So What? Choosing tactics and campaigns – the Bullseye Framework

Well, hey everyone, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. Chris, John, how's it going? It's going. Last Thursday before holiday weekend here in the USA.

That's right. Um this week we are talking about the Bullseye framework. And so choosing tactics and campaigns. Uh, what is the bullseye framework? Using the bullseye framework to determine campaigns and proven tracks to scale with the bullseye framework.

And so, John, this is something that you're going to be leading today. What the heck is the bullseye framework? What is the bullseye framework? Yeah, you know, one of the biggest questions we always get, or anytime we're you know, working as an advisor to companies, it's always what should I be doing? You know, what kind of marketing campaign should I be running?

And so the big question is, okay, you have limited time, you have limited resources. What are the types of things that you should be doing? And the Bullseye framework comes from a bunch of work that um it actually came from the book Traction by uh Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mayers, where they did research into hundreds of startups and actually analyzed like what campaigns worked for them, how did they get to traction to get to growing? And so, yeah, that's what we're gonna kick about kick around is basically what's the um the basic approach you have to take, and then from there you can dig in and what are the I know there's a good 20 odd different paths you can take, but we'll kick around all those different options and explain how that stuff works. All right.

Uh Chris, questions. Where do you want to start? Well, I mean the the challenge with today's marketing is that there's so many different options now for you know if you think even just a channel like digital advertising you've got a gazillion different ad tech vendors and all these different things. So how do you how do we go about sorting this out to even start narrowing down especially if there's new channels where we're not even sure what they do right like hey we've got this new meta based you know VR advertising I'm like uh what do we do? See and I I like to go backward from there and think well we might not know what they do but do we even know what we want um you know and so let's say there's some VR meta based whatever once we figure out what that does do we have do we know enough of what we want where we could figure out where that goes and I feel like that's a whole separate conversation.

So John, you know, where do we get started? How do we how do we do this? Yeah well the first is to talk about just the the overall strategy of you know where does the marketing mix fit into your whole approach and how much of the time you know that you've got gets devoted to that and one of the big learnings they had was that the most successful organizations split their time in half between half the time is working on the product or the service and then the other half of the time is working on marketing and demand generation you know interfacing with customers. There's basically a huge pile of failed companies that thought that they could just work on the product and eventually the customers would show up. And ultimately that's not how it works.

You know, you do have to have a map of where you're going. That is the that is the company that I used to work for. 100% of the time was spent on the product. Um, the marketing and sales teams were laid off, and then they brought in a new CEO who looked at me and said, You're gonna do lead gen. And I said, I don't know what that is, but okay.

So yeah. Right, right. That company doesn't exist anymore. They have been left in the trash bin of history. Yeah, that's the way it goes because there's so much that needs to be done as far as getting people who will become the ambassadors of your product and who will spread, you know, the the message of what you're offering and the value of what you're doing.

And yeah, if you just kind of sit around and wait for people to show up, the biggest risk is that someone else will do the same thing and do a better job of promoting it, right? I mean, this goes all the way back to, you know, why did Windows take on so much of the market? Because they just were cheaper, faster and got in front of more people. It's not that it was the highest quality product. And uh yeah, we we see this over and over again.

So that was the first half is the, you know, make sure you're spending time working on your marketing promotion plan. And then from there, I had slipped with this. Here's actually the full traction diagram that um Mayers and Weinberg kind of put the first version of this together. Over the years, we've actually changed it and added a few more branches to this tree. But there's um, you know, three large branches that you get into.

The first is product marketing, the fact that you can do things in the product itself that will help it spread and make it more viable. You know, you see this with pretty much any kind of social media tool. You know, you see somebody using some cool thing, and so you jump on board. And those are really great. There's a lot of leverage in those types of features and marketing campaigns because if you get it right, it you know, it builds upon itself.

That's a lot of the flywheel stuff falls into that category over there. Uh, the second huge pile is uh, you know, content, advertising, PR, social media, content marketing, all that stuff, which uh once we dug up into this more, realize that this all falls under Ginny Dietrich's pay so model. You know, this is all awareness stuff and peso fits right there easily. And so these are a lot of just classic marketing campaigns, right? You're running ads, you're doing PR, you've got social media accounts set up all over the place, you're creating content, you're going to events.

