Your marketing strategy in 5 minutes

Young, New CEO: 5-Min Hack To Identify Your Most Promising Marketing Options

Pardon me if there are typos in this post. A few keys on my laptop have stopped working.

Every other day, a fledgling entrepreneur asks me in private (usually on Twitter) what I think their best marketing options are with respect to what they have done so far, the nature of their product and, of course, their financial strength (or otherwise.) What often follows is that we have phone conversations or we meet in person and I try as best as I can (in such a short time and with limited backstory) to suggest their most promising channels.

As you can probably see, this is a rather inefficient way to do it. For one, I am just one man (and while I do enjoy talking to people about their new exciting ideas, I have a day job and a family and as such I tend to need to sleep somewhere along the line). The other reason is that the more genius approaches and tweaks that make every form of marketing ‘optimum’ usually come from the kind of ‘depth of knowledge’ that one simply cannot aggregate while talking to a fella over a cup of coffee.

So. That was the statement of the problem.

Below I am writing a five minute hack for you if you want to know what your first options should be when looking to promote your business. While I agree that it is a necessary evil for businesses in the millennial age to have a social media presence, I do not necessarily agree that social media should always be your go-to main marketing strategy.

Here is a quick checklist you can follow:

1. In one paragraph, describe what your business is about.
2. Now condense that into one sentence.
3. Rewrite that sentence into a value proposition (in a nutshell: the thing that makes your product/service useful to anyone.) If you have several of these, pick the strongest one.
4. Write a list of your competition.
5. Write out what makes you different from your competition.
6. Link that unique advantage to your value proposition. This is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
7. Buy yourself a drink.

Great work so far. I’d advise that you make the above a group activity. Get a group of smart people who are not too shy to reasonably bash any idea until you have mined the best output from all brains in the room. Synergy is beautiful to behold, but beware the groupthink.

The fun activities above will help you (and your team) become clear-headed in understanding your business better so you can more efficiently tackle the next few steps.

8. Do a little snooping around. Find the people who do stuff similar to you (usually your competition or business model pioneers in another continent). Find out what their most obvious marketing channels are.

9. Do another brainstorm. With your group of critical thinkers, list every marketing channel that you can think off. (Yes, social media too!)

10. Rate each channel along these lines:

a. Impact of the channel (eg: can reach a large audience really quickly, looks like a good channel for getting people who REALLY want what you are selling)

b. Ease of execution (eg cost of the channel, does your team have skill required to leverage on this channel, do you need to have ‘connects’?)

c. Gut feel (ie your intuition, how does this channel make you feel as a human being?)

Each criteria should be on a scale of 1–10, making each marketing channel have a potential maximum value of 30.

[I’ll add an example here so we are clear :)

Say you are considering using radio ads as a channel.

I, as one of the participants in the brainstorm, would rate the impact of radio as a 7, the ease of execution at 2 (because we really don’t have the money for radio) and my gut feel about the channel at 5 (because I feel the people who listen to radio will know about us, but they might not buy in quantities large enough to justify the marketing cost.)

That would peg radio as a channel at 14.]

When all channels have been brainstormed like this, collate the numbers and find the average per channel.

Your top three channels should be the first ones you should consider for your first campaigns.

The next three are the next best options.

I suggest that you conduct these experiments quarterly to accommodate for the ever-changing nature of your business and to factor in new approaches and, perhaps, channels.

I hope this helps. Comments, as always, are appreciated.

[I realize this is more than 5-minutes worth of work. Oh well.]

Have a great day!