I've Fixed Dozens of Bad Marketing Strategies. Here's How.

Angela Frank: 00:00:00

Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today we're checking in one on one to learn my step by step method for fixing a bad marketing strategy. I'm your host, Angela Frank.

eting revenue for clients. In: 2022

On The Growth Pod, I interview industry experts and share tips designed to help you build a profitable brand you love. So if you're like me and love learning about how to grow your business more efficiently, you've come to the right place.

I've helped dozens of brands create profitable marketing strategies. And one of the biggest misconceptions in marketing is that you can have profitability or you can have growth, but you can't have both.

And I'm here today to tell you that that's not true at all. You can have both, and I'll be sharing how you can steal my strategies and create a profitable marketing strategy without sacrificing growth.

Let's get into it first. Let's share where this misconception comes from in the first place.

Like many good things come and gone, this trend started with startups who are companies like Amazon, Uber and many other unicorns operated at a loss as they work to solidify their product, their acquisition model, and their marketing strategy.

And while many of these brands were able to leverage this strategy and achieve that unicorn status, a lot of these brands are still still not profitable to this day, which means all of their growth is funded by investors. But that's not the only model that startups can use to grow.

And in fact, once you have a proven offer, many startups are finding that there are better ways to grow, including many strategies that include a focus on profitability.

But before we chat about those strategies, I really want to drive home one key reason why strategies like the ones employed by unprofitable unicorns or even small businesses doing loss leader marketing are harmful to your business. And it really comes down to the longevity of the strategy.

In the early days of a startup, there are a lot that need to be discovered about a product target market, and how all of those moving elements work together to create an enticing offer. But once those elements have been ironed out, the smart thing to do is learn how you can acquire customers profitably.

Because when your brand is operating profitably, you create a lot more Runway for your brand and you create something that's sustainable not only over the short term, but the long term as well. When your brand is profitable, it has the ability to grow with every customer that's acquired instead of only when you're raising around.

And this really just creates more options for you when you're growing your brand.

So now that we know why striving for growth and profitability is key to a successful marketing strategy, I'm going to share with you a very simple three step process for achieving both. And that process is create an enticing offer. Show your offer to the right people and find the best marketing channel for your offer.

Creating an enticing offer means that you not only have proven market fit, but now you're building upon that to create the most appealing version of your offer. You can do this pretty simply by answering a few questions like what is the pain point that your brand can uniquely solve?

Who is the one person that your offer can uniquely help? And how can you quantify the results, meaning the speed, money or resources saved, or the pain that's relieved by using your offer?

Once you have these questions answered, you have the key components to make a compelling offer for your target market. Now you simply test different versions of that offer until you find the one that works best for your brand.

The next step is to show your offer to the right people.

Within your target market, there's going to be subgroups of people and in this step you're going to do a little research on the people who are actually the best fit for your offer. Starting with your existing customers, look at your best customers and identify what they all have in common.

Then look at your customer feedback and identify any trends that you may have missed. Then you'll look externally and find the places where your ideal prospects hang out online. And you'll try and learn everything about them.

What is the language that they're using, what concerns do they have, and what are they saying would be the perfect offer or solution for them.

Now that we have your perfect offer and you found the right people to show it to, we just need to see where we need to tell people about it so we find the best marketing channel to do this. There are a few simple steps which are to test everywhere and launch minimally.

Lean into your highest ROI channels and do more of what works and less of what doesn't.

When you're trying to find the best marketing channel, it's really difficult to know what will be the best fit for your offer and your target audience until you test them all. So, so that's what you're going to do first. But instead of launching full scale efforts on all of these new channels.

You'll start small and test a few channels at a time and then find the ones that work best.

Once you do that, stop marketing on the rest, add a few more new channels in and repeat until you've tested all the channels that are available to you. After that, you should have a few marketing channels that seem to work really well for your brand.

And now you just have to find which ones have the highest ROI and to lean into those channels. Over time, you'll continue testing and learning on those channels, maybe sprinkling in some new channels here and there.

But as you test, your goal is to do more of what works and less of what doesn't work. This is really the key to creating a marketing strategy that creates exponential growth for your brand.

Now there are a few ways that brands go wrong in this testing phase because they're looking for shortcuts to growth.

And some of these brands will run sales to attract new customers, they'll run free promotions to attract new customers, or they'll get stuck in a promotion cycle where nobody ever wants to pay full price for your offer. A great example of this is Natalie Barbu, who is a co founder of Rella.

She shared recently on her YouTube channel some reasoning behind why her startup was relaunching. Initially, Rella was a free to use social media scheduling tool designed for content creators.

After the original launch, users loved Rella and found immense value in it. And really the feedback was super positive. Everybody really enjoyed the tool and loved using it, but they weren't paying for it.

And when it came time to pay, these same users who gave such glowing rave reviews about Rella wouldn't make a small $15 a month commitment to pay for it. And in her video Natalie shared that this was really the primary reason behind the relaunch.

They realized that creating a tool for content creators would never bring the scale that they wanted to their brand and instead they were able to pivot to a new audience and one who was happy to pay for it. But it's not just SaaS companies that have this problem.

I've seen customer acquisition strategies ruined by running free promotions for first time customers. That was a digital service providing startup. Another company ran significant discounts every six months. That was a med spa.

Another fitness equipment retailer just ran a chronic sale every month. They just changed the name and ran the same discount over and over and over again.

And also a nutrition coach that ran quarterly deep discounts on their courses.

And when you run a strategy that's driven by discounts you become beholden to these sales patterns, which becomes very detrimental to your business because you're training customers to wait, you're training them to never pay the full price, or like in Natalie's case, you're training customers to never pay at all.

And so instead what you should do is use promotions sparingly and thoughtfully, make your existing offer more enticing, and learn how to communicate the value of your offer. And we actually have an entire episode dedicated to escaping discount dependence that I will link in the description for you.

But you can see here that Natalie and her co founders were able to quickly identify that their initial loss leader strategy was not going to get the business results they needed.

And while they could have maybe built a massive platform and put profitability off until the future, like some of those unicorns we discussed earlier in the episode, they made the decision to pivot and create a product for an audience that was happy to pay for their tools. And I bet if we check in with Natalie in a few years, she'll be really glad she did so.

To create a profitable growth strategy for your brand, don't lose money to acquire customers and don't rely on deep discounts. Instead, create an enticing offer. Show your offer to the right people and find the best marketing channel to sell your offer.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Growth Pod. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.