So What? How to build a marketing strategy

Happy Thursday, everyone. This is uh So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights show uh is John and I this week. Katie is uh somewhere in the woods being chased by bears, right? Hopefully not. Or very large squirrels.

Uh one of the two. So this week, in her absence, we're gonna spend some time talking about building marketing strategies with frameworks. Uh one of the things that a lot of folks in marketing seem to have a struggle with is particularly this time of year, is putting onto paper what the strategy is going to be uh for the next year. And having some kind of framework is a good way to start uh building out uh that strategy. Uh it gives you something other than a blank sheet of paper, that that lovely paralyzing feeling of huh, I don't know what we should be doing this year.

So we're gonna take a look at two frameworks, uh a tactical framework called traction and then a strategic framework, uh the SWOT analysis. So John, uh why don't you guys start off with what is traction other than something you're in when you severely injured yourself? Yeah, right, right. We're not talking about uh therapy here. We're talking about trying to get the uh some actual movement, get things growing and and running.

Um the whole traction framework um was basically taken from Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. They wrote a book called Traction a few years back, and yeah, it was ridiculous. It covered everything you could do on the marketing and sales fronts, and I have a bittersweet relationship with it because I had just done B2B marketing confessions, and their book was just better. Like if I had to suggest one book to buy, I'd be like, no, buy traction first, then buy their book. Because I had a lot of the campaigns and things right, but they got it right with the framework.

They came up with a framework that makes it very easy to understand and easier to put to use. And so that's what we'll talk about for a couple minutes here, just to get you on board. There's three big components to their strategy. And the first is the 50-50 rule, which is just that you should be spending half your time trying to grow the business. Half is working on the product to make the product better what you think it needs to be, but the other half needs to be spent on growing the business.

And the pitfall for that is always the build it and they will come argument. You know, people think that, you know, if you build the best product, you're gonna win in the marketplace. And unfortunately, history is littered with fantastic products that you know didn't make the out into the wild, usually because somebody was cheaper and faster. And so as a result, society as a whole has a crummier solution, you know, even though um better products tried and and worked. And yeah, the traction framework, I should say too, was actually built upon research with a bunch of VCs and with hundreds of startups.

They went back after you know the funds had closed down and said, okay, which one succeeded and why did they win? And 50-50 is is one part of it, you know, the ability to um put enough work into growing the business. So that's one. So from there, you're okay. What do you do with other that other 50 when you need to figure out how to grow the business?

And the second component of that is called the bullseye rule. And the that rule is that you only want to pick three channels to work in when you start at the very beginning. A big mistake that everybody makes is you know, they get a 50 grand marketing budget, and so they sprinkle it around in 50 different little buckets all over the place. And anybody who's been through, you know, more than one rodeo knows that that's just complete disaster and a headache that's going to kill you. And the solution to that is you pick three channels, you test all three against each other, and hopefully, and usually one of the three will have some traction, some activity.

And the second one, maybe you want to try for another round, and the third one usually you drop. And you just keep this iterative cycle going of pick one work, and um over time you will eventually just have all of the channels. We had there's 21 channels in the model, and you'll have all of them. Um, but you start with three, and you just as they generate a positive ROI, then you can decide to, you know, go deeper and until you hit a point of diminishing returns. Um, but by that point it's paying for itself and you can keep moving forward.

So that's the cycle. And so then the big, of course, reveal from all this is all right. So what are the 21 channels? Where does everything actually, you know, come to bear and where do you actually put your money? And so this is the updated model.

Now, to be honest with this, too, this is it's based on um Gabriel and um uh Justin's original model, but over the years we've added different branches and changed a bunch of things as things have evolved and moved. So the overall model here breaks down into four channels now. Uh product marketing, which uh is you know, you can actually generate traction and do marketing programs by making changes to the product. Um, at the bottom is sales. There's just the, you know, putting a person-to-person discussion going in one flavor or another to make that work.

Um marketing analytics is its own branch because we are now at this stage where the analytics that you're doing not only justify what's working and not working, but you can actually get competitive advantage if your marketing analytics has moved farther enough down the um down the as part of your model and as far as what you're doing. And we can dig in more to that. And then pretty much everything else, all the classic marketing stuff. Um for that, we've grabbed Spin Sucks Ginny Dietrich's peso uh framework, which is paid, earned, shared, and owned. But basically all the content that you create, you know, the content creation is its whole huge branch of the tree, and a lot of these efforts can take a lot of uh time and resources to become you know to generate positive ROI and get things moving.