Each one of those is a an avenue that you can dig into and get going. And then for most startups sales, some kind of direct, you know, interfacing with a customer, trying to figure out what works is part of the mix there too. And so there's, you know, having people who are solely devoted to talking to the customer and figuring out where they want to go or what they want to do is uh, you know, another full set of items. And then another one that we've added over the years is marketing analytics or data science. You know, we found that there's things that you can do, uh, especially as your product gets more mature, where you can create competitive advantage.

You know, this is the classic Amazon thing of um she who cannot be named in my office will come on my smart speaker and tell me about some device that's available now because she knows that I've bought you know the previous five of these and it's a slam dunk. So being able to take advantage of that data is a huge competitive advantage. Um, but so looking at this chart here, now their research again was focused on startups, and so they found a really interesting fact was that you know, if you're just a team of one to four people, you can really only focus on three of these at the most. You know, because what Chris dug into as far as how these things are always changing and there's new options coming in all the time. You know, any one of these channels, as you become a more mature company will be a full-time employee, right?

I mean, any one of these things, you could have somebody do this as their job for their entire career and you know, become an expert, but still have things to learn and places to go. So yeah, a lot of the challenges for smaller organizations is just like, okay, where do we spread our money around? And again, the learning was that three is the max. And so we see over and over again for smaller organizations, right? If you're gonna have a website, well, that's pretty much you know, having a blog and having uh, you know, you're creating content that's content marketing like publishing.

So that's pretty much a given. Nearly every business has to do that. And then email marketing tends to be another area where there's a lot of advantage for relatively little cost. You know, you can have both prospects and customers in your email list. Um, and then the third one after that is usually some kind of direct sales or business development, you know, having someone to talk to customers directly to get feedback because you need that for your product cycle early in the uh in the making of it.

So yeah, having this kind of whole list of tactics gives you a place to start. And then from there, they say, okay, you basically dig into these three things and take an agile approach to it. You know, you pick three for a month, do the three, figure out which ones are working, come back, close the loop at the end of the month, and decide where you want to adjust and go. And one thing that we've seen over and over again, too, is that um there's huge learning curves for almost all of these. And so the more time you invest in a single channel and the better you get at it, you tend to find that over time it delivers higher returns.

Right. So if you're doing LinkedIn ads for the first week, you know, you may burn through your budget and a couple of mistakes and actually, you know, tank yourself. And then suddenly after the first month, okay, you've got a couple campaigns that are generating conversions, but by five or six months, now you're doing things like you know, using negative phrases to get the ineffective ads out, and you you're learning how to, you know, when do you want to turn on the full network of ads versus targeting individual titles and things like that? You know, the returns continue to scale up as you get smarter about how to run those programs. And so that's why it's always smarter again, pick with three and get those three fully optimized instead of sprinkling it over 10 different areas where you're gonna be a noob in each one of those and you're gonna go through that painful learning process along the way.

Um yeah, I don't know. That's kind of a good place to break there. Are there any questions about that or like you know, where do people usually go? And and you know, what do you think about uh what you've got as far as this full menu in front of you? Well, it's the million dollar question, which three?

Which three do we do? I was as you were describing it, you know, my first instinct was well, content marketing is always going to be a part of the strategy. But I was able to sort of in my brain work through, well, no, that's not necessarily true. I think in B2B, it makes sense, like because if you always have content marketing, if you're always creating content, then you can repurpose that content for other things. But if you are a transactional e-commerce business, content marketing may not make sense.

It probably makes more sense if you have, you know, uh social media to do, you know, sales through, if you have maybe a newsletter of here's our new stuff to do sales through, and then maybe you focus on like more of a your website or brick and mortar or something like that. But in I would say a lot of the time, my inclination would always be to start with the content marketing. What do you guys think? Yeah, that's definitely where you want to jump in. Well, what you'll find sales actually tends to be the very first one, the lead one.

You know, you usually have a founder that's interacting directly with customers to get feedback and figure out that the thing's gonna work. But the big value with content is that when you create materials and you have them hosted, you're your own publishing outlet, that stuff is evergreen. You know, great white papers and how-to's and videos and stuff like that. You make them once and they stay up there forever and generate traffic. You know, I I've seen past companies where you know you do a good one-on-one white paper and it'll generate leads for seven, eight years.

