The learning center

I love the Internet. It brings together all these "weird" communities and subcultures.

Recently I got a video in my social feed about a controversy going on in the fountain pen community.

Yes, seriously.

My first reaction was, "There's a fountain pen community??"

My second reaction was, "There's CONTROVERSY in the fountain pen community!??

If ever there was a community where I'd expect peace and tranquility, it would be a fountain pen community. 😂

Google "Lamy dark lilac controversy" if you think I'm messing with you.

It really brought home to me the importance of focusing on and understanding a niche.

Here's a passage from page 33 of my new book Lean Marketing:

"I’ll often ask someone who thinks they’ve niched down what their target market is, and they’ll say something like “women over 40 years old.” Great, so that’s narrowed it down to 1.5 billion people.

What do we do with that?

While I wouldn’t say you can’t be too niche, chances are that when you think you’ve niched enough, you probably haven’t.

You want your niche to be an inch wide and a mile deep. An inch wide means you target a very tightly defined segment or subsegment of a market. A mile deep means a large enough addressable market is looking for a solution to a specific problem.

This doesn’t have to be a huge market. It just needs to be the right market for you. You can be successful beyond your wildest dreams, even if 99.9 percent of the planet has never heard of you.

Have you nailed your inch-wide, mile-deep niche?

I hear it every day:

“I need to wrap my head around it first.”

“I need to figure out my strategy.”

“I’m researching and learning.”

Look, I get it. I’m the strategy guy. The 1-Page Marketing Plan is all about your marketing strategy…but…this is just your starting point.

Be honest with yourself.

Do you really need more information?

More data?

A more comprehensive strategy?

Or is it just procrastination and fear that's driving you?

If you consume information and plan forever, nothing can go wrong.

After all, nothing's actually happened.

It's all just theory.

It feels safe.

On the other hand, doing is riskier.

When you do the things you've planned, there's a chance it might not work out.

In fact, I can pretty much guarantee it won’t work straight out of the gate.

It’s scary. It sucks.

But it’s also the only path to success and mastery.

Every master was once a disaster.

In my new book Lean Marketing, I talk about an affliction that particularly plagues smart people.

“Too many smart people think they’re measuring twice and cutting once but often they never cut. They just measure forever.” (Lean Marketing page 24)

It’s easy to get caught in an endless loop of gathering more information, doing more research, and endless planning.

You know what produces the very best information?

Action.

A better path is to accept that your plan is imperfect and course-correct as you get real feedback from the market.

A scientist in a lab spends some time putting together a hypothesis (plan) but then spends most of their time running the experiments that generate the data.

What’s stopping you from doing the same?

What I saw on my wife’s phone shocked me…

It was some grainy TikTok videos with poor lighting, and poor sound, shot on a cell phone while driving, but they have MILLIONS of views. 

It’s one woman’s epic tale of being deceived by, marrying, and divorcing a pathological liar.

ReesaTeesa has been blowing up TikTok and has racked up over 200 million views 😲WTF?

Curious, I went onto her TikTok page to see what the fuss was all about and, more importantly, to see what was so compelling to so many people.

Two hours later and totally sucked into her story, I’m shouting, “Oh no, he didn’t!”

Her story is broken up into 10-minute videos that span over 50 parts! It would take you over 7 hours to watch the whole lot… and millions of people are watching.

She’s breaking just about every rule taught by social media “gurus.”

Good lighting - nope

Scripting - no

Editing - nonexistent

Production quality - as low as it can get

Keep your content short and to the point - hell no

In my new book, Lean Marketing, I outline how to create great content. The cardinal rule is: don’t be boring. You can break almost any other rule except this one. You do this with compelling storytelling.

The human mind is hardwired to pay attention to information delivered in story form, and ReesaTeesa does this in spades.

She’s an ordinary person telling her story of heartbreak…a story that’s probably less interesting than many of the stories you have but just haven’t told.

Some of the elements that keep you hooked:

• Continuous new open loops - you NEED to know how they resolve
• Vulnerably - she tells you how it is even when it doesn’t make her look good. This builds massive trust.
• Authenticity - it’s clear she’s being herself, not some airbrushed caricature or performance for social media
• It’s often raw, and she conveys emotion. You want her to win.

ReesaTeesa cost me hours of my weekend but reinforced powerful lessons in content creation and storytelling (at least that’s how I’m justifying it).

You don’t need all that fancy stuff. Just turn on your phone camera, be yourself and start telling your story...

I've found entrepreneurs grossly overestimate how aware their customers are about their product range.

Have you ever been bewildered as to why one of your best customers bought something that you sell from someone else? When you ask them why they didn’t buy it from you, you facepalm as they reply, “I had no idea you sold that.”

In a previous life, I sold telecommunications services - Internet access, fixed lines (remember those?), wireless services, VPNs, and so on. We encountered this problem constantly.

