Everything you need to know about growth & marketing

I am writing this for a 45-minute presentation I will be giving at the Santa Fe College IPDC (Innovative Product Development Center) on Wednesday morning. I have organized everything I've learned about marketing in the past 6 years into 5 sections that I believe are clear, concise and very easy to implement. If you are providing a service and not selling a product, replace the word product with service (and vice-versa) whenever you see it throughout this essay. I will also be using the words client, user, and customer interchangeably.

1. If you don't have a great product, you shouldn't be thinking about marketing. The truth is, if you don't have a great product, you should not be doing anything else other than improving your product. How do you do that? It's quite simple. Talk to your users, customers, clients, etc. Become as close to them as possible and start to understand what are their pain-points or problems. Then re-iterate, or recreate your product to solve those problems. You shouldn't be asking your customer what they would like to be improved about your product or service - it's your job to come up with that once you fully understand their problem. During this time, it's reasonable and sometimes expected to offer your product at a discounted rate. If you try to sell a mediocre product at the market price of a great product, you will risk hurting your brand perception.
2. A closer look at the 80/20 principle and what you should do about it - If you haven't heard of the 80/20 principle, it essentially states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts or clients. But if we zoom in on it for a second, we also observe that 64% of all of your results come from just 4% of your efforts or clients. You cannot ignore this. The first thing you should do is identify, which of your clients fall into that 4%. Then you need to understand a few things: Why are you generating more revenue from them as opposed to your other clients? How pleased are they with the service you're providing?* And finally, how did you land these clients? This leads me to the second thing you need to identify: Which of your marketing and/or sales efforts lead you to land that client? How can you repeat those efforts to land other clients of a similar caliber. This is not something you ask once, figure out and move on from. This is something that needs to be revisited regularly, and depending on your business, you need to decide how frequently you will revisit it (each quarter, each year, etc.). *I needed to make a point about this one. If these clients are pleased, that's great. Now think about what you can do to blow all of their expectations out of the water. This is how you get referrals, which I'll talk about in the next section. If these clients are not pleased, you need to act immediately to repair/rebuild their trust in your brand and work to make them happy customers.
3. How to build a reputable brand and why this is important - I once heard Simon Sinek tell a story that illustrates this very well. He once spoke for a Microsoft leadership summit, and also spoke for an Apple leadership summit. He said "at the Microsoft summit, 70% of the executives spent the entire time talking about how to beat Apple. At Apple, 100% of the executives spent the entire time talking about how to help teachers teach and how to help students learn." After speaking at the Apple summit, he was in an Uber heading to the airport with one of the senior executives of the company. He turned to the executive and said "Microsoft gave me their new Zune and I've gotta tell you, it's far better than the iPod Touch." the executive turned back to him and replied "I have no doubt." and the conversation ended. Apple's music players on average were about $50 more expensive than Microsoft's, and yet they held 71% of the market share at the peak of the market. One company was hyper-focused on the competition, the other was hyper-focused on solving problems. Your brand is your promise to the customer, and the only way to keep that brand is to never break that promise. Jeff Bezos says your brand is what people say about you (or your company) when you're not in the room. You must be intentional about this, don't leave it to chance. There's a reason that the easiest way to convince a new customer to buy your product is through word-of-mouth marketing. It's because the message comes from someone who they know and trust as opposed to an ad that a company paid for. So what's the best way to get customers to brag about your company and product? Are you ready for it? Have a great product! There's no secrets here; in truth, marketing is quite simple, but we tend to overcomplicate it. However, just because it's very simple, does not mean it is easy.
4. The power of content marketing and how to effectively do it. Once your product is on point and you know your customers are bragging about it, it's time to think about ramping up the growth a bit. This is the fuel on the fire, if you will. The first step here is to ask yourself: Where does my audience spend most of their time? Not just physically, but also online. What platforms are they using, if any? What websites do they frequent? What blogs do they read? Understanding the answers to these questions will allow you to know what type of content you should be creating and what platforms you should be putting it out on. I will not go into specifics of writing a script for a video or coming up with topics for blogs (or other forms of content), that will be for another blog post in the future. The next thing to realize is that this has the potential to generate A LOT of leads and sales, but only if you are consistent over a long period of time. One thing I like to tell founders (or marketers, operators, etc.) is to create a challenge for yourself. Here are some examples: Commit to writing a short blog every single day for 90 days. Release 3 videos per week for 6 months. Come up with your own challenge but the keys here are high frequency and consistency. If you do this, I can almost guarantee you will see some type of results, unless you're doing something very wrong. In addition, always focus on building a relationship with your customers instead of trying to squeeze every penny you can out of them. Here's 3 impressive statistics that show how important it is to focus on having repeat customers instead of trying to find new ones: It can cost 5x more to acquire new customers than to keep current ones (The National Law Review). The average repeat customer spends 67% more in months 31-36 vs months 0-6 (Bain & Co). On average, loyal customers are worth 10x as much as their first purchase (Marketing Tech Blog).
5. Give back and help others without expectation. There was only supposed to be 4 total sections, but I had to add this one, which is also one of the most recent lessons I've learned just in the past 1-2 years. Ask yourself, who are some of the individuals that are making the largest positive impact in the community? Nobody has the bandwidth & resources to help everyone, but everyone has the ability to help someone. Do as much as you can, whether that be lending time to non-profit, sponsoring an event, mentoring other entrepreneurs in the community who are just starting out or even donating 5% of your services for those who are helping others or those who need it but can't afford it. This will almost always come back around, sometimes years later, in ways you can't really predict!

If you read the entire essay, you'll notice something that is consistent throughout most of the piece: questions. Marketing, and business for that matter, is all about asking the right questions and knowing what to do with those answers.

So if I had to sum this entire essay up into as few words as possible, it would be this: Sell a great product that solves a real problem. Focus on the 4% that gives you 64% of the results. Be so good, your customers brag about you. Learn everything about your customers and tailor your messaging to them. Post content every day for at least 90 days before complaining about not getting results. Help others without expectation. All of this is very simple yet difficult, but you can start today.

If you have additional questions, you can email me at [email protected] - For early startup founders, we have a 10-week accelerator program where we have weekly speakers, connect you with industry-specific mentors, and allow you to pitch accredited investors at our demo day. Applications are open now for our Spring 2021 cohort that is kicking off on February 15th. To learn more or apply, visit onesixonegroup.com