10 MINUTES TO CONQUER: A MULTITIERED MARKETING APPROACH

Hi! I’m Erin Marcus, founder and CEO of Conquer Your Business. Welcome to the 10 Minutes to Conquer series of the Ready Yet?! podcast. I’m excited to bring you quick tips and tools that will help you know what to do to move your business forward and who you need to be to do it.

Hello, hello, and welcome to this special episode of the Ready Yet?! podcast, where we’re just going to spend a few minutes giving you some very tactical information on what you can do to grow your business. 

Today, I want to talk to you about the idea of what I call a Multitiered Marketing Approach, and why it’s more important than ever that you not have all your eggs in one basket. I come out of the financial services industry, specifically in the long-term care insurance world, and several, several times in my career, I watched entire companies go under because of a change in the market, and they had all their eggs in one basket. Different insurance agents were representing only one insurance carrier. That carrier made changes to their plans and their goals, and poof, entire agencies that had been in place for decades found themselves with nothing to sell.

When you put all your eggs in one basket, from a marketing perspective, you’re giving away too much power over your results to any one tactic. So, why is this more important than ever? We’ve come to rely very, very heavily on social media as a primary way to market our business. The internet has done amazing, amazing things for the entrepreneur world and small businesses. Personally, I have clients in Germany and Canada and New Zealand, and I would’ve never been able to meet these people if it weren’t for Zoom and it weren’t for the internet. So, this has brought us amazing, amazing opportunities. 

But it has also brought us challenges. So, for example, if your primary way of marketing your business is on social media platforms, you have to remember that you don’t own those platforms. You don’t own those platforms. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, they’re all businesses and they’re all going to make decisions that are best for their business.

We’re kind of past the golden age of social media where just being there was so novel that everyone saw you and, “Oh my God, you’re so cool. You’re on social media. Take my money.” Right? That just doesn’t happen anymore. And those businesses are getting more and more picky about what they let us consumers do for free on their platforms. That’s only going to continue. 

The other problem with having social media as your only way of marketing your business is that the hackers are getting better and better and better at making our lives miserable. And truthfully, Facebook doesn’t care. Instagram doesn’t care. Even when the big, big, big names get hacked, there’s almost nothing that Facebook can do to make them whole or fix the problem. There’s certainly not going to spend their manpower on the smaller businesses, especially if you spend zero on ads and only do this organically, you are leaving yourself open to being hacked, which is basically being robbed, right?

So, what can you do instead? The good news is it’s not really difficult to show up in several different ways. You can repurpose your content. So, it’s not really about needing to make more content. It’s about getting smarter on how you use the content so that again, you’re not putting your eggs in one basket, especially a basket that you don’t own. 

So, what am I talking about here? What can you be doing instead? If you write a book, for example, as a credential, it’ll help you get speaking gigs, it’ll help you get on podcasts. You can take the content of the book, put that on social media, create a lead magnet that now grows your email list. And truthfully, you don’t even have to start that type of project with something as big as a book. You can use a video or a concept that you want to become known for and take that one piece of content, that one container, and use it in a lot of different ways so that you gain a following on social media. Yes, but you also gain a following on your own email list, and you gain a following on in the podcast world, which can also be used to create a YouTube channel, which yes, you can say is social media, but it’s a different platform.

And one of the biggest things you can be doing is talking to other human beings, whether that’s speaking, networking, so that you can ask for referrals and give referrals. So, I call that a Multitiered Marketing Approach. Right? Don’t put your eggs in one basket, especially not a basket that you don’t own. 

Make sure that you’re sprinkling across the board enough so that if one of these platforms goes down, you’re not starting at ground zero somewhere else. And I know that in marketing, it’s often a good idea to go deep as opposed to wide, but that has more to do with your niche and your content, not where you’re visible, not where you’re visible. 

Today’s people, today’s consumers of content, we get our content in more than one place. We used to usually say, “Oh, I’m a Facebook person. I’m a YouTube person.” Most people now get their content in more than one place. So, find out where your audience is and make sure you’re meeting them in more than one location, because the other bonus to this is it takes more of an effort to create the no, like and trust factor that makes people comfortable with buying from us. So, if they see you on more than one platform, in more than one place, it just helps increase how quickly you can build that no, like and trust factor. 

So, again, don’t overwhelm yourself with having to create lots and lots and lots of different content. That’s really not going to help you, but take the content you have and make sure you’re spreading it out so that people can find you in different places, so that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, especially a basket you don’t own. And so that you can increase how quickly you build the no, like and trust factor with your audience to speed up their buying cycle.