But so with this list here, you would end up picking three out of here for your start to get going and continue to work through the the table as you go. Um how do I how do I know which three to start? There's a lot in here. There is, and and this is one thing that they make no bones about this is that there's no way to know. You have to jump in there and just start doing it.

You know, you have to start running these programs. And the the good thing is, like with um social and display ads, right? You can run ads for a week, you can put 400 bucks into it in a week and just see if it gives you any lift or not, and that'll you know, let you decide whether you want to go forward with it or not. Now, most um products are going to be having some kind of website, right? So you basically by default are gonna be doing some SEO and some content on the website.

Uh, most businesses are gonna try and build their community around email marketing, so you're gonna have some kind of email functions going on. So that's two right there. So you really have very little um wiggle room as you get started, you know. You know, it's gonna be challenging to narrow it down to three and figure out which way to go. The only other thing that they uh were very clear about is it tends to happen that whenever you go into any organization, if you go to the whole team and say, okay, what should the three be?

Usually two of the three, everybody's in sync on. You know, people know that yeah, these are the things that we're doing are right now that are working. And so it's the third one that you have to go. But again, you can do, you know, because you're small and agile, one-week cycles, you know, try something for a week and see if it does anything. And if it doesn't, well then you rotate one of the three out and just keep working your way through the through the pile.

But so this is great because it gives you, you know, at the beginning of the year, you can say, okay, here's what we've got in mind. Here's how fast the cycles are going to be. Um, you know, maybe map out the next three or four you want to test as things fail, and at least gives you a structure um, you know, of what to do and where to go on that. Um and yeah, I don't know. I mean I can start to drill down further and we can kind of define these, unless I don't know, Chris, is there a better way to go or any questions?

Yeah, so let's let's pretend uh let's pretend uh I'll make up something. I've got a new book coming out, right? I've got a new book, um, and it's it's okay. Uh whatever. I what do I how do I use this to make my dreams come true of that book being an Amazon top, you know, top seller?

Right. Well, so for you for what you've got going on, I mean, obviously, email marketing, right? You've got the almost timely list was is massive. So that you just absolutely have to write. Let's let's pretend I got none of that.

Like, oh, really? You're it's ground zero. Got a brand new book, you know, Pokemon for marketers. Um and no one's ever heard of me in in the Pokemon space. What do I do?

I buy I I've got the book, and I'm sure it's gonna be pretty good, right? You know, uh Snorlaxes comparable to your nurturing campaigns, stuff like that. How how do I take this and turn it into into something useful? Yeah, so if you're starting from ground zero, uh, you know, one place that is pretty easy to start is usually search engine marketing and social and display ads. So at least just get one of the SEO tools, you know, run it through it, find out where are the websites that people are talking about this stuff.

How hard is it gonna be to, you know, if you write 10 articles, are you gonna get any traction on that? And you know, are people actually gonna read your stuff? Do they want to hear about it? And then you can just force that traffic with with ads. You know, you want to take and buy a couple topics and throw them out there.

And yeah, for something like a book, in fact, most of the most effective people on I see in this front, they don't even write the book. They just start running ads for a couple of weeks and say, hey, pre-order this book. It's about, you know, you know, do you love having uh Carmeleon, you know, decide your search strategy? Go ahead and and pick here. And what they'll find is you know, some topics, yeah, you think they're cool, but you just you get absolutely zero hits on the ads.

Or and the other one, you know, you do have go to the landing page, sign up to be notified when the book is published, you know, which is you make some date that you're lying about that, you know, you hope you're gonna hit, but you're gonna be six months late because books are always late. Um, but by mining out ads is the way to to at least get some instant feedback on where that's going. Um does that belong in product marketing then? Uh well, you know, that's yeah, you hit a great point in the like this stuff is really pretty mushy. The big thing is that you pick three and you stick with it, but kind of everything overlaps.

Like uh search engine optimization, yeah, that's marketing analytics, but really a ton of that is driven by content. Like you do have this, you know, the site structure and technical issues, but then you know, a lot of that falls under the content marketing publishing text. Um, so they can be all over the place. Um, and yeah, they they tend to kind of leach out of their buckets as they go. Um, but yeah, you pretty much again the key is to like pick through three things to run with.

