Episode 30: How to – Drive Sales without Ads

Full Transcript

Chris Edwards (00:02)

Hi, I’m Chris Edwards, you’re listening to Good Business. Welcome to this week’s “How To” episode.

Chris Edwards (00:10)

This week, I’m talking about how to build revenue without spending money on ads. So ads are incredibly expensive these days and they’re way less effective. The good old days of cheap ads are well and truly behind us.

Chris Edwards (00:26)

I feel like this is a really big, important piece of the puzzle as an entrepreneur, and it’s something that I have done. So my first business, Honeycombers, I built up an audience – quite a sizable audience now, we have over a million unique readers a month and we have about 150,000 subscribers – and we actually did it without spending any money on marketing in our first five to seven years. So today, I’m gonna share how did I do it.

Chris Edwards (00:59)

So I’ve really got a few key steps you need to do to be able to drive sales without constantly paying for poorly performing ads.

Chris Edwards (01:09)

Firstly, you need to make sure your product is mind-blowingly good, unique, and easy to purchase, and solves a real problem. I can’t stress this enough.

Chris Edwards (01:21)

You need to make sure that your product is absolutely amazing and not just in your eyes, OK? So if you have a kick-ass product and it is mind-blowingly good, then you may proceed to step number two. If you’re unsure, go back and listen to episode 21 of this podcast, where I talk about how do you create a product that solves a real problem. OK, step two: you need to create a marketing strategy that focuses on your owned channels and your earned channels. So what I want to do is just break down what are these channels and what is the difference between paid, owned, and earned marketing channels because, once you understand this, then you’ll be able to see the opportunities. So first of all, paid is obviously any channel like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, media ads, anywhere where you’re actually paying to reach your customer, OK? The next one is owned. So this is the channels that you own yourself.

Chris Edwards (02:32)

So content that you can publish for free. So this content includes your website and blog posts, your social media channels, it also includes email marketing, and the big one in owned is SEO. The third channel is earned. So this is any content where other people are talking about you. So this includes influencers, PR, reviews of your product or your business, or simply fans and advocates who share your content through their own channels. So if you want to go deep into marketing strategy, I do have another episode – episode 24 – that talks all about how to determine your marketing strategy. But what I want to talk for a little bit now is really about owned and earned channels. So for me, owned channels was what I really focused on for Honeycombers. And really what we focused on was SEO and email marketing.

Chris Edwards (03:30)

I feel like lots of people focus on social media because it’s in their pocket and they’re on social media, right? SEO and email marketing deliver in spades, but I just feel like entrepreneurs don’t focus on these channels enough.

Chris Edwards (03:47)

So to do SEO, the first thing you need to do is really understand SEO and you need to understand the basics, and you need to understand how to create an SEO-optimised website and a search-optimised article, and then you need to go and produce a lot of content and become the expert in your field so that you rank highly. And don’t expect it to deliver results overnight, SEO takes time, at least three months.

Chris Edwards (04:17)

The next one on owned is email marketing. Again, a very, very cost-effective, under-utilised tool. And what’s great about email marketing is it’s a really great way to nurture your customers so that they get to know you and they get to like you and they get to love you, which is what they need to do before they’re going to buy from you. So with email marketing, the biggest challenge is really to get people to join your list and then to get people to open your emails. So to get people to join your list, you really need to incentivise them with a lead magnet or a good reason, a good value proposition as to why they’ve got to give you their email address. No one wants to sign up for your email newsletter, they will give you their email address if you’re giving them something in return. So if you go to the launchpad.group website, you’ll see we have a bucket of freebies there, free templates and tools you can download – we just ask for your email address. So that’s our value exchange to get people onto our email list. And then I send them an email – everyone on our email list – I send them an email every week from me, personally, sharing tips and tricks about running a small business or a startup. And then another big piece about email marketing is really getting people to open your email, and that comes down to email subject line, and I really recommend doing AB split testing and really get trial and error to see what time of day and what subject line is going to work best for your email database. I think I’ll have to do a whole episode on email marketing – there’s so much to it, I love it – and ditto with SEO. OK, so let’s talk about earned channels. I love the earned channels. You have to be really creative to get the most out of your earned channels. So you need to be wildly creative, you need to be attention-seeking, and you need to leverage on PR and also unconventional PR.

Chris Edwards (06:12)

And what I mean by that is it’s almost like the gangster PR, it’s when you’re doing guerilla marketing tactics.

Chris Edwards (06:19)

An example of these I did early on at Honeycombers was we actually worked with Boutiques when they were back at Fort Canning, and we partnered with them and we went to each store holder and asked them to display Honeycombers, like, an image of our logo, on their stand, and whoever’s displayed the most Honeycombers logos actually got a free piece of coverage on Honeycombers. So we had all these store holders at this fair with Honeycombers logos all over them and it was a really great guerilla marketing tactic to build brand awareness and curiosity about what The Honeycombers was.

Chris Edwards (06:59)

Events is another really great way to get in front of people and build relationships – it can be hard work, like, it’s a lot more energy and effort, but it really pays off.

Chris Edwards (07:10)

And the other really nice thing is it gives you direct dialogue with your customer, which is really great, to make sure that your product is mind-blowingly good. And then the last thing about earned is working with partners, so collaboration marketing. An example of that at Launchpad is we actually collaborate with partners like OZChan, Boutiques, Uncommon, Conscious Festival, we partner with lots and lots of people because it’s really powerful and really cost-effective. And the best way to set up collaborations is really using your personal network or a community network like Launchpad. I have a whole episode on how to do this and this is episode 28, so go back and listen to how to create real business opportunities through your network. So that is a really short summary on how you can build revenue without spending money on ads. And just to bring it back home, the first step is make sure you’ve got a mind-blowingly good product that’s unique and easy to purchase, that solves a real problem. And secondly, make sure you’ve got a really clear marketing strategy that focuses on your owned and earned marketing channels. That’s all from me, I hope that this episode helps you create your own good business.

Chris Edwards (08:31)

That’s all for this week’s “How To” episode, thank you so much for listening, and I hope you found today’s episode super helpful. If this is the first time you’ve joined us, make sure to follow Good Business for more “How To”s – I’ve got a bunch of topics lined up and I’m super excited to share the things that have helped me through my entrepreneurial journey. If you’re a regular listener, thank you for your support. Make sure to rate us and leave a review on whatever podcast platform you’re listening on – it really does help with getting the word out and getting our podcast into more ears. So thank you, I really appreciate it. Of course, if you have any topics you’d like us to explore in a “How To” episode or if you want to recommend a guest who should come on our regular episodes, email us at [email protected] and we’ll see what we can do. Lastly, if you’d to join a community of ambitious, daring, smart, and kind entrepreneurs, and gain access to all the tools you’ll need to grow your business, make sure to check us out at www.thelaunchpad.group. Thanks again for tuning in to Good Business. My name’s Chris Edwards, and I’ll catch you next week.