Four Core Marketing Concepts

Whenever I’m about to construct a new marketing campaign from scratch, I let four core concepts guide my strategy. It’s important to consider these before we ever begin to think about tactics.

Any average Jane can learn how to use a marketing tool or piece of software. It is a firm understanding rooted in core concepts such as these four that separates the professionals from the amateurs.

I’ll share these with you now.

M*3 -- THE MARKETING TRIANGLE

The first core concept is the “Marketing Triangle,” or the Three M’s - Market, Message, and Media. Every single marketing or promotion effort is constructed upon these three pillars. Like a three-legged stool, if one is missing, the entire thing collapses.

Market: Your people. Those most receptive to what you have to offer. If you cannot write several pages about them, then you need to get to know them better. They also have a secret language that they use amongst themselves.

For example, golfers might use the word “slice” when referring to a particular “shot.” Marketers use words like “copy” and “conversion rate.” Digital Nomads might refer to themselves as “DNs.” Most people on the outside would not have a clue what the people within the group are talking about.

Find these people, where they converse, where they hang out online (and in real life).

Message: Every single marketing campaign is built around your message. Sometimes this is one message, but in practice it is usually several. Your message can refer to anything you send to your target market: the comments you post on photos, the direct messages or tweets you send, the automated messages received by new followers, the email pitches you write.

Identify these “touch points” of communication and write them out. The goal is to further the relationship towards a point of measurable action. Sometimes these messages, when automated, rely on spin syntaxes. We’ll cover that later.

Media: Every medium or form of communication comes with its own set of rules. For instance, Instagram does not allow links. Facebook groups come with moderators breathing down your neck. Public speaking allows you to establish “know, like, and trust” in an accelerated fashion (which is a strength). But once they leave the room and drive home, we’ve lost them (which is a weakness). So we need to find a way to followup with them using another media.

Email outreach allows us to write longer, more detailed messages than say, Twitter, which limits our message to 140 characters.

We thus need to tailor our message and strategy in a way that suits the rules of our chosen medium and plays to its strengths with consideration to its weaknesses.

Sometimes, we can get two of these three right, but if the third one misses the mark, a campaign will fail to achieve the results we desire. But when we dial in all three, we hit the sweet spot and our campaigns succeed.

AIDA - ATTENTION, INTEREST, DESIRE, ACTION.

You’ve probably heard of this one before. It’s famous because it works.

Marketing is nothing more than good salesmanship multiplied by a mass medium. And the process of making a sale — from opening to close — is a straight line, based around four things: getting a prospect’s attention, piquing her interest, triggering desire, and prompting her to take some form of action.

AIDA is a great roadmap to understanding how marketing works. Here’s a quick example (imagine you’re up late watching a series and an infomercial pops up on the screen):

Attention: “Are you a male, over the age of 55, suffering from multiple sclerosis?”

Interest: “You may be eligible for a free treatment of [new magic pill]. Patients report [Benefit 1, Benefit 2, and Benefit 3].”

Desire: Testimonials, case studies flash on the screen. Images of happy elderly couples walking in the park together with family, playing with pets, etc.

Action: “Call this number and start your new life today! If phones are busy, please keep trying.”

This is a quick example I threw together in less than three minutes, but do see the use of the three M’s here? In the “attention” step, we clearly defined the market, and caught the attention of anyone watching within that target market. Then we delivered the message in a way that piqued their interest, by promising a benefit. And of course the media is a late night infomercial, which allows for freedom of length, heavy use of visual imagery, uplifting music, testimonial interviews, and so on.

FMICC - FIND, MESSAGE, INTEREST, CONVERT, CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON.

“FMICC” is a process I’ve developed which parallels the framework of “AIDA” and supplements it based upon the Web 2.0 strategies and techniques we use.

And it forms the basis of our outreach campaigns (both manual and automated), which you’ll learn about in later chapters.

Step One: Find

Find our most targeted, highest converting, most engaged prospects, in the least timeconsuming and most efficient manner possible. Many rookie entrepreneurs mess up at this first step because they say “anyone can benefit from my product.” Or: “our customers are anyone really.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Either you need to know exactly what niche to target, or who your best / most engaged market segment is, otherwise any marketing effort you try will fail and you won’t receive the response are you looking for.

Please, take my word for this. If there’s one piece of advice well-intentioned but green entrepreneurs resist, its this one.

