We chat a lot about the power of a marketing ecosystem on this podcast. But what does one look like in practice? In this episode, Angela takes you step-by-step through a real-world example of implementing a marketing ecosystem.
Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.
Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.
Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.
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Transcripts
Angela Frank:
Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today we're checking in one on one to share how you can leverage marketing ecosystems to create profitable marketing strategies for your business.
I'm your host, Angela Frank. I'm a fractional CMO and founder with a track record of generating multimillion dollar revenue for clients.
In:
So if you're like me and you love learning about how to grow your business more efficiently, you've come to the right place. Recently, I was asked to share a little bit more about the best marketing that I've ever done.
I think that when most marketers are asked about the best marketing they've done, they try to think of this super growth hacky example where they had this moment of genius and ended up getting like a thousand percent roi. And while that's incredibly valid, I think it misses a lot of the things that make a marketing department really run profitably.
So my best marketing and the marketing that I'm most proud of comes when I get back to the basics and create something that works not only in one business, but across multiple businesses in different industries and niches and product offerings. And that is the marketing ecosystem.
A marketing ecosystem is a strategy where you make sure that all of your channels are working together to create a profitable marketing strategy.
And when you're making sure that all of your channels are working together, together you're actually able to create something that's greater than the sum of its parts. So let's use a real world example of this.
A few years ago, I did some work for a fitness company where the marketing and sales initiatives were very disjointed.
They were sending ad hoc emails, they were spending money on Google Ads, they heard that they should be blogging, so they were launching a blog and nothing really had a rhyme or a reason to it. So the first thing that I did was assess the current state of all the marketing channels. And my goal there was to identify two things.
One, where are the greatest opportunities for this company when it comes to marketing? And I define this as where the most profitable marketing channels are hiding.
And two, where is this company currently overspending on their marketing? Because most companies that haven't assessed their strategy are overspending somewhere. Immediately, two things became abundantly clear.
One, the Google Ads that they were running were actually not profitable and had not been for years. They had an agency that was essentially manipulating the data and had been lying about the performance for years.
And this business had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on their ads being not profitable. Major bummer. The second thing was that the largest area of opportunity for this company was email, and specifically by leveraging email automation.
So to action on these two items, I recommended that we cut back on Google Ads and diversify some of that spend into other ad advertising channels.
More importantly, we were able to take a portion of that budget and use it to set up an email automation for their abandoned cart sequence, which started generating over $10,000 a month on autopilot, essentially creating an extra $120,000 per year in revenue that the business was just leaving on the table. It was money that people were willing to spend, clearly, because we turned it on and it started generating revenue.
And maybe 10k doesn't seem like a lot to you in your business, but what we did is we used this concept of the mvp, which I've talked about before, and launched with the most minimal version of this abandoned cart sequence.
It was literally three emails that auto populated the product that they had left in their cart, and the final email had a coupon in it, and that was it. And it generated $120,000 a year in business from nothing.
So the other thing that's important to mention here is the importance of the website in all this and really the reason that this worked so well. This fitness company actually had two brands. One where the website was really optimized.
It had everything that it needed for us to begin creating the ecosystem around, and the other did not. And so we ended up launching this abandoned cart sequence in the one obviously that was ready to go.
So if we had launched this email sequence with the other brand, with the unoptimized website, it sure it would have generated some money, but it really needed a lot more work on the website before we could launch with an MVP version of the abandoned cart sequence and see the same type of success as with their other brand. Now, it can definitely be a challenge to take a step back and prioritize getting the basics right in your marketing strategy.
There's so much that goes on in marketing, and it can be really easy to get shiny objects syndrome and constantly chase the next new thing that's promising growth. But in reality, the fundamental aspects of marketing never change. And those are the ones worth getting right in your business.
Not only is it worth getting right, but those are the ones that drive profitability and growth. When you start implementing them in your marketing strategy. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Growth Pod.
