 | ||||||||
| ||||||||
| | ||||||||
Hi Marketing Bestie, I genuinely believe buying a new tennis racket might fix my backhand. I know that’s not how tennis works. But I’m also not ruling it out. Let me have this. Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by Vibe.co Ever hear of the “rule of 3” in ad frequency? Things to steal: 📈📈📈 SPARKNOTES FROM THE PODCAST 5 WAYS TO MAKE 10X EASIER THAN 2XWhat if doubling your marketing results is actually harder than growing them 10x? I had Blake Erickson, co-founder of Scaling.com and co-author of The Science of Scaling, on the podcast to talk about this. Before Scaling.com, Blake built a door-to-door sales company to 400 reps. He learned a lot about what happens when a business grows faster than its people, processes, and systems. His argument is interesting. A 10% growth goal lets you keep doing what already works. A 10x goal forces you to find an entirely different way to get there. And sometimes that means doing a lot less. Listen to the full episode here for our conversation on scaling, AI, hiring, and finding the things holding your growth back. 1️⃣. Set a goal your current playbook can't hit.Blake's Take: "If you're in marketing and you say, 'I want to convert ten clients this month, and next month I want to convert eleven,' you can just do the exact same thing you've already done, just increase ad spend. But the moment you go, 'I want to go from 10 conversions a month to a hundred,' now all of a sudden you can't just do the exact same thing." This is such an interesting way to approach planning. If your goal is 10% more leads, you'll probably increase your budget, improve a few campaigns, and call it a strategy. But if your goal is 10x more leads with the same budget, you have to ask completely different questions. Could 1 partnership get you in front of a million new people? Could a different offer convert an audience you've never reached? The goal forces you to look for opportunities you wouldn't have considered otherwise. Takeaway: Pick 1 marketing metric and write down what 10x would look like. Then ask how you'd get there without increasing your budget. Come up with 3 approaches that don't involve doing more of what you're already doing. 2️⃣. Stop optimizing things that shouldn't exist.Blake's Take: "What am I doing that isn't creating results? So what is everything I'm doing that actually isn't working? I'd get really rigorous and honest with yourself. And all of those answers, whatever answers I get from that, I would stop doing those things." This might have been my favorite part of our conversation. It's easy to spend 3 hours improving a campaign without asking whether the campaign deserves another three hours in the first place. Blake's approach is to work backward from the result you want. If you're trying to double revenue, every campaign, project, and meeting should have a reason to exist that connects to that goal. And if something isn't contributing, improving it probably isn't the answer. Takeaway: Audit your last 30 days of marketing activity. Find 3 things taking up time without producing meaningful results. Pause one this week and put those hours toward something that's already showing traction. 3️⃣. Be known for 1 thing before trying to be known for everything.Blake's Take: "What is the one thing that, if you beat on that drum long enough, you could become known for and you could become best in the world at, and people could begin associating that with you?" Blake told me about a friend who owns 6 businesses. Every time he posts, he's promoting a different offer. The problem is that his audience has no idea what he actually does. This reminded me of a conversation I had with someone who wanted to grow on LinkedIn. Before we talked about content, I asked what they wanted to be known for. Because getting attention and building an association in someone's mind are 2 very different things. You can publish something new every day, but if the message changes every time, you're constantly starting over. Takeaway: Look at your last 10 posts, emails, and campaigns. If someone saw only those 10 things, could they explain what your brand stands for? Pick 1 problem you want to own and make it the common thread across your next quarter of marketing. 4️⃣. Give yourself less time to get more done.Blake's Take: "If we can be really rigorous with our deadlines and always condense our time frames, it's going to force us to be focused on the highest leverage things." I asked Blake about using time as a constraint, and I loved his answer. Think about the difference between having 2 weeks to launch a campaign and having 2 days. With 2 weeks, there's time to debate headlines, schedule extra meetings, and make another round of revisions. With 2 days, you have to figure out what actually matters. The offer, the message, the audience, and getting it live. The interesting part is how much work disappears when the deadline gets shorter. Takeaway: Take 1 marketing project scheduled for next week and ask what it would take to finish it in 48 hours. Identify the decisions that actually affect the result, make those first, and cut the steps that don't need to happen before launch. 5️⃣. Don't use AI to make useless work faster.Blake's Take: "Where AI can be really unuseful is when people begin building things with AI that don't need to be built." We got into AI, and this part really stood out to me. There's a difference between using AI to speed up an existing process and using AI to rethink whether that process should exist at all. Say your team spends hours building a weekly report that nobody uses to make decisions. Automating that report saves time, sure. But eliminating it saves even more. Blake's point was that AI becomes valuable when it improves an outcome that matters, like conversion or productivity, instead of just making it easier to produce more stuff. Takeaway: Look at the AI tools and workflows your team uses. For each 1, ask what result it's improving. If the only answer is that it makes something faster, ask whether that thing needs to happen at all. Put your energy into the workflows that can actually change a business metric. WASN’T AI SUPPOSED TO SAVE TIME? Sometimes fixing an AI draft takes so long I’d rather just write it myself. Which kind of defeats the point. We’re fixing that in a live workshop: building a brand voice playbook so you spend less time editing and more time doing literally anything else. IN A MEME  OPEN TABS I use the Wilson Defyer or the Wilson Blade racket if that matters to you. Your friend, Daniel | ||||||||
|
