If you choose the right marketing strategy, you’ll be like that little guy in the middle of my diagram above. Yeah! Victorious! Fist pumps!
The problem with marketing today is that there are too many options and it’s too confusing. It makes me dizzy just thinking about these things and I’ve been immersed in them for 35 years.
Well, I lay on my bed last week with a notepad and began to map out my “Unified Theory of Marketing Strategies“with an emphasis on online marketing.
And I actually came up with something that isn’t entirely confusing, and might even be useful to some people.
Here it goes…
It’s another four quadrant grid where the vertical axis is a scale from easy to difficult and the horizontal axis is a scale from passive to proactive.
I came away with these four agile quadrants:
Hard and Passive = Multimedia
Easy and Passive = Post
Tough and Proactive = Presentations
Easy and proactive = email
Now, all these strategies can be effective. But, yes, some are easier than others. And passive ones usually take much longer than proactive ones.
Hard and Passive = Multimedia (Videos)
Everyone is crazy about video these days. It’s a challenge, but passive strategy. You work a lot to create a video and then you post it on YouTube in the hope that people will see it.
It’s hard to get it right. It is time consuming and can be expensive. And most of the videos are pure garbage. If you want to get it right, it takes a lot of change and a lot of time.
Throwing lots of small videos on your website can be a nice touch, but they usually don’t get people calling you out in droves.
So as you can see I’m not crazy about a video strategy for freelance professionals. I’m not saying they can’t work, but it’s a lot of work to get it right.
Best example: A non-duality teacher named Rupert Spira (non-duality.rupertspira.com/home). He does live workshops and films everything. His staff then breaks them into question-and-answer segments and posts them on YouTube. They last from five to fifteen minutes. And what you see is what you get. No tone, no exaggeration. It is his unadulterated teaching.
He has hundreds of videos on YouTube with millions of views. Works? Well, his workshops are always packed and all he does is a discreet email announcement to his list every month or two.
I really like this approach. Do you have a lot of good content? Do you look good in the video (unlike yours)? So you might want to emulate Rupert.
Easy and Passive = Post
I really like this strategy because, ahem, it built my “Empire”. It’s relatively easy: write a how-to article on your topic once a week, send it out to those on your e-list, and post it on your blog. Fame rises.
But online publishing can be much more than that. You can take those same articles and publish them on Medium, LinkedIn, and Ezine Articles. And then you can advertise them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Sometimes you can get great exposure by writing an article for a major online publication. Web traffic multiplies.
The cost is zero; an article takes two to five hours to write (unless it takes several days). And his ideas are online for eternity to be discovered by those looking for practical ideas. Some will opt for your electronic list and will perpetuate this virtuous circle of marketing.
The downside, of course, is that according to my extensive research (a 10 second Google search), there are 2 million articles published online every day. The actual mind. So your things will be out there, but sort of lost in a very large haystack.
I’m still a big proponent of publishing online, but the mountain is getting steeper. Just writing an article or two here and there won’t help you much.
Best example: Well, aside from mine of course, check out Henneke from Enchanted Marketing. She has a wonderful, readable, and fun blog about business writing and blogging. And she walks the talk of it. It is relevant and well written content. If you don’t have that as a base, it’s a total waste of time.
Tough and Proactive = Presentations
I built my business on performing in front of live audiences in professional associations and chambers of commerce. It caught my eye, added people to my mailing list, and generated warm leads for marketing coaching.
And I still do presentations today in the form of webinars. I just completed my recent group program with the help of a couple of webinars (also called video conferences). They certainly work.
But I put the presentations in the difficult category, not because they are so difficult to give, but because they can take a long time to prepare. The last one I did took two full days. There were about 200 slides (wow).
Yeah, that’s not the only way to do a webinar. You can go live on Zoom Video, and that can work too. Ultimately, you have to find your style and test what works.
The presentations are proactive in the sense that at the end you can ask about the business. And of course, you can turn the webinar recording into a video in an instant and send it to those on your list. Look it here.
Therefore, presentations will always play an important role in my marketing toolkit.
One other thing though: if you don’t have a LOT of people on your email list, good luck getting a lot of support. Yes, you can do guest presentations hosted by others, but you don’t have the same control and ability to present your professional services.
Best example: John Nemo of LinkedIn Riches (linkedinriches.com). His webinar is amazing. There are many of them in the world of online marketing. And many, like John, have set them up as evergreen webinars that are scheduled to autoplay multiple times a day. These are kind of a hybrid between publishing and presentations.
Easy and proactive = email
In my opinion, email is the most powerful general marketing tool. And receives the least respect. But I can’t imagine even being in business without email marketing.
Social media gets all the PR and all the attention, but email gets the business. A recent study showed that email generated 40 times the business results of Facebook and Twitter combined.
Email is the online tool that has been around the longest and I think it is taken for granted. Promotional emails have expanded exponentially over the years, but most aren’t very good.
We check our email inboxes as if we were sorting our mail in the trash. Delete, delete, delete. Because? Because it’s not relevant or it’s boring. Usually both.
I feel that email has the most potential of all online marketing strategies because it is relatively easy and the most proactive marketing medium of all. Your message goes straight to your prospect’s inbox. Nothing else can do that.
Email marketing has great opportunities for improvement in several areas:
1. How to incorporate humor as the most powerful attention device there is (that hardly anyone uses).
2. How to telegraph your value proposition directly to the mind and heart of your prospect.
3. How to make your emails clear, focused and easy to read.
4. How to craft a compelling call to action that’s hard to resist.
5. How to email thousands of your prospects without looking like spam.
If you’re not working on ALL of these, your emails won’t get the attention and response you want.
Best example: Therapy practice accelerator. Visit this site and sign up for the list just to see the brilliance of email marketing. It’s about showing results.
What marketing strategies will you choose?
Consider the four marketing quadrants. The easier a marketing activity is, the more likely it is that you will actually carry it out. And the more proactive a marketing activity is, the quicker the response you’ll get.
Regards, Robert