63. Focus on the fundamentals to create a marketing strategy for your startup – Tim Fitzpatrick Interview
Many founders skip the marketing fundamentals and strategic thinking and jump directly to executing on some set of ad-hoc initiatives.
Then they wonder why their marketing is not working.
While I have done a lot of marketing over the years, it is not my core expertise. So, I interviewed Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, who is an expert.
We talked about the fundamentals of marketing strategy and some great tips on implementing them in practice.
Interview Transcript:
Lance
Tim, welcome to Feel The Boot.
Tim
Lance, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and excited to dig into this today.
Lance
Yeah. I think this is going to be a great topic for our viewers. I've done a fair amount of marketing in my time, but it is not one of my core expertise, and so perhaps you could share just really quickly, how you became an expert in this space.
Tim
It's been a long, winding road. Like most entrepreneurial journeys. When I got out of college, I got involved with the wholesale distribution company that my dad had founded two or three years before, and that's how I kind of got my teeth cut in the entrepreneurial space. I managed that company on a day-to-day basis. We grew about 60% a year until we sold it in 2005, stayed on for another three years. And then I got into residential real estate, which I did not enjoy. And that's when I shifted into what I'm doing now, which is marketing.
Tim
I got into marketing because one I was good at growing, operating a business felt like I could help people from a marketing standpoint. Without marketing, you can have the best product or service in the world, and it's not going to matter.
Lance
That's right. If no one knows about it, no one can buy marketing.
Tim
Yes, exactly. So, I mean, there's plenty of people that have great ideas and phenomenal products and services, but they don't make it because nobody knows about it, and they're not bringing in leads can convert to customers. So that's how I got into what I'm doing today.
Lance
So in your experience, you're spending a lot of time now coaching and advising other entrepreneurs. What sort of mistakes are you seeing most commonly out there?
Tim
The biggest mistake that I see because we really focus on the fundamentals. Getting the fundamentals in place is that people just skip the fundamentals or something in the fundamentals is missing. It's misaligned, and they want to get tactical immediately. And frankly, it's not their fault, right? There are so many different marketing channels out there. There's so many tactics within those channels. There is no shortage of people saying, Well, Lance, you need to have a YouTube channel or you need to be on clubhouse or whatever it is, and people just they default to getting tactical and taking action immediately before they really have a firm foundation.
Tim
And when that happens, you're building a house without a foundation, which is that we all know that that's not going to work long term. It may stay up for a while, but at some point it is going to fall.
Lance
Yeah, it's funny. This is a pattern that I see over and over is this instinct towards action and towards tactics. And I guess maybe that's just part of the entrepreneurial makeup is that we all kind of have a proaction Proactive bias, but it does trip us up a lot because it's so important to make sure that you're not just doing things but doing the right things when we talk through, what are those fundamentals that people need to be thinking about? And what should they be making sure they've kind of worked through before they start to jump into the need of actually executing.
Tim
So when I look at the marketing fundamentals, I call them the marketing strategy trilogy. First, is your target market. Everything from a marketing standpoint starts with your target market. Who are you going to serve? How are you going to serve those people? You have to have an understanding of who you're going to serve. Otherwise, you're shooting at a target that's far too broad. Once you understand your target market and who your ideal clients are within that target market, then you can start to create messaging that is going to be clear and engaging to those ideal clients.
Tim
But unless you understand them better than they understand themselves as it relates to what you do, you really can't create messaging that is going to grab their attention and their interest.
Lance
How specific do you tend to get with this? When you're looking at defining that target market, can you give an example of how detailed that gets down to?
Tim
So what I would recommend for an existing business is quite a bit different than a startup, right? When you're a startup and you're just getting going, you may not know exactly who your ideal clients are, but you do already have an idea of who the target market is right now. Let's take a step back. In some cases, people start a company because they have extensive experience in a given industry, and they saw a problem. And they said, I know how to fix this, right. In those cases, you already know your target market, and you probably have a very good understanding of who your ideal clients are within that space because you already worked in that space.
Tim
You understand that space. So let's just take an example because a lot of people say, Well, I target entrepreneurs. Super broad, right? That's really broad. Some people dig down and they go, Well, we work with electricians pretty narrow, right? That's a really narrow target market. But even if you say you are targeting entrepreneurs, not every entrepreneur is going to be a good fit or an ideal client for your business. There are attributes, whether it's demographic or psychographic or behavioral, their thoughts, their feelings, the common problems they have, how they view what you do.
