The Secret Weapon Superstar Marketers Use That Has Nothing To Do With Marketing…
It’s time to scale your business so you start working on your most creative marketing ideas.
Your hopes are high for this one. After the campaign goes viral you’ll have an endless supply of new business!
You read a dozen marketing books, study the latest Digital Marketing trends and get to work.
You wait… The day after launching your new marketing campaign you rush to your desk, excited about following up all your new sale leads.
But, your inbox is empty.
Even after all your best creative effort and studying the experts something is still not right. The marketing copy? The headline? The image?
What if your marketing was not the problem? What if it’s your entire business?
You want to grow your business so you start with the obvious question. How do I get more customers? This leads you to the answer – I’ll do some marketing.
But are you treating the symptom or the cause?
We all know that switching from eating full-fat ice cream to a low-fat ice cream is not really going to help us lose weight. The ice cream could just be one element of your diet.
To get long term change you’d need to work on your entire lifestyle.
In the same way investing more in a new marketing campaign or training our sales teams is unlikely to have any significant long-term impact, if our Business Model is not right, to begin with.
How often do you go right back to the start and examine your Business Model?
Wikipedia’s entry on Business Models says…
A Business Model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value[1] (economic, social, or other forms of value).
Here’s what I think it should say…
- What problem do you solve?
- Who for?
- How will you get it done better than everyone else?
- How will you get paid?
None of the biggest businesses in the world scaled through a super high converting marketing campaign. They have instead invested their energy and money into creating Business Models that are so good, they sell themselves.
Ever played “What if…”?
Have you ever played the game, “What if…”? Playing this game is our most valuable step in creating Digital Marketing Strategies.
What if …we were the best place in the world to solve {customers issue}, how would we do it?
The point of the question is to start with the biggest, craziest, best version of your business and then start working out what is actually possible.
Answering these questions can be fun and extremely insightful. Here are some tips…
- Get some techy geeky types to help. People who know about this kind of stuff will help you expand what you might think is actually possible.
- Look for advantages in delivery speed, shareability (build in the ability to share with a community), price/costs, design, accessibility (where can I access it), automation (subscriptions)…
- Imagine you could not do any marketing… how could you build in features that would do the marketing for you?
- How could you build something your customers loved?
In the end, most of us will be investing in some kind of Digital Marketing, but even the world’s best marketers will not get far with a crappy Business Model.
Get your business model right and you’ll look like a Marketing Superstar!