Feed a Starving Crowd – marketing training overview

Last week on Friday I attended a 1 day workshop run by Robert Coorey author of Feed a Starving Crowd. Rob’s book is full of marketing tactics, 147 of them require no advertising budget. This course was run by Zambesi; a learning platform targeting entrepreneurs learning from people with skin in the game. Each workshop is limited to 12 people and you learn just as much from the group discussions as you do from the instructor. I quite enjoy this learning style. This blog post is an overview of my key take aways from this course. I attended this course with some interesting people who had some cool business ideas.

Why did I want to attend this course?

Since I’ve started working at Campaign Monitor, I feel like I haven’t learnt much about marketing. I’m meant to be working in email marketing but I don’t understand the people I am helping build products for. What makes a marketers mind tick? What language do they use? What are their biggest challenges? I wanted to learn about marketing to help me build up user empathy, how can I advocate on behalf of quality if I don’t know what is a quality product in the eyes of the people who matter? I want to learn about marketing tactics and put those learnings into practice by using my personal brand as an experiment bed for it.

Who is your ideal client?

After some introductions; the first exercise was “Who is your ideal client?”. As this was early on in the day I was thinking from a Campaign Monitor point of view and I came up with Gertrude; she works as a travel agent, mostly helping Australian retirees book cruise ship holidays. She’ll often email her clients with updates about upcoming cruises, travel tips and special offers. It’s a small company of a dozen people and she wears a lot of different hats. Sales, marketing and travel agent. She’s approaching retirement age herself which gives her good empathy with her clients. She lives on the Gold Coast, she’s on Facebook to keep in touch with her family, she enjoys watching my kitchen rules on the evening.

What are their pain points?

The next exercise involved brain storming their pain points. We often came back to the pain points when it came to generating content ideas later. One way to brainstorm pain points was to look at all of the 3 star reviews about books your target audience would read on Amazon. As the day progressed I started thinking about these exercises from a software testing consultant point of view and how I could sell my services. I’ve done this activity from a software testing point of view and have discovered that a lot of the good content feels a little dated and people feel like it hasn’t been adapted for more agile practices. So publishing content around software testing in Agile practices seems to be an unfulfilled market segment and an area worth experimenting more in.

Industry Leadership

Being seen as a industry leader is a good thing. My involvement with tech conferences and meetup events is a good starting point in growing this perception. There’s a lot more work I can do from this point of view and I’m excited to grow in this area.

Building a sales funnel

There was a large section on building the sales funnel with a focus on paid advertising vs free advertising and using quality content in your advertising. E.G. coming up with a quiz to generate leads (for software testing I could generate a quiz like; what type of tester are you? How mature is your agile testing approach?). You then follow up with quiz participants with some email content e.g. if some took the agile testing quiz maybe send them an email on agile testing and best practices, you can then retarget this audience with facebook/linkedIn advertising. Basically people need to see your brand at least 7-10 times before it becomes memorable. Rob also went over how to structure a sales team based on the most common model used in silicone valley.

Conclusion

Email marketing is still a useful tool for anyone working in Sales/Marketing but businesses should diversify their tactics. I was able to get a good basic understanding of sales/marketing and the main idea out there is people should combine paid and unpaid advertising tactics in creative ways to get the best of both worlds. My commitment out of this training is; putting aside 10 minutes of my time a week to do LinkedIn networking with purpose. I will have a process for engaging people on social media around my personal brand. I have a few other ideas for growing my engagement that I’d like to test out too and I’ll keep you posted on how they go.

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