The the most important thing you don't want to do if you're a marketing team of like one or two, you don't want to be checking in on 10 programs, you know, because it the and the a big part of that is that um the trend that they saw over and over again is that these marketing programs have steep learning curves. Somebody who's done, you know, social and display ads for a specific topic for six months is you know, 30 to 100 times more effective at running those ad campaigns that somebody that's doing it for the first week and the first time. You just learn so much as you go that um starting really small and just getting super good in single channels is way more important than you know, sprinkling money around all over the place and just praying that stuff digs in. Um, you know, for the book one, like events could be key, you know, if there's a community, obviously for Pokemon. If you can uh, you know, back in the day in the time before when we used to go places, you could go to Pokemon Go events and things like that, and you'd have you know give away a coupon for the book or whatever, and that could be a huge successful thing for you.

Um yeah, on the book Oh, go ahead. How does the product marketing section fit into this? So like I got the book, you know, Pokemon for Marketers, whatever. Like, how do those pieces in that blue uh relate to it? Right.

So the big thing with the product marketing branch is, and it's at the top because these can be the most effective activities. Is there anything you can do with the product so that it will organically spread? Okay, so um, you know, all the social networks totally leverage this, right? As part of their engineering as marketing, when you sign on to the new social network, hey, upload your contact book. Give us everybody.

And so now every time you're sending a message to somebody is saying, Hey, you're on head book, you know, welcome. Come invite your aunts and uncles and 65 people. And any of these organic things that are baked right into the product, a lot of it too is just share your results. You know, you use X product, go ahead and publish your results to social. Um that's the kind of stuff that can give you exponential growth, you know, because if something there works and it just spreads like wildfire on its own, you get like the clubhouse effect, you know.

Who knows whether the app is really that good or not? But if everybody decides it's cool this week, you know, you're gonna get millions of downloads. And then a little bit of an angle on that is sometimes instead of so engineering is marketing, is when you're baking that stuff into the product, you also have existing platforms slide into that. So it's for example, any B2B SaaS thing, sooner or later you start to consider if it should have a HubSpot or a Salesforce integration. Because if you can latch on to another platform, that's just going to be, you know, again, the bodies can just start pouring in from its own momentum.

You don't even have to get involved. If you um had a, I'm trying to think of a good angle for Pokemon. You know, if you could bake the Pokemon into Salesforce Trailblazer, where you know, additional Trailblazer badges include Pokemon, that that would probably sell itself instantly. You could totally retire off that. Off sharp.

Yeah, yeah. Let's do some gamification. Come on, get on board. Um, so assuming I've got a book, there really isn't a whole I can engineer to it because it is just a pile of pages, right? Um, where does something like influencer marketing fit in here?

Yeah, so that um it influencer kind of is a little bit in between. It's uh that's you know, classic awareness stuff. So it's either conventional PR or it's just your social. It's it's a matter of, you know, do you get somebody to help you out with that or do you do it yourself, and in which case you'd be doing a ton of social. But yeah, that's um for a book that could be a killer one, you know, if you find top players and get them to endorse your book and say that it's there.

And some of that could drop down on the sales channel too, a good affiliate program. You know, a lot of influencer marketing is actually a just affiliate programs. You know, it's not that they really like you that much, it but if they're getting two bucks a copy, suddenly you're gonna find that they're willing to share it with everybody in the whole community, which can be great. Um gotcha. Let me think.

Um yeah, go ahead. What else? Any other questions? Well, so this is predicated on, I guess the this is much more of a tactical framework than is a strategic framework, right? Because this is like you you know where you're trying to go.

Now this is the map for how you're gonna get there. Yeah, and the big thing is this is presuming that there is a there, you know, I hate to use that hackneyed phrase, but it you know, it's you've already done the homework, and I think a lot of the stuff you're gonna talk about with um lining up your strategy, but you're uh kind of placing all your bets that you've already got the ship pointed in the right direction, and it's just a matter of getting it moving faster. Um, because yeah, this well it will prove itself out really quickly, if you pick three channels and hit three channels, you know, once a week for four weeks, and you've gone through 12 channels and you're all at zeros. It's time to back up and do another a different kind of analysis. All right.

