S14 EP9-12 BUILDING IN FRONT OF YOU: IMPROVING THE THE OFFER AND CREATING A MARKETING AGENCY - WILLIAM EASTMAN

Rebuilding the Offer and Processes:

• Do We Really Have to Do This Again?
• The Essence of Design and Development
• Build Only What You Have To
• Understand What You Are Testing 

EPISODE 9 Refresh My Memory, What Swamp Are We Draining?
Let’s start this with where we have been over the last 2 weeks.

• Week 1 was all about Startups As Experiments: build little until you know what the market will buy.
• Week 2 was getting the marketing / sales matrix right: what are you selling, who you are selling to, and how to sell to them.

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Since most of us know what we ‘think’ we want to sell, I left it off the previous conversations and saved it for today. So what is your initial offer?

This term or concept has been over used in the last 20 years however it is still valid. Your first offer in the market must be streamlined and featured down, in other words what are the minimum features you need to build into the offer to make the sale? Better as a Minimally Viable Product, or Service, or Offer. I’ll use the term MVO for the remainder of this conversation.

MVO Definition
A minimum viable offer, or MVO, is a product or service with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle.

There are two parts of the definition that are critical:

• Matching the Offer to Who and How in marketing.
• Creating a repeatable process for the creation of new products and services

Matching we discussed in the last show, today is the repeatable process for creation of things to sell.

EPISODE 10 The Tao of Design and the Zen of Development
We coined a phrase by putting two concepts together, tao and zen. 

Tao, and I’m paraphrasing, is understanding the essence of the product or service you are designing, why does it exist or why should it exist? It is how we approach design.

Zen, again taking liberties with the concepts, is what is the ultimate function this product or service must meet and employ the same philosophy to how it is developed.
Don’t think this has a high woo-hoo factor, it is all about approaching a new product or service with a clear mind, understanding the essence of what must delivery to the customer, and making it user-friendly in its construction and in the customers hands.

Now for us, what did we learn? And it was huge!

Our original design, our taozen, was to provide a platform for business owners that gave them global exposure, an opportunity to transmit their unique messaging, and have a year's work of marketing materials. This analysis was based on being a radio station manager, a host, and experience marketing. We figure it would take the bulk of the first year to work out all the kinks in the offer and by January 2021, Season 4, it would be working. It didn’t, not to the level we expected.

Our hosts, who were all new to radio and podcasting, were fearful of their performance so they didn’t invite listeners. Just stop here. They are on the number 1 global business talk and news network on the internet and because of being self-conscious, the hosts keep it secret. I would comment further, it is what it is.

So we formalized bringing new hosts on board into a multistep process to ensure from their first show, at least after the first commercial break, they are great. Did it work? Some, but not enough.

EPISODE 11 Build Only What You Must
I wish this was a nice and neat, linear process, it's not. The process for building the first offer is sloppy, iterative, and time consuming. You will only by talking with clients and analyzing the results they are realizing working with you.

Back to our story. After a year of onboarding hosts, the current process was insufficient. Our performance in 2021 was better than 2020, but still not up to our expectations. It was obvious we needed to enhance the offer and the next step was to build more features because we had to. The next step was to formally address podcasting. We were covering it during the host onboarding process but the focus was on live broadcasts, not the recording or replay.

We felt this was an area we had demonstrated expertise, by the end of 2021 there were over 350,000 show downloads. The year 2022 was focused on completing the offer. After adding a podcasting segment, we completed the offer by partnering with book writers and publishers. Now the offer was complete and we could say with complete confidence that everything you needed to market your brand and sell the offer was present, and yet there seemed to be more obstacles.

In a word, our hosts wanted IBGR to become a marketing agency and assume some, if not all, of the marketing responsibilities. Welcome to 2023.

EPISODE 12 Understand What You Are Testing
We will close out today’s show on gaining clarity of what answers we need to move ahead. By our internal evaluation of the business, we are at least 9 months behind where we should be. That means our tests must provide two answers, and it is where we started 45 minutes ago.

1. Have we worked out the marketing and sales formula: are we selling the right product or service to the right customer in a way that will entice them to buy?
2. Do we have a marketing process that efficiently creates brand awareness? Does our offer excite the right customer to reach out and start the sales process?

How we are asking questions to answer those questions were covered in the last show S14 EP5-8 BUILDING IN FRONT OF YOU: MARKETING MISTAKES AND LESSONS LEARNED - WILLIAM EASTMAN - EPISODE 8: The Pivot

My focus over Season 14 (July - September) is getting #2 answered.

1. Determine the entire market you believe holds the perfect customer.
2. Break it into small segments, small enough you can easily reach it
3. Create an open ended survey to collect their language - google forms work well for this type of survey; collect email addresses
4. Create a second survey of multiple choice questions that will help determine how many subgroups are in this segment
5. Match survey responses (benefits they seek) with the features of each product or service you want to sell
6. Develop a profile (avatar) for each product or service to the perfect customer
7. Write copy for emails to each subgroup, the goal is to excite them into taking action

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