You know, you go back every two or three years to update the thing and clean it up, but it continues to generate traffic. At the other end of the spectrum is advertising, right? Until you have a strong budget and are a company that has momentum, advertising is terrible because as soon as you dump the money two weeks later, you know, if you turn off all the ads, that's it. It's all completely gone. Like there's no ongoing value to that.

Now you'll reach a certain point where you need to dump that money in to grow and you eventually get hooked on the quarterly uh hit, like like most users do. Um, but that becomes part of just the way you're you're doing your work. So yeah, content marketing is usually always pretty early in the the cycle. Um, and for us, events, you know, we've got speaking engagements as part of that. Like that's a whole um avenue for us that has just proven to work over time.

It's like if you can get in front of audiences and tell your story, that builds your network, which then gives you referrals and gives you insight into the industry. So uh, yeah, so you know, sales are always there first, then um pretty much content marketing and awareness stuff that's not paid. Um the product marketing stuff, that's kind of um, you know, unicorn kind of stuff. Like if you can stumble upon something that works there, that's great, and that can be huge, but those just kind of evolve with the product, and that there's no rhyme or reason to when those things show up. And then marketing analytics is a similar one too, and that that's just kind of has to be there through the whole cycle.

But if you ever hit a point where you can leverage it over to revenue, that's just like the product marketing. I mean, it's just kind of a um those things show up when the opportunities are there. There's really no predicting when that kind of thing would come into it. Um, I don't know, too. It's interesting.

Now I'm social, I'm starting to wonder how much that's past its peak, you know, because it used to be that organic social was a thing. I don't know. We see so many cases of where people are publishing social stuff and it's just it gets no views, no shares, nothing. I mean, it should that is are we gonna lose that branch? Do you think it depends?

It depends on how many people you've got uh access to that can help promote it. So um, you know, for example, uh I you know the last few months have been doing this whole uh warrior none campaign thing. And when you have even just a hundred people who who will basically retweet and comment on anything, that is enough to juice the algorithms to say, hey, this is important, start showing it to people really fast. The same is true, even if you have it maybe a a couple dozen people, but they're rabid fans that will quickly share something, or there's something a piece of content that they just have to share. Um organic social can still work.

For the average marketing content, no, yeah, average market content doesn't go anywhere. Um back in the old days, we used to have uh this graph, and I'm I I will have to redraw it one day, but it was basically two uh power law curves, one going you know, sort of down into the right, one going up into the right. And the down to the right one was advertising, and the up and to the right was organic content and SEO and content marketing. And the the premise that we told people back then was you need to have that spend up front to build your audience quickly, because you're you know, you could be waiting for 18 months for SEO to pick up um on average. Now, you know, every SEO vendor in the world say, no, no, with our tool or our software or our agency, it'll be up in three months.

Yeah, but you know, realistically, it's 18 months. Um whereas with advertising, yeah, you could spend a lot of money up front and then it you know, you just spend a lot of time uh spending money uh you know not getting not uh getting anywhere there. So the tr the trick was to try and get those two curves to overlap as much as possible, to try and get the ads to build enough audience to create people who stuck around and would boost the SEO stuff faster. What's interesting, I asked uh in our free Slack group this morning, uh, which you can join for free at Trust Insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. I asked if you had to drop one active tactic from your marketing, which one would it be?

And right out of the gate, the first one was organic social. Um, because it's, I mean, it it works for some companies. Some companies that's exactly where they should be, but for a lot of companies, it's not. So it was interesting and unsurprising at the same time that organic social was the first one that people, if given the choice, would drop from their tactics. Social is tough too, because there's there's so many variations of it.

So, like what constitutes social? If you're thinking just Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, then yeah, that's a pretty narrow category, but then you expand that. What about YouTube? YouTube's a social network. What about TikTok?

That is social. Um, what about you know, you know, group chats, Discord, Slack, all that also falls into the bucket of social. And so social is one of those really hard things to even put your arms around. And to what John was saying, uh as you get bigger, um, you will have people or an entire teams just for individual channels within that category. Like you will have Facebook ad experts who are just just running ads on Facebook because you can get so narrow and so deep into any one of these categories.