So speaking of that, let's let's pivot to our our friend the SWAT analysis. Uh now, John, based on on your past experience, what do you remember about SWOT analysis from like all those Harvard Business Review case studies we all had to read? Oh, yeah. Well, the case studies are a big part of it. But for me, it's always this is like the classic um kickoff uh uh activity.

You know, they they put the paper up on the the easel goes up at the once a year company meeting and everybody runs through this. And um yeah, I don't know. Looking back now, having more historical, you know, understanding of things, like that's absolutely insane. Like, why the hell would you do that with the whole company on board? Like you that's for like a small group of managers to do and like figure out before you just throw it out to the rest of the world.

So yeah, I guess that that's I didn't I didn't realize the places that I were was at were such a complete um asylum, because you know that just is is total insanity. Um I think the other thing too, I know you and Katie have done a bunch of stuff with this, and most people don't do it properly. You know, they screw up the threats and the opportunities. Um so yeah, so I'm interested in in you giving me the kind of the you know the the actual method that works so we can get deeper into it. Let's do the grumpy old man uh complaining about the world first.

Uh so this is an example. This is from a former team at a at an old company. Uh this is a SWOT analysis somebody put together for uh starting up a fine a new financial planning blog. And in that initial planning meeting, this this team and the people who are on, I was a uh a a neutral observer, let's say. Uh and this is what they came up with for the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, which is what SWAT stands for.

And they identify their the strengths of this uh new blog content product. They have good subject matter experts and skilled writers on staff. The weaknesses, they had no advertising plan and unclear hosting, and namely like they didn't know where they're gonna make this thing live on their company's website. The opportunities were uh unique perspective, new spent on financial planning, and the threats were uh saturated market for financial blogs. Now I'm gonna tell you off the bat, this fails.

This is a this is an F. Um, but what what's what do you see here, John? Yeah, yeah. Like um, this is all they're looking at their own company and saying, hey, these are our strengths, our weaknesses, our opportunities, our threats. You're supposed to be applying this to the market.

Like, this is what's happening in the world, and the opportunities are like here's the things we can grab, and the threats are here's the other people that are trying to grab it, or structural problems with getting there. Uh so yeah, it it seems like this is just a completely this is more psychologist couch stuff than actually looking at what's going on in the market. I'm gonna actually take it uh a step even further down than that. This is so a SWOT analysis. Let's go ahead and actually uh draw one up here.

We're gonna do the the standard two by two matrix, right? Which is every consultant's favorites. Uh and we're gonna do strength and weakness, opportunity, and threat. Here's mistake number one people make with SWOT analyses. They think it is just sort of this big amorphous thing.

This is not what this is. SWOT analysis is you versus one other competitor. Because in order to be able to clarify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you need to have it be that specific. It is you versus one competitor of some kind. So that's mistake number one.

You can't even really do it with the marketplace because the marketplace is kind of this big amorphous thing. It's like you and this other thing. So that's that's number one. Number two is let's go change colors here. You're right.

Strengths and weaknesses, that's us, right? So if I've got a new Pokemon book, right? That uh or um we've got a new podcast, or we have a we're consulting agency. What are our strengths, the things that we're good at? What are our weaknesses, the things that we are bad at?

And these are the things that are under theoretically under our control. So if I'm putting out uh we've got a marketing podcast, right? Like marketing over coffee, our strength is that we've been doing this show for one of our strengths, we've been doing a show for 15 years now. Uh, we've amassed a large audience. Um, we have a consistent format and a publishing schedule.

These are all things that uh our customers would find valuable. Our weaknesses, um, we probably don't advertise enough, right? Um, we probably we don't really, because it's not a full-time job, we don't have a full-time marketing plan behind it, right? We just kind of do things. Um we don't there's not a lot of order or structure to it.

I mean, the show does well for sure, but it probably could be bigger if we if these things that were innate to our practices didn't stand in our now. From from your perspective, thinking about the podcast, um, well, we'll I got because I think that's a good example. What are some of the other strengths and weaknesses that are are unique to marketing over coffee? You know, the community is huge on the strength side. You know, you know.

It's the fact that we both in our own careers, too have been doing the same network and building the same audience, so that's that's a big deal. Um but yeah, it's interesting that the space has changed in that you know, I think a strength was being an early adopter, um, you know, coming in and being able to kind of build things up before it goes. But now that almost goes into uh a weakness now in that well, I guess that's more of a threat too. But it's just the the landscape has changed. It's far more difficult for us to cut through the clutter just because there's so many other um uh different outlets out there and guest fatigue and all kinds of things like that.

