Host

• Kevin Dieny

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hi, welcome to the Close The Loop podcast. I’m your host, Kevin Dieny, and today we’re going to talk about strategies of unscalable marketing. I guess I should say, I’m going to be talking about it. So when we’re talking about an unscalable marketing plan and unscalable marketing strategies, we’re often talking about the opposite most of the time, right?

[00:00:22] Kevin Dieny: We’re we’re usually talking about scalable marketing strategies. And by that we mean, if we throw some more money at it, right. If we can prove that the ad is working when we budget, I don’t know, $50 a day, a hundred dollars a day.

[00:00:34] Kevin Dieny: What happens if we were to double that budget or triple that budget or 10 X or a 100 X that budget, by increasing the scale and the magnitude of that ad, are we still going to see the same results? And that’s what we’re usually talking about when we say scalable marketing. Because we want to create marketing that scales, because that way we initially start out a campaign spending a low amount of money with lower risk, right.

[00:00:58] Kevin Dieny: Investments, risk. And then over time we’ve proven, okay. If we increase the budget, we’re getting more or an increased amount, maybe a slightly diminished amount. But at the end of the day, if we can incur, if we can spend the most amount of money we have to get the highest ROI possible. That’s what we’d like to do.

[00:01:16] Kevin Dieny: I mean, just sitting on the money, we could use cash in other ways, but it may not have the same return. It may not lead to growth for the business. So today we’re talking about all about growth, but how is it going to come from marketing strategies that are unscalable?

[00:01:31] Kevin Dieny: Scalable marketing is generally done by a process, a repeatable process that can be done without a person getting in the way as the bottleneck. When you can flip on a switch and suddenly spend two or three times more and you haven’t done anything, right.

[00:01:48] Kevin Dieny: Like I just changed the budget number, and all of a sudden the ad went from spending 10 a day to 100 a day, so it’s scaled and I haven’t had to do much, other than adjust the budget. That’s what we’re, that’s scalable.

[00:01:58] Kevin Dieny: So what is this unscalable business? What are we talking about? So unscalable, means something about it requires a person, requires manual, requires the process itself may have elements of it that are repeatable or that are mechanical or automated.

[00:02:19] Kevin Dieny: But at the end of the day, it’s still functionally moving along because it’s manual. So the most a person could possibly do, right. You could think about it like, well, how many phone calls could a person possibly taking a day? Well, it might be close to like a couple hundred or something like that maximum.

[00:02:35] Kevin Dieny: There’s not someone who is able to answer 10 phones at once, right. It doesn’t exist. There’s a natural limit there and it’s pretty low when we’re talking about what people can do, how people can perform. Now, there are extraordinary staff. There’s extraordinary people out there. Just like we have the Olympics that can do things that no one else can do.

[00:02:53] Kevin Dieny: And in some sense, they might be better than the automated process, uh, at doing and executing things. But humans are still, are still subject to risk, to flaws, to errors, especially with repeatable tasks. There’s problems, that’s why a lot of times the assembly lines at companies may start out with people.

[00:03:15] Kevin Dieny: But over time as the company grows, they may shift from someone who screws on the caps to a robot that screws on the caps. Because it can go all day, all the time, all night all the time, and people can’t. So unscalable is the stuff that people have to do. And let’s say that there’s quadrants. So they’re scalable on one end and like a Punnett square.

[00:03:38] Kevin Dieny: On one side, it’s how scalable it is. And on the other dimension, it’s how repeatable it is, okay? So a scalable and repeatable campaign is what most marketing is all about. I would say 80%, 90% of marketing probably falls into marketers wanting to be able to find something that works and then crank it up. So that it performs at an extraordinary level.

[00:04:01] Kevin Dieny: Even when you spend more, it’s making 5 X or 10 X its ROI. That’s usually the dream, the goal, the ideal. Now, scalable, but not repeatable. It is sort of like the conundrum. I think some people have debated whether this even exists. So it, it probably does.