Tim
For example, I'm a marketing consultant. If somebody doesn't value marketing and want to grow their business, those are psychographic and behavioral attributes that they have to have. Otherwise, they are not going to be a good fit for me. So no matter how broad or narrow your target market is, your ideal clients within that target market need to be deeper, because not everybody in a target market is going to be a good fit. And so we need to hone in on those things. The struggle when you're just getting started out as a startup is you haven't worked with anybody yet, right.
Tim
And what I often recommend people that have experience with clients is you look at your current, your past customers, the best place to start. With the start up, you can't do that. So we need to do a little bit of research and make some educated guesses to start. And as we start and we get experience, then we can make updates and adjustments. I think one of the common roadblocks people have in honing in on their target market and their ideal clients is they think, okay, great.
Tim
I do this work and I make some choices. And now I'm stuck. And that's not the case at all. It's just you need to make choices for now doesn't mean that they're written in stone, and you can't change it. But you have to make some choices because most startups do not have unlimited funds. Right?
Lance
It's almost the definition.
Tim
Yes. Okay. So when we have a limited budget, it is impossible to target a broad market. Somebody like an Amazon or a Google or take any Fortune 500 company can target a much broader audience because they have a huge budget. Not only that they have experience that they can pull from, but when you're starting out, targeting a broad market costs tens, hundreds, billions of dollars.
Lance
It's a funny thing. I see that a lot where someone will come in and their business could potentially target a gigantic fraction of the population. But to launch, they almost need to artificially narrow it down to pick. Okay. What is the lowest of the low hanging fruit? Right. What's the easiest thing to go after? So you can get a win and start the wheel going.
Tim
Based on what we know, what market and what clients within that market do we believe are going to be the best fit for us? We don't know for sure. Now we can do research, right? We can interview people in our target market, especially if you know people in that market who may be able to connect you with people that you believe could be ideal clients. You can do interviews and start to talk to people and get feedback. There's tons of information on Google, right. There are forums for almost any target market.
Tim
There's social media, there are social media groups, so there's industry associations. There's all kinds of places we can go to gather data so that we can make the best educated guesses as possible. And then once we make those choices, we need to focus. We need to give it some time and look at what the data is, then telling us as we start to get experience. But we have to make some choices because if I say, well, I'm going to target entrepreneurs.
Lance
Great.
Tim
Well, where the hell are you going to go? Right there's way too many places to go. Whereas if we narrow it down to maybe more specific industries, specific types of people. Once we know that, then we can start to identify where these people congregate, whether it's online or offline. And when we have a list of where they are, then we can start to narrow down that list to determine which of these places do we want to start to get in front of the people we intend to attract?
Lance
So once we've defined this target market, what's the next set of fundamentals that they need to be looking at from there?
Tim
Once you understand them, you can enter the conversation that they have in their head. Right? You can speak in their words as it relates to what you do. Then you can start to look at how you can craft your message because your message, what you say is what's going to grab their attention and their interest. Without that, you don't have anything. Your message is never going to resonate. People might see it and they just go, it's not clear. It's not engaging for them. When we look at messaging, we use storytelling for a number of reasons.
Tim
One we all understand story, right? It's been around for eons. We all love a good story. What we do when we use storytelling for your messaging is we are inviting your customers, your prospects into a story where they're the hero and you are the guide. Our customers are not looking for another hero. If you think about most heroes, they have problems. They're stuck. They don't know what the next step is to solve this problem that they have in the story. They need a guide. Yoda, Luke Skywalker, right?
Tim
Luke wants to become a Jedi. Doesn't know what the heck to do. And hopefully the Star Wars fanatics are: dude, you're getting it out of sequence. I probably am, but in at least one of them, right? You have Yoda and Luke. He doesn't know what to do. But Yoda is a Jedi. He knows exactly what Luke needs to do. That's what our customers are looking for. They are looking for a guide that knows exactly the steps they need to take to get from where they are to where they want to be.
Tim
And so that's what we're doing when we use storytelling. And when we use the framework, you're not reinventing the wheel every time you need to create a message. I need to create a social post. I need to create an email. I'm going to create a blog post. What are some of the things I need to touch on? A lot of people? Just reinvent the wheel every time when you have a playbook that you can go back to and just pull what you need to, it helps your message be consistent and clear over time.
