In the pilot episode of Hitchhiker's, I'll briefly cover who I am and what I do. Plus, I'll let you know what the show is about and what you can hope to learn.
Hope you enjoy!
It is time. We are here. Welcome to the very first episode. Of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Growth Marketing. My name is Mick. I'll be your host. And in this first episode, we're really just going to go through, first of all, who I am, why would you want to listen to anything I have to say? But what the show is going to be about, who it's for, and then ultimately, what you can expect to learn in coming episodes.
So that's what we're going to talk about today. First off, I want to be completely clear. I don't have a huge editing team. In fact, I have no editing any team. It's just me. So, uh, and at least in these first episodes, It's going to be kind of raw, but I think that authenticity can really translate well, uh, because we're talking to, uh, we're going to be talking to small business owners.
So. I want to make sure that I'm clear on that. Like, this is not going to be one of those fancy shows with half a million subscribers. It's, we're bootstrapping – we're bootstrapping a podcast. So just wanted to make that clear upfront. So, first of all, who am I? Um, I worked for power. That's who I'm with now.
I'm the head of growth and partnerships at POWR. We're still a small company, I would say, but in the grand scheme, I suppose that we're really not. We have over 4 million users worldwide. We have a very small marketing team. It's just myself and two others, and we've had to get quite crafty because we have such a small team. We've had to learn how to automate several things. We've had to learn how to do a lot with the little. Where all of our tools are completely free. You only have to pay for them if you upgrade.
So our profit margins are low, so we have to do a lot with a little, and it's really been very eye opening for me. I came from the corporate world. We were spending a million dollars a month. We had a part, a department of over a hundred people. And marketing. And that the net world is quite different. Uh, as you would obviously imagine, so. I came from that.
I had to completely reinvent myself when I came to POWR. I had to figure out how to do things without a huge budget, without a huge team of people to pass things off to. It was up to me. And because of that, even though I've been in marketing for over 20 years, I learned so much about the small things, the little things that you can change and make changes to that.
Maybe just look a little different or sound a little different. Can really resonate. So that's my background. I've been in the business for a very long time. I've spent many years in advertising and media buying. In television. Transitioned over to digital marketing and really never looked back. So it's a little bit about me. Who the show is for.
And what we're going to be talking about, the show is going to be obviously for anyone that is interested in learning about growth marketing. But I plan on speaking directly to the small business owner. And whenever I say small business, I mean two, three people. Maybe it's you and your wife or you and a buddy that are trying to scale a business, and you don't have a lot of money, don't have a lot of resources to look into it and pay for, for that matter. So that's, that's one, then solopreneurs, startups – people that are looking to bring a new product to market. We're going to go into a lot of detail related to how to write a go-to-market strategy, how to get those things in the proper places and worded the correct way. To where you can scale those and then automate a lot of these things.
So you can focus on other things that, that matter more. So. That's kind of what the show shows is going to be about and who it's going to be for. What can you expect to learn? We're going to focus mainly on middle-to-bottom funnel-type things. We're going to be at the buyer intent area is probably where we're going to start.
Unless you want to know more about brand awareness. We can certainly do that. Brand awareness is the most expensive part of marketing and has very little return. It does help down the line, of course, but you spend a lot with little return upfront. So, brand awareness is very difficult to do. If you had, if you don't have a ton of money, so we can discuss that. I'm actually going to put about 50 show titles in the description of things that I've planned on talking about. We'd love to get feedback on it. Those are things of interest, or something that is just not, and you want to hear about other things, but we're going to be talking specifically about buyer intent, purchase decision, and customer loyalty. That's what we're going to spend the majority of time. A lot about lead generation. Lead generation can look very different depending on multiple factors, the type of business, the money that you have.
What's your, how your model is built. So there are a number of things that we'll dig into as it relates to lead generation. We'll go into email marketing, content marketing, and SEO. All of those things, then, of course, we're going to discuss how to better improve conversions, how to improve those conversion rates for the new leads that you get. It all starts at the lead stage.
If you get good qualified leads, your conversion rates are going to go up as a result. So we'll get into that. And then we're going to spend a fair amount of time on retention and customer loyalty. I don't think that this has really been discussed a lot from a marketing perspective because marketing's goal historically has been to get them through the funnel, and then customer support takes over.
That's changed a lot. It's changed a lot. The Internet has changed that a lot, where those that are new customers, you're still being spoken to by those from marketing, because that's where you get brand ambassadors, influencer marketing, user-generated content. All of those, all of those fun things. So we'll spend a lot of time talking about retention and customer loyalty.
I think it's something that is not discussed enough, frankly. And it's been a big, big part of what we've done at POWR is keeping our retention and churn rates very low. Our customers, once they are with us, they stay with us at a very high rate and that's done wonders for us in building our profile organically without having to spend a lot of money.
So those are the main things that we're going to get into in this show.
I'm going to keep this short, wanting to give you kind of the TL;DR of what the show is going to be about.
We'd love to get feedback from anyone to learn more. Please like, comment, subscribe. This is going to be a fun show.
If you're a fan of the book, DON’T PANIC. It's not going to be over your head. I'm going to talk on a very, uh, common level. I will try to do my best, I should say. Not to use lingo and things that you might understand. So anyone can watch the show and get something from it.
Episode two, we're going to start off where we’re going to focus on buyer personas, ideal customer profiles. Everything in marketing starts with who you're speaking to. When I was selling advertising, that was one of the biggest mistakes that I saw people make based on the amount of money that they had. Their target was way too broad. It was, there was no way that they could reach who they wanted to reach with what they had to spend. So the best way to do that is to be more focused on who your ideal customer is. Work on your creative to speak directly to those people. And you're going to make your money go a lot farther.
And in a lot of ways you can actually attract new customers without spending any money at all. So we'll kind of, we're going to dig into ideal customer profiles, buyer personas how to figure those out. How to set up your marketing strategy for them?
And, uh, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. This is going to be fun.
I hope you guys join me for the ride. Looking forward to it. Excited to be a little yellow fish in your ear.
Stay tuned for the next episode. I'm going to try to publish every weekend. So, new episodes should be debuting on Mondays. We're going to be hosting the video podcast on YouTube, and then we're going to be streaming on audio platforms. All of them, Spotify, Apple, Samsung, all of the popular audio sites. So that's the plan. I hope to see you guys again soon. Have a great weekend.