David Kelly: Growing Your Business with Zero Marketing Budget
How do you go from $0 to $100,000 in monthly revenue …
… with a $0 marketing budget?
David Kelly will spill the beans on how he did it.
You’ll learn:
- Actionable strategies to build a 7-figure business with ZERO ad budget
- How to validate a product idea … FAST
- GOLDEN email marketing strategies and some of the biggest mistakes marketers make
Growth With Zero Budget and a Small Team is Possible
As the General Manager at SendFox, a business providing free and paid email marketing tools for content creators, David Kelly’s specialty is growing products from zero to seven figures in revenue with limited or no marketing and ad budgets. How does he do it?
People assume you need investor money to grow your business, says David, and that growth needs to happen fast. But that model is often unsustainable. As an entrepreneur, it’s absolutely possible for you to expand your business with a zero-dollar ad or marketing budget and a very small team.
“Because we had zero budget,” David says, speaking about his experience at SendFox, “we saw growth a little slower than we would have if we had dumped a bunch of money into ads. But it’s really important to emphasize that we can build companies without tons of investment money. It is one of the things I was most proud of, and I will continue to champion that.”
Be Very Clear About Who You Are Serving
While businesses never want to alienate people, it is important to pick a target market. It is much easier to build the business if you know who you are serving and why.
At SendFox, David explains, they had a clear vision of who they wanted to serve: The underdogs and the people starting side hustles. Young entrepreneurs and content creators.
These people were not using the established, well-known marketing automation platforms.
Why not?
The reason wasn’t clear at first. But it was clear that this particular audience was looking for an alternative.
Most People Do Not Want a Cheaper Pricing Model - They Want a Solution to Their Problem
SendFox took a while to get off the ground.
A big hypothesis at first was cost was the barrier preventing young entrepreneurs from using the established platforms.
“But the fascinating thing,” David says, “is that most people said no to our cheaper pricing model.”
After this realization, they had to head back to the drawing board. The team had to look at their business objectively to understand why people still weren’t that interested.
And here’s the crux:
“What people pay money for is this: a solution to their problem. And they need to really have a burning need for that solution. Anything else is a waste of time and effort.”
So the secret to how SendFox became successful in two years is:
- They continued to listen to their users and what they needed (which turned out to be a simpler, better tool for content creators); and
- They asked for feedback from the right people.
“From day one, we had an automated sequence set up. The first email someone gets when they sign up for SendFox asks what their number one goal is. And the reason it is phrased this way is because people are very good at telling you what their dreams and goals are.”
This knowledge of people’s goals has been very powerful in forming an understanding of the bigger picture. “From there, we could start to pattern-match, identify what people were saying, and understand what users were asking for.”
This information is the first step of the process.
From there, it’s all about aligning the business goals with those of its customers.
In entrepreneurship, you need to have a long-term view, David says. “I will gladly slow down a company’s growth a little bit if I think this will have more impact down the line.”
Here’s the Number 1 Mistake Businesses Make...
The number one mistake businesses make, David says, is not establishing a clear goal and not attaching a numeric value to this goal. If you know the value of your goal – whether it’s projected revenue, number of conversions, number of sign-ups or number of leads – it becomes a simple math equation.
If you have a clear goal, your team can be clear on the direction everyone is supposed to be going.
It is so easy for young entrepreneurs getting started or launching a new product to focus on hitting all kinds of metrics. But the most important thing is making sure you are solving the right problem to begin with.
Another mistake business owners make when goal setting is that they lose sight of why they started the business in the first place.
“Think about why you started the business,” David says. “Was it to be happier? To make things better, easier and more accessible? To help people? Often we get too analytical about the process, and our heart gets dropped from the equation. We want to make sure we’re bringing our heart into our decisions and empowering the team to keep the business going.”
Valuing Feedback from the Right People
If you’re not getting positive responses, David suggests, ask yourself what can be learned from that. Perhaps you need to tweak or optimize something.
At the same time, you need to know who to listen to.
David believes that people don’t value free things. If you give a product away for free, that customer will still need your time and support. What’s more, David says, those people who take the freebies often don’t give quality feedback. This is because the types of people who use free products differ from those who buy.
This is why David doesn’t believe in giving anything away for free.
“Instead, I reach out to people about a new product and ask them if they or anyone they know might be interested. Remember, as a millennial entrepreneur, to never miss an opportunity for someone to introduce you to a potential customer!”
Confusing Messaging Hampers your Email Marketing Efforts
David notes that one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make in email marketing is confusing messaging. He suggests thinking about two things when creating email marketing material:
- What would I want to hear or read?
- How can I make the copy as simple and effective as possible?
What do you want the end user to feel with that particular email, and how can you accomplish that?
These days we’re so inundated with all kinds of messages. Simple phrasing and short copy are key.
Marketers, David says, tend to overcomplicate things.
The best copy is short and straightforward, and aims to solve a specific problem.
Optimizing Email Marketing
Your email marketing should tie into your key goal for your business, whether it is to drive sales or push for subscribers. Once you know what the goal is, you can focus on the metric for that goal.
Whether it is click rates, unsubscribe rates or anything else, each metric tells a different story. And each can be an important metric or the most important metric, depending on your goal.
So, in summary:
Know your audience.
Be clear on your goal.
Be clear on your metrics.
Then optimize with quality copy to get people to read and engage.
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Find out more about David Kelly and SendFox by visiting sendfox.com.