One Conscious Marketing Channel to Rule Them All

Last week I wrote a blog post sharing what I see as my failure to properly market my membership website, products and services – not taking full advantage of the Rainmaker Platform’s many built-in content marketing tools.

That realization got me contemplating: how would my business and solopreneurial life look, if I deliberately chose to market my website ONLY using the content marketing tools available on the Rainmaker Platform?

Yet, over the weekend, I began having serious doubts about the validity, realism and plausibility of that idea. Hence, I earlier this week published a follow-up post.

Since then, I’ve been thinking… again… Yes: I think a lot. Sometimes too much, according to family and friends. But such is the life of a genius! ;o)

How Growth Hacking Changed My (Marketing) Mindset

On GrowthHacker.tv – a site with startup-related video interviews that I reviewed here – I’ve come across Perry Marshall (author of 80/20 Sales & Marketing), Jason Cohen (successful serial entrepreneur + founder of brilliant WordPress host WP Engine) and the book Traction, by Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares. By watching their interviews, a surprising, interesting pattern emerged! It suddenly became crystal-clear to me that most successful startups:

1. create a shortlist of high-potential marketing channels,
2. swiftly test a few of the most promising ones,
3. evaluate the ROI of each tested channel,
4. then focus 100% on the most rewarding one.

One channel. Not several. Not even a couple. ONE.

The prime idea and objective is to wring out as much traction as humanly from that single, carefully chosen, relentlessly optimized, shamelessly exploited channel.

The premise and realization is that it takes a lot of work to fully master and dominate a given channel.

It’s interesting that most solopreneurs and service professionals have the crazy idea that they should be active marketing via a wide range of platforms/channels. I’ve had countless clients who are like “ehm… we also need to get our Facebook fan page started… and our Google+ page needs some work too… and LinkedIn… or Pinterest maybe… and our AdWords account also needs some care… we haven’t looked at it for the last couple o’ months…”

So! While the lonesome solopreneur is busy beyond belief trying to be and do everything everywhere – the 5-person startup has realized long ago, that THEY have too little time and resources to focus on anything but a single channel at a time.

Can you see what’s horribly, inhumanely, painstakingly wrong with that picture?

Startups seem to understand. Yet so many small business owners, solopreneurs and service professionals still seem to think they should do everything. They shouldn’t – and they can’t. It’s just too much work.

Focus Your Marketing Efforts on One Thing – A Single Marketing Channel

Mastering and dominating a marketing channel is a process that takes months. Not weeks or days.

ONLY when a channel is fully mastered, and no more can be done to optimize it; should you proceed to the next-most promising channel.

Say you have good flair for Google AdWords and you have good reasons to believe you can reach a sufficiently large amount of your ideal customers via that platform: then that’s what you’re gonna do! AdWords, AdWords and even more AdWords. For months! You optimize. You test. You improve your skills, constantly, striving to become a super dominatus AdWords bad-ass mofo (and yes; women can be “dat kind o’ bad-ass mofo” too!)

Meanwhile, you should largely ignore other “possible” (yet likely still plausible) growth channels like f.e. social media, email marketing and all the other tempting marketing channels and tools available, all begging for your attention, consideration… and credit card.

Sounds insane to you? Or reasonable?

A great read on the above by Jason:
For marketing early startups: Deep, not wide

If there’s a guy I’d love to have as my wiser big brother, it’s Jason Cohen – and Perry Marshall for dad! Imagine the mentorship!

In the name of politically correct equality and all, I’d equally love to feature a woman as my “Marketing Mom” – unfortunately I can’t think of many. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty women I respect, look up to and admire, but not related to this particular topic of simplifying/focusing my marketing… If you can name me some, I’d love to know of them in the comments below!

There is one I can think of though! Carolyn Tate, author of Conscious Marketing – a marketing book based on the Conscious Capitalism movement’s creed of doing no harm to humans or the environment. Conscious businesses often adhere to the Triple Bottom Line model – the goal being to not “just” profit, but also provide positive value to people and our planet. A nice concept, isn’t it?

I read (or rather: listened to) Conscious Marketing last summer, and I feel it may be time for a reread (relisten), as it can likely be a “guiding light” during my quest for simplified, essentialist marketing.

Let the journey begin!

Okay. I’m in! I’ll take on this challenge. For the next 12 months I’ll be doing everything I can to simplify my marketing, striving to use *only* the content marketing tools of the Rainmaker Platform.

Are you with me? Any book tips and such will be highly appreciated and are muchos muchos welcome! Please post ’em below!