We’ve made $6m for ourselves over the past 2 years. We did that by generating our clients $14m+ (both done-for-you and done-with-you) using a framework our Co-Founder, Jacob Le Vine, built after spending over a decade in digital marketing.
In this blog, we will delve into the details of this framework, covering the research methods, assumption forming, and implementation strategies that have been the backbone of our success.
Research
As a Growth Partner agency, the foundation of every piece of marketing we do is research.
This is why we’ve developed a 2-tier research method that allows us to get to the depths of any market and build effective marketing campaigns.
Tier 1 - Basic Research: Customer Facing
You can’t market something when you don’t know who you’re marketing to. We make sure to know, in as much detail as possible:
- The Target Market / Customer Avatar (age, income, etc.)
- Their pains
- How the product/service solves their pains
- Their desires
- How the product/service will get them their desires
- How the product/service takes the least amount of effort
- Why haven’t they done this themselves?
It doesn’t matter what level of marketing you are at or how much you make. These questions are foundational to every single campaign.
Tier 2 - Advanced Research: Competitor Facing
What separates the good from the great is how deep you go in terms of understanding not just your target market, but what your target audience sees on a day-to-day basis, inside and outside of your niche. This will cover how you get to the core of your target market.
Understanding Industry Standard
In the majority of cases, a product/service will have competitors. This can be an advantage when researching, as if your competitors have seen any level of success, they will have already done a lot of research for you. By looking at your competitors you can find:
- Common strategies the successful businesses all deploy: For example, in the dentistry industry, it’s widely known that advertisements with clean, attractive teeth outperform those with dirty, ugly teeth. If you’re starting from scratch in marketing for dentists, you may not pick up on this. But one look at all of the top competitors' advertisements, and you can quickly notice the pattern. Whilst it’s important to research what your competitors are doing, it should never be used as an excuse to blindly follow market trends or straight-up copy competitors. A great marketer always asks the reason behind competitors utilising a similar strategy, and the knowledge they gain from asking this question builds their campaigns.
- Unique insights you never came up with in customer-facing research: Unless you are the top company in your niche, your competitors know more than you. If they are selling more than you, it means they have more insights into what customers really want. We can again use this to our advantage. By understanding what our competitors offer, we can understand what our prospects are seeing, and can begin to think about communicating why we’re different. Once these basics of research are covered, only then do you get creative.
Forming Assumptions
Marketing at its core is testing assumptions. You make an educated guess on what you think your target market would like, if it doesn’t work, you make another guess, if it does work, you iterate and improve on that guess.
What Makes You Unique?
What forms the basis of the assumptions you make is what makes you unique. A mistake businesses often make is believing there is nothing unique about them. If this were true, there wouldn’t be hundreds of brands of popular water, the most bland product in existence. Here are some questions to ask to find your unique angles:
- Is there something you do that’s genuinely different from your competitors?
- When the first electric car came out, it was genuinely unique. They could sell from the point that the car was electric, nothing else.
- Water may come from a specific spring that no other water brands use, that’s genuinely unique. They can sell on that point alone.
- Is there anything you do that your competitors also do, but nobody is drawing attention to it?
- There’s a high likelihood that there is something everybody does in your niche but isn’t talking about - you can use that to make a unique angle for a campaign.
- Is there a standard process you do better than everyone else.
- For example, if you offer lead generation, do you do anything better/different to anyone else in the follow-up, the initial cold email, or even a particular widespread strategy?
- Inside our Growth Partner agency, we use more value than average. We send over genuinely valuable assets prospects can use whether or not they buy from us.
- Even though we’re not the only marketing company to deploy this strategy, it becomes a point of differentiation because we do it better than most of the other companies in our industry.
The goal of all of this is to answer one singular question: Why has everything else prospects tried before failed and why will your solution be the one that works?
Implementing Assumptions
Now you know how to research and come up with assumptions, it’s time to put it to work inside of a marketing campaign. Typically, you want to test one assumption at a time, starting with the assumption which will have the biggest impact: the offer.
- What do your target market get?
- In what timeframe?
- How will they get it?
- What’s unique about it?
We continuously tested our offer and nothing else until we found one that people responded to. We then streamlined that offer until we had one that worked best - judging by the key data metrics (explained below).
Once the offer is in a good place, then it’s time to make assumptions and micro-optimisations on the rest of your marketing:
Advertisements
- Start with the headline and hook
- Work your way down from there
- Data to track: Cost per lead, click-through rate, cost per call
Funnel Pages
- Start with the headline, a formula we use is “How to go from <state 1> to <state 2> in <timeframe> with <unique method>/without <biggest pain>”
- Once that’s working, move your way down to benefits bullet points, a “who this is for” section, and social proof
- Note: make sure everything you do is mobile optimised
Email Flows for Funnels
- Start with a welcome flow; an automated email sequence a lead gets when they opt in to your ad or funnel
- Send anywhere from 3-7 emails a week to the list, and place the best “regular” emails you send each week into the welcome flow
- Data to track: open rate, click-through rate, calls booked, qualified calls booked
Cold Email Outreach
- Start with the subject line, then move to the first line, then the body copy, then the CTA (typically you ask for a reply)
- Data to track: Reply rate, calls booked, qualified calls booked
SDR Processes
- An SDR can do two roles: either ensure prospects are notified and ready to attend a call already booked, or book a call after a prospect has replied to a cold email / opted in
- Metric to focus on: call show-up rate, reply rates, calls booked
Organic Content
- In B2B marketing, organic typically supports the “heavier” marketing such as advertisements and cold emails, the purpose is to increase trust
- Post case studies, value pieces, and text messaging
- Data to track: new followers, calls booked
Always Be a Learner
One of our main values at The Growth Partner is to always be learning. We take the belief that as long as you are willing to learn, there is nothing out of reach. The scientific marketing method is this value put into a system, it’s how you become strong on all fronts of your B2B marketing efforts, in any niche.