Yeah, as I'm looking thinking about more too now, it just seems like social is gonna have to become a branch of content marketing, right? You're gonna have to have content that you share on social. And so, you know, you've already got publishing text, video, audio. So, you know, things like YouTube and things fit over there. And I think social is just gonna have to become a a branch of that now, you know.

I always think of content as horizontal and like the channels as vertical, right? Because you have text, audio, video, interactive and stuff as as horizontals that can go across multiple categories, right? Because you have text that can be a blog post, which is you know a blog as a vertical, your email newsletters are vertical, and so on and so forth. So that's those same horizontals can go across many different categories. Yeah, yeah, that whole matrix that makes a lot of sense.

Um so as far as running these again it most commonly the success they saw starting out was with monthly check-in. You know, you have your three and at the end of the month you go back and look in and see what works. And for the majority of this stuff, you can pretty much look at you know website traffic. And then if you have some kind of CRM system where you can measure both you know leads, um sales accepted leads and then what goes to deals and what closed, you know, with all of those points, you're usually able to get enough data to kind of figure out okay what's working and of course you just work the way down the hierarchy with that. You know, if at the end of the month you've had three deals that have come from one thing, well then that's it.

Like all the money goes to that one thing. If you're not at deals then it's like okay well how many conversations did we have if you don't have that it's how many contacts did we get how many people made it into the database and then at the bottom of the hierarchy is just the raw traffic like what at least drove some traffic to our website. But by using that you're able to um you know adjust and move on the fly. And yeah unfortunately for the first couple cycles you may find that you know you have one of the three does something the other two may be completely garbage and hopefully after six months or so you've at least got two that are working and maybe you've finally got one that is going to become a permanent program because it's you know continuing to drive traffic and you continue to level those up you know usually for most of these you start doubling the budget and putting more people on them as you know possible if you have that kind of expansion, but you just continue to level these things up and add them to the mix until, yeah, hopefully ultimately you've got you know four or five different programs uh running on a regular basis. Um there is actually I've got a chart uh that I had picked up from a large company that uh let me show this one here as far as where these things tend to grow.

So this is a kind of a classic map by team side of where stuff tends to go. Um, you know, again, as a startup, it's just a single person, you're doing everything to attract attention, convert them to deals, get the deals closed. Um, but then over time, uh the next checkpoint you get to would be a staff of three. And in that point, it's usually best to divide them up amongst the three different um disciplines. You know, you've got one person that's doing content and just attracting traffic.

The second one is working at getting leads into the pipeline, and then the third is actually working on what actually closes, you know, what gets people over the end, or an alternate setup for that is um just two for traffic and one for convert and close. And then, you know, the map gets more complicated as you keep adding staff. But it's basically that was from the zero to 50 million dollar, you know, checkpoints as you're adding staff, giving you a rough idea of how they should be spread out. And so again, when you get to the huge team, now you're actually doing, you know, SEO has two people dead on board. You've got a design team.

Um you're starting to figure out, you know, by product or by product manager where the sales team should be at. But this was just a good kind of thumbnail sketch of where you should go through time as you move up the ladder. It's interesting this this basically maps to the funnel, right? In terms of like the size of the funnel at each stage. Your attract is is those large stages.

Because that kind of goes contrary to what the way a lot of people manage, where they're like, okay, we know we just we need to staff up sales. We need to be selling around the clock and and oh yeah, there's that marketing thing. I'm not sure what they do, but go go call another 100 people, which has been the philosophy I've seen in previous companies when they're trying to figure out like what do we do? How do we how are we going to make some money? Um they always seemed to be over reliant on sales and marketing kind of got the short end of the stick.

Yeah, absolutely. That's again classic failure strategy of you know, you hire three marketing people and ten salespeople, and then for the next nine to twelve months, you know, those salespeople are working five leads, right? Whereas if you go the the other route of okay, you've got three marketing people and you only start hiring salespeople when they can't handle the volume, you know, that they've got in front of them as far as their pipeline, that's a lot more effective way of uh cost effective way of doing it, really, right? Because uh those sales guys at the top of the pipe end up being the most expensive employees in the chain, usually, you know, except for you know, when you start to get up to team 18, if you have an SEO specialist on staff, you know, people like that start to get paid heavy salaries. But yeah, that this the idea with this was to build a strong funnel.

