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.
Transcripts
Angela Frank:
Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today we're checking in one on one to explore the power of marketing MVPs. I'm your host, Angela Frank.
ollar revenue for clients. In:
On The Growth Pod, I, along with some of the coolest experts in business, share tips designed to help you build a business you love. 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. So what are MVPs?
If you're not entrenched in startup culture, this may be a new concept to you, but it simply means minimum viable product.
It's the concept that if you're launching something, you should launch with the most simple or minimal version of the product and then work to improve it over time, incorporating customer feedback to make your product even better than you thought it could be. And today I want to talk about using this concept of the MVP and explore how we can apply it to what we're doing when marketing our businesses.
I think it's really easy to fall into this trap of, okay, here's what I'm going to do. Here are all of the things that I need to make it perfect.
And oh no, now I'm overwhelmed or I'm going to procrastinate by working on something easier or more menial and avoid this altogether. So to take a real life example, maybe you listen to our episode with Tanya Brody about why you need to be emailing your list more often.
And then after that you listen to Sean Tepper's episode where he mentioned that his nurture sequence is like super long. And so now you're thinking, okay, we need to be emailing our list more and we need a welcome sequence.
And I want it to be really long because that's working for Sean and I think it could work for us too. And so you start mapping everything out and not only is there copywriting, but there's automation.
Angela Frank:
And are you going to do this.
Angela Frank:
Or who on your team can help with this? And now there's meetings and opinions from your team and now it's a whole thing. And that's really just using email as an example.
But it's easy to see how ads, SEO, website updates, or really whatever marketing you've got on your plate, it could just as easily be swapped in for email in that example. So instead, what I want you to do is think about your marketing.
Anything you're launching or when you're updating your existing marketing ecosystem, I want you to start with this concept of the mvp. Going back to the email example, maybe your goal is to increase your frequency.
Angela Frank:
But also you want to set up a welcome sequence.
Angela Frank:
That's a pretty great goal. And let's say currently you're emailing your list once a month and you have no email sequence.
Angela Frank:
So if your goal is to increase.
Angela Frank:
Your frequency and you're emailing your list once a month, it would be a.
Angela Frank:
Huge win just to start emailing your.
Angela Frank:
List twice a month or every other week. Then after that feels comfortable, you could step it up to once a week.
Angela Frank:
And eventually twice per week or every day or whatever seems to work best for your audience.
Angela Frank:
And the same thing with your welcome sequence. Maybe start by automating just one email.
Angela Frank:
So when somebody joins your list, they receive a hey, welcome to the list. This is what you can expect.
Angela Frank:
And then next time you sit down.
Angela Frank:
To write your newsletter, maybe you decide you want to add a second step to your welcome sequence.
Angela Frank:
The next week, the third step. And I think this is the exact.
Angela Frank:
Opposite of what most people recommend, which is batch working. You hear a lot online, oh, I.
Angela Frank:
Sat down and wrote all of my emails for the entire year.
Angela Frank:
And you're like, wow, I'd love to have all my emails written for the entire year. That sounds really cool.
And so I think it can really easily become this huge task in your head where now instead of just getting something done, which would take 10 or 15 minutes, which is write an email and then a couple weeks later, write another email. Now you need a whole day, four or five hours to sit down and write all of your emails for the year. And here's the thing, batch working is great.
Maybe in January you have that time and you want to get all your emails written. That's awesome.
Angela Frank:
But what you've got to do before.
Angela Frank:
You start batch working is understand what works for your business. That is the most important thing to know before you sit down to batch something.
And it could be your emails, your ad, creative, social posts, whatever. You shouldn't be batching at the start when you're launching something new. So instead, when you use this model of the mvp, not only can you.
Angela Frank:
Launch quicker, but once you launch, you're.
Angela Frank:
Able to get learnings quicker and then you're able to use that feedback from your learnings to start improving your marketing quicker. So if you go from one email a month to two a month, well now you have double your learning and you can start testing and iterating.
And then when you double that and you go to once a week, your.
Angela Frank:
Learnings are through the roof.
Angela Frank:
And because you haven't sat down to batch your content in advance, you're able to take and now the next time you sit down to write an email, you can take everything you've learned and make it better. And the same with social posts, everything that I mentioned earlier.
Angela Frank:
And so this continual feedback creates a.
Angela Frank:
Flywheel that actually helps your business surpass your competitors. It's like what Michelle McCarthy was saying when she was talking about the need to put in the work on your personal brand upfront.
She mentioned that it seems like putting in all of this work takes longer, but actually you're able to slingshot past your competition after you've taken the time to get things right. And the exact same goes for anything you're doing in your marketing, not just building a personal brand.
If you take the time to really tinker, experiment and learn what works for your brand from the start, you're able to actually implement the things that you're learning and build a much stronger marketing ecosystem for your business and surpass your competitors.
Angela Frank:
And since we've been talking a lot about building an email list, I'd love.
Angela Frank:
To remind you that you can always join mine by clicking the link in the description. I send out business building tips every.
Angela Frank:
Week as well as a podcast roundup.
Angela Frank:
So you don't miss a single episode.
Angela Frank:
Thank you so much for listening to.
Angela Frank:
This episode of The Growth Pod. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.