Lance
Is that playbook based? Is that repeatable for everyone? Or is the playbook based on the specific story that each company is trying? To tell.
Tim
It's based on the story that each company is trying to tell, but it is repeatable. So the framework we use is from a company called Story Brand by Donald Miller has been around for a while now. It's proven and they did not come up with this. The storytelling framework they use has been around for years. They just did an excellent job of popularizing it within the marketing space. And at this point it has been used by thousands of companies. It works, and it is simple. Now let me take a step back.
Tim
When I say simple, that doesn't mean easy. When I say easy, I mean, there's no work involved. Simple means it's easy to understand, and it's not complicated, but it's still work. But when you use this framework, you got to be clear with your message. Too many of us get clever with our message and we confuse people and confused. People do not buy so oftentimes through storytelling. Sometimes they gosh, I feel like I'm repeating myself. I feel like this is like, too simplistic, and that's the point.
Tim
You can get into the weeds and dig deeper on what you do as you start to have sales conversations. If you're talking to the right people that want to go that deep. But most people don't want to go deep from a marketing standpoint. If I start to dig into and start talking at an eight, nine out of ten level, most people are just going to get confused and I'm going to lose them. We need to talk at a two, three. And that's not to say that the people we're working with are inferior in any way, shape or form.
Tim
It's just where most of them are at with what we do. And so we need to communicate it in a way that they're going to understand it, because if they don't understand it, they are never going to.
Lance
The people you're talking to may be experts in what they're experts in, but they may not be experts in the thing you're talking about. And to any of the viewers who've listened to any of my Making a Pitch Deck episodes. This should sound pretty familiar. You've got to start with the basics.
Tim
Yes. Well, that's a great example, Lance. When you have your messaging playbook, what do you put in your pitch deck? You know exactly what you're going to put in your pitch deck because you have the messaging right now, you may tweak that messaging a little bit depending on who the pitch deck is for. Pitch Deck is for right. When you're talking to investors, they need to understand exactly what you do, but you also need to speak to them in a way that they like, what's in it for them.
Tim
So that's what investors are going to care about. They want to understand what you do. So they need to understand that. Gosh, does this have legs? Is this something that we do want to invest in? So they need your front end messaging that you're going to use for your prospects and your clients. But investors also need messaging that's clearly directed towards them and what they care about.
Lance
Right. One of the things I really like about the Story Brand approach is this point of making the audience the hero, because there's this real tendency for people to want to talk about their company and what they're doing and make themselves the star. And the whole philosophy just has to flip that around.
Tim
And if you think about it again, our customers don't care about us. So when we talk about ourselves, they're just like, God, what they care about is one of two things a problem they have and do not want or a result they want and don't have. Our messaging needs to focus on those two things. That's what's going to be the hook that brings them in and enables us to continue the conversation. They don't care about us. And that's the great thing about Story Brand is to position yourself as the guide.
Tim
You only need to do two things. You need to show empathy. I understand what it's like to be in your shoes and to battle this problem. And two, you need to have credibility. How do we establish credibility? It's not as difficult as most people think. Testimonials certifications. You have awards, you've won customers that you've worked with. All of those things help establish credibility and your position as the guide. So we only want to talk about ourselves enough to position ourselves as the guide. Then we're shifting all of our messaging towards the customer and what they care about.
Lance
Excellent. So are there other steps to the fundamentals before people start thinking tactics?
Tim
Yes. The last one is you have to have a plan. What's your plan to get that message in front of those people? You mentioned this early in the conversation, Lance, as entrepreneurs, as startup people, I think we are very biased towards action and taking action, and that is not a bad thing. In any way, shape or form, because there are so many people that just want to do things, but they never take action. But we also have to have the self awareness to know that. Man, am I taking a ready fire aim approach here, which a lot of us do?
Tim
We are much better off putting plans in place and then executing on those plans. Planning is key to being effective, and I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that start up people make is they jump to tactics immediately. You're so much better off starting with a bad plan and executing on it than having no plan at all. Because if we don't have a plan, all we're doing is throwing stuff up against the wall, seeing if it sticks most of the time, stuff doesn't stick. If it does, we have no idea why it actually worked.
Tim
And so we don't have enough data that we can actually act on to improve what we're doing without a plan.
Lance
Even if you're looking at the results, it's hard to even interpret it because you don't have some benchmark that you were trying to measure against.
