Be a creep

“I’ve used this approach in hundreds of cases, especially for myself…

And to tell you the truth, most of them were not that difficult to get. The point is that massive and diligent follow-up can penetrate just about any company if you are determined.”

• Chet Holmes, The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies

I love it when I hear a recommendation like this:

“What do you MEAN you haven’t seen X it’s the BOMB you’ve got to see it NOW”.

If I’m interested I’m making a beeline and seeing it ASAP.

Another one is “I can’t BELIEVE I know about this before you” or “It’s my secret weapon”.

My friends know my nerdy interests in trends, tech, marketing, turn-based strategy games, personal development, and alcohol-free craft beer so it’s pretty rare they’ll slip a new thing past me.

You want to have this level of obsessive detail about what your customers do.

The hard part is you’re going to have to dig.

Why so much effort?

Because there are big fishes in every pond.

That university student you’re trying to sell to might watch YouTube, scroll TikTok, and spend a lot of time chatting with friends in Instagram DMs but none of that browsing information is detailed and it’s incredibly hard to “hang out” in without significant advertising costs.

You want to unearth treasures.

During COVID lockdowns in Melbourne, I would punch out calls on an emerging platform called LunchClub (I still do by the way).

I would happily swap notes and trade banter, enjoying serendipity and the way conversations would meander in unexpected ways. I would always learn something new and interesting.

As a marketer you’re looking to identify fresh angles you can work your business into, get involved with, or collaborate on.

You find these smaller channels by listening for properties you haven’t heard of before.

A few years ago I did a digital strategy for an organisation who specialised in child safety. At the time (my sister’s sometimes call me Uncle Awkward) this world was very new to me.

I started learning about expecting and new Mums and what they did.

There were the usual answers from young Mums about what they read, didn’t read, and websites they visited.

These didn’t hold much value because they were so sleep-deprived anyway.

But as I dug, they kept sharing their love for Instagram Stories. They could smash through a quick video while breastfeeding at 2am in the morning.

The organisation I was helping didn’t have short, punchy, phone-friendly videos at all. But after finding out this juicy detail, it became a recommendation in the final strategy.

Become a creep for your customers. Understand what they consume to a level that’s weird.

Here’s some things to look for in learning what you need to know:

• Podcasts
• YouTube channels
• Facebook Groups
• Other groups or online communities
• Websites
• Videos
• Pages and accounts they follow
• News sites
• Must-read emails
• Local events
• Online events
• How they find out news about X

If one person mentions it, and you haven’t heard it yet note it down.

If three or more people mention it and you’ve spoken to 10-20 people it’s a pattern.

Geography works to your advantage here.

You will never be able to compete with national and international advertisers. But you can run rings around them if you hit a particular region and know someone who knows someone.

Always Be Pitching comes in handy.

A cold email only goes so far. Mentioning you know a person they know, consume local produce, or like something because of the way it represents the town is going to go a lot further.

One of my regular clients is Startup Gippsland. I loved working with them not because they were my biggest customer, but because of the connection it had to where I grew up.

I saw Pozible early on in their crowdfunding trajectory. They presented the idea of using their platform to raise money to cover your publishing costs at the Emerging Writer’s Festival in Melbourne.

Their website covered all of Australia. Yet by making it local, they planted a seed that would later became my first book Being Bi-Bi. I raised nearly $4,000 on Pozible self-published my story about mental health and sexuality, and donated a generous percentage to a worthy cause.

None of that would have happened without Pozible going local.