7 Tips to Help You Launch Business Growth Using Content & Generosity

Published by: Tim Thomason
Thomason Media Group/Atlanta

In  Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition, Michael Stelzner dismisses traditional marketing messages and pushes the concept of success through giving the gift of great content.

 Stelzner believes people want valuable insight, access to great people and recognition – before they want products and services. Therefore, building trust with your potential customer is more important than your products and services.

 Read on to discover Stelzner’s prescription for growing and marketing your business without employing traditional marketing tactics. He walks the reader through the step-by-step process of growing a business through generosity and cultivation of great content.

1. The Elevation Principle and a Simple Equation - Launch is based on something Stelzner calls the Elevation Principle. Simply put, this principle is the process of meeting the core desires of prospects and customers by helping them solve their basic problems AT NO COST.

 Gifting your prospects with free information, you will earn their trust and they will have a higher likelihood of considering you when they are ready to make a purchase.

 This strategy requires business owners and marketers to rely less on marketing messages that only drive sales. Instead, they are asked to generously solve the problems of their potential customers without asking for anything in return by creating valuable content.

 This is great news for content creators, like myself, who thrive on producing articles that educate their reader base. However, it’s far too easy to get lost in all that content and forget WHO you’re writing for and WHY. Stelzner lays out a detailed plan to help leverage the value of great content in order to grow your business.

Great content + other people – marketing message = growth

2. Your Flight Path to ‘Out of this World’ Results - Using the metaphor of a rocket ship maneuvering through space, Stelzner helps the reader navigate a solid flight path.

 Once you’ve decided to employ the elevation principle, it’s time to refine your ‘vision statement.’ A vision statement is ‘a sentence or 2 that helps keep you focused during moments of uncertainty.’ It should answer the question: Where do I ultimately want my business to be?’

 Your vision statement is something that will help you make decisions and ensure you’re staying on course. It’s not recommended that you rush this part of the process, but work to truly uncover what it is you want out of your business.

 After your vision statement has been completed, it’s time to set those SMART goals we’ve all heard so much about.

 SMART Goals:

•  Specific
•  Measurable
•  Attainable
•  Relevant
•  Time-bound (put them on the calendar)

 Stelzner does an excellent job at walking the reader through some examples of setting goals based on a vision statement. He recommends setting up ‘markers’ or key accomplishments that will guide your business along its path to success.

 3. Inspiration Comes in Many Forms and Can Be Fleeting - Stelzner advises finding inspirational role models that inspire you to take your business to new places. These can be individual competitors, brands or any entity that has engaged you with its content.

 Inspirational and engaging content gives you ideas for your own business and these ideas need to be captured.

 Enter the Idea Vault…An idea vault creates a place where ideas live and can be easily fetched. Recommended tools to help you capture your ideas include:

•  Bookmark sites, delicious, etc.
•  Email folders
•  Store on desktop – create folder of PDF’s
•  Physical folders

 4. Secret Sauce = Solving Your Readers’  Problems - Solving your prospects’ problems without asking for anything in return will establish trust and make them LOVE you. Solving their basic problems is an easy concept to understand, but I would argue VERY few businesses actually put this into practice.

 The first question to be answered is WHO are you trying to reach? The more targeted your answer, the easier it is to create valuable content relevant to that group.

 Stelzner lays out detailed information on how to build a profile for your ideal ‘people’ base. He advises considering the following when determining your ideal base:

 Industry focus – Does it make sense to target people in a specific industry?

 Topical interests – Does it make sense to focus on a few specific topics? (Make sure they have longevity.)

 Job title and function – Decide what is the most likely title for your target

 Company size – How big is the company size of your target and how are you quantifying size? Employees, revenue, etc.

 Geography – Should you focus on people in a particular location?

 He then takes it a step further and asks you to answer the following questions:

•  What problems are they facing? Make a list.
•  What is the nature of who you’re trying to reach? (Busy? Seeking new ideas?Skeptical?)
•  How familiar are they with my topic?
•  What are the desires of my user base? What do they really want?

 Once you have created a comprehensive persona or two, you can begin to actually visualize this person and truly uncover how to best meet their needs with your content.

