- What start-ups can learn from internet marketers.
Now I know right off the bat you're going:
Internet marketers, for real?
Those schemey guys trying to sell me teeth whitening
and acai or acai berry and all these crazy products online.
Yes! I'm gonna share with you guys a quick story.
You know, all start-up want more growth, traction...
They want more revenue.
And they're always trying to figure out,
how can they make their product deliver on these things?
But here's what I've learned, you know,
I was building Clarity and it was a marketplace
for entrepreneurs to get expert
advice from other entrepreneurs.
And I remember it was a few months into it,
and all of a sudden we started getting a bunch of traffic.
And I started looking at where
was all this traffic coming from?
And I realized we had certain individuals
that were signing up for Clarity
and then promoting it to their audience.
But I couldn't understand how could one person drive
30, 40 thousand people to their profile?
And I realized it's cause they built an audience.
And honestly I didn't even understand
this world of internet marketing.
But it turned out that many of my friends,
people that I've known for five, six, seven years,
who I thought were just bloggers,
were essentially using these techniques
to build educational programs,
to serve their community, to help other people.
And when I talked to them about their business model,
because when I thought of Clarity, I'm like well,
Clarity's kind of an educational product.
We're helping people get connected over the phone
to solve some of their biggest business challenges.
It's information, right?
And they showed me how they've
been able to build their business.
how they've been able to monetize that.
The way they looked at it, I realized there were
so many opportunities for tech start-ups,
technology companies, to use and leverage these approaches,
that I wanted to shoot this video.
There's seven different ones and there's probably many more.
But I just wanted to share with you guys
the big ones that I've learned.
The first one is funnels.
There's so much when it comes to building your sign-up flow,
and your registration process, and your paywall,
and all these different aspects.
A lot of these companies call them funnels,
a lot of these internet marketers.
And what they do is they think about,
well, if I already have a customer in my funnel,
how can I up-sell, cross-sell, or down-sell
them something else to increase the total cart value.
That's the way they talk about it.
So maybe as a tech startup, you call it
"lifetime value of a customer."
The way that most tech startups do it now
is by creating different packages or tiers of products.
But I would argue that if you just ask yourself,
my customer has a pain, they have a need,
and yes my technology solves that pain, but there could
be other ways that you could help solve it better and that
could be by offering services or consulting on top of it.
But I just want to inspire you,
maybe to think about how can you up-sell or down-sell.
Maybe they don't want the enterprise version
but then you down-sell some other thing.
I've seen companies do this with live-events.
They have their yearly event,
and as people sign-up for their SaaS business they say
hey do you want 50 percent off a ticket to our yearly event?
So that's the first one, funnels.
The second one is promotional partners.
Look, here's the deal.
If you depend on you and yourself and your resources
and your employees and your teams, community,
to get the word out about your product
or maybe you're trying to hustle to get the press.
That could work, and for many startups that is one channel.
But I will argue with you, what I've seen,
a lot of information marketers, internet marketers,
the way they do joint-ventures, the way they do affiliates,
the way they partner with other companies
that have large email lists and communities to get their
product in front of their ideal customer is phenomenal.
Like seriously, you need to understand how they do this.
Many of them do launches.
The reason why: it's an event.
They create a competition.
They create their ranking.
Who's the best promotional partner?
Whatever it is for your product, maybe you have some kind of
affiliate program or you could create one.
And just find a dozen other companies like yours
and you guys could cross-promote each other.
It is such a simple and powerful idea,
it's one that I wanted to mention, so promotional partners.
The third is focus.
You know most companies don't realize that
the more they focus the larger the market's gonna expand.
They don't focus on one customer.
Instead, they say we can, we're the easiest,
fastest way to do this result, or get this result.
It's everything to everybody.
They focus on being super broad,
and it doesn't matter who you are,
if you have this problem we can solve you.
Internet marketers, I've never seen them do this,
because they know that they'll fall flat.
When, see a lot of online marketers, internet marketers,
information marketers, they get paid on performance.
So they need to make sure that when they
do a promotion its performs, it works.
So they can't go broad. They go hyper-focused.
They say if you're this type of person with this kind
of problem, we have the solution for you.
And that is a huge thing. So that's number three.
I really wanted you guys to learn and understand,
that if you don't have a number-one customer avatar,
that you don't really have a focus
for your marketing and your initiative.
So that's number three. Number four is copywriting!
I mean, I'm guilty of this. I'll be honest with you guys.
In the early days of building start-ups
I just thought, whatever.
You label a button, you create a homepage,
you write some marketing copy, you setup some emails.
Whatever, it doesn't matter just get it done.
And I can tell you from experience,
talking with some of the world's number one
top internet marketers that they are able
to triple, quadruple their performance based on copywriting.
