3 Pillars of Marketing
(with Andy Buyting)
Andy Buyting is a serial entrepreneur and a bestselling author of three books. Through his company, Tulip Media Group, Andy and his team of marketing specialists help to fuel the revenue growth of numerous companies across North America.
In today’s episode, we’re going to dive into Andy’s book, How to Win Clients and Influence People, in which we will go over the three pillars of marketing. We’ll also discuss his book Double Sales. Zero Sales People, and how we can increase sales without a sales team.
Key Takeaways
We will cover the following key takeaways:
- Andy’s three pillars of marketing are: digital marketing, print marketing and interactive marketing.
- Digital marketing is the highway to quickly getting your message out to the world.
- Messaging in print gives you more credibility.
- Interactive marketing puts a face to our brand so we can better communicate emotion and intent.
- Instead of looking at sales and marketing as two different systems, we should look at them as one business development system.
- Instead of trying to reach everyone, we should focus our marketing efforts on just our key customers.
3 Pillars of Marketing
First, we’re going to review How to Win Clients & Influence People, where Andy shares a new approach to business development leveraging online marketing and sales strategies.
In his book, he discusses the three pillars of marketing (the three ways to reach our customers): digital marketing, print marketing and interactive marketing. Andy believes that for a really effective marketing strategy, we need to have all three and each of these pillars should work together as a system.
“When you put messaging out . . . have one specific message,” Andy said. “[If] people come into your store and they talk to your salespeople [and] they’re hearing a slightly different message, you really lose credibility. Those three pillars need to work succinctly and with the same messaging.”
The messaging of our sales team should be similar to our messaging on our social media, which should be similar to our messaging in a magazine, etc. Without this alignment, our customers will get confused and won’t progress on their customer journey in the way we intend them to.
1. Digital Marketing
Digital marketing helps us get content and messaging out fast. Not only can we post in a matter of seconds, we can also reach people from across the globe in seconds. It is the highway to quickly get your message out to the world.
The challenge is that digital has a short shelf life. For example, a social media post will only appear on a customer’s news feed when it is most timely, then it will disappear. The viewer can also choose to keep scrolling and miss the post entirely.
“[If] somebody’s scrolling through their feed and they see that they don’t have time to read [a post], how often do you go back and read that? Our answers usually never,” Adny said. “Digital is great to keep top of mind, but it does have a very short shelf life.”
2. Print Marketing
One of the reasons Andy is such a big fan of print marketing is that, unlike digital, it has a very long shelf life. Whether we write a book, an article in a magazine, or mail out a printed newsletter, our customers will likely spend more time with it than an online post.
Andy explained that studies have shown that when introduced to business concepts, 84% of readers would rather receive it in print than in digital format. Studies have also shown that print is more believable to many readers.
“Having your messaging in print gives you more credibility,” Andy said. “If you see an article online versus . . . see[ing] the same article in print, the print will have more credibility. The print is more believable.”
Anyone can publish something online. You don’t have to be credible. However, publishing in print takes more time. Often you have to go through multiple editors and a publisher before you move to print. This “time cost” automatically gives us credibility with our customers, even before they sit down to read.
We can also print our content in someone else’s publication. When we do this, we can inherit some of the credibility from the owner. For example, if we are in the insurance agency, we could publish an article in an insurance trade magazine. “By doing that, that magazine is recognizing you as an expert, and is giving you a ton of credibility,” Andy said.
While we see new organizations going out of business and magazines discontinuing their print publications and moving online, print is still very valuable and valid as a marketing method. Many people still prefer to read print and that is evident with the increase of print book purchases while Kindle books or ebooks remain somewhat flat.
Joe Polish from the Genius Network sends out more letters now in envelopes than ever before because, he said, the most uncluttered inbox you have is the one in the front of your house.
In saying this, it’s important to note that we can repurpose content. We don’t have to avoid digital content and only do print. We can and should do both. We can even publish the same article online and in print. To do this, we simply need to write print content that is keyword optimized as well.
3. Interactive Marketing
The third pillar is interactive marketing. Anytime we are conversing with a customer, this is interactive marketing, whether it is a sales member or a customer service representative. This can even include video.
Interactive marketing is so important because it puts a face to our brand. When we talk with our customers in person or in video, we can better communicate emotion and intent. Customers are much more likely to buy from a person than a company so it is essential we interact with our customers and build relationships through methods beyond digital and print content.
Again, we have to remember that all of our marketing messages are aligned. We should make sure our sales messaging is the same as our messaging in digital and print. In the next section, we’re going to go into how we can use interactive marketing without a sales team.
Marketing with Zero Sales People
The second book we’re going to dive into is Double Sales. Zero Sales People, where Andy shares how we can build a “sales machine” and acquire and retain more customers.
The Sales Machine
One of the biggest problems companies have is a marketing and sales team that isn’t aligned. This can cause miscommunication within our organization and with our customers. Instead of looking at sales and marketing as two different systems, we should look at them as one development system.
“What is that customer journey from the first moment they have any interaction with your company to when you actually close that sale?” Andy said. “Look at it and break it down into a process. What is that process? I lay out our own process to the Media Group [and] it’s an eight step process.”
Andy likes to think of the business process as a business development “assembly line”. We can break down each task we complete within the customer journey and turn them into steps. What tasks do we complete? The first step is likely to build awareness and attract our customers. Maybe that is an intro call or a demo. Then, we might launch an email marketing campaign, etc.
Once we have our steps broken down we can ask, what skills do we need at each “station” or each step? We should match our employees and team members with the right skill sets to the right stations. With a clear system in place, we can begin to eliminate unnecessary processes. We will want to ask, what can we automate?
In Andy’s eight step process, he was able to automate the first half of his assembly line with digital marketing and effective conversion strategies. He also found that their production people actually did a better job at selling than their sales team. So, he eliminated the sales team.
“If you look at your business development process and the customer journey as an assembly line with different stations, then match up the right people at the right stations where you’re getting high value for the time that you’re you’re paying, . . . it makes the whole thing run much smoother, . . . faster, and much more successful.”
Making a Sale Without the Sales Team
After Andy’s team cut their entire sales department, they still met the same sales quota for the next quarter. Then, they tripled their quota in the following quarter with zero sales people.
He explained, “We leveraged digital marketing strategies to replace old fashioned sales processes. We went from cold calling hundreds of [people] . . . a day to zero chasing.” He continued, “We use automated online marketing strategies and conversion strategies and so instead of chasing 300 leads for the seven qualified ones, we’re just dealing with the seven qualified ones because they’ve come to us now.”
Instead of trying to reach everyone, they focused their marketing efforts on just their key customers. Instead of cold calling 300, they used digital strategies to attract the interested seven leads.
We should focus on developing and nurturing the customer relationship as much as we can and we likely don’t need a sales team to do this. If we run strong digital, print, and interactive marketing strategies, the right customers will come to us when they’re ready. We won’t need a sales team to sell the product because they will already be sold.
Connect with Andy
Thank you so much Andy for sharing your stories and insights with us today. To learn more about or connect with Andy:
- Visit his blog at TulipMediaGroup.com
- Check out his books on Amazon
Next Steps
- Get a free ebook about passion marketing, and learn how to become a top priority of your ideal customers at PassionMarketing.com.
- Subscribe to Monetization Nation on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, our Facebook Group, and on your favorite podcast platform.
