Growing your business consistently

In today’s blog, we’ll explore how to consistently grow your business using a combination of passive and active marketing. Contrary to popular belief, neither approach is inherently superior; both have their strengths, but they require different approaches. The key is consistency.

So, let’s get into it.

Whether you’re selling a physical product or service, offering e-commerce solutions, providing Software as a Service products, teaching courses, or selling books, consistent marketing is crucial. Many entrepreneurs launch their businesses with a grand launch event and then neglect marketing efforts. However, marketing is an ongoing process that requires daily attention.

Just as brushing your teeth and taking a shower are essential daily routines, marketing is a necessary part of running a successful business. As you progress in your entrepreneurial journey, it’s important to shift your focus from working harder to working smarter.

The most valuable thing in life and business is time. Money can come and go, you can make more of it but time is finite and you can’t get more once it’s gone so we need to be smart when using it.

Every action you take in your business will have a different impact. Some strategies will yield significant results, while others may seem less impactful. However, some are essential for maintaining traffic and growth.

To begin, let’s define passive and active marketing.

Active marketing involves any marketing activity that requires your physical presence and immediate involvement. On the other hand, passive marketing involves strategies that generate results without your constant direct involvement.

So, here are some examples of active marketing: speaking on stage at an event, sponsoring an event, running a live webinar, etc. With all these initiatives, you’re required to allocate a specific amount of time for each one.

When you’re not actively engaged in these activities, you won’t see the desired results. For instance, if you’re not on stage speaking at an event, you won’t reap the benefits of your efforts. Similarly, if you’re not a sponsor at an event, you won’t experience the advantages of your involvement.

The same applies to other platforms like live webinars, and going live on Facebook or YouTube. I’m not suggesting that active marketing is a bad idea; in fact, it’s quite powerful and can help you make strong connections and close more deals. However, it’s essential to approach it strategically. I’ll delve deeper into this in a moment, but let’s first discuss passive marketing.

So, what is passive marketing? Such things like writing a blog. Once you’ve written it, you can publish it and continue to reap its benefits for years to come. People can read your post anytime, anywhere, from today to next year. An email automation campaign is another example of passive marketing.

When someone signs up for your newsletter, they receive a series of emails based on their actions. This email sequence continues to work even if you’re not present to provide live support. Automated webinars are another passive marketing strategy. When someone signs up for your webinar, they watch it, receive the benefits, and see the offer. You can close a sale even if you’re not there to assist them.

Does this mean passive marketing is the best marketing approach? It’s certainly effective and has its place. It can help you tremendously, especially bringing in more business whilst you’re sleeping but it’s not going to the the silver bullet to your business growth problems.

But if I’m comparing one marketing activity that’s passive versus active, I can’t guarantee which one will perform better. However, I can tell you that you can do more of one than the other. And here’s the why and how:

The key takeaway from today’s session is that you need to maximise your passive marketing activities to ensure your marketing efforts continue even when you’re away, such as during holidays, weekends or even whilst you’re sleeping. While passive marketing may not yield higher conversion rates, it reaches a broader audience.

Now, let’s discuss active marketing.

Let’s say you’re planning a live webinar. Live webinars have been proven to have the highest conversion rates compared to any other type of webinar or passive marketing activity, including email marketing.

For example, if I have 100 attendees at a webinar, more people will convert into customers than if I send 100 emails to 100 customers or potential customers. Therefore, while active marketing is still important, I want to capitalise on that event by ensuring a large number of attendees. I want to fill up as many spaces as possible.

I don’t want to host small webinars or rooms. I want to fill them up to the maximum capacity. To achieve this, I might schedule webinars every two weeks and promote them using various passive marketing strategies to maximise my time and effort.

Outside of my active marketing activities, I also implement a significant amount of passive marketing. And guess what? My passive marketing efforts ultimately lead people to my active marketing.

Now, I wanted to do this lesson because I want you to critically evaluate how you allocate your marketing time.

Are you primarily engaged in active marketing or passive marketing?

I believe a balanced approach is ideal, with 80% of your marketing efforts being passive and 20% active. From experience this will maximise your time and spend across the two to deliver the biggest reward to your business.

In our marketing strategy, we allocate ten activities, with eight being passive and two being active. My active marketing strategies include live webinars and stage appearances, which have proven to be highly effective for us.

The remaining 80% of my marketing efforts are passive, encompassing activities like blogging, podcasting, email marketing, email automations, and batched social media posts. These strategies are designed to scale and leverage your limited time effectively.

However, we do see some of our clients when they come into our coaching programmes dedicating six or seven hours daily to social media, responding to messages, and engaging in conversations. This excessive time investment in active marketing may hinder your ability to focus on building your business, managing your team, and improving your product.

Ultimately, your goal should be to grow your team to the point where you can delegate all active marketing tasks. This way, you can leverage your time and labor effectively. While hiring a team member may seem like a significant investment, it’s a way to maximise your time and avoid wasting it on repetitive tasks.

For instance, creating a blog post once can yield long-term benefits, serving as a valuable resource for years to come. By adopting a balanced marketing approach that leverages your time and labor, you can ensure that your marketing efforts don’t consume your precious time or at least maximise its effectiveness.

The same principle applies to YouTube videos, podcasts, or automated webinars, as I mentioned earlier. The majority of your marketing efforts should be passive.

To conclude today’s session, I encourage you to review all the marketing activities you’ve undertaken in the past three months. Note them down, then, ask yourself: how many of these activities are passive, meaning that once you complete the work, people can benefit from it for days or even years to come?

Next, consider how many of these activities are active, where you only receive benefits when you actively engage in the action.

Do you have an 80-20 split? If not, if you’re overly focused on active marketing, identify which active activities yield the most significant results from your efforts.

These activities should generate the most sales, customers, and leads. Prioritise them in order of effectiveness. This one should be at the top, followed by the second, third, and fourth.

Active is great for engaged customers but passive marketing has a compounding effect meaning over time the build up of passive marketing assets grows, in turn giving you more pull towards filling your active marketing time when it comes to engaging customers that are ready to buy whatever it is that you sell.

Now, take your top activities and allocate them to achieve an 80-20 split. Many of us face a marketing challenge rather than a content creation issue.

We often struggle to share our content, products, and services effectively. However, sharing can be a passive marketing strategy. For social media, I highly recommend using a tool called Buffer.

Buffer allows you to schedule your posts in advance, eliminating the need to constantly monitor social media. You can literally schedule all your social media content to be published on time every day, weeks in advance.

This way, you can sit back and relax. If you’re serious about leveraging passive marketing, consider dedicating an hour each week to schedule everything, and then avoid social media for weeks. Here at Purple Yak we do 90% of our social media posting in 4 hours a month, right at the end of the month. We only post adhoc stuff as and when it happens throughout the month but this is very minimal.

Thank you so much for reading my blog.

Got a burning question? Reach out on our social channels or email michael@purpleyak.co.uk

I’ll hopefully catch you on the next blog. See you then!

Take care.