My Minimum Viable Growth Framework[Build In Public Update 3]

“We've Spent £60k+ On Marketing In The Last 12 Months and Got Nothing In Return!”

This was a conversation I had with a business owner a little while ago.

They're an established company that has been in business for more than 10 years.

They're great at what they do, profitable, and want to continue growing.

Historically, most of their business has come from referrals and their network and they have not had to "do much selling".

About a year ago, the founder decided that they wanted to grow, so he thought to himself:

"We need to do some marketing!"

So he went out and hired a couple of marketing agencies, and over the next 12 months they:

• Redesigned his website

• Wrote a bunch of "thought leader" posts for his blog

• Encouraged him to buy HubSpot

Helped him to create some great brand designs, and presentation templates, and redesigned the logo

The result?

Nothing.

Literally zero new revenue.

This is what I mean when I say "doing marketing" and not growing! I'm afraid it’s a very common story...

Here's why it happens:

You see, marketing is just attention. It's just raising awareness of your market message.

The trouble is, if all of your business has come from referrals in the past, then you've never really had to work on your market message for cold audiences (ie: people that have never heard of you).

You’re OK at closing warm leads but don’t know the unique message that will take a cold prospect and turn them into a warm lead.

So, you "do a bunch of marketing" and it just brings attention to a mixed message that doesn't have resonance with your marketplace.

The answer is to find resonance first and then use marketing to scale up that resonance.

And finding resonance is more about business strategy than it is about marketing.

Don't expect an external agency or a marketing graduate to figure out your positioning and help you find market resonance!

Here is my advice on how to deal with this:

• Stop doing marketing for the sake of doing marketing. Strip back everything that is not required and focus on one or two things.

• Create ONE great piece of content.

• Focus on ONE way of driving traffic to it.

Is it working? (Think: are people responding well to it? Is it generating leads? Is it turning cold prospects into warm leads? Are people telling you that they resonate with what you’re saying?).

If not, scrap it and try again.

You keep going until you have a message that really, really, resonates.

And once you have something that resonates, then it's time to scale up that resonance. Not the other way around.

This way, your marketing spend will go so much further than it could before. You’ll make more revenue whilst spending less.

If you want to learn more about this methodology, check out this video on my YouTube channel.

Give it a try and let me know how you get on!

- David