Marketing Handbook

This handbook is a guide to everything marketing for your startup, combining some of the best advice from experienced founders, such as The One-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib, and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares, as well as our own experience from implementing this exact system. The content in the handbook aims to provide you with the information needed to easily create your own system for acquiring users and scaling your business.

This system is divided into three phases, with a final bonus phase for maximising the return of your system post-sale. The stages are as follows:

• Captivate… your target market with marketing media and direct them to your website
• Capture... leads from your target market that land on your website
• Convert...leads by nurturing them overtime with value until they buy or die
• Continue... provide maximum value and extract maximum return

Before you begin implementing this system to acquire customers, it’s important to first identify who your target market is, and craft a clear message. These initial steps will ensure we minimise wasted marketing effort/capital, and maximise our potential return.

The aim here is to clearly define who your target market is (try to focus down on one niche at a time, and be as specific as possible). Create a persona for your target market using the following criteria:

• Who they are (demographics)
• What they do (job, skills, credentials)
• The things they’re interested in
• The things they experience (problems, pains, daily routine)

Your message across most traction channels will be similar, as you’re looking to resonate with your target market, whilst also demonstrating the value proposition, and USP you offer them. Your message should have one clear objective, and remain as simple as possible (clarity over cleverness). It can help to craft your message in the following format:

• Who they are (demographics)
• What they do (job, skills, credentials)
• The things they’re interested in
• The things they experience (problems, pains, daily routine)

Now you’ve completed the prerequisites, let’s move onto setting up your system.

The aim of this phase is to reach out to your target market using your chosen traction channel, and to captivate them with your message, hopefully eliciting a response (usually in the form of them taking action and directing them to your website).

With your target market in mind, and a clear message, we can now look at the traction channels suitable for your business. For new businesses, focusing on a paid advertising channels such as SEM or Social Ads is often the best option, as we can clearly measure our ROI, and therefore our marketing success. For more established business, a longer play traction channel may be more suitable. With each channel, we recommend you either skill up to a good standard, or pay professionals to support you. Lastly, try to focus on 2-3 at a time, that way you can compare results.

Below we’ll break down each traction channel to help you determine whether it’s suitable for you and your business, as although some channels might be suitable for your business, they might not be suitable for you, and vice versa. E.g. will you enjoy them, will you naturally put the work in. Lean into your strengths, we didn’t get into business to do work we don’t enjoy (well, most of the time).

We appreciate not all channels will suit you or your business, so work through them to determine those that do. Again, it’s best practice to focus on 2/3 at a time, as to not spread yourself too thin, but to also have a large enough sample size for cross comparison.

As we mentioned above, once you've chosen your 2/3 channels, either up-skill or hire professionals to set you up, ensuring you’re specifically targeting your market, and are communicating a clear message that showcases your value proposition and USP.

Once setup, you should now be captivating potential customers, likely to your website. In the next phase we’ll explore how you can capture these people to maximise your return.

The aim of this phase is to capture the details of the people you have captivated with your traction channels, thereby adding them to your CRM. The reason we do this is because not everyone that lands on your website will be ready to buy, in-fact 99% won’t be in a position to buy, but they might be in the future, and so by capturing their information we can keep in touch with them so that when they are ready, we’re positioned to utilise that opportunity.

Essentially, without a way to capture visitors you massively waste marketing capital/time, which is usually referred to as having a leak. With a way to capture potential customers, you minimise leakage in your system.

Most often the way to capture the information of a potential customer is to provide them with value in return of an email address, a follow on social media, a mobile number, or any other form of contact information. This means its important for you website to include at least 1, but ideally multiple lead magnets across your website to capture a visitors information as they explore.

Note that some traction channels by nature are lead magnets, as they require you to create content/tools that in and of itself is valuable to the prospect, and could be used to capture their information (e.g. an engineering as marketing tool you need to create a free account for, or a free PDF guide you need to enter your email address to receive).

