8 Growth Lessons I Learned From 2018 About What To Expect From 2019

Changes are coming (many have happened already) to the way marketing works. If you're not ready to make changes and focus on leveling up, you'll be on a fast path to ZERO.

I compiled some of what I learned in 2018 that'll directly affect marketing this year and beyond 2019.

1. Know Your Avatar Pains

I can't tell you the number of folks I've talked to who have spent thousands building products (sometimes with other people's money) without knowing who the product is for.

If you can't list the in-depth, gut-wrenching pains of your core avatar - you're going to be sh*t out of luck when it comes to marketing your product.

The future (and NOW) of garnering attention is being able to speak to the pains of your market, agitate that pain and show them a way of transformation (your solution).

If you can't do that in a concise way, you're going to get left in the dust by folks who can.

2. Intimacy Matters In Scaling

Intimacy is what builds trust. In building that trust you'll be able to gain the all mighty currency from individuals - their attention.

Just because you're a 1,000 person company, doesn't mean you have any excuse not to build a level of intimacy with your audience.

LeadPages is a good example of this, they've scaled to a pretty massive extent but most of their core customers have a level of trust built with them.

It's not because they're a great product (which they are), it's because at some point or another they've seen one of LeadPages' personalities in a video and built a connection based on that educational experience.

I feel a level of trust with them because I learned about how LeadPages works from Jeff, who then further taught me how to use their product in the on-boarding and then further nurtured me as a community member in their Facebook page.

Building that personal connection with someone who represents a massive company is what built a level of intimacy with me, and what keeps me from turning off my subscription - aside from it being a good product for my use case.

If you're having an issue of churn or refunds, you're probably not building enough intimacy.

In short, your customers don't give a sh*t about you.

3. Zero Churn Is A Thing, As is Negative Churn

Don't aim for less.

If you don't know where to start, spend a few days mapping out your entire growth engine (or funnel) from end to end.

Leave no details out.

You'll see all the gaps and blatant issues in no time.

4. Don't Tie Your Entire Company To One Growth Channel

I'm looking at you Facebook only advertisers.

It's great when you're just starting to scale paid acquisition and want to master one channel first.

But there are a lot of channels out there - and there are more great ones every year.

If you're already spending over 4 figures a day on Facebook, start investing time and energy in other channel development.

You'd be absolutely blown away at the new frontier - platforms like SnapChat bring CPMs like Facebook used to years ago.

P.S. Google is not dead, chances are if you're solving a pain in a market that's been around for a few years or more - you can be crushing it with search or search ads.

5. Track Everything - But Focus On Lead Indicators

Tracking doesn't stop just at the point of immediate conversion from a Facebook ad.

You NEED to be tracking full cycle from anonymized visitor to long term customer.

There's tons of tools that'll help you do this (Heap, MixPanel, etc), but even conversion and ROI tracking doesn't stop just after you've had a conversion on Facebook.

If you're not leveraging your bank of data to send back offline conversions and LTV data - you're missing out on better optimizing your acquisition channels in a BIG way.

I could talk on this for literal days, but I won't.

Just track everything and start NOW - you can't recoup lost data.

But focus on what's important, setting lead indicating KPIs.

6. Leverage Video

Image content is great, especially if you have to be producing Facebook ads en mass because you're spending a ton.

BUT, video is often the medium that can drive way cheaper converting traffic.

Maybe not directly, but as a relevancy hacking medium to 'warm up' cold traffic to then be pulled into a more sales focused ad, it works WONDERS.

On top of that video is one of the most extensible mediums for repurposing. One awesome, information packed video can be repurposed into an article, podcast, posted to YouTube to be ranked and more.

Not comfortable in-front of a camera, that's fine too.

Look up some of your burning questions on YouTube and chances are 20-30% of the time you're seeing an animated video or presentation style video.

While it's better to put a face to it all for building intimacy, quality information doesn't lose out.

7. Monetization Doesn't Have To STOP At Your Core Product

Just because you have a single awesome product that people love doesn't mean you should stop there.

Even in the realm of SaaS you can further monetize the lead flow you're bringing in.

This is important in two core scenarios:

1) You have a B2B high ticket offer

2) You have a B2C or B2B offer that's really low ticket

In both scenarios, you're looking at how you can bring in as many prospects as possible at as low a cost per prospect as possible - because you're often playing a bit of a numbers game to make it work for scale.

Often the companies that scale well in these scenarios focus on organic traffic and content marketing.

While that's great, and I'm a big fan of it (I've literally written the book and created multiple courses used by thousands on both SEO and content marketing) - it's becoming harder and harder to "start".

The best model of better monetization I've seen thus far is ClickFunnels.

They literally get paid $20+ per lead they bring in, BEFORE they introduce that lead to ClickFunnels.

All they do is create products where the next logical step after consuming that product is to look at ClickFunnels as a potential software solution.

Example:

You buy their book DotCom Secrets, you figure out what market you want to build a business in. What's your starting point?

Spin up a way to start building an audience or making sales right? AKA ClickFunnels.

That's one of a few dozen products they offer as their "front end" to indoctrinate potential leads into their way of thinking to get them to understand one core thing:

"If I want to build or scale a business - I need funnels. If It need funnels the only way for me to build them well is ClickFunnels".

I could also go on for literal days talking through the persuasion and cult building that goes into making ClickFunnels work - but if you head over to their site and do some digging you'll get a sense of why it all works.

The summary - you don't need to just sell your one core product to generate high volume lead flow. Look at how you can better monetize leads coming in to build a flow of leads where your cost is as close to zero as possible to bring potential customers in.

8. Virality & Viral Loop Stacking Can Save Your Low ROAS...Sometimes

I won't go into too much detail because I've posted time and time again about viral loops.

But just know, if you're leveraging a well oiled viral machine that's built as part of your core user experience within your product - it can often be the fix for low a low immediate ROAS.

Again looking back at the examples when selling a product that has a low recurring or non-recurring price point.

SUMMARY

The marketing landscape is changing, be ready to focus on building a more connected audience and being more dynamic.

If you're too set in your ways you'll end up the way of the dinosaurs. Cool, but non-existent anymore.