Guide #8: Best practices for choosing your marketing channels
Optimize your time investment to get the best results
In today’s guide, we’re going to look at some simple tips on how to get the most out of your marketing efforts as a solo-founder.
As a 1-person business, you can’t do everything, so you need to think about the options you have that will give you the biggest return-on-investment for your time.
We can’t copy the strategies that Coca-Cola, Apple or Tesla use because we don’t have the luxury of having a dedicated marketing team or large marketing budget.
Unfortunately, we’re so conditioned to taking inspiration from large companies that many people go down the route of copying their strategies exactly and end up not getting good results from hours and hours of effort every week.
Be very VERY targeted
Instead, we need to be laser focused on our marketing efforts.
We need to know the reason for EVERYTHING we do.
Instead of being focused, many people spread themselves too thin and focus on every marketing channel. There are a few reasons why people do this:
Everyone else is doing it
They feel like that’s what they’re “supposed” to do
More marketing channels gives more chance to reach customers
They don’t want to miss customers that only use one specific platform
This approach leads to a lot of unnecessary (and unprofitable) work. But don’t worry, we can ask ourselves 1 simple question which can help make our marketing efforts run like a perfectly engineered pocket watch. And that question is this:
How much does it cost to acquire a customer?
This is a question we need to ask ourselves for EVERY marketing channel we target.
Customer Acquisition Cost is the metric large businesses use to calculate how much it costs to acquire a customer. This can sound complicated, but we can use a very simple version to help us determine the best way to market our product/service as a 1-person business.
The way we do this is by dividing either our spending (for paid marketing channels) or our time (for free marketing channels) by the number of sign ups.
A paid marketing channel would look like this:
For our time, we need to know how much we make per hour. I like to do this by looking at revenue over the most recent period, say the last 6 months and divide that by the number of hours I’ve spent working (roughly). I can then multiply that hourly rate by the number of hours I’ve spent on a given task to turn my time input into a financial cost.
It looks something like this:
Once you know this rate, you can then track how much time or money you spend on specific activities (e.g. writing and responding to tweets) and then work out the Customer Acquisition cost for that specific channel.
Let’s say you work out your hourly rate as $100/hour and find that you have spent 8 hours on Twitter activities which led to 10 sales, the calculation breaks down as follows:
In this example, it costs you $80 to acquire 1 customer through Twitter.
Do this for every channel and you’ll soon find the channels which are bringing you the most revenue for the lowest amount of effort. Once you’ve done that, you should now have a clear idea of the optimal ways to use your time and what to focus on.
When it comes to actually choosing the marketing channels to focus on, here are some tips:
1. Choose 2-3 marketing channels that you can put your focus into
To begin with, you want to choose the ones that you think are most likely to work. This can sometimes require a bit of testing. But whenever you start seeing good results from one channel, double-down on that and remove your effort from other less profitable channels. Ultimately, you’re looking for paying customers (or maybe page views if you’re running an advertising business), so look at the channels that are leading to your core goal, not just sign-ups.
2. You don’t need to have a social presence
It suits some industries, but not all. For example, a lot of B2B businesses won’t benefit much from social media, and could have much better results focusing more on direct selling.
3. Sales is one of the most powerful options you have
When it’s suitable, direct outreach can be one of the easiest ways to find customers. You can do this via email, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other channel. It allows you to speak directly with customers, get feedback and gives you meaningful control over revenue. This primarily applies to B2B businesses.
4. Don’t necessarily copy everyone else
You may immediately think that social media is the way to go, but sometimes there are better options, which may be more unorthodox. Think outside the box and look for ways to market your business in a more remarkable way.
5. Think about where your ideal customers are and target them there
If your ideal customers are waste companies, then social media probably isn’t a very good strategy and is probably a waste of time completely. Save yourself the hassle and focus elsewhere.
To sum up
By taking a step back and doing some quick calculations on your efforts, you can easily identify the best options available to you, then focus on those options to increase your revenue and decrease your time simultaneously. I cover this more in the Tiny Empires Method video course which has just gone live 2 days ago. If you’d like to sign up, use the discount code COURSELAUNCH for 33% off.
See you next week.