 5. Content! Content! Content! - It’s all about content. But not just any content, ENGAGING, COMPELLING, OUTSTANDING content. So how you do you define GREAT content? It should include these essential elements:

•  Highly relevant
•  Educational
•  Easy to digest
•  Visually appealing
•  Conversation-igniting
•  Lacks a sales angle

 Stelzner suggests creating an editorial guide and an editorial calendar to help keep you publishing content regularly. An editorial guide should outline the following:

•  For whom are you writing?
•  Length of content
•  Layout and formatting considerations

 He tapped Social Media Examiner’s managing editor, Cindy King, for tips on creating a solid editorial calendar:

•  Publish strongest content on days you have the most readers
•  Look for variety in categories over the week/month
•  Space out multiple authors
•  Be flexible

 Along with these solid tips, working examples are provided to the reader and make creating these important assets fairly painless.

6. Primary Fuel vs. Nuclear Fuel - Getting specific about the content you’ll want to publish, Stelzner categorizes your content into two types: Primary and Nuclear.

 Primary fuel is regularly published, free content that meets the needs of your reader base. The goal of your primary fuel is to help your readers solve their problems so they will become raving fans.

 Stelzner advises that the lifespan of primary fuel is about three days. The types of primary fuel include:

•  How-to articles
•  Expert interviews
•  Reviews
•  News stories
•  Case studies
•  Contrarian stories

 Nuclear fuel is carefully designed content that has a lasting impact on significant numbers of your ideal reader base and possibly experts.

 This type of content has a lifespan easily exceeding that of primary fuel. It can sometimes be relevant for years. Nuclear fuel should always be free and includes:

•  Reports based on surveys
•  White papers
•  Top 10 contests
•  Micro events (webinars, videos, podcasts)

7. Cage Your Marketing Messages, Be Generous and Your Business Will Grow - The insights and advice I have outlined from Stelzner’s book are simply a launching pad for growing your business. If you’re looking to make the complete journey, invest in a copy and read it for yourself. It’s the type of book you’ll find yourself going back to throughout the process of growing a successful business.

 Some may find it difficult to swallow the bitter pill that marketing messages no longer work and need to be scrapped. However, I have experienced how sales-driven content will bring community activity and growth to a screeching halt.

 Today’s landscape requires a different methodology and a paradigm shift away from TAKING to GIVING. I think we can all agree that we admire those who are generous. It’s time to apply that important principle to business.

Thinking Against the Grain

8 Counter-Intuitive Marketing Principles That May Surprise You
By: Tim Thomason, Thomason Media Group/Atlanta


One of the smartest sayings in marketing is this: “Some of the best marketing principles are counter-intuitive.”

Consumers aren’t in need of 1/4 inch drill bits. They’re in need of 1/4 inch holes.

It highlights one of the great truths in marketing — that you should spend more time studying your consumer than studying your product. If you get inside the mind of your consumer, you can understand what it is they’re really buying. And once you’ve done that, you’re home free.


To drive home this point, take this simple test:


People who buy Porsches buy them because:
1. They have 4 valves per cylinder

2. They have longitudinal engine alignment

3. They have a 9:1 compression ratio

4. They make the owner feel sexy


The answer, of course, is number 4. I truly don’t believe anyone ever bought a Porsche for its longitudinal engine alignment. The people at Porsche understand this. Which is why they sell so many Porsches every year.


What are the timeless truths about marketing that every marketing director should know? With that in mind, here’s what I’ve come up with:


There are only 4 reasons people will buy your product/service. They are 1) price 2) service 3) quality 4) exclusivity or some combination of those concepts. Everything else is just a variation of those themes.


Don’t do research on people who buy your product or service. Do research on the people who have considered your product/service, then gone elsewhere. That’s where you’ll find gold.


Your #1 job isn’t to take care of your existing customers. Instead, your #1 job is to acquire new customers. Oh, sure, taking care of existing customers is a very close second. But your #1 job is to get new customers. Otherwise, you’ll be out of business in about 4 to 6 years. Do the math. Seriously. You’ll find it’s true.


The best time to increase customer loyalty is when a customer is dissatisfied with you. This is also counter-intuitive, and it’s also true. If you can take an existing customer who is about to leave and convert them to a happy, fulfilled customer, they’ll often become your biggest advocates.


