At Growth Associates we don’t have a fixed plan or price for any particular service we offer. Wonder why? This is because we believe that each and every company need a unique marketing strategy. Most people think that it’s enough to copy a strategy that is done by a similar company. This is not true. What worked for someone else won’t necessarily work for you.
Throwing Pizza on the wall
What worked for someone else won’t necessarily work for you even if you are in the same space. One of the ad agency that we knew copied the marketing strategy of their competitors. The results were negative and they were losing lots of money. So if you’re wondering where to start a marketing campaign, it’s like throwing Pizza on the wall. You take a lot of marketing channels and throw them on the wall and whatever sticks is what you follow on. You can try paid ads, SEO, Facebook ads, Social Media Marketing etc. and from there see what shows positive results. Pick the ones that show best results with the least amount of work and double down on that. Create a process on this so that other people can work on it and keep growing it. For example, if its SEO, create a process on how to keep developing and add multiple channels to it. Then check for the next best result and create a process for it as well and keep doing this until all the channels are doing extremely well. And for the ones that didn’t show any results initially pick them and do something creative with it, test it and make drastic changes to it. Check if you can get those channels to work and once you start getting results, create a process, automate it as much as possible and continue from there.
One-on-One Contact
How do you go about on acquiring the first hundred or thousand customers? The answer is always one-on-one contact. It’s going out there knocking on doors, talking to customers, emailing to people directly, it’s like ‘laser targeted’ type of marketing. This is good for product development as well as marketing. Most companies, especially startups, the first 100 customers are all acquired manually. The reason for these companies to do this in marketing is because your first hundred customers will determine the first thousand customers and these thousand customers will determine the first ten thousand customers. So if you have the wrong hundred, it screws up everything.
Cash flow
You also need to analyse the current situation. As a company what is your cash flow?
Do you need the money today?
Do you need it tomorrow?
Do you need it a month from now?
Are you making any money now?
Is there a current revenue and X amount of money in your bank account?
How long can you last?
When do you want to make money? Is it next week? Or month? Or else are you going to shut down? You don’t want to be in a sticking on with strategies like SEO or content marketing or even Social Media Marketing because it takes so long to work. Building up a Facebook channel or an Instagram channel or gaining ranking on Google is a lot of work. If that is the situation you’re in, you have to go with paid ads. It can be Google AdWords or Facebook ads or Instagram ads or it can be even affiliated marketing but you have to look at your cash situation. If you’re that entrepreneur who is great at raising money and you just raised a huge amount then always go for that long-term strategies while test out the paid ads at the same time too. In that case, you don’t have to pick a channel on which one to go after first. You can do whatever you want.
What channel would you avoid?
If you’re starting out, in most cases it wouldn’t make sense to build an affiliate or partnership. Firstly it’s going to take a lot of time in sales and when you’re working with other people they don’t necessarily have an incentive to work things directly with you. At the end of the day, they are in it for themselves. They are going to take a long time to manifest and they’re not going to have huge success rates.
Another strategy you might want to avoid when starting on is content marketing. Even though it is one of the best strategies, if you don’t know exactly who you’re targeting and start creating content for the wrong audience, then you’re out of luck. All the contents you created won’t do any good for you. Once you get your first hundred customers manually or any channel you want and once you figure out who they are then you can create contents.
Let’s sum up
Focus on one-to-one strategy. Pick up the best channel that you think are going to give better results.
Throw things against the wall and focus on specific channels and continue from there.
When you start the one-to-one contact, you’re going to figure out who your target audience is and how to scale and sell.
You need to find the right marketing strategy for your specific business.
Find out who your specific audience is before you establish long-term marketing plans.
Avoid Partnership and content marketing when you’re first starting out.