Yeah. I would say uh being early, I don't think belongs in either because it's not something we have control over. Like we can't control that we we were or were not early. Um and and and in a lot of ways it doesn't really matter. Our community absolutely is under our control how much we we choose to do our community uh to nurture our community.

The same is true for like the analytics for marketer slack. We have the that community is an advantage, it's a strength, um, but it is also something that we have to to actively work on. It just doesn't happen. Our audience, same thing. So, what other things under our control do we either have do we do we do well or do we do poorly?

Yeah, um I think community can even be sliced up a couple of ways because it's listeners and then it's also guests and experts. You know, we have a Rolodex of people that that can come on as guests and are willing to talk to us, and then yeah, we do have track record of you know, understanding what makes a great story and puts together a compelling episode, you know. Call that hosting skill or whatever you want to call that, but that is definitely something that we kind of already know what works and doesn't work compared to a lot of the other stuff out there. Um what would you put on the weakness side? Yeah, I was just thinking of a weakness.

Um again, uh it's a weakness that we have control over and could make easier. Um, just pure on budget, you know. If we were to, you know, have a market, you know, a six-figure marketing plan to promote the thing, you know, that would be uh a big deal. Um I've always wanted to do more work as far as becoming part of a network, you know. Like, do we need to, is it possible to, and the whole space is going through this, but like it just seems obvious that if six or seven shows on similar topics could align and they would just benefit from doing that kind of stuff, but there's just not enough.

Um, I don't know. For most properties, it's just too much of a struggle just to get the show out the door. So there's not enough strategy going on. Right. Yeah, okay.

I would say I would put that under partnership. Okay. Now let's pick a competitor. So uh a competing show for whom that we compete with audience with technically in the podcasting space, that's literally everybody else, right? Um, so that that's you know, Joe Rogan, that's all you know, the the entire space.

Um let's pick um let's pick one in particular. I'm gonna go with like Gary Vaynerchuk, because you know, easy prominent person, and that's gonna be our competitor. Here's where, again, where SWAT analysis goes wrong. These threats and opportunities, uh we we think of them as these X, you know, weird, crazy externalities when really all this is is our competitors' strengths and our competitors' weaknesses, right? So now we are doing the inverse exercise here.

So for Gary's show, he's got a huge audience, right? That's he's got a fantastic audience. He is a content machine. Uh so he has a content velocity that is out of this world. Um he has staff, he has 27 staff just responsible for producing his stuff alone.

Um which is is just nutty. The idea of having a five-man camera crew following you around all day, uh recording every single thing you do, uh, is is slightly odd. Um but it you know it works. Um and distribution, right? So uh because he's got this large network, he's got a distribution pretty well handled.

Um and he spends money like crazy. So he's got a huge ad budget. He um on his stuff is spending uh on one of his recent podcasts was saying he spends a couple hundred thousand dollars a month on on just promoting his stuff, and he doesn't care about the results at all. Um he's like, I just want I just need to see eyeballs on my stuff. I don't care who it is, you know, he he has a kid's show and stuff.

I just he's like, I just want people paying attention to my stuff. So weaknesses, things are there under his control. Um because of this, inherently he inherently has a lack of focus, right? Just try everything to see what uh uh what's working, which means that um there's a also a la a lot of waste, right? If you're you know building a kid's show for marketing, uh and you're expecting, you know, you're trying to build a cartoons and comic books and stuff about your personal IP.

That's a uh uh a reasonable 15 to 20 year plan. Um, because you know, kid a kid who's 10 today who becomes an entrepreneur at 30, yeah. If if you are still alive, then that may be a good bet, but uh it's a little bit uh uh tough. Uh and because of the way that he does his content, there is a a lack of originality. If you watch his YouTube channel, you don't need to listen to his podcast, right?

If you read his blog, you don't need to to watch his YouTube channel and stuff. He's because he's repurposing all the time, it's pretty much the same stuff in every channel. Um, and so if you're trying to make a podcast successful, there should be something there that you can't get other places. Um, from a big picture perspective, because of the the the size of the strengths that he's working with, his strengths greatly outla uh power his weaknesses, right? You know, they he's they've been enormously successful uh in leveraging his networks.