Tim
Yeah, most of the time they don't know whether it works because they didn't even identify what metrics they were going to track. And without the metrics, you have no idea why something worked or if it worked. So we don't need to over complicate this. It does not have to be, especially in startup land. Why in the world do you want to spend thousands of dollars on a year long marketing plan? Stuff is shifting way too fast, way too fast. So keep it simple. The way I look at marketing plans is 90 day sprints, and there are six elements in this plan.
Tim
This can be on a single page, depending on how long winded you are. If you're long winded, it might be two or three pages. That's okay. It's still simple and actionable. The first thing is target market. Who are your ideal clients? You should not have more than three as a startup. I would probably hone in on one to start and then maybe have one or two others that you're going to expand to once you start gaining traction with the first. But focusing, I think in the beginning, especially, is much, much better than going too broad, because if you go too broad, you're going to dilute your focus.
Tim
And I think you're going to end up spinning your wheels. All I want you to do, at a minimum, is have a paragraph of who that ideal client is. What do they look like? You just want to paint the picture of what they look like, and it needs to be simple enough so that if somebody says to you, who do you work with and you read them that paragraph, they go, oh, yeah, I know somebody you should talk to. That's what you want to ask.
Lance
This has to be cocktail partyable.
Tim
It's digestible. It's not super in depth and in the weeds, you can go super deep here, but I don't think you need to go that deep. And frankly, I think the psychographics and the behavioral attributes of them are actually more important in a lot of cases than the demographics, demographics being they live in this geographic area and they have this much income. I mean, that's important. It starts to paint the picture, but how they really feel and what actions they take really helps you understand them much, much better.
Tim
And it helps people and partners you may be working with identify them better. So the reason this is the first step in the plan is because you have to keep it top of mind in everything that you do. The second step is what's your goal. We have to have an idea of where we're headed, right? Most startups have a general idea of gosh. I want to get here in a year. I want to be here in three. This goal is your 90 day goal that's going to help you get one step closer to that year goal.
Tim
It's specific. It's measurable. It's time bound because this is a 90 day plan. So this might be something like we intend to bring on our first five customers in the next 90 days.
Lance
And why 90 days? What led you to the 90 day time frame?
Tim
90 days is long enough to start seeing whether you are gaining traction. It is short enough where you can start to make course corrections. And it's a good thing there's four quarters in a year. You can create a plan. You can have four plans throughout the year. 90 days. It's very measurable, but it's not so long that things become too complicated.
Lance
I like it because you're right. In one month, you probably really don't know whether or not it worked. But you do want to be able to learn and then pivot because no plan survives first contact with the customer. So you're going to need to be evolving continuously.
Tim
Exactly. And if you think about it, here's the other thing from a 90 day standpoint, most marketing tactics take a minimum of 90 days. Now, people that are selling you the tactical work are not going to tell you that, right. But, man, if you are not patient with what you are doing from a marketing perspective, you are bound to jump from one tactic to another and just go: none of this stuff works. So we have to give things time. 90 days is long enough where you can start to determine if it's not fully working.
Tim
You can see whether things are headed in the right direction and whether you need to make changes. So that's why I like 90 days. It's digestible. You tend to not over complicate things, and it's long enough to see whether things are working so that you can make course corrections. Update your plan and you just wash, rinse and repeat. So we were talking about marketing goal, right. So the thing that I like to touch on with a goal like this is I refer to it as an outcome based goal.
Tim
That's how it was described to me. Where gosh, you may do everything in your power to hit that goal, and you don't hit it because of outside circumstances, things beyond your control. So I think it's really important to have that goal that's helping you get one step closer to where you really want to be. But I think it's detrimental if you get too tied to that goal because you could do everything you can, you don't hit it. And if you're one of those people that's going to go into a hole after that because you didn't hit the goal, that's not really serving you.
Tim
So I think that's important to keep in the back of your mind. I like to know where we're headed and then focus more on what we can, the actions we can control within the plan than get stuck on all the other things beyond our control. Third step in the plan is my budget and my resources. This gives us an idea of what we have to work with and what we can bite off in our plan if it's $500 a month and 4 hours of my time as a founder a week.
