 If your market understands who you are and what you do, when the time comes that they actually need your product or service, they're going to think of you. Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where we share marketing agency insights, ideas, and best practices to help your business or brand grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder and chief strategist at Slam Agency. And today I want to introduce you to the Slam Revenue Generation Model. Now this is going to be fun for me because I like making money. And this show is all about how to make money, how to grow revenue, how to make more sales. Now we know there's two ways to drive revenue. The first being through acquisition and the second through retention. Today I want to share with you the four pillars of customer acquisition. The first is a strong brand. All right, so let's talk about brand and why a strong brand is important. All right, so I want you to think about it like this. You go to lunch, you're having lunch with a friend, and you're sitting there, you're chatting. And you know, you love this person. They're an important part of your life and they have been for many years. And you're at lunch and he or she's just having a bad day. And they want you to know it. So they're just sharing all these stories and their outlook on just like their experiences throughout that day. It's just, it's not very good. We call it a negative experience. And so they're just like vomiting all that negativity on you. And you know what you say? You say in your mind, that's okay. They're a friend. I just need to, you know, be a shoulder that they can cry on. I just need to listen and have empathy and just, you know, let them get this out. No big deal. It is what it is. A couple months later, you get back together with this friend and it's the same thing. Okay. You know, their bad day has turned into a bad couple months. And that's just, you know, that's bad for them. And you want to support them in any way that you can. And so you're there, you're listening and you're, you're just, you're being empathetic. And you're just saying not in your head and saying, yeah, I understand. I know what you're going through. Right? Couple months later, it's the same thing. And now you start thinking yourself. Hmm. You know, this is, this is turning into a recurring situation. Every time I get together with this person, they're spewing negativity in their conversation towards me. And this isn't really lifting me up. But you know what? I have a history with this person and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. Okay. This is, this is, this friendship is like a strong brand in moments of crisis in moments of, in moments of uncertainty. You give the brand the benefit of the doubt. If they've been with you, if they've invested in you over the years, then you're going to invest in them. You're going to give them the benefit of the doubt. But what happens if you continue to have lunch with this friend and it's the same thing over and over and over again? How long are you going to let that storyline play out? Well, the thing is eventually you're going to say, I don't have time for this negativity and you're going to stop scheduling lunches with this person. And the reason why is because over time that relationship, that friendship has deteriorated based on that negative user experience, that negative brand experience. So think about it this way, building a brand is like building a close friendship. It takes a consistent relationship over time. It takes trust and it requires an emotional connection. If you have these things, then you have a strong brand. The second pillar of customer acquisition is market awareness. Market awareness, if you took marketing in college, is actually labeled brand awareness. If your market understands who you are and what you do, then when the time comes that they actually need your product or service, they're going to think of you. And that's all you could ever want with market awareness is you want the consumer, you want your potential buyer to think of you when they have a problem that your product or service addresses. The third pillar of customer acquisition is targeted lead generation. Now this is a big one because as we know this year, 51% of all advertising spend is going to be digital spend. Why is digital spend finally overtaking traditional spend? Because it's able to be targeted. This covers over the top connected TV, Google pay per click, social media advertising. You're able to target this media spend, this ad buy, to your audience, to your buyers. So that's why it's so important to understand who your buyers are. It's important to understand market segmentation, which is this idea of demographics, geographics, behavior and psychographics in order to develop customer segments that actually produce the results that you want them to produce. Some people refer to this as the holy grail of marketing. It's this idea that you really can in this day and age connect the right message to the right person in the right place and at the right time. That's the holy grail of marketing and it's completely possible if you take a step back, do your homework and invest in content development. The fourth and final pillar of customer acquisition is sales proficiency. Now as an agency, as a marketing agency, you know, this is not necessarily something that we always have our hand in. But what I figured out is that all things could be hitting on all cylinders. You could have a strong brand. The market could be aware of who you are and what you do and all the ads could be going, you know, to the right person, the right timing, the right place, the right message just for them. But they're not converting. Why aren't they converting? They're not converting for one of two reasons. Number one, if you have an offline sales process, then your sales people aren't closing. Number two, the e-commerce experience is somehow flawed and it's preventing sales from happening. It's preventing sales from happening at the rate at which you need them to happen. So what is it? It's sales proficiency. It's understanding and capitalizing on these ideas that allow you to make sales either online or offline. So as an agency, you know, we really haven't had the ability to affect sales proficiency. Typically it's like, you know, we send you all this traffic. We send you all these leads and now you just have to close it. You have to close deals. But what happens when a sales department doesn't close deals? Who gets the blame? Usually it's the marketing agency. Usually it's the marketing department. If you're a marketing director watching right now, usually it's you that they're running to to say, what's going on? Like, these are bad leads. What's going on with these leads? They're not closing. But what we know and what we've found is that a lot of times it's sales proficiency. It's this question. Does sales have the content that it needs to be able to close the deal, to answer the questions, to provide information that's needed at that point in a buying cycle? Does sales have the responses to the objections that the buyers are asking or, you know, the questions that they're asking or the objections that they are sharing? Do they have those answers? And if they don't, or if your website doesn't, or if there's something broken along that path to purchase, then all of a sudden you're not able to drive the results that you want to drive. And so this fourth pillar is super critical. It's super important because at the end of the day you can have a strong brand. You can have market awareness. You could have targeted lead generation. And if you're not making sales, then none of that stuff matters. SLAM agency, we're a full service marketing agency that is focused really on driving the results that you want to drive. You know, I got my start many, many years ago in this progression of web, to SEO, to pay per click, to conversion rate optimization, to this idea of building experiences that convert. And if you haven't built an experience that converts or if you're having trouble along that funnel, contact us. I want to hear from you. I want to know where it is that you need help. You can go to slamagency.com. You can click on free consultation. And we'll look at those four pillars of customer acquisition and we'll pinpoint the areas that you need to focus and where you can use some help and we'll help you get there. So that's slamagency.com. Thank you for tuning in to the show this week. If this is your first time, be sure to subscribe, rate, and review. And if you've tuned in before, please share with a friend. We value those shares and we want to get this content out to as many people as we can. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next week.