You know, you want to have a lot of traffic at the top, and then you'll be able to figure it out as you get to the bottom. Whereas if you have a ton of people at the bottom of the funnel staring up and a team that's understaffed and underpowered, you know, driving traffic down there, it's uh yeah, that's just recipe for disaster usually. It makes me wonder, and you answered one of the questions I was gonna ask you about covering uh attract, convert, and close. Um, but it makes me wonder, sort of maybe rhetorically, you know, do you think companies will look at something like the traction framework and focus only on attract or only on close and skip over the other, you know, parts of the funnel, not realizing that you need all three working together. So that's one sort of, you know, way my brain is thinking.

The other thing I'm wondering, because you know, you have in here you start to list out some of the tactics of like blog, SEO. Do you find when as you're talking to other companies that they're using these channels, these tactics incorrectly? Like they're using, they're trying to use organic SEO to close versus attract, for example. Yeah, that get, you know, and the problem is, you know, the model just gets exponentially complex as time goes by, right? Because it's great when you have the team of one that's doing attract, convert, close, they have kind of the life cycle in their head of where it is and where it's supposed to be.

Um, and yeah, so that's like classic plug for us along the way, right? Once you get to team size nine, you want if you had a digital customer journey report, then you'd know, hey, you know, SEO and email are at the top of the funnel. So we need to make sure we're doing attraction campaigns for that. But of course, for us too, it's also email is also a key closing one that you have to have email specifically designed for closing. And yeah, so having some analytics built around where certain programs fall at certain points in the funnel, yeah, that can be huge.

And yeah, this this is one of those things you again, when you look look through the dumpster of history of these startups that haven't made it, you see these things all the time. It's like, oh, if they had just done, you know, these campaigns as part of the closing strategy as opposed to part of the attracting attention, like they could have done so much better. It's like, yeah, sending cold email to drive leads didn't do anything for them and they flamed out. Whereas if they had been doing videos and then you know following up with the folks that shared those videos via email, maybe they could have survived. You know, you don't know.

Um unfortunately we never are able to study that stuff, right? Nobody shares the results of why their startup went down in flames, right? But those lessons are lost to to history, unfortunately. But yeah, no, you you bring up a great point. And yeah, it's kind of something that I talk about a lot with this, you know, if anybody tells you that their path is going to be successful for you or like this is the way to grow the business and this is how to win it's not that they're lying, but it's the fact that basically we're giving you this map and saying, okay, you know, we know that 95% of companies die.

And so this is the map that those five percent you know used to be successful. But there's still like a 90% chance you're going to die. You know, like we're we're giving you a path to success and at least showing you all these pitfalls where you absolutely will fail, but it's still a mystery path to get to success and that you know we can make you more successful, but there's still by no means any guarantee that you're going to be able to you know build a repeatable process that has regular revenue and you know keeps customers satisfied. It's a really it's a magic uh combination that just takes iteration and guts and money and time. You know, there's just so many variables and I, you know, the other joke is always like it's like a chocolate chip cookie recipe, right?

All it takes is one teaspoon of Draeno and you're screwed. Yeah, I don't know that I've heard that old joke. You haven't heard that old yeah, that is it's you know, anything that's a very specific old joke. Right. My uncle, who shan't be named, uh caught in that old thing.

Um, but yeah, it's you know, there's just so many different knobs and levers to pull, and you can at least use some strategy to try and get, you know, to a more effective place, but um, you know, again, there's no guarantees. It's just uh again, this your only hope is constant iteration and adjusting and trying out new tactics as stuff does, you know, get successful, continue to dump resources into it. But uh, yeah, there's no guarantees on any of this path. So where do we start? That was gonna be my question too.

So, you know, let's you know, let's pretend for a second, you know, we're starting a brand new company and we're gonna sell some kind of a widget that you know makes coffee and washes your windows, and we know who the audience is, but we you like started from scratch. How does someone use this bullseye framework and get started? Like, what do they do? Yeah, and it's usually the best way to do this is you know, you sit down with the founders and you basically teach them each of the branches, you know, you make sure that they understand what every branch means, and then you usually just go with their gut on their first three. You know, they will have some feedback as far as okay, well, we've been selling some of this product through here, or we've been getting some information on where the product should go.