But the next step in a SWOT analysis is to say, okay, what are the things here that cancel each other out? Right? Are there things that you know uh when we look at our strengths versus his weaknesses? Do they map well? Um we do have good focus, right?

So that is something that we can double down on because we have focus, he doesn't necessarily waste because we don't spend that much to begin with, right? Um, but that is something here on this side. We say, okay, this is something we need to do more of, because yes, he's he's wasting money, but just that sheer distribution is working for him. So that's kind of a thing that I would say we add a plus one on priority there. Um lack of originality.

Uh again, this is a good one for us. Our content is good. Um when you do the guests for marketing over coffee, how do you how do you decide what you're gonna talk about? Is it like I If you know, the I guess the thing I would say is when you watch, say, like Melissa Benoist promoting her new book, and you check out the Kelly Clarkson show and Ellen and Oprah, it's literally the same seven questions people she gets asked all the time. How did you come up with the idea for this book?

So if you watched one, you don't need to watch the others. Whereas a show like Hot Ones, the way Sean Evans does his interviewing, A, he does a crap ton of research, and he's always asking questions that you've not heard on other shows. So when we do the when you do the guests with marketing over coffee, how original are the guests' answers? Yeah, it's the same thing like you were talking about with Hot Wings. And it doesn't scale that well, but it is the fact that like I've read the books.

I always talk about how other interviews start with page one. I usually start with page 250. Like the the best things you can get from an author. Um yeah, because people don't realize this. When a book is finally in readers' hands, the author has moved on for a full year.

So the question of like, okay, now that you've finished this book, like what are you working on now? That's actually an answer that they're not going to give to all those other interviews because the other ones are just they're gonna have to start from page one, like, oh, so what's this book about, anyways? Um so yeah, that that is one thing is to do a lot more um research and qualification and yeah, taking more of an NPR approach to the interviews. Mm-hmm. Okay.

And then for the segments that we do, how would you you know again? There's stuff that we'll see in say like search engine land or things like that. How would you improve that so that was even more original? So even if you read the article in Search Engine Land, listening to the show would be a benefit. Yeah, I think that's um, you know, one is that that stuff is being curated, so it's, you know, you don't have to read all the articles.

We're going through and we're giving you the 10 most important ones for this week. And then it's also the gut check on we can actually provide additional commentary to, you know, as far as, yeah, no, we've tried that, and that's a bunch of baloney and uh, you know, or that yes, that does really work and you need to do it. So yeah, that's a very specialized um info that we're adding on to that. And yeah, there's definitely value in there. Somebody that listens to us for 20 minutes is basically saving themselves, you know, an hour and a half of combing through other outlets or trying to test stuff on their own.

Right. Okay. So what we're starting to get at now in terms of this framework is it's no longer just a laundry list of random post-its, which is what it always ends up ends up being like some you know two-day strategic of a wall with post-its all over it, you know, like, and now what? We're starting to outline the things that we can do, because remember, this is all about control. We have no control over what Gary Vaynerchuk does.

You know, just like we have no control over what Accenture does as you know when we're speaking for Trust Insights. We have no control. If you're McDonald's, you have no control over what Burger King does. But we have full control over these things. So based on these weaknesses that we've identified and these strengths, we can say, okay, we need uh as an action plan, let's uh go with green here.

We need to do to increase our originality in research. Uh we need to improve continue to improve the value of our content, but we're doing okay on experts. We need to improve more of our community, because community is something that Gary does pretty well too. But we need to find our niche, something there that he doesn't have and doesn't care about. Because again, if you're a small company going up a big one, you're not gonna take on the big one on a you know uh face to face-to-face punching match and win.

Um the same is true for audience. They the audience can be uh better on the weaknesses side, we probably the budget is one thing. We probably need an actual marketing plan. Right, right. Um with things like KPIs, so that when you see other shows talking about um you know the the size of the audience, uh we can differentiate and say, yes, we have 20,000 listeners.

We don't have 20 million, but 15 of those 20,000 are the are the buyers for the for the people who choose to advertise with the show. So if the the goal is to make money, we can say, yes, it's not as big, but it is substantially better quality than a different show. Um what else would you say prioritize here on the on the weaknesses side? You know, I think that's pretty tough because as I'm going back now, you know, even though we don't have the classic business plan, there has been, you know, I am picking off the three campaigns because we've been doing PR, you know, over the past two years now. I've actually been doing paid um interviews on other casts, and so we're starting to figure out if that works or not.