Tim
Well, it is what it is. But now I know what I have to work with if it's $5,000 a month, and I've got three people on staff that can implement the plan, well, then that's a totally different thing. Either one is okay. We just have to have that understanding so that we put enough in the plan or we don't put too much. If we don't put enough in, well, then we're not going to get to where we want to go as fast as we could. If we put too much in well, then we just end up executing poorly and we may start to get into a negative mindset, and that's just not going to serve anybody either.
Tim
So really important to know what we have to work with. The fourth step is what's our current marketing plan now, as a start up. If you're just in the very beginning stage, you haven't done anything. Well, then you're not going to have anything in this part if you've already started to do some things, that's all we want to do is get an idea of what have you done? Is your website in place? Do you have good calls to action on your website? Is there good messaging in there?
Tim
All your stuff starts with strategy. So if you don't understand who you intend to attract and work with and know that you have clear messaging, well, you got to work on that, right. If you've done that, well, then great. Just take a note of it. What have you done? What do you continue to do? From a marketing standpoint. What this is doing is giving us a baseline. We can't outline what we need to do in our plan to get to where we want to go until we know where we're starting from.
Tim
It's no different than my GPS. I tell my GPS I want to get to Denver International Airport. It's just going to sit there and do nothing until I first plug in that I'm starting from Denver, or I'm starting from Highlands Ranch. That's all we're doing here is getting a baseline and a reference point of where we're at. Then in the fifth step, that's where we look at what are we going to focus on in the next 90 days, depending on where we are starting from and the resources that we have that's going to determine what we choose to focus on in our next 90 days.
Tim
But when we outline what we're going to focus on in the next 90 days, we know what our priorities are, which gives us clarity. When we have clarity, our stress is down, which is great, right? There's plenty of stress when you're starting a new business. Let's do what we can to try and reduce that stress. The other thing is when we know what our priorities are, it helps eliminate distraction. It's so easy to be like a squirrel chasing a nut. When somebody sends an email to your inbox going oh my, Lance, you got to be on Clubhouse.
Tim
Well, if you don't have a plan, you can easily just chase everything and you're just going to spin your wheels when you have a plan in place. And you know what your priorities are. When that happens, you can have the discipline to say, you know what? I'm not sure if this is a good avenue for us or not. I'm going to write it down. But until I've executed on the priorities in my plan right now, this is not something that I'm going to focus on or if you do choose to focus on it, at least you are knowingly saying, okay, I'm going to add this and here's why I'm going to add it.
Tim
And maybe I'm going to pull something else out of my plan. But you're not acting on a whim. You're acting based on what's in the plan, and you're making a decision based on information that you have going, you know what? I'm going to update my plan because of X, Y, and Z. Not. Oh, that looks good. Let me go see what happens, right?
Lance
Has there really been a change in the underlying reality or assumptions that it was based on?
Tim
Yes. Is there a strong reason for me to follow this route right now? If there's not, then you should execute on what's on your plan. Keep that in the back burner, because you know that you're going to be doing this every 90 days.
Lance
That's right. It's rarely a situation where it can't wait 90 days for the next cycle to finish out what you're doing.
Tim
Yeah, rarely do you ever see something from a marketing standpoint where an opportunity comes up and it's like, oh, my God. If I don't jump on this now, the opportunity is going to be gone right there's fear of missing out there. Which is why I think a lot of people jump on things like that and end up chasing tactics. But if you have a plan in place, you have the discipline to make a good decision as to whether you should, in fact, follow it or whether you should put that on the back burner.
Tim
Now, the last part of this six step plan is your metrics. The metrics are what you're going to measure, because if you don't measure things, you can't make decisions, you can't make good decisions at least. Let's put it that way. So a lot of people don't know whether the marketing they're doing is working because they haven't outlined the metrics that they need to track in order to determine whether those are working or not. So the metrics is just all we're doing here is outlining what are we going to measure so that we can determine what's working, what's not and make good decisions about what directions we need to go in.
Tim
That's all we're doing with the metrics. Now, I was a math major, so I can dig into the weeds on analytics. There are a lot of what we call vanity metrics in marketing. What I mean by that is metrics that just don't really mean a lot. They don't have a lot of value. How many people are on your email list? How many followers do you have on Facebook or LinkedIn? How many visitors are going to your website? None of those things matter if you are not generating leads, so don't get caught up in vanity metrics.
Tim
That don't mean anything. I think in the beginning, the easiest place to start is with three metrics. One is leads. How many leads are you generating? And you do need to determine what a lead means for you. So, for example, if somebody comes onto my email list for my company, that's not a lead to me. A lead for me is somebody that maybe they were on our email list or they found out about us from a workshop that we did, and they raised their hand and they said, I want a free consultation.