From the landing page, to the subject line,
to the email copy, to the sequence of words,
the way they overcome objections,
the way they understand their customers' needs.
And yes they are selling. Don't think selling is a bad word.
Selling is conveying enthusiasm for your product.
It's coming from a place of integrity.
If you truly believe if somebody used your product
that they will be better off, then it is your responsibility
to do whatever you can ethically
to get them to use that product.
And copywriting is such a huge, huge way to do that.
So that's number four. Number five is paid-acquisition.
Most of these internet marketers, they cannot depend
on inbound content marketing or press.
Nobody's gonna write about their next educational product.
It's not news-worthy, it's not like
getting featured on TechCrunch or whatever.
But they focus on paid because it scales, you know?
They focus on different channels,
that they'll go test because they understand
their economics and their business.
They understand the unit economics.
They understand, if I spend three dollars to get this email,
that email turns into 20 dollars
revenue over the next 12 months.
And they're willing to find other channels to scale that.
So startups is all about repeatable, scale-able businesses,
but many of them when I talk to them,
I go, okay what are you doing for paid-acquisition?
And they go, oh well we've tried Facebook ads.
We've tried doing some stuff.
No, no, no, no. It's not about trying, okay?
It's about dominating.
It's about deciding I need to make this channel work.
I need to make this channel work.
It's not about dabbling or playing around.
It's getting it to work 100 percent.
So paid-channels, if you've never done this at scale...
Trust me, I call it building a growth engine.
Paid is part of that.
Once you understand the economics of your product, and the
life-time value, and your return rates, and all these
other metrics, you need to be focusing on paid-to-scale
the business the biggest way, fastest way possible.
So number six is email marketing.
This is, this to me is the fun one.
I had no clue how powerful email marketing is.
I gotta be honest, even though I did it fairly well.
We've been written up, Clarity got written up
as like the best emails ever sent by a startup,
because of the things that I was learning.
But the truth is there's so much more you can do.
Things like, creating goodwill.
You know, if somebody comes to your website
and you don't collect their email,
maybe by creating value for them,
giving them some kind of eBook,
or PDF or content on your blog.
Getting that email and then nurturing that relationship,
using it, and then making offers within that email
to get them to sign-up for your product.
Once they're in that funnel, use that funnel structure
to do an up-sell, down-sell, to increase
the life-time-value of your business.
These are things that every tech startup
needs to implement in their business.
Email marketing, to me, should have been number one
because it is the most powerful, potent strategy.
So that's number six.
Number seven is building trust. It's goodwill.
It's, before I ask you to give
me anything, I wanna earn your trust.
I want to create value for you.
Internet marketers, information
marketers, are world class at this.
I've seen them in their sales process
say look, you know what, we're gonna create
these free videos and you can consume them.
And the videos provide value.
They give training, they teach you how to do stuff.
And if you never consume or buy their product or offer,
you will be better off from watching this.
Most startups are like, hey, here's our product,
sign-up for it and that's how your life's gonna be better.
There's so many better ways to
actually sell or get people on-board.
And the way I look at it, is goodwill
is something you earn over time.
It's creating so much value that
they feel like they're reciprocated.
I mean a lot of people know about Evernote
and the premium business model.
A lot of people upgraded for Evernote to the paid version
just because they felt almost a sense of responsibility
to like pay for something even though the free version
would have continued solving their problems.
And that is the level of goodwill, overtime,
using email, because email shows up in their inbox.
It's still the highest performing marketing channel.
It's something you have to do.
So I just wanted to share these seven.
I'm gonna quickly recap. So number one is funnels.
Okay, so make sure that you think about
how can you increase lifetime value
by up-sells, down-sell, and cross-sells.
You guys can go Google and learn more about those.
Number two is promotional partners.
That's the word I like to use.
Some people call them affiliates,
joint-ventures, JVs, etcetera.
Getting partners in your space
that you guys can start promoting
each other to get more customers.
Number three is focus.
Getting your number one customer avatar nailed.
Four is copywriting.
How do you get your words to sell?
You know, even free content needs to be sold.
Don't kid yourself.
It doesn't matter what it is, it needs to be sold.
Copywriting will help you do it.
Five is paid-acquisition. Building that growth funnel.
Building that channel to get a lot of people in the system,
in your funnels to scale the business.
Number six is email marketing.
So really thinking about how do you build goodwill
and communicate and what's the message
and the information that you want
your customer to learn over a period of time.
And number seven, which is the whole package,
is creating goodwill for your customers by value first,
building their trust, and over time they will eventually,
when they have the need, they'll think
of your business and they will sign-up.
That is number seven.
I want to invite you to subscribe
to my channel if you're not.
To share this with somebody in
your world, a tech founder, somebody
starting a new technology company
that's already trying to scale and increase
their revenue, share this video with them.
I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life,
and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.