Hi, everyone, and welcome back to things out
loud. I'm Tim Peter.
I had the pleasure earlier this week. Of
speaking to a group of hotel marketers
about how they could improve their customer acquisition
and the role that things like social media.
Play in that process.
And it reminded me of a discussion we
had here on the podcast earlier this year
all around how you can bundle and un
bundle the various offerings
that are available to your customers,
how you can bundle and un bundle the
channels that worked together to reach your customers
and use that to acquire customers more effectively
and more efficiently.
So I hope you'll enjoy this repo of
a prior episode that looks at bundling un
bundling in customer acquisition. Headed your way right
now.
Welcome. Think so. Cloud, more sourced from
Well, hello again, everyone and welcome back to
things out loud. Your source for all the
digital expertise, your business needs.
My name is Tim Peter. This is episode
410
of the big show, and I think we've
got a really cool episode for you today.
You know, 1 of the things
that I think about a lot.
What we do here, what what my firm
does what I try to do what my
team tries to do is we try to
help our clients lower the cost of acquiring
customers.
Fundamentally,
that's what we do.
It's so important to me that I'm writing
a book about it.
But we try to help clients get more
customers
for less money. That could be by helping
with marketing. It could be by helping with
customer experience,
it could be by helping with their tech
stack,
and we do this for companies in hospitality
or travel or Saas or
technology
or financial services, what have you? You know
lots of different things.
When I talk about e commerce
or
Ai, which we've done in lots of recent
shows or email like last week's show Or
what have you?
It's always
coming from a place of lowering that cost
of finding and connecting with customers, fundamentally
you've heard me say this a lot. You
know this Peter Dr quote that the first
job of business is to create a customer.
And if we're not doing that, if we're
not helping our clients do that if we're
not helping you do that
on this show,
then we're not doing our jobs.
Now of course, what are my favorite ways
to do that is by keeping an eye
on various,
trends that matter that are either going to
raise the cost of acquiring customers for you
or going to lower your costs if you
put them to work the right way. I
mean, that's why I'm so hot on the
Ai lately.
And there is a big trend
that's going on right at the moment
that gets overlooked a lot. By me as
much as anyone, I should add.
And my
epiphany on this. My realization on this came
from a conversation. I was having with my
friend Mark Sc for last week. Mark is
a great guy big thinker, super super smart
dude has written... I don't know. 787
books or something like that
He's just the the best guy and a
really, really smart dude.
And he is
rightly
a big proponent of community.
Of user generated content and of creators
and influencers
in terms of their ability to help you
reach your customers
and in the case of community of having
customers
help you reach more customers, help customers help
themselves.
And create greater experience.
His new book called belonging to the brand.
His most recent book.
Is well worth the read of that very
topic.
And as much as he loves
creators and influencers, and I do too. I
think they're tremendous tremendous source. For you.
He mentioned a limitation that exists among them,
which is burnout
for I've seen a bunch of folks I
follow on Youtube in just the last few
weeks, dedicate
entire episodes to the topic. He's talked he
was talking about in our conversation about people
who just get set up and can't do
it anymore.
And if you think about it, how many
television shows had amazing runs for their entire
history? How many film sequels were as good
as the original?
Not many. Right? It's tough to sustained creativity.
And what you're starting to see more of,
and I think somebody like mister Beast would
be a good example of this, though there
are countless others,
are creators who are becoming production companies. Somebody
these aren't solo
operators or solo. They have an entire crew
and company
where they're consolidating efforts. They're bringing people together,
to, you know, make the work
easier.
And that really is the larger trend that
I wanna talk about. This idea of bringing
things together.
And the weird part is I'm not gonna
just talk about bringing them together. I'm gonna
talk about bringing them together and splitting them
apart.
Jim Bark who was 1 of the founders
of Nets scape back in the day with
Mark and Theresa and and Jim Clark,
Famously said there are only 2 business models,
bundling
the un
and un
the bundles.
Right? If you think about the number of
businesses out there that have been the successful.
They're always either splitting off some feature or
function from another business or they're taking a
bunch of features and functions and putting them
together.
You know,
Craigslist un bundle classified ads from newspapers. And
in fact, if you think about lots of
services,
they're just, like little things that used to
be in newspapers. Right?
Instagram un unbelievable the photo sharing.
Functionality
from Facebook originally.
On the bundling side Youtube bundled videos
from everywhere. They became the place where you
could get everything.
Amazon bundled
purchasing instead of going 12 different stores. You
can just go to Amazon and get everything.
Linkedin sort of un bundled your business contacts
from, you know, wherever else you might have
had them. Right? They're just different ideas of
this idea of bundling or un bundling. Or
if you prefer
integration and d
integration.
We're talking about ways you split apart the,
you know, the place that you go or
you you bring different places you go into
1.
