MARKETING BRAIN DUMP: 3 IDEAS I WISH I'D HEARD 5 YEARS SOONER

Morning!

I’m currently sitting on a jam-packed train to London. I’m shoulder to shoulder with a stranger and getting glares from the woman across from me, who clearly isn’t happy with the fact that I’ve got my laptop out on a Saturday.

But what they don’t know is that I’ve got a newsletter to write.

Today, I’m sharing 3 marketing laws I wish I’d learned 5 years sooner. (They would have saved £ 1000s)

Let’s get into it!

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO VERSION HERE

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO VERSION

BREAKING DOWN THE STRATEGY

A year in a start-up is like 3 years in real life. A year in a start-up marketing agency?

You might as well get the trip to Turkey booked already.

Hairline runs away, grey hairs settle in, body starts aching, one day you’re 22 and loving life, the next you’re hobbling around like a 60-year-old man. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating slightly. But a few years in an early-stage marketing agency really does feel like a lifetime - especially when you founded it.

It’s so fast-paced, the world around you shifts so quickly, and you’re sprinting along a never-ending treadmill of new marketing.

Every week, a new tactic hits the metaphorical marketing shelves. Every quarter, a new platform becomes popular. Every year, a new technology emerges.

But as Ogilvy once said, “Fashion in advertising is a powerful influence. But fashionable advertising is seldom good advertising.”

And that couldn’t ring more true than today.

So today, I’m not going to share with you all the new tools I’m using or the cool ways we’re implementing AI. Instead, I want to share the few core laws that have never failed me yet. They were learned through many failures, some wins, and would have saved me £ 1000s if I had known them 5 years sooner.

Here are the 3 marketing laws tattooed into my brain.

Law 1: Always Be Transparent With Supply & Demand

Marketing is often a lot of bragging.

You want big numbers, big names. Then the more you talk about those big names and numbers, the more big names and numbers come your way.

But the irony is, you can make a lot more money by using small numbers in the right way.

In 2023, we hosted our 2nd ever webinar for noticed. - our only focus for that campaign was big numbers. We wanted:

• The highest number of sign-ups possible

• The highest number of people on the webinar

• The highest number of calls booked off the back of it

So we promoted the hell out of it.

We screamed about it on LinkedIn, ran a bunch of campaigns around it, we did everything we could to get attention on it.

In the end, we managed to get about 200 people to sign up, and ~110 showed up on the day.

We did our speech, broke down our system and then let all 100+ know that they could all get a free call with us where we’d help them with their marketing. That day, we left the call and celebrated - this was going to be huge for us.

Then… crickets.

A couple of people booked calls, most were unqualified, and I’m I don’t think we signed any clients off the back of it. It was a massive failure.

We started to question if webinars actually worked or if we’d not shown enough value in it. How could we not get 1 out of 200 people to buy? Later down the line, we found out why…

After reading a combination of Russell Brunson and Daniel Priestley’s books, we realised that if you want people to purchase, you have to show them you have more demand than supply. Daniel Priestley has a concept he calls “Demand & Supply Transparency”, and it’s arguably the best marketing tactic or philosophy I’ve used over the last 4 years.

In that webinar, I mentioned that we had a demand of 100+ people but an unlimited supply. It was a terrible ratio and that’s why we failed.

6 months later, locked and loaded with this new knowledge, we launched another webinar, this time with a very different approach.

Step 1: Limited Seats

We only offered 100 seats on the webinar. No extras, no additions. We then publicly showcased just how many people were going to get a chance to grab one of those seats.

We had 50,000+ followers (demand) and only 100 seats (supply). If you wanted one, you’d have to act quickly.

We even added a live tracker on the site that counted down when seats filled up (reducing supply).

Step 2: Repeat it on the webinar

Ironically, even though we had 50% fewer people sign up, we still had 75+ people turn up on the webinar (unheard of show rate for a webinar). We promoted it just as much and kept promoting it even when it was sold out - and it worked.

