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.
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