Which marketing strategy is the best for you?
If you pick the right marketing strategy, you’ll be like that little guy in the middle of my diagram above. Yes! Victorious! Fist pumps!
The problem with today’s marketing is that there are too many options and it’s too confusing. It makes me dizzy just thinking about these things and I’ve been immersed in them for 35 years.
Well, I lay down on my bed last week with a notepad and started mapping out my “Unified Theory of Marketing Strategies“with an emphasis on online marketing.
And I actually came up with something that’s not entirely confusing, and might even be useful to some people.
Here it goes…
It’s another four-quadrant grid where the vertical axis is a scale from easy to difficult and the horizontal axis is a scale from passive to proactive.
I came out with these four agile quadrants:
Hard and Passive = Multimedia
Easy and Passive = Publishing
Tough and Proactive = Presentations
Easy and proactive = email
Now, all of these strategies can be effective. But yes, some are easier than others. And the passive ones usually take much longer than the proactive ones.
Hard and Passive = Multimedia (Videos)
Everyone is video crazy these days. It’s a challenge, but passive strategy. You work really hard to create a video and then post it on YouTube hoping people will watch it.
It’s hard to get it right. It is time consuming and can be expensive. And most of the videos are pure garbage. If you want to get it right, it takes a lot of change and a lot of time.
Throwing lots of small videos on your website can be a nice touch, but they usually don’t get people calling you in droves.
So as you can see I’m not crazy about a video strategy for self-employed professionals. I’m not saying they can’t work, but it’s a lot of work to get it right.
Best example: A non-duality teacher named Rupert Spira (non-duality.rupertspira.com/home). He does live workshops and films everything. His staff then breaks them into question-and-answer segments and posts them on YouTube. They last from five to fifteen minutes. And what you see is what you get. No tone, no exaggeration. It is his unadulterated teaching.
He has hundreds of videos on YouTube with millions of views. Works? Well, his workshops are always full and all he does is a discreet email announcement to his list every month or two.
I really like this approach. Do you have a lot of good content? Do you look good in the video (unlike yours)? Then you may want to emulate Rupert.
Easy and Passive = Publishing
I really like this strategy because, ahem, it built my “Empire”. It’s relatively easy: write a how-to article on your topic once a week, send it to those on your email list, and post it on your blog. Fame arises.
But online publishing can be so much more than that. You can take those same articles and publish them on Medium, LinkedIn, and Ezine Articles. And then you can advertise them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Sometimes you can get great exposure by writing an article for a major online publication. Web traffic multiplies.
The cost is zero; an article takes two to five hours to write (unless it takes several days). And his ideas are online for eternity to be discovered by those looking for practical ideas. Some will opt for your electronic list and perpetuate this virtuous circle of marketing.
The downside, of course, is that according to my extensive research (a 10-second Google search), there are 2 million articles published online every day. The actual mind. So your things will be out there, but somewhat lost in a very large haystack.
I’m still a big supporter of publishing online, but the mountain is getting steeper. Simply writing an article or two here and there won’t help you much.
Best example: Well apart from mine of course check out Henneke from Enchanted Marketing. She has a wonderful, readable and fun blog about business writing and blogging. And she walks the talk of it. This is relevant and well-written content. If you don’t have that as a base, it’s a total waste of time.
Tough and Proactive = Presentations
I built my business on presentations in front of live audiences in professional associations and chambers of commerce. It got my attention, added people to my mailing list, and generated warm leads for marketing training.
And I still do presentations today in the form of webinars. I just completed my recent group show with the help of a couple of webinars (also called video conferences). They certainly work.
But I put presentations in the difficult category, not because they’re that hard to give, but because they can take a long time to prepare. The last one I did took me two full days. There were about 200 slides (wow!).
Yes, that’s not the only way to do a webinar. You can stream live on Zoom Video, and that can work too. Ultimately, you need to find your style and test what works.
The introductions are proactive in the sense that at the end you can ask about the business. And of course, you can turn the webinar recording into a video in an instant and send it to those on your list. Look it here.
Therefore, presentations will always play an important role in my marketing toolkit.
One other thing though: if you don’t have a LOT of people on your email list, good luck getting a lot of support. Yes, you can do guest presentations arranged by others, but you don’t have the same control and ability to present your professional services.
Best example: John Nemo of LinkedIn Riches (linkedinriches.com). His webinar is wonderful. There are many of them in the world of online marketing. And many, like John, have set them up as evergreen webinars that are scheduled to play automatically several times a day. These are kind of a hybrid between publishing and presentations.
Easy and proactive = email
In my opinion, email is the most powerful overall marketing tool. And he gets the least respect. But I can’t imagine even being in business without email marketing.
Social media gets all the PR and all the attention, but email gets the business. A recent study showed that email generated 40 times the business results of Facebook and Twitter combined.
Email is the online tool that has been around the longest and I think it is taken for granted. Promotional emails have expanded exponentially over the years, but most of them aren’t very good.
We check our email inboxes as if we were sorting our mail in the trash can. Delete, delete, delete. Why? Because it’s not relevant or it’s boring. Usually both.
I feel that email has the most potential of all online marketing strategies because it is relatively easy and the most proactive marketing medium of all. Your message goes straight to your prospect’s inbox. Nothing else can do that.
Email marketing has great opportunities for improvement in several areas:
1. How to incorporate humor as the most powerful attention device there is (that hardly anyone uses).
2. How to telegraph your value proposition directly to the mind and heart of your prospect.
3. How to make your emails clear, focused and easy to read.
4. How to craft a compelling call to action that’s hard to resist.
5. How to send emails to thousands of your prospects without looking like spam.
If you’re not working on ALL of these, your emails won’t get the attention and response you want.
Best example: Therapy Practice Accelerator. Visit this site and sign up for the list just to see the brilliance of email marketing. It’s about showing results.
What marketing strategies will you choose?
Consider the four quadrants of marketing. The easier a marketing activity is, the more likely you are to actually carry it out. And the more proactive a marketing activity is, the faster the response you will get.
Regards, Robert