Was your marketing as crap as mine was in 2005?

Back in 2005, I started my first business. I was still working full-time running a radio station, so was ducking out to make furtive phone calls during the day, then doing most of the work from my spare bedroom in the evenings.

Ahhh... how much spare time you have before children come along...

The business I started was a PR agency. It morphed over several years into a general marketing agency, and really took off when I focused just on three specialist healthcare sectors.

Last night I found an old external hard drive packed with marketing from back in the day.

Man, my marketing was weak back then.

I'm serious. I look back now at what I did in the first few years, and realise there was very little strategy behind it. I was doing the kind of marketing lots of business owners do... a random bit here, a random bit there, see what works.

Driven by the need for cash, rather than implementing a strategy.

Here's an example. I sent thousands of these flyers out to local businesses:

That was an expensive and pointless exercise. From memory it didn't even pay for itself.

Everything changed in about 2009. I realised that I was putting in a lot of marketing effort for very little return.

But I was meeting people who were very successful, because they were great at marketing.

What made them different? I wanted to find out. So started going to marketing seminars. Dedicated my evenings to learning. Analysed marketing that I knew was working.

And soon realised what my fatal mistake had been - I was doing one step marketing.

What's that? It's where you have just one step in the marketing process.

Get someone's attention -> ask them to buy something

I realised that the more robust strategy was to have two step marketing.

Get someone's attention -> build a relationship with them -> ask them to buy something

The beauty of two step marketing is that you have multiple bites at the apple. You can start talking to someone today, but they might not be ready to buy today.

With one step marketing the conversation is over. Damn.

With two step marketing you can continue the conversation for years... until the exact day they are ready to buy.

And that's when the relationship building really pays off, as you have first place at the table.

That was a real epiphany for me. I wrote my first book, and started to build a database of prospects (so I could build a relationship with them).

This is the cover of that first book:

Whoah. I used to look so young 🤣

I went on to build a database of 12,000 prospects, which allowed to me massively grow, and ultimately sell the business.

I've learned an enormous amount about marketing over the last decade. I still make mistakes and have misfires (I think you learn more from those, than from your successes).

But at the heart of any marketing I do today across multiple projects, sits that two step marketing strategy:

Get someone's attention -> build a relationship with them -> ask them to buy something

I recommend it to every single MSP I work with. Sure, the implementation of it is quite different in 2019 than in 2009. But the core strategy of building and audience and developing a relationship with them remains.