Here are some examples of lead magnets you can use across your website to capture visitors:

• Email Newsletter
• Content
• Text based (Guides, reports, cheat sheets, checklist, resource libraries)
• Video Content (Video Guides, Courses)
• Visual Content (Infographics, Packs of images)
• Digital Downloads - PDFs, Files, etc.
• Free account sign ups for Engineering as Marketing tools
• Free trial/free accounts for your own product
• Free services (e.g. quotations, reviews, audits)
• Demos - Usually offered when you have a complex product
• Events (online/offline)
• Webinars/Podcasts
• Contests
• Offers
• Live Chat
• Private Groups/Communities

The aim of this phase is to nurture the leads you capture overtime by providing them with consistent value, that way, when they are ready to buy, your company and product are top of mind.

To do this, it’s all about systems. Once you capture leads, you need a system in place that consistently provides value to the people in your CRM (this is where your leads tend to be stored). Ideally, you want regular touch points with your leads, whether that’s through them using the free version of your product, or whether it’s you sending them valuable content/services on a regular basis. By regular, aim for a minimum of monthly interactions, but no more than weekly (unless it’s social media posts).

Here are a few systems you can setup to nurture leads:

• Social Media - if you have captured a lead in the form of a follower, this is a great opportunity to post valuable content via social media, as its likely that even if your target market don’t necessarily engage with your content (e.g. like, share), they may see it, and that compounded overtime can have a positive effect.
• Email newsletter - If you’ve captured the email address of a users (make sure they have agreed to receive marketing content first), then it can be great to touch base with them on a regular basis via an email newsletter. Often companies do a roundup each month of new content they’ve created that month, any product updates, as well as new resources, all rolled into one convenient and valuable email.
• Your Product - if you have a free trial your product should be designed to naturally have them experience value as they use it, whether that be by solving the problem they have, or providing them with the value proposition you promised. If this is the case, users should organically convert into paying users, should the offering be relevant to their needs.
• Drip Campaigns - Drip Campaigns are a sequence of emails setup over a period of time to nurture a lead into converting. Usually, a campaign will focus on first educating prospects on the problem, providing value in terms of education around solutions, and then presenting themselves (product/service) as the ultimate solution to the problem.
• Content Marketing - As mentioned above, this is a traction channel that captivates prospects with valuable content, captures their information with the offer of more, and converts them by building trust through regular instalments of valuable content.
• Sales - This is again a traction channel that covers the entire spectrum of the system, from captivating a lead by messaging them, capturing their information by getting them on a call, and nurturing them by continually engaging with them until a sale has been made.

If you setup a system and provide value consistently, you’ll naturally nurture your leads until they either buy, or die. (Sounds harsh, but it’s just a saying).

In this bonus phase we’ll discuss some of the extra things you can do to maximise your return on investment. As although you might think as soon as you make the sale the process is over, in fact, the most opportunity/upside is in the post sale cycle.

You’ve worked hard to captivate, capture, and convert prospects, now is not the time to take your foot off the gas. To truly maximise your return, deliver a world-class experience, whether that’s through the service you offer, or the product you sell.

Learn from previous customers and refine your offering, how you deliver it, how your customers interact with it, and use this to improve the experience for them. Additionally, refine your systems in the previous phases, making them both scaleable and more valuable to the prospect.

Explore ways you can get more out of existing customers, such as:

• Raising prices
• Upselling
• Upgrading customers to higher priced offerings
• Increasing customer frequency of purchase

Ask and you shall receive (hopefully). Reach out to customers and ask for referrals. Better yet, create a system that does this for you, collecting testimonials, asking for referrals, and even handling any rewards provided to referrers as an incentive.

By implementing this system you can set your business up for not only success, but automated success. By creating a system where you can both scale and outsource, you allow your business to reach a point in which you are not required to operate it, massively increasing your ability to do the things you love, whilst drastically increasing the value of your business.

We hope this handbook has helped, and if you’re interested in receiving more guides like this in the future, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below (see what we did there, it’s a lead magnet!). But seriously, we love sharing the tips and tricks we learn running experiments with our business, and the best place to receive them is our newsletter.