“I didn’t know you guys did [insert service we had been selling for years] that’s a shame as we signed a two-year contract for that with another provider just last week." 🤦

We radically reduced the probability of this happening by paying close attention to a key metric - products per customer. If a customer had only one product with us e.g. maybe Internet but not voice services, that was a problem for three reasons:

1. The customer had a fragmented experience. They’d get multiple bills from multiple providers. Technical issues frequently meant finger-pointing between providers.
2. We were capturing a lower share of revenue than we could be
3. It gave a competitor a foot in the door to steal the customer from us

By paying attention to and rewarding our salespeople on the “product per customer” metric, we massively reduced these issues. These were also the easiest sales to make because the customer already knew us, liked us, and trusted us.

If you sell multiple products, you need to segment your customers by product line and consistently make them aware of the products they could be buying from you that they currently don’t.

In many areas of life, your efforts and your results are linear. You try a little harder, you work a bit more, and you get proportional gains.

This is much less true in business. You can somewhat brute-force your way to a mediocre level of success, but soon enough, you’ll encounter a plateau that you just can’t break through, no matter how hard you work.

Running a business is much more akin to standing in front of an impenetrable vault that requires a four-number combination to unlock. Inside is everything you ever dreamed of. 

When you have one number dialed in, you get nothing.

When you have two numbers dialed in, you get nothing.

When you have three numbers dialed, despite being close, the vault remains locked, and you still get nothing.

However, when you dial in that fourth number, everything changes.

In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill described this phenomenon:

“When riches begin to come they come so quickly, in such great abundance, that one wonders where they have been hiding during all those lean years.”

The stuff inside the vault that you desperately want (lots of revenue, plenty of profit, happy customers, awesome team) is often being blocked by that final frustrating digit that’s missing.

For many businesses, that missing digit is marketing.

The coolest part of what my team and I do is helping clients crack that final digit and then hearing that satisfying click as the vault unlocks for them. I’ve seen it happen many times, and it never gets old.

If you can relate to feeling like you have most of your digits dialed in but want my team to whisper that final digit in your ear, book a marketing audit HERE.

Back in 2016, ConvertKit was just another email marketing tool. They were pulling in $70-80k a month but needed something more to break out. Enter Nathan Barry (the founder) and Darrell Vesterfelt, just two guys on a ski trip, were hashing out a strategy to ramp up growth.

The Game Plan

When your business is small, you don’t need 10 different marketing strategies. By chasing 5 rabbits, you’ll catch none. You need one repeatable strategy that works. 

Forget fancy gimmicks; Darrel came up with an idea for webinars. It was their golden ticket. Affordable, effective, and right in the wheelhouse for a lean operation like ConvertKit. The goal? Pure and simple: Max out on webinars.

The Hustle

ConvertKit went all-in. We're talking about 150 webinars in just 365 days. All the webinars were the same but each was hosted by a different affiliate. They partnered with anyone keen to join their affiliate program, size of the audience didn’t matter. The message was clear: Everyone gets a shot.

The Raw Tactics

1. Friction-free sign-up: ConvertKit's affiliate program was pretty easy to get into. Sign up, get going, and earn money.
2. Audience Size Doesn’t Matter: Big fish, small pond – didn't matter. ConvertKit teamed up with anyone ready to act. Although, they managed to book Pat Flynn in the first quarter. This webinar alone got around a thousand signups within 24 hours.
3. Real Value, No Sleazy Sales: Their webinars offered pure value and asked nothing in return. At the beginning of each webinar, they countered “typical webinar sales traps” objections by announcing “We’re not going to sell you here a single thing”. Instead, they gave away online courses, ebooks, and t-shirts. And affiliate partners often gave freebies of their own.
4. Laser-Focused on Bloggers: Darrell and Nathan knew their target audience – bloggers. And they stuck to it, making every move count.
5. Reliable Tech: Nothing flashy, or breakable. Just solid, reliable tools to get the job done right.

This helped ConvertKit grow by over 625%. 

They went from $98k/month to $625k/month within a year. 

If the lesson you took away from this story is that webinars are the key to rapid growth, then you learned the wrong lesson.

Often marketing is made out to be some weird, incomprehensible voodoo. However, the reality is it’s about creating a simple, solid plan and being consistent with it.

ConvertKit’s story isn’t about a magic bullet. It's about being intentional and consistent.

I’ve been thinking deeply about positioning lately. It’s such a powerful part of marketing. A well-thought-out change in positioning can put a rocket 🚀 under your business—with no change in the core product.

A simple definition of positioning is "what a product does, and who it is for."

The roaring 1920s was an era marked by dramatic social and political change, particularly in the realm of women's rights. 

Amidst this, the American Tobacco Company faced a dilemma. How to convince the other half of the population—women—to smoke? Thereby doubling their addressable market.

Back then, cigarettes were predominantly smoked by men, and for women, the act of smoking was seen as a taboo, often associated with immoral behavior.

Enter George Washington Hill, the visionary president of the American Tobacco Company. Hill enlisted the help of Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and a pioneer in the field of public relations, to craft a campaign that would revolutionize societal views.

