to
select promising channels. So this is a very important
step where we start to narrow the field. Instead of pursuing
all 33 channels, we're gonna narrow it down
to about three to five of the most promising
opportunities. And when I say promising, because you're a startup, your number one priority
should be speed. So you wanna find
channels that are likely to create results
for you quickly. And of course, you also wanna choose
channels that are likely to offer a lot of
customers, right? So you're talking about
both volume of customers and speed at which you
can actually attract them. And of course another
consideration would
be your ability to attract them profitably. So just because a channel can
deliver a lot of customers, and can do so quickly, it might not be cost
effective to pursue it. So that's the kinda thing
you wanna be thinking about as you narrow down the
field to three to five of the most promising channels, or the most promising
opportunities based on your initial brainstorming. Then it's time to
move on to step three. And step three is something
that I think a lot of businesses skip
over just naturally when they try to pursue
marketing opportunities. And step three is to
perform inexpensive tests. This is critical because even if an opportunity
seems really promising, and as you go through
how you might pursue it, it seems really attractive and
it might be really exciting, the fact is not all
marketing channels are equal. And sometimes you might
be really surprised to find out that one channel
just isn't that effective. And if you don't compare its
results with another channel, then you're really
never able to make that differentiation
and to realize, hey, this might be a
half decent opportunity, but over here is a much, much better opportunity that we should really be
focusing all of our time and attention on. So this step is all about just simply
performing inexpensive, simple tests to
validate the potential of each of your
promising opportunities. Now, one mistake a
lot of businesses make when it comes to testing marketing
opportunities like this, is they try to overly
optimize in the process. So for example, if you were gonna place
ads on Google AdWords, you might go on there and say, "Okay, I have a $40
margin on my product, "I can't afford to spend more
than $40 per conversion here. "And so if I'm
spending more than "that then this channel
just isn't very promising." And that thought process
leads them to aim for targets and to set their
ad spend in a way that is unlikely to provide
really great results. And the reason
why this is bad is because the only goal
of this step here is to validate two things. One, that there are
enough customers in this channel that
it's worth pursuing. And two, that you
have a vague sense that if you took the time
to optimize your efforts, and to improve your ad copy and
to improve your landing page and your entire marketing funnel as it relates to that channel, then over time, you almost certainly
will be profitable. That's what you're
trying to figure out. You're not trying
to actually optimize because if you do
that too early, you're ruling out a channel before you even give
it a chance to breathe. So what you wanna do here is just simply perform
inexpensive tests to validate there
are customers there and that it's worth your time and energy to pursue
things further. And then afterwards, later in the future, you can worry about doing
all that optimization. In some cases, it takes months if not years, to really perfect your entire
approach to that channel. And that's perfectly okay. You can do that in the future, and it's not gonna affect
your long term potential with that channel. But the idea behind
this step is just simply to validate that
it's worth your time to explore things further. And then we move on
to step number four, which is to look at all these
tests that we've performed and to select one
promising channel. To select the single thing
that we're gonna focus on when it comes to building
momentum with the business. And this is incredibly
important when it comes to a brand new startup because
you really can't afford to be spreading
yourself too thin. And the reality is that
when it comes to a lot of marketing channels, there's a bit of a
winner take all dynamic that happens with
marketing channels. Google Search is a
great example of this. The person that is
able to best optimize and best outperform their
rivals when it comes to advertising for
a specific keyword or a specific family
of keyword phrases, they tend to far outperform
whoever is second in that area, whoever is
second best at utilizing that marketing channel. So it really pays to
become an absolute master at at least one channel when
you're growing a business. In fact, that's
pretty common wisdom within the marketing
community that you really, if you wanna have a
successful business, there should be at least
one channel out there that the entrepreneur
or founder, or at least one of the
co-founders of the business, is incredibly familiar with and
is very proficient at using. And that really gives the
business a lot of strength. And so the idea here is
really simple, right? You just wanna focus
on one channel, you wanna become really
great at that one channel, and you wanna absolutely
focus your efforts on capitalizing on all of the
potential of that channel, until of course, you hit diminishing returns. And that's the point at
which spending more money on the channel doesn't
really give you more results. You might find a
point like let's say, Google AdWords, you might
find spending more than 50,000 in a given period just simply
does not increase results. And at that point, it's time to revisit
this process, explore other channels
and figure out what second or third channel you can tag
on to expand your business. But that's really
the process here. It's really straightforward. It's really simple. It might almost seem too simple, but that's okay. And it's a very powerful
way to like I say, select and test and ultimately
find the one channel that is most promising
for your business. Anyway, that's it
for this video. If you have any questions
or if you have any thoughts or even suggestions for
better ways to attract and convert customers, please share them in the
comment section below. And of course, if you're interested in
learning more about how to build and grow your business, then I recommend that you
subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications
so you don't miss out on future videos. But with that said, thank you for watching and
I'll see you in the next video.
