One of those business concepts that seems universal is the cobbler’s shoes. The idea here is that the cobbler is so busy making shoes for other people that he can’t stop and make his own shoes nice. There may be some deep-seated pathology here, but that’s a different topic altogether.
We do a lot of marketing work for other people; it’s one of those outsourcing things we do. We don’t do a lot of it for ourselves — staff gets absorbed into programs, new programs arrive and demand attention, shit happens, and so on.
Yesterday, after describing a marketing approach that wasn’t making headway with the client, after mapping several proposed prospect > lead > client journeys with upsells and communications to drive conversions and retentions, after a relatively in-depth competitive analysis; it struck me that I’d never done that for my own company.
We just, you know, rely on word-of-mouth, hope, a money frog, prayer, and herky-jerky hustle for fresh customers. Hey self: WTF?
I’ve meant to do these things for our merry band; it’s the time of COVID when all things are possible, after all.
To wit:
We find prospects through data gathering. Data gathering is a more benign term for web scraping (I dislike the word “scraping.”). This is marginally better than buying lists, which works for high-volume projects, I suppose. The problem is that the lead provenance can be scammy, the data musty, the quality relatively low — unless you spend a ridiculously large sum on your data and, well, we’re an offshore outsourcer, so we can just grab the data ourselves.
A better approach is audience building. Make people interested in what you have to say, and then casually toss in a mention of your availability for hire. Audience-building takes time, and it works better if you niche. Everyone tells you to niche; for BPOs, that’s extremely hard because outsourcing shops tend to focus on a domain (or not) and then grab anyone in any industry will to give them a nickel. There are reasons for this, but I’m not going to think about them now.
Allan Dib is no exception to this punditry; his handy, The 1-Page Marketing Plan, states, “Targeting a tight niche allows you to become a big fish in a small pond. It allows you to dominate a category or geography in a way that is impossible by being general.” He sells it with, “A specialist is much more highly respected than a jack-of-all-trades. A specialist is paid handsomely to solve a specific problem for their target market.”
Audience-building in a niche is no easy task. You have to develop interesting content and have a voice to reel in a few people who care about your message. It’s methodical. Once you’ve got a teeny tiny audience to work with, you can solicit feedback and see what works.
Our portfolio consists of data management companies, real estate companies, online learning, a sports-drink company, an RV rental platform company, a small group of dive resorts, a logistics company. We consult for several outsourcing companies — hardy focused. Not niched.
The good news is that we have a pretty nice selection here. We can pick a space and get to work with a pretty good handle on the back-office mechanics of the related customer support and marketing duties for a diverse group.
