$ales & Lead$: Do This Or Else You Won't Survive The Next 7 years

If you don't make the shift now, you probably won't make it in the next era of business driven by creators, AI, brand, authenticity & Technology.

I already know what you are thinking, "Not me", "my business doesn't work that way", or "my industry is different". And truthfully you have been able to get away with it.

But here is what's different...

The strategy that I am going to lay out is legitimately not being used by some of the “top agencies” and alumni of those agencies. Why? Because they have all been raised to use tactics and lack a fundamental evergreen strategy.

Unfortunately, if you as the founder or owner and are unwilling to put in the work I have outlined below, then..."Good Luck" You are going to need it! That’s how serious this is.

The Harsh Truth

I hate to break this to you, but you are now a content marketing company. Yup, every single business and their sales team on the planet are now a content marketing company first, followed by XYZ industry 2nd. The old days of buying short-term attention like paid media, billboards, and TV spots as the first move, are no longer a thing. At least not if you want to build a long-term evergreen strategy. Plus paid media will become incredibly expensive and is transactional, which means you won’t survive if you are always living hand-to-mouth on lead generation. If you don't have a Solid foundation of content, and content creation isn't a core value of your company, you will always be seeking and convincing, verse attracting and qualifying.

A better Mouse Trap

In fact, 90% of the research process is done before the customer picks up the phone. This means, that even if your short-term ad works, the customer is following up that conversion with research across google, LinkedIn, YouTube, IG, TikTok, news outlets, and above all reading reviews. This means, your show-up rate is likely killing your CAC (customer acquisition costs) and you are being shopped on price, not on value.

How do you overcome this problem?

The answer is grounded in strategy. Below you will find the secret sauce that we use in our businesses and that I would encourage you to adopt. That said, I know that 99% of you will not execute because it's dressed in overalls and looks like hard work. Marketing has been reliant on hacks and tactics for the last 15 years. But now, there is nothing new coming to the market. The hacks are done! Even AI is not a hack, because it is still reliant on your ability to give it great input. Bad input = Bad output

This method, combined with originality and creativity, is what generated 6000 subs/followers in our first 30 days of launch and is healthily growing 50-100+ per week. This seems nominal, but we are only in the first quarter, and we have the power of compounding on our side.

Every day, week, and month our content volume increases, our team grows, our output grows, and our past investment compounds.

The challenge?

There are no shortcuts, no hacks. It requires delayed gratification, commitment by all, and accountability across the organization.

The PROs?

It’s an evergreen strategy that will outlast algorithm changes and it will reduce your cost per click (CPC) and cost per impression (CPM) over time.

It’s very similar to exercise.

If you know me well, you know that I own a degree in human physiology, a master's in sports nutrition, and a premier private training facility in northern Colorado www.pursuit.fit. Therefore you also know that I like using exercise and Training as a way to explain life, business, and success.

This also means we aren’t getting through this post without an exercise/training analogy. LOL!

You can go to the gym and do arm exercises every day, but you will never see the results you are after if you don’t train the body holistically. And if you don’t cycle through different objectives like strength, verse muscle gain, verse endurance you will always struggle to build. For example, you will find that it’s difficult to improve muscle mass and endurance without a foundation in strength.

The truth is building strength is slow, arduous, and doesn't actually give you what you want, which is the aesthetics. That said, without strength, you can't push more weight and improve. Therefore, you have to take the long road, if you want permanent transformation, and start by building a firm foundation. Regardless of which objective you are after - strength, muscle, or endurance - every training program is built on the back of progressive overload - marketing is the same way.

What Is Progressive Overload?

It’s gradually adding intensity as your strength improves in order to achieve continual improvement. As you build a stronger base you can increase the intensity over time by adding:

• Increase resistance by adding more weight or moving to a tougher resistance band.

• Increase the number of repetitions.

• Do your repetitions more quickly.

• Do longer workouts.

All these things put more stress on the body, forcing it to adapt. Those adaptations make the muscle larger in some cases or make it stronger. But it's all grounded in doing the work, and committing to the long haul.

The Compound Evergreen Strategy

Marketing is no different than building your body, a house, or your bank account. It starts by laying a solid foundation and consistently making the evergreen investment.

These are ranked in order of importance, from slowest to fastest, and from hardest to easiest because Slow is Fast.

Company-Generated Content (Hardest)

1. Founder & Leadership content: YouTube, Podcast, Speaking, Guest podcasting, PR

2. Inner Circle Content: Exclusive Newsletter

Employee-generated content (Hard)

• Sales and marketing-generated content: Every single person on your team has the responsibility to be generated attention and build an audience

• By Repurposing core company content across social channels

• By Creating original thought leadership and authority social content

• By Building a social network and strategically influencing the market back to the mothership

• By Connecting In Their local community to engage, speak and create a local influence that pouts back to the brand but also helps them sell more and make more money because the brand and the salesperson now have more authority and influence

• By writing authoritative articles that add value to the market.

Partner Generated Content (Hard)

• Articles written by 3rd party partners who want to build their brand, and build authority in adjacent markets. Warning: this is one of the most abused SEO tactics. People write articles in order to rank, verse writing articles that are thought-leading and add value to the market. Guess what? The algorithms can tell. And if you are abusing AI to write articles, guess what? The algorithms can tell. True creativity and a willingness to write articles like the one you are reading will win.

User/Customer-generated Content (Medium)

• Leverage customers and prospects to help you create more content for YouTube, podcasts, and shorts. Invite them for interviews, guest articles, speaking engagements, etc.

• Local SEO: Optimizing your local listings in each of your respective markets. Localizing your reviews by asking customers in those markets to write reviews on those local Google my business listings. Not only is this great for building trust with future customers, but it's invaluable as an SEO strategy. 87% of your happy customers will write a review for you. Problem is, we don’t ask.

Paid Retargeting (Easy)

• Cross-channeling paid media from websites on primary platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, and maybe even Facebook, drives them back to a landing page with an offer.

Influencer marketing (Easy)

• Partnering with Creators who align well with the brand, and/or who have influenced a like-kind audience and mutually add value to each other's network. Once you have a body of work, you can add value to their network, but not before you do the work above.

Paid lookalike audiences (Easy)

• As your tribe grows and you gain a more clear picture of your avatar you can use that data to build audiences that perfectly match your target avatar on social, to attract more people into the fold.

Paid search (Easiest)

• Your last resort is paid search because it's the most expensive, and the most competitive. It is still very relevant, granted you are building a solid foundation. The brand with the most Trust wins this battle. Therefore without the foundational strategy laid out above, you are not going to be able to compete without deep pockets. And still, yet, you will never achieve a profitable ROAS (return on ad spend).

Everything else is a nuance tactic to the core strategies. But above all, content creation is and will always be KING!

Best,

Samson

📚 Listen To Building a Story Brand

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