Tim
I need to talk to you. That is our threshold for a lead. What that may be for you might be a little bit different, but you need to determine that threshold, so it's clear when somebody becomes a lead or not. But you need to determine how many leads you're generating from there. You want to understand where the leads came from. What's the lead source? When you can understand the lead source that's going to start to give you an indication of which channels you're using are actually working and generating leads the third metric is how many leads are converting to customers?
Tim
Really important? That's your conversion rate. How many leads do I need to get a customer? When you understand the conversion rate, that's exactly what you know. And that is super powerful, because all you need to do from there is add in a few other metrics, and then you can actually start to determine. Okay. Our goal is to get to X amount of revenue we need to generate this many leads to hit that revenue.
Lance
You know exactly how things drop off at each stage of the funnel now, so you can work backwards from what you want to achieve to what you need to be putting in the front end.
Tim
Exactly. To be able to do that, you need to start digging into some other metrics, like the lifetime value of a customer. But once you understand that, then you can start to attach a dollar value to leads to customers and get to a revenue figure, if that's your specific goal. But the easiest place to start is those three metrics. And then can you get more advanced and more sophisticated? Absolutely, you can. But you have to start somewhere. And I think if you start by tracking too many metrics, it gets complicated and complexity is the enemy of results.
Tim
So start small. And then if you want to get more sophisticated from there, then you can start to track additional metrics. But, man, I talked to a lot of companies that they might be tracking leads. Lead source, it's 50 50. What their conversions are. Again, 50 50. So you got to start there, because without that, you don't have much.
Lance
Right? Just how do you know whether or not the amount you're spending on some particular marketing effort is actually making you money or losing you money? If you don't understand how that all flows through, lifetime value can be tricky early on, of course, because track record.
Tim
There are going to be some guesses there in the beginning. But again, you've got to start somewhere and you can make course corrections to it as you get more data and more history. But again, you've got to start somewhere. And like I said, you can certainly get much more detailed. But you need to have a general idea of where the majority of your leads are coming from. Once you understand that, then you can certainly dig deeper into those specific channels to get more data and more valuable data.
Tim
But why get complicated in the beginning? Start simple and then expand?
Lance
So are there strategies or tactics that you see overused in a lot of the groups you work with, where you go and you talk to them and they're doing something that is common but not necessarily right for them or right for a lot of people? And Conversely, are there underused strategies or tactics that you find yourself recommending to companies on a regular basis?
Tim
Yeah. So first off, let me say there's tons of tactics. Any tactic can work to me. It's the fuel you put behind the tactic that's going to determine how far you get. And the fuel behind the tactic is the strategy stuff. We're talking about understanding your target market and having great messaging super important. That's why we're talking about it. But from a tactical standpoint, I think a lot of people immediately social media super popular. I've got to be on social, or I've got to be creating content and they jump into action immediately without fully understanding what they need to do to fully take advantage of that particular marketing channel.
Tim
Posting on social media is not going to do anything. People are like, Gosh, I've been posting consistently on social on my social channels. Okay, so everybody's doing that, it is social media. You need to get social, you need to interact with people, right? It takes time to build relationships offline. Why is that any different online? It's not. And so I think people's understanding and impressions of what they need to do to be successful in some of the more popular channels are not in alignment with reality.
Tim
That's the biggest issue that I see. And a lot of times it's not their fault. Right? There's people out there there's marketing gurus saying, oh, all you need to do is this right? Yeah.
Lance
Social people build it and they will come kind of idea that shouting into the voice will somehow magically attract followers.
Tim
It doesn't. There is no silver bullet. Marketing like anything else in life takes work. It takes consistency over time to be successful. So it's no one thing that it's going to all of a sudden shoot you to, the moon. It doesn't happen. So come into it realistically and know what it's going to take to be successful in any given channel because you don't have to be everywhere. When I look at the main marketing channels, I look at eight main channels strategy, which is the target market in your messaging.
Tim
There's your website, there's content. So like blog posts, podcasts, what you and I are doing right now. Lance, there's SEO search engine optimization helping me get found. When people search for specific keywords online, you've got social media. You have email marketing, paid advertising like Google ads, Facebook, and then you have offline marketing. Any tactic is going to fall into one of those eight channels. You do not have to be in every single one of those channels to be successful. There are plenty of businesses that put together a website and they have great referral partners, and they built a hugely successful business.
