Read this if you run ads for your company (you might be wasting millions).

You are probably doing marketing exactly like your competitors, right?

• If you are DTC, you are plowing money into paid media, influencers, and email marketing.
• If you are CPG you are weak on social or pay for engagement so that you can get retail to pay attention to you. And you are investing in Amazon ads.
• If you are SaaS you have someone cold emailing 5k people a day, and doing webinars.
• If you are a B2B service business, you are investing in media, cold emailing, industry events, etc.

And you know what?

So is everyone else in your industry...

So what does that do to your audience's attention to those things?

It dilutes it; and desensitizes it.

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Try this...

Calculate how much money you are spending on "push advertising" like paid media or cold outreach.

Example:

$50k/mo in Meta, Google and TikTok ads = $600k

- OR-

3 sales reps @ $75k + benefits + commission ~ $500k

This kind of sales and marketing is hard because you have to have the perfect message and the perfect time which means LOTS of trial and error.

BE DIFFERENT

Let's take a Cybersecurity firm as an example.

Take that $500k budget and hire 25 community managers (CMs), content creators (CCs), and content assistants (CAs) for $1,500/mo each from the Philippines or Latin America (SupportShepard.com or GrowthAssistant.com can help you get qualified candidates).

Here is how you break down their roles and goals:

14 are split up across Twitter, Reddit, Linkedin, Quora, Slack, Discord, and YouTube (2 each).

• Every day they have to comment on 100 posts relevant to your industry.
• You give them keywords, types of posts, topics, etc to identify posts.
• You also give them 100 influential accounts to follow and comment on.
• You give them a wiki with replies based on the topic and types of posts.
• You use a tool like Mention to track those comments and conversations
• Any conversations that get a reply, immediately go to DM wherever possible.
• If DM isn't possible (YouTube) then it goes to email (can find it with Apollo.io )
• They will comment as your account but named something like "Amy from CyberProtect" (or whatever your company name)

In 1 year those five CMs will have had 364,000 meaningful initial touchpoints with potential clients, and that doesn't count the people that passively see those comments.

So you can assume well over 1 million impressions on a natural conversation.

Another 5 are creating cyber security content and posting them to non-branded accounts (like this https://youtu.be/hXSFdwIOfnE?si=ZgdkLXSjL-hxerV8 )

After 1 year (if done well) each channel with 10k views per video and one video per day, will have 3,650,000 views.

You could probably make 2 channels, which means 7,300,000 views.

Each of those videos will have strong CTAs to visit landing pages and download resources in exchange for email addresses.

The remaining 4 content managers are curating the best content and repurposing them to blogs that they create like this https://danielmiessler.com/ ; along with an email newsletter.

If they are posting 2x/day and building the website up to 10k visitors a month, and 10k newsletter subscribers...

That will be a readership of about 100k per year.

Again, with strong CTAs in each post and newsletter.

All of this activity is much higher quality than push advertising because it doesn't bother people, it adds value in the following ways:

• It's 1-to-1, personalized communication
• It gives them valuable resources
• It builds authority through quality information
• It builds trust through repetition and awareness

And the best part is that the investment is mostly evergreen; meaning it does go away once the money is spent (like ads).

So here is my takeaway advice to you:

If your business needs to go fast, start with ads and outreach. But as soon as you can make the shift, move to community and content. You brand will grow larger and stronger. And your revenue growth will be more consistent.

Follow John Timmerman for more creative sales and marketing strategies.

Contact thegoodmonster.com if you need help building a different, more successful marketing machine.