Uh paid ad campaigns have been running um over the past year, so that's been working. And then after that, it's some SEO, you know, keeping the website in order. But I think um, and that's actually uh one that can go up on the strengths, is you know, having 15 years of posts up on the website, um, there's a ton of content up there. And so uh, you know, maybe 20% of the transcripts have been done, like the rest of the transcripts need to be done. There's other things that we need to do to generate more um traffic to the site and to get that going.

Um, yeah, other action stuff. I and then you know, I do always have my ear to the ground with partnership stuff, but that's not entirely in our control. I'm not going to start up the partner program myself, that's for sure. So it's more just a listening thing. Yep.

So now what we've done here, uh, we actually probably should have done this in reverse order, but that's fine. Um, is we've identified the strategic imperatives using the SWOT analysis. If our goal is to deal with the Gary Vaynerchuk show. Now, if we want to talk about the landscape as a whole, this would not be the right framework. Something like Porter's Five Forces would be the better framework because it's intended to talk about what's happening in the landscape as a whole.

Podcasting as a whole is changing. SWAT is for you need to take a baseball bat to a specific competitor's needs. You need to somehow get uh advantage in the space, especially if it's a single larger competitor of some kind, and this is the way to use it. And then once you've got that, then you take those those bullet lists of okay, we need uh to improve our uh our uh interview content, we need to improve our SEO, we need to assign some marketing KPIs, and now we can map it to traction. So, based on that, um, like one of the first things that would come to mind is okay, we're not gonna do partnerships, but how can we do that product marketing that engineering is marketing and turn that into how do we build that into the show?

Yeah, and now when you end up doing this when clients want this kind of analysis, then so are you going in and usually doing it for three or four competitors to get a better picture of the space, or how does that usually work? It depends. It really depends on the the client because if it's and how much creep they have. The question that we always like to ask people is: who do you lose to in RFPs, right? Or in sales pitches.

So, like back when when Katie and I worked at a PR agency, um, we lost to Golan Harris, uh and Edelman, but pr mostly Golden Harris, because Edelman, there were a lot of client pitches we were in, uh, where like you know, the the budget wouldn't even get Edelman out of bed. Uh so uh but Golem Harris was one of the big ones. And so that was the first thing was to say, okay, well, what specifically are why we losing to them. And you can do this for a lot of competitors, but once you get above two or three, then you start saying, you know what, you need to do a Portus Five Forces first, because it's pretty clear you don't understand the space. There's something you know in the in the space itself you don't understand.

And then once you understand the space, you'll s your SWOT analysis gets better because you can discount all those distractions that are in the space and say, okay, what specifically does this competitor do in the context of the field that they're doing better that we're losing to them on sales pitches. Yeah, that makes sense. I can see that having that be sales driven, yeah, because that um any semi-mature company has a couple of thorns that they're always complaining about. Oh, yeah, totally. Um, and you know, what one of the things that you hear a lot in in PR, uh, and I know it drives PR practitioners up a wall is when uh somebody asks, like, you know, who are your competitors, and and a company inanely says, We're so unique, we have no competitors.

Yeah, there's no competition, right? There's no competition, which is you know, code for we have a product nobody wants. Yeah, yeah, we don't know what the hell's going on at all. Exactly. So if you were to in a case like that, that's you know, again, one of those warning signs where the framework you you have to work with is not the right one because it's clear that this is something that you know somebody doesn't quite understand.

Um you look at uh Porter's Five Forces, uh let's go ahead and bring this up here. Uh you're looking at things like is this the right one? I think I am. No, that's Levitt's Diamond Framework. Um Yeah, I think this is poor as five.

No, that's not Porter's five forces. I'll have to go look it up somewhere. Oh, there it is. Um your bargaining power of suppliers, threat of substitutes, threat of new entrance, and bargaining power of buyers. So in a case like a podcast, uh your your bargaining power of buyers is your audience.

Um, how easy is it for an audience to switch? How much power do they have over you? Right? And podcasting, it's super easy. That that drive time slot or that you know time in the gym, they got 40 minutes to to listen to two shows.

Is your show gonna be one of them? If your show is like two hours long. Probably not. Yeah, um, you're you are at risk to that bargaining power of uh buyers. Same for threat of substitutes, right?