Yes, anyone in business can benefit from a book about growth hacking, such as this one. But if I’m going to promote this book I need to find the best places to direct my efforts — the best groups to focus on for maximum response.

Fortunately, finding people is very easy on the internet. We have search engines, hashtags, keywords, groups, subreddits, forums, blogs, and so on. For example, we can go to Instagram and begin typing any keyword preceded by a #, and discover our market.

For efficiency, there are a number of tools and other forces that we can rely on to find large groups of targeted prospects even more quickly than we normally would. These are covered in detail throughout this book.

Step Two: Message

“Message” in this context refers to the noun more so than the verb. The message refers to the message that you created as part of the marketing triangle.

This is NOT the step where we deliver our offer, call to action, or self-promotion. That comes later, in step four. Instead, this step focuses on breaking the ice, contributing value, being helpful, entering into someone’s sphere of influence in a way that is nonintrusive and that evokes compliance.

Step Three: Interest

“Interest” in this context usually means breaking ice and establishing rapport over shared interests or shared goals. It may also mean countering a person’s innate skepticism and reluctance to engage a stranger by demonstrating credibility, authority, or passion in a particular area.

Since the web is built around connections, it’s about displaying you are someone worth taking the time to talk to, to get to know, and to listen to.

Step Four: Convert

Convert essentially carries the same meaning as “Action” in AIDA, in a sense more applicable to web mediums.

It’s about creating an “ask” that’s virtually impossible to say no to. It’s about prompting the contact or prospect to take some form of action — one that preferably helps them to get what they truly want, or one that leads to a mutually beneficial win-win outcome.

Example: they join your list, and in return, win the chance to receive a free iPhone, or a free 7-day trip to China (or something else they may desire).

This step becomes REALLY fun when you use the tool “Queue” and deploy advanced strategies such as viral gamification, which we’ll cover in detail in a later chapter.

Which brings me to the fifth and final step…

Step Five: Choose Your Weapon

The fifth and final step is one I like to call “choose your weapon.” This is the method you will use to deploy all of these steps. This method could be performed manually, semimanually, or completely automated.

It could mean leveraging a certain software. It could also mean taking advantage of other forces, such as piggybacking off of known brands (the way Airbnb did with Craigslist), stealing a competitor’s fans, or engaging the most active followers of another account. It could mean setting up a bunch of fake profiles to show social proof and activity, the way Reddit did in its infancy.

Like the media, every weapon we could potentially deploy carries with it its own set of rules, parameters, strengths, and potential weaknesses. The more we test and deploy a weapon, the more proficient we become in its use.

I decided to add this final step because I think it’s important. We can come up with all types of ingenious methods to deploy the four steps above, and thanks to the advanced tools we have at our disposal, we are limited only by our imaginations.

This is where the true art in the craft of growth marketing occurs.

Interconnection Webs

In order to make our efforts with AIDA and FMICC more effective, it helps to understand how relationships form.

Keith Ferrazzi, author of “Never Eat Alone,” writes that you need to communicate with a person through three different forms of media before they can get feel like they know you. Keith also says you should set a goal to talk to one hundred people each day, but that’s a topic for another chapter.

Dan Kennedy says that once you’ve assembled your herd (of customers, users, etc), you need to create a “fence,” and “touch” them with some form of communication at least 50 times per year. Otherwise, they’ll wander off or be stolen away by nefarious competitors.

To bring these concepts more up to date and in line with the online landscape, I like to refer to these principles as “webs.” As an online marketer, our goal is to spin webs that attract the prospects we want to catch, and then strengthen the web so that it becomes as strong as possible.

Sometimes, in order to make our messages effective, we need to reach out to someone through three different forms of media — for example we may comment on their video, tweet at them, and add them on Facebook. This helps our name to stick and improves the chances that are messages will be noticed and replied to.

Like all of these core concepts, this will be fleshed out in greater detail in another chapter.

When you are able to successfully integrate all four of these core concepts together, you will have a successful campaign. You will become a force within your niche.

The rest of this book details implementation — the muscles and sinew — that will bring your efforts and ideas to life.

To fully internalize and master these concepts is simple: run a hundred campaigns. A campaign can be as simple as sending ten email pitches, or sending 10,000. It could be running a Facebook ad for five days. It really doesn’t matter; the point is to test each of the three M’s: the message you wrote, the market you sent that message to, and the media you chose. And of course each campaign allows you to actively practice the other core concepts as well.

Do these things, and you will master marketing.