And so some kind of either direct sales or engineering is marketing, you know, are the first two on the the uh the list that they've got to go with. And then again, I just the kind of that publishing content marketing publishing branch, you know, people want to have some kind of web contact and they usually want to have a contact form, you know, they have to have some kind of presence. And so that one usually always makes the list. But yeah, it's just a matter of talking to them and figuring out, you know, what do they think? But yeah, it's absolutely true that for the first you know, five or six iterations, it's just gonna be people going on their gut, like, okay, we think this is gonna work.

We're gonna give this a try for a month to see if it if we can move the needle in any direction at all. And you know, it and it may or may not run. Well, and another interesting point is too I because I always like to dig into this is as far as for us, you know. I mean, for us is pretty much it's publishing, email marketing, and speaking engagements, right? Like those are three that are kind of right in the bullseye for us, especially when you consider publishing is also community, um, you know, like Slack um presence and things like that.

Um, but yeah, yeah, as a matter of fact, too. If you want to talk about any of these strategies, swing on over to Analytics for Marketers, our Slack group where the can conversation is always rolling. Um, but yeah, I don't know. And when you guys look at these, are there any that you think about for trust insights? Like what are some things that you've thought about maybe kicked around that we're not doing, or ones, you know, tactics we're doing that you think could be accelerated if we stepped on the gas more.

One of the tactics that we've tried on and off that almost never works for us, partly because we're not experts in this particular tactic is advertising. Um we've tried Google ads, social ads, uh streaming ads. Um, and we just for trust insights, we either we're either getting the copy wrong, the offer wrong, or the audience wrong, or all three. And uh because I am so conservative when it comes to spending, I probably tend to pull the plug on the ads before we really learn enough about what we're doing right or wrong. I'm definitely the you know, frustrating CEO who's like, well, it's not working immediately, so just pull the plug because I get really nervous about spending the money because it is an investment.

Um, so I can say that ads haven't worked for us, but we also haven't really given them a fair shake, and we are also not ads experts. Yeah, what's some other stuff that we've tried that just fell flat? Um organic social on most public or uh social media networks typically doesn't do a whole lot, and that's that's consistent with what we see other companies uh in our space uh experiencing, right? We're not we're not Arby's, you know, we're not stake um having philosophical conversations about frozen meat and things like that. Um so there's that aspect of that.

The ads part was definitely one that I was going to to uh hit on because it really is that we're bad at ads. Um and we're not willing to spend the money to become good at ads. You know, it's it's like uh the way we always tell people like you can't go to the gym just once, right? You gotta go to the gym and work really hard for a very long period of time if you want good results out of going to the gym. And the the same is true of all the channels.

I mean, your your first uh your first 10 podcast episodes are gonna suck, right? And you're gonna go back on look at it, listen one day and go, Oh, oh let's delete these and pretend they never existed. Your first 10 YouTube videos, like, wow, your lighting was wrong. You're like 15 feet away from the mic if you even had a mic. Um so those are the ones that ads.

Um the thing that's the other thing that's not on here, um, and that I think is more important than ever is partnerships of some kind, right? You know, the how do you because increasingly as uh as we deal with the impacts of AI and content generation stuff, having partners that have audiences you care about uh is gonna be so so important because everything else is just gonna get drowned out. I mean, I I was looking the other uh yesterday at what you can now do um with like some of the video AI tools. And like this is gonna be a a tsunami of stuff. And the people who have attention right now, who have a community, have an audience, they're gonna be super valuable because as things like SEO get harder, as social media gets noisier and and filled with disinformation, people are gonna kind of retreat to the communities where they know they can trust the other people in those communities, at least to some degree.

And increasing it there's harder and harder to find. Well, and so it's interesting that you mentioned partners, because I was gonna mention influencer marketing, which I don't think is on here either. Um, I think that's one of the tactics that is pretty misunderstood in terms of what it is and how effective it can be. Um, you know, it's not just going out hiring a Kardashian to say the name of your product and like hoping for a lot of sales. There's a lot that goes into it.