Again, is there another show? And this is where your unique selling proposition comes in. Is there another show that does what you do but does it better, um, faster, cheaper? Uh with podcasts, it's a quality issue, right? Like you were saying with interviews.

Uh this goes back to that SWOT analysis. If the quality of the interview is so good that you can't get that anywhere else, you're gonna watch that. Again, uh, I go, I look at Sean Evans and Hot Ones. Hot Ones is a brilliant show because nobody else can do that. Uh even if you were to come up with like a ridiculous, like you know, similar concept, like you know, yeah, you have to cut onions for an entire hour while we're asking these questions, it comes across as a terrible knockoff, as opposed to like, okay, let's torment people we know or people we're familiar with as celebrities by making them eat increasingly you know spicy food and then try to keep their composure.

Um it there's there's very little threat of substitute there. Yeah, no, they they've totally locked that down. That show is amazing. Exactly. And so with a podcast, it's like, okay, are there threat associates?

Yeah, there's a ton of threats. Um the bargaining power suppliers is an interesting one for podcasting because there's this isn't really a supplier in in the traditional sense, but for us, and this goes back to what you're saying earlier, SEO is a big deal, right? And this is where an attribution model is really important for your marketing because your attribution model is your supplier model. I say that again, your attribution model is your supplier model. You though the channels that are in your attribution model are supplying you with audience.

That as a marketer is your raw material, attention. So, what bargaining power do suppliers have? If that's really interesting, though. Yeah, because it's so that kind of goes into the um idea, you know, of what Gary Vaynerchuk is doing. Like he has this huge machine with millions of people in it, so his bargaining power with his suppliers, that you know, he his suppliers are serving it up to him easily, whereas trying to generate that crowd, that's it.

And that's uh that's an interesting point to think about too. All the celebrity podcasts, you know, they show up with a crowd behind them, so that the money that they have to put into that to make that work is just significantly less. Well, except in Gary's case, he has to spend a couple hundred grand a month to keep that audience, right? So his suppliers actually have a fair amount of power over him. But for us, um in marketing, with things like SEO, Google has enormous power over us, right?

Google one change in the search listings, and you're you are gone, right? You've vanished. Uh so you there that's something that has to be considered. And again, going back to the SWOT analysis, that 15-year history does matter because from Google's perspective of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, a new show coming, you know, starting up uh that didn't have a big ad budget or something would have be at a substantial disadvantage to an existing well-established show because that we have the we have built that content authority with Google, and that is we have a little bit of power with that supply. Not much, but a little bit.

Um, and then of course the threat of new entrance has been the the story for the last four years in podcasting because every person and their cousin has attempted to start a podcast. Now the good news is um they last for three episodes for the most part, and they're like, Oh, this is a lot of work. Yeah, it's free to start a bad podcast. Exactly. Um, so Porter's Five Forces uh is a model I think you you should probably do before you do a SWOT analysis so that you understand what the landscape look like?

How you know how much of a buzzsaw are we walking face first into? And then once you've done this, then you do a SWOT analysis that helps you understand that specific competitor. Then you have your you from your SWOT analysis, you pull all this pieces out, that's your punch list that goes into traction. Yeah, I like it. It's a full ramp.

That's enough to uh you can at least convince your boss you have some idea you know what the hell you're doing for 2022. Exactly. Um so that's the uh today's show. Uh we looked at these the two now three frameworks, really. Um, what to do with the analysis and then turning that into a measurable strategy.

And remember, as you look at something, uh we talked about this with with uh Porter's Fire Forces a little bit. We talked about it a lot more uh here with the SWOT analysis in terms of these are specific things like the community. That is measurable, like you can measure community numbers, community engagement, your budget spend, your cost per acquisition, uh all these things have uh have KPIs attached to them, and then once you go into traction, uh you're talking about now very specific metrics, your email marketing, uh click-through rates and stuff like that. So if you follow this process, um you can quickly identify okay, here are the things that we need to pay attention to, here's what we need to do, and here's how we measure each of those things. But if you would prefer to have someone talk to to talk to about it, uh let us know.

We're happy to help out. So any uh any final parting words, John? No, just you know, make sure you get your paperwork ahead of time before you get asked for it. That makes life much easier. All right, so with that, we will uh thanks for watching, and we'll talk to you next week.

Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it for more resources and to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers.

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