Bernays, leveraging his understanding of psychology and public relations, consulted with psychoanalyst A. A. Brill. Brill suggested that cigarettes symbolized male power and that linking them to women’s fight for equality could be the key to changing perceptions. 

With this insight, Bernays orchestrated a PR stunt that would change history. He arranged for a group of elegant women to boldly smoke "torches of freedom" during the Easter Sunday Parade in New York in 1929, framing it as an act of defiance against male dominance.

The media was alerted in advance, and the next day, newspapers worldwide were abuzz with stories of the "torches of freedom." This stunt not only challenged societal norms but also marked a pivotal shift in the tobacco industry. Sales of cigarettes among women skyrocketed. 

Although we might question the moral aspects of the campaign, its results are undeniable. This campaign stands as a testament to the power of positioning.

Positioning is a small hinges that swing big doors. With clever positioning, even on a small budget and no fundamental change to the product, you can have an enormous impact on revenue.

Can you clearly articulate what your product does, and who it’s for?

“We have the best widget / best service / best blah blah…but not enough people are buying.”

Sounds a lot like a marketing or sales problem right?

It rarely is.

For sure, getting your sales and marketing right is essential, but more often than not, there’s some other constraint that needs to be unblocked.

Picture this…

You just got a job as a marketing manager at fast-food chain “Freshness Burger” in Japan.

The business had a huge problem - only a small part of their customers were women. They wanted to change that, and that’s why they hired you.

More marketing, more advertising, more pushing hasn’t been helping.

You know that women like burgers, so there’s a deeper reason behind why they’re avoiding your burgers.

You noticed, that not only your burger chain is affected. Japanese women avoid other burger restaurants as well.

In Japan, tradition and modernity often dance in a delicate balance. The concept of ‘Ochobo’ - a small, modest woman’s mouth is valued by Japanese culture.

It's considered rude and unattractive for women to open their mouths wide, especially when eating something like a big burger.

This made it hard for women to enjoy eating at Freshness Burger because they felt uncomfortable and self-conscious.

You come up with the idea of the "Liberation Wrapper" – a special napkin that covers the mouth

while eating a burger.

This wrapper has a picture of a polite, small smile, making it easier for women to eat in public without worrying about being seen with their mouths wide open.

And it works like magic! Sales at Freshness Burger increase by 213% in just one month.

If you’re sales have plateaued, it’s rarely the main thing that’s at fault.

In the case of Freshness Burger, they could have kept tweaking the burger recipe, getting better ingredients, and improving the service. It wouldn't have helped…Because the problem wasn’t anything to with the main thing.

The main thing is never the main thing.

You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.

That’s where an external set of eyes is a lifesaver.

Would you like someone in my team to be that external set of eyes for you…for free?

Book a marketing audit HERE.

Entrepreneurs often scoff when I tell them how they present their pricing is more important than the actual price.

You see, in 2024, KFC Australia faced the problem: How to make their already successful “$1 french fries” seasonal deal even better?

This campaign has been running for years now, and customers were growing sick of it. 

Yes, even a $1 deal.

So, if you think lowering your price will make a difference in the long run, think again.

You know what will, though?

The perception of your price.

Let me explain, by showing you what KFC did:

Act 1 - Message

“In order to bring the right ingredients into the mix, we looked at the literature and found 18 different principles from psychology most relevant to the perception of value within fast-moving consumer goods.” - Ogilvy Behavior Strategist, Sam Tatam

KFC hired Ogilvy, a marketing agency, to produce 90 different ways of saying “$1 french fries” and got them down to 5 core psychology frames.

1. Scarcity - People place a higher value on an object in a limited supply.
   • Headline - “$1.00 french fries won’t be around forever”
     
2. Reciprocity - People feel the need to pay back when they receive something.
   • Headline - “You wanted free french fries, but we’ll meet you halfway with our french fries for $1”
     
3. Anchoring - Users put a bigger weight on the first piece of information they see. This time it was all about the quantity anchor.
   • Headline: “A deal so good you can only buy four”
     
4. Value payoff -  If something feels too good to be true, people start to question it. So Ogilvy gave the limitations to the offer to justify the deal. 
   • Headline: “$1.00 french fries - pickup only”

      Keep in mind, KFC Australia doesn’t do delivery.

5. Social norming - People will follow the actions of other people.
   • Headline: "Everyone’s enjoying our french fries for $1, why not you?”

Act 2 - Testing

KFC tested each of the 5 headlines using Facebook ads for a week, to see which one has the best engagement.

Experts from Ogilvy found that "reciprocity" and "anchoring" outperformed the rest by far margin.

Why is that?

Because price stopped being the main topic of the product. Quantity became the new focal point. “Are you buying 3 or 4 fries?”

Act 3 - Promotion

KFC ran the winning campaigns both on radio and TV in Australia.

The results? A 56% increase in sales of fries! 

The "anchoring" headline worked so well, the 4-pack fries sales increased by 84%!

So, what are the lessons here?

It’s not about the price. It’s about your customer’s perception of it.

Test your offer before you go all-in on it.

Use the help of experts. There’s a reason they are experts in their respective fields.