And, you know, our good friends, you know, Justin Levy and uh Ashley Zachman, like that's their primary focus is influencer B2B marketing, and I would think that for a company like Trust Insights, for example, it I would kind of bucket it under uh sort of maybe content and events in some ways, depending on what the actual tactics of that is. But I can see where a tactic like that could be very effective for us. Yeah, I think the other thing too that and this is something I've talked with both of those folks about is sort of evolving that away from individual influencer marketing to community-based influencer marketing where your entire communities like analytics for marketers, or you know, or the CMI Slack or our friends over at the Marketing AI Institute, where you're marketing to and with groups of people rather than individuals, because you know, if you provide value to a community over a long enough period of time, eventually when you need to ask that community for help, you get a lot of people jumping in. And the nature of a lot of the AI-based algorithms for things like social media now is that you need multiple people jumping in on something to be able to move the needle. Yeah, the influencer, you know, the evolution of influencers is interesting because there's a segment of it that is just straight advertising, right?

I mean, you're just paying some people to talk about your thing and promote your stuff, and that's fine. But then, yeah, you do get down into stuff where yeah, really is more community building. It's like you want to align your community with their community because there's some overlap and it makes sense for everybody in there. Um, yeah, you know, Jason Walls has a ton of stuff on that too. I have to give him a plug because if you would are interested in measuring reach and things like that, he has a lot of good um uh approaches to that that that can get you where you want to go.

Um yeah, I don't it's you know there's really so many challenges in kind of lining this stuff and up and getting it to be effective that um yeah, you we always find ourselves debating branches, you know, or like the campaign. In fact, even I was talking with uh a VC a couple months ago who was saying, yeah, for some reason every startup that I work with like has one marketing campaign that doesn't really fit any of the branches. You know, there's something that they're doing that's you know, some kind of weird variation of a trade show or you know, just something that doesn't really fit neatly into any box. And yeah, that goes back to the the whole idea of you know, this is just you're trying to change human behavior. So it's you know, it's not a direct science, right?

The the stuff that worked for you six months ago is not gonna work uh a year from now. You know, again, so it's uh keeps coming back to adjusting on the fly all the time. Where does brand building fit on this? It's not a channel, so it's not uh uh a tactic, but but it's critical to being known. Yeah, that's uh a really good question.

So for smaller organizations, right? For startups, like they're just not interested in that, right? You're you're not gonna be running ads just to get the perception of your brand in line and make sure that you've got a customer 10 years from now. Um, you know, some for an art for a um framework like this, you could argue that it's really product marketing, right? It's the promise of the product.

You have to make sure that the thing itself does what it's supposed to do, and people trust and feel that it's what they need further down the line. But yeah, I don't there's there's a lot of discussion and argument about the importance of brand building and you know, what does that really mean and where does it really go? Um, because you know, we we've seen a lot of the brands today, the conglomerates, their power is just drying up and vanishing. You know, when you look at the top 200 brands today versus uh 25 years ago, you know, the the concentration of power is all in the top 10 now, and nobody has even heard of the bottom, you know, two thirds. Um but yeah, that that's a whole argument in itself.

Again, the the um the general argument is you know, until you get over 50 million dollars, you're probably not doing any just straight up branding, you know, you're not sponsoring, you know, you're not doing TV commercials or um, you know, any other kind of just like get the name out there, you know, have your name on the building, that kind of stuff, unless there is some kind of weird direct thing where, oh, because of doing that, you're gonna get some direct leads, you know, that there's some kind of path to to instant traffic. But yeah, just um worrying about the impression of the brand is uh further up on the food chain. So let's say I wasn't me, I was someone uh, you know, completely from the outside. And I were to reach out to you, John, I would reach out to trust insights.ai slash contact. I would get John Wall, and I said, Hey, so I have this company, pretend it is Trust Insights.

What is the one thing that we're not doing that we should be doing based on this traction framework? Like what basic so basically what would you tell me that Trust Insights isn't doing that we should be? Uh, for trust insights, that's good see, because in general, to answer that question, any time leads come to us for whatever reason, 85, 90% of the time, it's you you're not doing email right. We just see that over and over and over again. Like they're doing a bunch of different campaigns, but we know, you know, uh so many of our clients have huge success with email.