And the reason I bring this up is
because this has a lot of
effect on what's gonna to happen with your
marketing and what's going to happen on the
way you use digital to reach your cusp
numbers, see bringing this back around to where
I started today.
I believe I have long belief, and I
think most people would agree numbers the best
form of marketing is was and always healthy
word of.
It's why I all the way to say
that customer experience is queen.
Your customers are your secret Salesforce
every single person who you interact with has
roughly 200
friends and family and fans and followers
on various social networks on various social
connections.
They they tell your bells friends and family
and fans and followers, all about your products
and services.
They sometimes do this when they have a
good experience,
and they always do this or pretty much
always do this when they have a bad
experience.
That's kind of how people are wired, they
talk to what's going on in their lives
with their social network.
And 1 of the things you have to
remember is that social networks
are not
a technology
platform.
Social networks are people.
Social
is people.
We call
Meta and Facebook and threads and
Instagram and Tiktok and Linkedin and dis cord
and snap,
social networks,
but they're not
they're platforms
that connect
people with their actual social network with the
people they care about.
They're still incredibly important as platforms,
because their where word of
happens
a ton of the time.
Not much maybe as when you're talking to
people at dinner or you're talking to people
at a club or you're talking to people
at a company meeting, but they talk as
to all their friends and family and fans
and followers of those platforms.
And, of course, influencers and creators
are a form of word at least to
a point. Obviously,
most of what they're talking about is not
your business or not the companies they partner
with
but some of the time they do, so
they're providing word mouth opportunities for you.
Community is a form of word math. You
know, my friend Mark Sc
thing that he's beating the drum about so
so rightly lately.
It's also if you think about it, a
form of un.
And this gets really important when we talk
about, you know, burnout among creators and the
like.
Because what community is doing is it's moving
the creation from a bundled point, the creator
or the influencer or the brand
to an un
group.
The community,
its user generated content at scale where the
content may just be the conversation that's happening
among the people in that community.
The point is that we see this
continual pendulum
of bundling and un of
integration and dis
integration,
and we're kind of going through a period
right now where that's occurring. We're moving
from what's seemed to be more of a
centralized
activity where the brand or the influencer or
the creator
was the centralized
point
it's starting to
un bundle it starting to disintegrate
a little bit.
I think we are in the early days
of an un
period.
People want to engage with their social networks.
Privately
more than they did. They don't want 1
place where people can go and see everything
about them. They're trying to
they're trying to keep different groups of people
separate from 1 another.
Jeff Jarvis once referred to the difference between
the public
and a public. They're okay with sharing information
with a select group of people, but maybe
they don't want it shared with the world
And if you look at things like subs
or discord, those are more private
communities or more private ways of sharing,
that again are
sort of an un
sort of subs a weird 1 because it's
bundling all these un
creators
and bringing them into 1 place. So, you
know, the pendulum doesn't have to just move
in 1 direction at any given time. I
sort I suppose it's sort of, like, sc
yours pendulum it's it depends on how you
look at it at any given point.
But
a, some stack,
subscription or discord or things like that. Those
are more private.
And your audiences are getting more discreet, more
fragmented
and maybe a little more private so we're
having a little more dis integration going on
a little more un bundling going on.
The point is that the way you get
your message out
changes. It changes constantly, and it is in
this constant state of flux between a bundled
situation and an un bundled
situation.
And what you need to be thinking about
is how do you work in an environment
in a fragmented that environment in an un
unbelievable environment
or in a bundled 1 that may later
become un unbelievable and be prepared for it,
You know, work well in that environment.
And there's a handful of things you need
to do. And the great thing
is that these are things we've talked about
before. The strategies don't change that much. The
tactics might change a lot, but the strategies
don't change tons.
The first is you need to connect with
your customers directly. You need to build
relationships with your customers. Wherever you build them,
whether you build them in your email list,
whether you build them in a community, whether
you build them through partnerships, whether you build
them from getting people to use your app,
it's about connecting with customers directly.
And you need to have quality
content
to do that. You need to be a
trusted resource that your customers can go to
for at least some of their questions.
Right? So think in terms of quality content
that addresses their needs. So there's a reason
why I say content is king.
You also don't need to be the only
people who create that content.
Real,
partnerships with creators that matter to your customers
can be super effective as a form of
content.
And when I say real partnerships, I mean,
partner with people whose audience
are your customers.
Build
relationships with those creators communities.
This shouldn't just be about paid placement.
A, it raises your cost, so let's not
do that. Shall we?
B,
you'll look like an outsider. You'll look in.
And see,
you don't really become of the community.
Makes it less likely that the people you're
interacting with are people who actually want to
interact with you. This should be a mutually
benefit... Official
relationship.
At the same time, we should realize that
some of these folks you're working with might
burn out. They might
find things that they're are more interesting than
what they're talking about. They may evolve over
time. So you don't wanna put all your
eggs and that 1 basket.
