I started my first managed services company and I was struggling to get clients in the door. And so that took me on a decade long journey to really learn marketing the difficult, expensive way., I spent like I said about a decade trying to learn marketing and I finally kind of cracked the formula and I grew that company, built that up to be a national business and I exited that, then after that I built a very high growth startup which was in the telecommunications space, we went from zero to four years later being in the top 100 fastest growing companies in the country I exited that and now I'm helping business leaders and entrepreneurs from all over the world help develop their own marketing capabilities so that they can experience rapid business growth.

So what I like to tell my clients start with buy let's get clients in the door and then we can build our brand on the back of that because when you look at some of the really big successful brands they didn't start with big flashy billboards and big branding advertising campaigns they started with for example in the case of Nike was a guy who was selling shoes out of the back of his uh car at athletic track meets right so that's how that big brand started

Direct response marketing has a few elements, so for example, it's trackable, it's measurable, we usually use compelling headlines and copy, it targets very specific audiences, so it's kind of like if you think of a billboard, it's the opposite of that. Like Coca-Cola doesn't know which billboard made you buy that Coca-Cola right, so that it's very difficult to to be able to reverse engineer a return on investment

Clayton Christian uh explained his concepts and i agree with a lot of what he he used to teach one of the things that i often see in organizations is marketing for marketing sake or technology for technology's sake and i like to make sure within all of our business systems and especially our marketing systems uh whether it's our crm system whether it's our the way we define our avatar

You want to have a very defined target market so in what Seth Godin is saying that the minute minimum target market, but we want a niche that's an inch wide and a mile deep so you know we could you can have a very tightly defined niche but there's not enough people in there that to make it worthwhile, but we want a niche that's an inch wide and a mile deep so an inch wide meaning, hey, we can create an avatar of our ideal target audience

You want to have very clearly defined metrics for each piece of technology for each step in your marketing process and then you know if it's on track or off track so for example for our own website the metric that really matters most is the number of email opt-ins we know that the more email opt-ins that we get the more it's going to impact revenue positively if email opt-ins plummet for whatever reason maybe then

So how can we take that tribe of raving fans and get them to buy in more quantity, more quality, more frequency?

I think that's a business principle that's violated in nearly every aspect of organizations

I think now we're going to be returning to that conversational and customized marketing approach