And if you're not doing any structured or formal email thing, like you're just there's a there's probably a pot of money there that you're missing on, um missing out on, and you you need to jump on that. So that's we just see that over and over again. It's it's almost uh uh you know, it's just cliche that we see that so many times. Um, for us, you know, there's really no way to. I mean, obviously we can go with gut and with our you know experience on what we've seen, but really the best way to do that is like the digital customer journey.

You know, take a look at all the programs you're running, which ones are effective, which ones, you know, where do they fall in the um overall uh pipeline? You know, are they good at attracting attention or are they good at closing deals? And so that's really the best way to figure out, you know, you can rank everything that you're doing, and that gives you one level of insight, and then the next level is like, okay, what are you not doing that we've seen work that you should be doing? Um, and so that's a second level. And yeah, again, still there's no way to do that, but test, but it's great if you can have somebody come in and tell you that, well, based on your vertical and where you're at, you know, we've seen companies that by trying these three things, at least one of these are going to be effective.

That's a lot better map than you know, sitting around the conference table and um, you know, whoever gets the ping-pong ball in the cup gets to pick the campaign. That's not the best. I didn't know beer pong was a valid strategic tool. It's many a startup, right? So that's our prescriptive remedy.

You write the channels down on the beer pong cups and just start throwing the ball across the table. Whatever lands, you'll you'll try for a week. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if I was talking to uh to a new startup that had nothing at all, like because yeah, with trust Insights, it's kind of uh uh uh a little awkward in the sense that we started with a lot of assets, like we started the company with uh a good sized list and a reputation uh and a brand stuff. You're starting with absolutely positively nothing.

My inclinations were yeah, get an email marketing program in place so that you can have a if you have a publishing platform of some kind, get a um community in place so that you can retain access to your audience that you you're you have. And then I would say for somebody who's brand spanking new, you need some content obviously to to be attractive, but you need to have ads running to that content just to get people to just to even get eyeballs on it. Um, because if you don't, you're gonna be waiting 18 months for your first five visitors to find you in a you know the it's page 12 of Google search results. Yeah, I was I was gonna ask, but I think you answered the question with the advertising is okay, it's great for them to stand up and email marketing, but if they don't have an audience and they don't have a presence on social media, how does anyone know to sign up for the emails? And so it sounds like they would have to use the advertising initially to get people to sign up for the email, and then they can start to uh pull back on the ad dollars.

Yeah, if you think about like the funnel, awareness, engagement, conversion, just like those three books. You gotta have some mechanism in each one of those stages in the beginning just to catch what kind of falls through it. And you know, to what John was saying, it doesn't have to be everything, uh, it should be everything, but you should have one mechanism per stage so that you're not just pouring traffic out, you know, into a funnel out all over the floor. Yeah, we'll have to do you know, the advertising thing is huge. I have been playing around with some stuff as far as like dollar a day campaigns, you know, campaigns where you just go super focused, and yeah, you may only get two or three clicks a month, but those are people that are square in the bullseye.

You're not wasting a penny of that, and you know, the total spend is effective. So yeah, hopefully after another month or so, I'll have some numbers and could talk a little bit more uh uh you know data based as far as what's working and what you could be doing on those fronts. All right. Well, yeah, that's the uh the overall framework. If you want to learn more about this stuff, definitely ping us at any time.

We're happy to look at what you're doing, and we can give you some ideas as to where you should be going. And of course, all this stuff works better if you have marketing analytics set up and running and you have some dashboards to see, you know, if you can easily at the end of the month go back and in 20 minutes say, okay, here's the five campaigns that are you know, did it right, and here's the channel we're gonna drop. That takes all the headache out of this, and we would be happy to help out with that. Um, but uh yeah, I don't know. So any final thoughts on that.

I think the final thought is don't try to do every single digital marketing tactic known to man if you're just getting started. Uh, you know, be a little bit more picky, be a little bit more strategic. But also, before that, even know where your audience is. Yep, I'd agree with that because you can have the right offer and the right creative, but if it's to the wrong people, it ain't gonna matter. All right, folks, that's it for this week's show.

We will see you all next time. 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 T I podcast.

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