Two Questions To Revolutionize Your Marketing
When it comes to business, one of the most important factors, after a solid offering and a great business plan, is a quality approach to marketing. For the new business owner just starting out, this can be a daunting prospect – how do you know what approach to take, which outlets to utilize, and how to make the most of them? These can be tricky questions to answer, and the novice business owner-cum-marketing specialist may find themselves misstepping and missing the mark altogether. They don’t have to go it alone, though, and Caleb Welborn of Welborn and Co. hopes to help revolutionize the way in which business owners approach marketing.
Welborn, who started his own marketing company about 18 months ago with a goal of providing custom marketing solutions, has always been interested in advertising, marketing, and production. As a teenager, he developed his video editing skills purely as a hobby, then studied business in college. After graduation, he was able to combine the skills he learned in school with those that he taught himself in order to begin developing creative and targeted marketing programs. Through trying new approaches, some of which succeeded and some of which didn’t, he developed a robust “tool belt” that he was then able to apply moving forward. Now, he utilized those tools to help companies develop and implement successful marketing strategies that work well in the space that they occupy.
This, he says, is one of the biggest struggles that companies face – they’re often frustrated to find that their marketing isn’t moving their businesses how they want it to, often because they’re caught up in what’s “hot” right now rather than what makes sense for their specific business. By helping business owners to understand how they can create a targeted approach tailored to their industry, Welborn works to ease that frustration. To do that, he first asks his clients to answer two deceptively simple questions that, he believes, will revolutionize their marketing:
- What am I trying to accomplish?
- Who am I trying to reach?
While these questions may initially seem easy to answer, it can be hard to “zoom out” and see the bigger picture and answer them accurately logically. Sometimes, he says, business owners are surprised to find that they forgot to consider these things before they jumped into trying to market themselves and that they’ve been wasting a lot of their time by pursuing customers and goals that don’t really make sense or mesh with their overall business approaches.
So how do you find the answers to these questions, especially if you’re new to marketing? Welborn suggests that you dive in deep from the beginning – if you’re already an established company, you can go through all of your customer and sales data and break it down to see what categories of people are buying your product or service and to pick out the main groups that you can identify in that information. This, he says, will allow you to target your marketing to the 20% of customers that are producing 80% of your results, as is generally the case, making the most of your limited time and resources.
Once you’ve accomplished this, Welborn says, you can begin to look at high-potential targets that you might not yet have reached. To identify them, he suggests working your way down from the top, from governments to institutions, businesses to individuals. By taking a combination of your current customer base and those who are likely to transact with you moving forward, you can create a communication and marketing strategy around each of those groups that will be most effective using the least possible time and resources.
Making the most of your resources is especially important, according to Welborn, because it takes a lot of effort to bring in a new client – in general, you need around a dozen “touches” with an individual before they’ll transact with you for the first time. For this reason, your most important customers are your current customers – it’s far easier to get them to come back than it is to bring in someone entirely new, and it makes sense, therefore, to target your marketing primarily towards your current customer base.
Once you’ve identified your current customer base and the groups that you’d like to reach out to and capture, it’s time to choose which marketing methods are appropriate to utilize when trying to reach your identified customers. One of the best ways to do this, Welborn says, is to look at where else they hang out – what groups and organizations are they a part of? What Podcasts do they listen to, and to which Youtube channels do they subscribe? Once you’ve identified these spaces, reach out to them to see if they’re interested in partnering. Whenever possible, he suggests building off of someone else’s credibility to gain access to their people. Customers who haven’t transacted with your business before having any reason to trust that you’ll provide a quality service or product, but if you’re partnered with and endorsed by an influencer or company that they already trust, they’re far more likely to take the risk of transacting with you for the first time. Whoever you want to reach, Welborn says, there’s a way to do it effectively – you just need to find it.
There’s still one more step to consider, even after you’ve identified your customer base and the method that you’re going to use to advertise to them – how do you implement your marketing strategy? In many cases, Welborn says, you can do it yourself; if you’re savvy in the space that you’re looking at advertising in, whether it be writing, editing, or social media, you can often do most of the work on your own. But whether you decide to do things yourself or bring in an expert, this will generally be a tiered process. The first step is to create the key magnet that will pull people in – this is your big display, as it were; the major effort that most people think of when they hear the word “marketing.” The second step is to start driving traffic – find your target customer base, and start driving them closer and closer to your end goal, which you identified through answering the first of Welborn’s two questions.
At the end of the day, Welborn says, it’s about gaining clarity and “not wasting energy on stuff that’s not producing results.” As a business owner, you should always be reevaluating the two questions that drive your marketing approach – what are you trying to accomplish, and who are you trying to reach? By initially answering and continuing to look at these two questions, Welborn says, you can really revolutionize and completely change the way in which people approach marketing – they may have completely misidentified their end goal and the people that they need to reach in order to accomplish it. “There’s a good quote, I think it’s a Lincoln quote,” Welborn says. “‘If you had six hours to chop down a tree, you’d spend the first four sharpening the axe.’ So rather than just trying to chop down a bunch of trees with a blunt axe – that’s what a lot of people end up doing when they want to rush into it, so it’s worth sitting back and taking the time to really develop your game plan and then…taking aggressive action on just a few things.”
“It’s all about figuring out what your strategy is and then choosing what methods will help you achieve what those business goals are,” he says, “not just marketing for the sake of marketing.” And, he points out, “it matters a lot more what other people are saying about you than what you’re saying about yourself.”
To learn more about marketing strategies, the two critical questions Welborn uses to help businesses revolutionize their marketing, and more, visit WelbornAndCo.com or email [email protected].
