How to stand out on a budget. 💰
How to stand out on a budget. 💰
Episode three is in the private community. 🔗
👋 What our free community missed over the last 3 weeks
🔗 Marketing funnels
👀 How to harness your creativity
✍️ Ideas for starting TOFU content
👏 Where to find what your target audience wants to know
💭 Free courses to put yourself through
💡 Answers to some of the community questions
🧩 Some decent browser extensions and websites to make your life easier
Our logic is if you do just one of these things every week, over the course of a year, you’ll have done 52 extra things to make your business less shit.
We’re changing up the format of the episodes and newsletters and will be updating the community about it in #announcements.
It’ll make it easier for you to action a load of ways to improve your following, sales, and marketing every week. 🙌
A quick run down of some of the content you’ll have missed over the last few weeks:
It’s easy to get stuck in doing the same old things. ✍️
We fail at being creative because we get so used to thinking patterns that get in the way of new ideas.
Selective thinking.
It makes us choose the safe bets. The ones we’ve done seen and done before. We favour certain ideas over others, and we become blind to anything that contradicts them.
Both leave us convinced that we know what is and what isn’t a good idea before we’ve even tried it or put it out into the ether. This isn’t just bad for creativity, it’s bad for business, too.
Reactive thinking.
This is what makes people quick to push an idea out and do so without much of a thought process. Who is it targeting, what is it trying to achieve, and will it do that? It’s not the worst way to be, you want to stay reactive to things to be on current trends, but you want to do so with some logic behind it.
You don’t always want to be the first out the door. Beating other people to be reactive isn’t always the winning idea. You only allow other companies to watch, learn, and eventually enter a ready market with something superior.
Assumptive thinking.
It’s normal to base decisions and ideas on knowledge or past experiences.
But this stops us from taking in new information and trying other ways of doing things - the two main drivers of creativity.
💭 Coming up with ideas takes a lot of back and forth. But there’s no better way to decide if it’s worth pushing further or not than by just doing.
You can use the below as a guide for executing a new idea if you’re a bit stuck.👇
Idea – what’s the basis of what you want to achieve?
Metric – how will you measure the outcome of it?
Goal – what do you want to get from it?
Timeline – the duration to accomplish the idea, make sure you give yourself something to work towards or you’ll just let things drop.
For example:
I will create an (A/B ad test) to increase (the number of email sign ups on a landing page) by (10 times) within (one month) from whatever start date.
Always make sure you note down:
What’s in it for your audience? If they don’t get any value then neither will you.
Can I do this well? Is it within my remit? Will it absolutely flop without 3rd party help? Can I afford 3rd party help or is there something I can change to make it more manageable to do myself?
What can I action right now? Is there a smaller version of your idea you can push somewhere (socials, website, emails) to get some feedback and refine your idea?
Plus the VAMO creative process was written down and memorialised forever. 📺
Here are a few of the main platform free courses you might find useful that we mentioned if you’re new to the world of social media marketing or on a limited budget to start with.👇
The FB courses platform has a load of free material for you to start doing more.
No budget to hire a freelancer or agency to start doing FB ads? Learn it for yourself and start putting it into practice to retarget your customers and keep your business or brand in the back of their minds.
Loads of free courses on social strategy, building websites, email marketing, content marketing, web optimisation, operations, and a bajillion other topics.
Cover everything about Google ads and analytics.
❝Master the Google tools you use at work with free online training. Develop skills you can apply right away, with e-learning courses designed by Google product experts. Learn at your own pace and get Google product certified.
2 of the questions to the team 💡
When you're bootstrapping a business, how important is it to have a business plan from the start?
I say a business plan is less important than a defined end goal.
That's the most important thing. You can work backward from that and then create your plan. I'll share some stuff on this moving forward. But, if you don't know where to go and what time you’re meant to arrive there... you can't really plan your journey.
You can spend all day writing a business plan. Same as a marketing plan, but what you’re doing in 2 years’ time won’t look anything like the plan you spent hours on at the start.
Backward plan from a clear objective. That's the key.
Mine was "I want to sell Learning Heroes on 1st Jan 2018 for £10,000,000"
Then what I needed to do I worked back from - who might buy it, why, when should I approach them, what would they want to see, number of clients, recurring revenue, how much should I charge, sales targets for year 1, 2 and 3, etc.
That all came AFTER the goal had been defined.
- Mike.
What do you think of content repurposing, specifically podcast repurposing? Meaning, is it worth the time investment for a shot at higher ROI (if you think there is one)?
You should repurpose content, always. But don't do it for the sake of it and just use anything you’ve got - only repurpose the bits you know are going be decent.
I see loads of companies offer 60 bits of content repurposed from an interview or podcast when intact 50 bits are crap and aren't adding any value.
So yes repurpose, but it has to be valuable and follow the formula of being what your ideal client is looking for and in the place they look.
- Mike.
👉 NB from Mollie: On the above, Milk Video is a useful bit of tech for repurposing Zoom podcast meetings and other long-form video recordings.
(Mike and Dan would probably disagree because their businesses create video content, but for those without a budget this isn’t a bad place to start with repurposing.)
👉 If this was forwarded to you and you like what you see, subscribe so you don’t miss out on the next send.
VAMO_ 📺