Jacob Warwick

Jacob is a performance driven marketer with 10 years experience working with high growth start ups in Silicon Valley and Fortune 500s. One B2B client doubled their monthly recurring revenue (MRR) in 12 months, another halved their advertising spend without performance loss, and a mobile app saw their user retention climb from 4% to 27%.

He concentrates on enterprise software with funnels longer than 6 months.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Jacob’s success

Concentrate on purpose driven, quality content

Result if you follow the steps in Jacob’s session

Processes will become more efficient. You will begin to reach and engage with more customers. You will learn more about your business and it’s SWOT. You will open doors to more strategic partnerships.

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

I always recommend strategy first. It’s challenging. If you’re a marketer that works in a department at a small business or a mid sized organization and you say to your boss, hey, we need to focus on strategy.

A lot of times you’re going to get pushback and say, well, you’re not doing anything. If you’re doing strategy, right? You’re not marketing to our customers, you’re not getting ROI from building the strategy.

So there’s a lot of expectation setting that you need to have if you work with, if you’re a part of the marketing department, or whether you’re the C level or the owner of your business. Understand that these kinds of things are going to take some time to figure out and manage your expectations accordingly.

So, if you’re in a position where you have the luxury of spending time to develop your strategy and your resources, I totally recommend doing that. But you also need to understand that your business isn’t going to grow while you’re in that phase. You know, unless you know you keep doing your marketing projects that have been working over time.

So if you want to keep growing, you’re going to need to kind of take a step back and you’ll notice your company will plateau a bit. And that’s okay, as long as you’re mindful that’s going to happen in that strategy phase. And you have the expectations that the strategy is going to help us at you know, 10 x or to you know, double our business over time. So that’s an important thing to consider.

The second step is again, applying that strategy. You can have the best go to market strategy in the world and as a, you know, a small business owner, rather than doing your email marketing campaigns that you’ve brilliantly designed in your funnel, so you’ve designed, you get torn off in your QuickBooks or you have to talk to your CPA or you have an employee leave and you have to deal with, it’s just putting out fires everywhere.

And you’ll understand that you have a great marketing strategy, but you’re not actually able to apply it in a way that’s going to benefit your business. So the second step is to concentrate on an actionable way to apply your strategy. And again, this comes back to managing expectations.

You’ve might have built a strategy that says, look, I’m going to engage my audience on Facebook or any social media, that I’m going to get them to my email list, I’m going to put them into this funnel, I’m going to send those leads to my sales team, and you have all of these pieces drawn out in your process.

But you don’t have time to engage the community properly on Facebook, the whole strategy is going to fail if you can’t do it in the proper order and through the right processes.

So the application phase is very important, how you’re going to create your marketing content, and then distribute that to your audience in a manner that you can actually accomplish.

Again, you need to understand the time it takes to do all those processes before you set crazy expectations like oh, we’re going to post on Facebook four times a day. And I’m going to have a dedicated account manager and you need to start slow.

So again, that comes back to that doing everything with a purpose to build out that one kind of key workflow for your marketing. Understand how it works, and then try to make it a little bit better next time before trying to do it four times in a row. So that’s where applying things is very important.

The third step is called performance. And this is where you’re really measuring your actions, making sure that they’re taking care of your business needs and then optimizing it and this comes back to your processes as well, your content creation and distribution processes.

How can you make that better? For example, if you’re working with copywriters and you have a graphic designer on contract, there’s a lot of communication that goes on between the graphic designer, your copywriter, maybe an editor, those are all areas that can be optimized. So that rather than it taking a week to get an article out, you can create a system. So it only takes three days, or it only takes a day.

And this is where optimization really comes in and where your business starts to make more money, the first time you go through the entire marketing process is going to be the most expensive time you do it.

And then the optimal goal is to make it a little bit cheaper, make it a little more effective, cheaper, effective, so you’re really driving your efficiency. And I do this a lot with freelancers where you might say I need an article on my business for a publication, that I’m going to send to this pretty vague request.

So what I like to do is create a process create guidelines. This is what I want, 600 to 800 words. That’s going to eliminate the question of the freelancer coming back in email saying how long do you want it to be?

So that eliminates an email. I want the tone to be casual and conversational. That eliminates a possible question. Here’s a link to all the image assets you can use. That eliminates having to go through and have a freelancer come back with Google images that you can use for your business.

So you outline exactly what you want, how you want them to accomplish it, it’s a lot of extra work up front. And this is again, going to go back to your strategy and planning, process, development, things like that. But the more you can eliminate and think ahead of those pain points and those challenges you’re going to get while executing your plan, the further optimize everything’s going to be, the more effective and efficient you’ll be at creating your marketing strategy.

So once you get to that point, and you start optimizing the workflows that you’ve done, and start seeing how that plays a bigger part of your marketing strategy, that’s when you can start thinking about, okay, now I can do two of these instead of one.

Now that I’ve worked through the process entirely, I’m going to do this better. And now that instead of taking five days, it takes two and a half. I can do two and a week and double my life.

Efficiency without having to raise costs. So that’s something you always need to be aware of. And it’s inherently complicated at even the small business level. But it only grows in complexity as your business grows.