Don’t compare your company to other companies in your industry. The trick is to compare your company to best-in-class companies in other industries. That’s where you’ll find the new, innovative and growth-producing ideas that make the cash register ring.


You’ll learn more from your failures than you will from your successes. People spend their careers trying not to fail. But if you aren’t failing, it means you’re not trying new things. Remember, Steve Jobs failed at Apple plenty of times before coming back and kicking ass.


The most important order you’ll ever get is the second order. This is a classic principle first mentioned by Bob Stone, the direct marketing guru. Why is the most important order the second one? Because a two-time buyer is at least twice as likely to buy again as a one-time buyer. Treat your second time buyers like royalty. Because they are.


All the research in the world won’t teach you as much as transactional data. Transactional data is the information from people who have actually purchased your product or service. You’d be amazed at how deep it can go.

The Leverage of Leverage

'Creating highly leveraged marketing strategies' seems to be a vastly overused phrase. It's really very simple.


A problem that many business owners face is the challenge to create highly leveraged marketing strategies within their business. We should be focused on areas in the business where we can do the work once and benefit from our work over and over again. That’s the definition of Leverage.

There is gold to be mined in your business simply by systematizing many of your regular, routine processes. It does not require fancy solutions, just the discipline to document your processes, make them repeatable, train your team and require that everyone follow the process. The outcome is a set of business processes that delivers the same consistent level of quality to the customer.

We are going to focus on Marketing Strategies. Why focus here you ask? Here’s the simple answer. If we want to have consistent messaging and exposure for our business, we need to make our marketing efforts repeatable and self-sustaining.

I know this has never happened to you, but let me give you a typical scenario:

A business owner spends a significant amount of time marketing and promoting their business only to be so successful that they land several new customers. Their workload increases and soon they focus the majority of their time on fulfilling their new customers orders. Meanwhile, they are not doing much marketing and promoting. After a short period of time, the business owner looks up to find their business is slowing down, so they go back out and market heavily once again. Again, they secure more business, become overwhelmed and focus on delivering their product or service to the customer. Once again, without the consistent marketing, the new business slows down and they find themselves in a cycle that continues to repeat itself.

Sound familiar? Go ahead, point to someone else you know who lets this happen all the time. Now look at your hand as you are pointing. Count the finger pointing back at you. Yep – there are 4 of them pointing directly to the guilty person! Admit it – we all fall into this trap. I know I am guilt. So what is the fix? Build leverage and systems into your marketing processes!

You have 6-8 strategies that you are using to expand awareness of your business, right? If not, go re-read the article on Lead Generation. Every business should have at least 6-8 marketing strategies in place at all times. This eliminates variability and creates consistency in your messaging.

Now take each of your marketing strategies and ask yourself, how could this marketing strategy work on a consistent basis without my having to personally be involved or engaged in the activity? Come up with 4 or 5 ideas for each strategy. If you are the only one who knows how that particular strategy works, then one of your actions will be to document the step-by-step processes you take to do it. If you consistently do a mailing or run an advertisement, how can you systematize it so that the mailings get sent or the ad gets placed without fail on a regular basis?

In some cases, you may need to involve others on your team or assign the specific activities to someone outside of your business. If you are doing search engine optimization but are relying on your personal skills in this area to accomplish it, ask yourself “Is my time better utilized optimizing my SEO or meeting with prospects and landing new customers?” I often times see business owners who are personally involved in the execution of their marketing strategies rather than focusing their efforts on meeting new prospects and landing new clients. Why? Maybe it’s because it is easier for them to focus on the marketing strategies. Maybe they don’t like doing the “selling”.

You need to determine where your efforts are most optimally used in your business. What is your highest value add. Once you find that, then focus on that and put systems in place to handle the other activities. Businesses that Leverage their Marketing activities are more likely to maintain a consistent flow of new prospects and new customers. Their business growth occurs more predictably than those who turn the marketing faucet on and off as their time and resources allow. Which type of business would you rather have? One that is consistently growing or one that is constantly up and down? Let me guess…

So, time to get after it. Write down your marketing strategies and for each one, come up with 4-5 ideas on how you can continue to do each strategy with you having to personally be involved in them. Document. Delegate. Use your Default Calendar. Create Systems.