You should make sure you're working with an
array of creators, not necessarily 50 or a
hundred or 200,
but a set that makes sense to the
scale of your business that you can work
with effectively a manage. If you're working with
1 creator, that's probably not enough.
If you're working with a hundred thousand,
you've got a bigger budget than most people
and congratulations. That's fantastic.
Right? But it's... It's finding the scale that
fits your needs without relying solely on a
single creator.
You also wanna think about the hub and
spoke model that we've talked about lots of
times. You need a hub where all your
content can be found can be addressed. That's
your website. That's your email. That's your app.
It could be a community that you create.
And that you run on behalf of your
customers.
With the caveat that, of course, the minute
you have a community,
it belongs to the community as much as
it belongs to you. So that one's, you
know, a hub, but it may not be
the most central part of your hub to
because you don't have as much control there
as you would like to, or you may
want to in certain cases.
But you wanna have those hubs available to
you And then the spokes are
using channels like Youtube, using channels like subs
stack, using creators who you partner with using
channels like
Instagram or, or,
Linkedin if you're a b to b company
to connect with customers where they are. The
point once again is not to be disintegrate
if 1 of those goes away, but to
we have an array of these spokes that
you're using
that enable you to connect with customers where
they are and not be dependent on anyone
should choose smart kids in a garage come
along and blow 1 of them up. 1
of these days is, you gonna, make it
go away.
And then the last core strategy that matters
here is this idea of core and explore
that we've talked about plenty of times here.
You know, as I talk about this, it
can be easy to get a little overwhelmed
and say, well, that's too many things. How
do I do all of that?
And the answer is you don't. And I
mean, you start
by putting 80 percent of your efforts or
90 percent of the your efforts. On the
things that you know work and that continue
to work well for you and you put
most of your effort, most of your time,
most of your money, most of your resources
into the core
into the items that have proven successful for
you again and again and again.
And then with the 10 or 20 percent
that you have left over, you test.
So you test with a creator. You test
with a new channel. You test with a
community that you join.
Maybe don't start your own, Maybe join someone
else's as a genuine member of that community.
But these are tests. To see if they
work to see if you gain any traction.
If you find you're not getting any traction,
you either change what you're doing or you
change where you're doing it.
Just change the 1 thing and then see
what happens there.
But that's the explore part because you're going
to find some of those tests don't work.
And some of those tests are gonna work
really well, for you and may eventually become
part of your core because they outperform something
that is in the core for That's okay.
That's normal. That's why you do it this
way.
The point to remember there is that the
way you reach customers,
continually changes, the way customers want you to
reach them,
continually changes.
And if you continue to always do what
you've always done.
You may be, you know, you may be
sadly surprised to learn that it doesn't work
as well over. Time,
which is why you have to continually be
testing for new opportunities.
So
integration and dis integration, bundling and un bundling
is a reality in the digital world is
a reality in the business world, it's been
a reality
forever
and it's unlikely a change.
What we know is true is that customers
still want to connect with trusted
individuals and trusted brands on the topics that
a matter to them, and be your relevant
resource for.
So work to connect cut... Directly with customers
work to create quality content that addresses their
needs.
Remember that content is king and customer experiences
queen. So create great experiences that turn your
secret salesforce
into influencers and creators on behalf of your
brand in their social networks and in their
communities
regardless of whether those happen online or offline.
Think in terms of real partnerships with creators
that matter to your customers,
whether they're in your customers themselves or whether
there people who create content.
Keep hub and spoke, top of mind for
how you do what you do.
Make sure you've got a hub that you
people can always find the content and community
and customer experience, that matter to them and
also
using different spokes to reach customers in all
of the various places that they are.
And then lastly,
core and explore, focus most of your energies
all the areas that at work today.
And test 10 to 20 percent of the
time on new things that will help your
business in the longer term as we live
through this pendulum swing between bundling and un
or integration and dis integration over time.
Because the 1 thing I will tell you
is that's a huge trend that we've seen
again and again and again. It's not going
away anytime soon. It's gonna come back again
and again and again, and you wanna make
sure that whether it's in a bundle or
whether it's un bundle.
People know where to find you. Your customers
know where to find you. And if you
do that consistently,
then you're going to continue to be able
to acquire customers
without raising your costs over the long run.
And that's really the first job as we
said at the beginning, your job is to
create a customer and do it in a
way that's profitable to you.
The only thing I want you to do
is do it in a way that it
works whether it's bundled or un bundled.
Put those pieces together properly for your business,
and I guarantee you'll be just fine whether
it's an integrated solution or a integrated solution.
Whether the creators you like burnout or whether
you find new ones altogether.
In any case, you'll be creating customers who'll
be happy to work with you for years
to come.
Let me know how you're make out. I
can't wait to hear what you do.
Now looking at the clock on the wall,
we are out of time for this week.
I want to remind you that you can
find the show notes for this episode as
well as an archive of all past episodes
by going to tim Peter dot com slash
podcast.
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