1. Determine Your Positioning & Stand Out From the Competition
2. Greatest Hits
3. Bright Ideas
4. Under the Hood

If you sell something that could be used by a lot of different customers in a lot of different industries (like Trello), then you are going to have a really hard time getting traction unless you position your offer properly. Today, I’m going to help you solve this problem.

First, let’s define what I mean by positioning. If you are well positioned, it means you offer something that is the best in the world at delivering some kind of value, to a very clearly defined set of customers who care deeply about that value.

See how powerful that is? Now let’s break it down a bit so you can really understand what I’m getting at, and then I’m going to share with you how we are doing this ourselves using Flowster.

Much like Trello, our software could be used by anyone in any industry…but if we marketed it that way, it would be really really hard to get anyone’s attention. So, to help with this, we need to define how the value we deliver (process management software) is relevant to a very clearly defined target audience…and then we have to make sure that they actually care – so they will buy our software.

So how is this done? First, we used cold email to reach out to potential customers in a niche that I know well: eCommerce. While this is a simple concept, it definitely was not easy. In fact, getting people (strangers) to talk to me was REALLY hard.
To start, I sent out 250 emails offering to pay people (eCommerce managers) for their time. I got ONE reply. A the same time, I reached out to past podcast guests that owned D2C brands with the same offer. I got two replies. Ouch.

At this point, I was started to feel extremely frustrated and was wondering how the f**K I was every going to get enough conversations to validate the assumptions I was making about the needs/wants/fears/desires of my target audience.
So now what? Well, if I had an endless pile of money, I would have just started to run ads to landing pages and eventually, I would have bought enough data to get the answers I needed. But that would have been rather expensive and time consuming.

Fortunately, I found an app called Wynter…and my problems were quickly solved. With Wynter, I was able to quickly create a survey and then send it to a very targeted group of recipients; each of whom has volunteered to respond (because they are being compensated by Wynter).

So, for a few hundred bucks, I was able to get clear answers from 5 people in my target niche in just 24 hours. Suffice to say, that was a very good use of a few hundred bucks. Side note; if you don’t think 5 people is enough, you can get 15 responses for $800.

So now that I’ve seen a patter in the responses I have received (6 survey responses and 7 calls that I was eventually able to claw my way to getting), I am well equipped to start running ads to landing pages without feeling like I’m completely flying blind.

Once I have the first round of ad campaigns complete, I’ll look at the data, make some improvements to my ads and offer and then repeat the process. By taking this approach, I’m confident that we are going to significantly increase signups for our software over the next 30 days – and beyond.

Checking my business dashboard wakes me up so much better than a morning cup of coffee.

I am beyond excited to share our content marketing engine with you. Since we implemented it, my life has become a lot easier.

Stefan Lubinski and I discuss how to email split test.

Split testing is what has helped my cold emails receive over 43% open rate over tens of thousands of emails over the last few years.