Warning: this content is older than 365 days. It may be out of date and no longer relevant.

You Ask, I Answer: How to Start Marketing from Scratch?

Kirill asks, “If you were starting from scratch in 2019 with no budget, what would you do to gain traffic for your project?”

The answer to this question is contingent on what the project or product is. One of the flaws of modern marketing is that we spend too little time on product marketing itself – making a better product. Concerns like traffic are irrelevant if your product sucks. Once you have a product that solves a real problem which requires almost no explanation, and that massive audiences are desperate for your solution, a couple of tactics work really well. Watch the video to learn which ones.

You Ask, I Answer: How to Start Marketing from Scratch?

Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.

Listen to the audio here:

Download the MP3 audio here.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.

In today’s episode, Carol asks, If you were starting from scratch and 2019 with no budget, what would you do to gain traffic for your project?

The answer to this question is contingent on what the project or product is. One of the one of the critical flaws of Modern Marketing today is that we spend so much time on the marketing part like how do I get more traffic? How do I get more leads? How do I get more sales? How do I get more followers? How do I do all of these things and marketing operations which are important you do need to be able to do these things

to be able to be successful as a modern marketer but we don’t spend enough time on the product marketing side itself that is making a product that people actually want

concerns like traffic are around

If your product sucks, if your product is terrible, if your product doesn’t solve a problem, if it’s a solution, in search of a problem,

all of your marketing operations efforts are going to be wasted. You’ll be very frustrated, you’ll be very unhappy

and you won’t get the results you’re looking for.

I remember I was working at

another company wants and there was one customer that had this product was a in an anti money laundering cryptocurrency and they were it took them like 45 minutes to explain the product and and the mostly hypothetical problem it solved

like no one is going to want this thing a part of the whole idea of the cryptocurrency was the so that you couldn’t be traced and things like that. And this is 2017. So that’s sort of the height of the the craziness and

Then your solution and, and your ability to explain the problem took so long, so long that

I was like, no one’s gonna buy this thing, no one’s going to want this thing, no one’s going to invest in this thing because

it doesn’t solve a problem. If anything, it it is antithetical to the problem that the bigger product category solves. And so

unsurprisingly, the the company went kaboom. And

there you know, there was there was no way to market this thing. So,

whatever your product or project is, has to solve a real problem that real people and a lot of real people have and that real people are desperate for a solution for if you have that and your product or project requires almost no explanation,

then there are very strict

forward you know traffic and awareness generation tactics that work really well so

let’s say

your product helps make

purchasing something easier right? It is maybe it’s an app on your phone that that streamlines purchases and it works so well. So well that a person just a wave their phone in a magic pattern like you know, it’s kind of a silly example. But yeah, maybe have to draw their initials in the air with the phone and, and the phone knows that they’re the intended purchase something

and there’s no friction. They don’t have to, they don’t have to do any kind of special crazy authentication. They just they just wave their phone like a magic wand,

and the phone knows. Okay, whatever transactions being asked for it. Now complete the transaction.

That’s always a real problem. Because face ID, and bumpkins, fingerprint ID and credit cards and stuff are still friction points for the

User so what would you do if you had this magic wand product? You give it away. You give it a way to as many people as you possibly can, especially influencers within your niche or vertical or industry and you let them do the talking about if it’s really if it’s really as good as

you believe it is that handing it away to people

and we just have to be open to the world. It can be this like group or 50 or 100 people, but say, Hey,

I got this thing. I’d like you to talk about this thing. I’m giving it away.

There’s no risk to you. There’s no risk to your audiences to try this thing out

and see what happens if it works. Well

if it does what it says it does, then you should have absolutely no trouble getting people to adopt thing and use the thing

that’s one very obvious tactic that with no money with no budget, starting from scratch.

Do your research, figure out who’s got the goods? Who’s got the audience that needs the product that you have and give it away to them and see what happens.

The second thing if you have no budget,

you have to rely on basic things like SEO. SEO is still one of the best ways to generate

awareness and traffic and attention unbranded SEO meaning that you know if nobody if you’re starting from scratch and nobody has any idea who you are, what your brand is, then you put all your efforts on to creating content that explains

the the solutions for the problem that you solve. Again, if the audience if your audience is desperate for a solution to your problem, then creating content that has high search volume and is attractive

is

The Way to go,

let’s say

a very common problem in marketing itself is lead quality, right? So if you create a whole bunch of great, I mean, terrific content

that for free about solving lead quality problems, you will reap the benefits of it. It will take a long time, it will take a long time, but you can win, you can win on that if you are creating content that is better than anyone elses. And that solves a real problem and they just keep harping on this. It’s got to solve a real problem. So much of what’s in the marketplace right now doesn’t solve anything

or eat in fact, in some cases, it makes it worse working on

a part of my book right now on

some different technologies for machine learning. And there are cases where machine learning is the wrong answer is the wrong hands. It will make things worse, so

Keep that in mind. So that’s that’s the way I would approach it in 2019, SEO and influencers with a product that people actually want and if you don’t have that don’t bother doing the marketing fix the product first. As always please leave any further comments in the comments box and of course leave it subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for watching one help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you


You might also enjoy:


Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? Get updates here:

subscribe to my newsletter here


AI for Marketers Book
Take my Generative AI for Marketers course!

Analytics for Marketers Discussion Group
Join my Analytics for Marketers Slack Group!