Once we had the 75 people on the webinar, we went through the hour offering as much value as possible, but this time, at the end, we announced that we only had space for 2 more clients. We made it clear that we had 75+ people on this webinar (demand) and only 2 would get a chance to work with us (supply).

Off the back of that webinar, we had 13 sales calls booked in the calendar. We then went on to sign 2 of our biggest clients ever.

Law 2: Jealousy Drives Sales

I’ve never been a huge fan of outreach, mainly because I hate receiving it myself.

• The spammy LinkedIn DMs

• The endless cold emails

• The brutal cold calls

These are things that make my day dramatically worse and definitely don’t get me closer to purchasing from you… Or at least that’s how I felt. Then one day, I got a cold DM off a video editor.

It said something like this….

Within 1 week of receiving this message, I replied, had a call with him, sent him a video to edit, and then paid him for more edits.

He was a fantastic editor, but it wasn’t his quality of work that got my attention. It was the name of our competitor.

I’d been got.

I’d been got by the same simple fact that has made so many cold outreach agencies millions of pounds. Everyone wants to know the secrets their competitors have.

In $ 100M Leads, Alex Hormozi recommends a very similar approach. His cold outreach script is:

Do you see the hook? We worked with your competitor and got these results.

It’s teasing you, and very few people can resist the urge to find out the methods their competitors are using.

When it comes to outreach or cold email, so many people think the key to getting someone’s attention is:

• Timing

• Personalisation

• A no-brainer offer

But often the best carrot you can dangle at the end of your stick is that you know what their competitor is doing and you can tell them if they’re interested.

Law 3: The Best Marketing Is Just A Media Brand

Getting attention on your brand while trying to drive new sales is like an impossible task.

If you talk too much about your offering, no one will follow you, and if you focus too much on entertaining, no one will buy from you.

This is why the best way to get attention on your company is just to start a media brand - easier said than done, but very very effective when done.

Let me give you 2 clear examples of what this looks like in action:

1/ Steven Bartlett & FlightStory

Love him or loathe him, Steven Bartlett is an incredible marketer, and currently he’s on a rampage with his company, FlightStory. It’s expanding into new verticals, making some massive moves and growing at an insane rate. But if he just started constantly talking about FlightStory on his socials and podcast (Diary Of A CEO) then everyone would unfollow him.

So, he created Behind The Diary. A new YouTube vlog channel that documents his journey building FlightStory from the ground up. It’s one core dedicated distribution channel to get millions of eyes on what FlightStory is doing for everyone to follow along.

Now his socials can stick to entertainment and pushing DOAC, while he has a new distribution channel for FlightStory.

2/ MoneyWise and Hampton

A simpler example is the MoneyWise podcast.

In 2022, Sam Parr launched Hampton - a community for founders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs. The obvious example for promoting it would be across his socials and his popular business podcast My First Million. But he had the same issue as Steven… if he started using his successful channels for constantly promoting his business, people wouldn’t stick around for long.

So instead, he created a new podcast called MoneyWise covering a topic that he thought his ICP would find interesting - breaking down how multi-millionaires organise their finances.

• It was something his target audience would want

• They should be drawn to it

• It will push people towards Hampton

It’s so tough to get enough distribution and attention on your company, especially when you’re limited to company socials. By creating a separate media brand that funnels attention to your business you solve that issue.

It’s not easily done, but if you can do it, it will solve A LOT of your marketing problems.

NOTE: This can be done through a Key Person of Influence, a newsletter, a podcast or any other media type.

 🌱 THE GREENHOUSE

Things I’ve saved this week that are worth seeing:

• Read an old deep dive I wrote on Sam Parr creating MoneyWise. (See Here)

TL;DR

Law 1: Always Be Transparent With Supply & Demand
Law 2: Jealousy Drives Sales
Law 3: The Best Marketing Is Just A Media Brand

This was the type of breakdown I’m a little worried to hit send on. In here are some of the key principles that have had a massive impact on our business. Hopefully this resonated and you’re able to action them in yours.

If you did enjoy this, please share it with a friend - it helps a bunch :)

Until next Sunday.

— Niall

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