Tim
So don't fall into the trap of thinking. You have to be everywhere. I think you're much better off going narrow at first in one or two channels, building those up, and then you start to expand from there. Yeah.
Lance
It's surprising how often these channels are a really successful option for someone. Rather than trying to build their own audience. If you can just borrow someone else's, that can be a massive accelerator.
Tim
Absolutely right. Most businesses get to a certain point of success on referral. Referral is huge for almost every business I have ever talked to. I can't even think of somebody that I've talked to that didn't build their business initially on referral. Whether that's referral from current or past clients or referral partnerships. Strategic partnerships. It is a great place to start, but from a strategic partner standpoint that can take time, too. Right. So we need to jump in and do that with consistency to build those relationships. But if we can leverage, like you said, somebody else's audience to build our own, that's a fantastic place to start.
Tim
But guess what? We can't identify who those partners may be until we first understand who the hell we want to work with, because the first question you're going to ask is great. I want to establish some strategic partnerships who has my audience. Well, who is your audience? If you can't answer that question, you can't identify your strategic partners. Right. So everything comes back to these fundamentals that we keep.
Lance
It's the root starting point for absolutely all of the other activities.
Tim
Yeah.
Lance
Excellent. Any final thoughts? Parting advice here? Anything you want to plug?
Tim
Yeah. You know what? I'm going to sound like a broken record. Don't skip the fundamentals. If you do, you are going to waste time and you're going CTO waste money. And I know as start up people and you want to get to where you want to go as quickly as possible. That is not going to happen if you just get tactical with your marketing. So take the time. You're far better off taking a month or two to do some of this fundamental work and then start taking action than you are to take action immediately.
Tim
So be patient, which can be really difficult. But man, business is a marathon. It is not a sprint. And I think if we can think from a longer term perspective, we are going to make much better business decisions. Most poor business decisions I have made or seen people make stem from short term thinking. So if we can get out of that and think long term, we're going to make a much better decision.
Lance
Funny, I say exactly the same thing about developing applications. Spend a lot more time making sure you're building the right thing before you start building it because you want to make sure you're not just running off in some crazy direction that doesn't make sense.
Tim
But planning is super important. And I always say the plan you start with is not going to be the plan that's going to get you to where you want to go. But you have to start with something and then you can adjust it and make course corrections along the way. So one of the things I did put together for your audience, to help is some resources. They are totally free. There's no opt in right off of our website on these fundamentals that we touched on so they can go there.
Tim
It's Realtomarketing.Com is our website, which is R-I-A-L-T-O marketing dot com and then the resources are at https://www.rialtomarketing.com/feel-the-boot-the-science-of-startups/ And there's a dash between each of those words.
Lance
I'll put a link to that down in the description and in the social, so it'll be easy for everyone to find if they weren't scribbling notes or if they're in their car or something.
Tim
Yes. Cool. I appreciate that. If you dig into some of this stuff and you need outside eyes, just click the get a free consultation button on that page on our homepage. I would be happy to chat with you and give you some clarity on what those next right steps should be for you based on where you are and where you want to get to.
Lance
Fantastic. I really appreciate you sharing all this insight and wisdom with us and these free resources, and I love the model of the free initial consults as well because it allows you to test drive someone before you actually start working with them and know what you're getting into. So again, thanks so much for being on Feel the Boot and hopefully we'll be able to talk again later.
Tim
Awesome. Thanks so much, Lance, I appreciate it.
Links
Tim provided some free resources for you: https://www.rialtomarketing.com/feel-the-boot-the-science-of-startups/
Join other Founders for help, advice, and support at the Founders Alliance: https://ftb.bz/Alliance
About our guest Tim Fitzpatrick
Tim is an entrepreneur/business owner with expertise in marketing and business growth. He has 20+ years of entrepreneurial experience with a passion for developing and growing businesses. That passion served him well in operating and managing a wholesale distribution company he co-owned for nine years. The company grew an average of 60% a year before being acquired in 2005.
Since then, he’s had failures and successes that have been valuable learning experiences. He started Rialto Marketing in 2013 and has been helping service businesses simplify marketing so they can grow with less stress. Most people overcomplicate marketing. It doesn't have to be that way.