[00:04:19] Kevin Dieny: And by that, I mean, it’s an opportunity for an entrepreneur, right? So something that’s scalable, but not repeatable is something where maybe a tool hasn’t been invented quite yet, because it hasn’t been able to make it repeatable, right. It hasn’t been able to make it so that it can perform that function, every single time. Because maybe there’s a time constraint, seasonal limit.

[00:04:43] Kevin Dieny: I don’t want to get too complicated in this, but basically scalable and repeatable go hand in hand. And so you want that and then there’s the unscalable side. Okay, so an unscalable and repeatable strategy is something that still requires a person to do, but it’s something they could do over and over and over again.

[00:05:02] Kevin Dieny: So like taking phone calls. That is a good example where someone’s sitting there and doing the same kind of activity, but it still requires a human to do it. So we’re talking unscalable requires the human to do it and repeatable like the phone call. Now, unscalable and not repeatable that would be obviously problematic.

[00:05:19] Kevin Dieny: So we want to stay away from, again, you want to stay away from the non repeatable stuff in marketing, because anything that you can’t repeat, it’s once and done and gone. Now there are campaigns, there are things like that where it’s like, Hey, look, I only have one chance to get this right.

[00:05:34] Kevin Dieny: Has to be perfect from the beginning, but generally that’s not quite marketing. That’s more like a perfectionist. That’s more like striving for perfection and it leaves no room for testing. It leaves no room for experimentation. And leaves little room for feedback, and for learning. You kind of just throwing it up in the air and hoping you get it right.

[00:05:51] Kevin Dieny: So that is not really marketing. Marketing is less about taking those extreme hopeful chances and more about iterative learning over time, experimentation, testing stuff. Anyone can just throw something up in the air, right. I can flip coins. So we in marketing in your business, you’ve gotta be after things that are repeatable.

[00:06:13] Kevin Dieny: So this episode’s all about the repeatable stuff, but still done by people. Now why, why are unscalable marketing activities typically ignored? Yeah, they can’t be scaled, but they tend to be costly. Right? Hire someone to, you know, pick up the phone, costly. To hire someone, to write letters to every client, new customers, costly. And so businesses jump in and outsource that kind of stuff, but it’s still a cost.

[00:06:41] Kevin Dieny: And so sometimes at the end of the day, it’s like, is this worth it? So a lot of unscalable marketing activities just aren’t worth it, because we’re generally after a pretty solid return on the stuff that we want to do in marketing. And if we get too heavy in unscalable stuff, then we may grow to a point, but then we’re not able to, to grow at a scalable level.

[00:07:03] Kevin Dieny: So there’s got to be, I think, is my opinion, a mixture of the unscalable with the scalable strategies that you’re running. So I think we should be very picky about the unscalable stuff we’re doing and the activities we’re doing, because that is more costly, therefore it has to work. We need it to be repeatable because we want to see if maybe we can tune this to make it work.

[00:07:26] Kevin Dieny: Very few marketing strategies work right off, right off the bat, right. You turn on the campaign, an ad or anything, something you’re going to learn, okay. We’ve got negative keywords to add. We’ve got to trim down this audience. We’ve got to change this ad, the copy. Something’s not working. And that’s how it works.

[00:07:42] Kevin Dieny: Every time you do it, you’ve got to try and test something else to see if it’s going to get better. Their campaigns that we all run should hopefully, over time, be improved, you know, one bit at a time. In email you may think, well, maybe the sending time is off. Maybe the list isn’t as clean as it should be. Maybe I’m not segmenting my emails as well.

[00:08:01] Kevin Dieny: Now, what does an unscalable activity feel like? This is a really good question, right? Cause it, it obviously it’s done by a person, but generally an unscalable activity feels like, man, if I just had more hours of the day more time in the day than I would, I would spend it doing X, Y, and Z. What is X, Y, Z, right? What alternatives are there? What are you forced to do manually?

[00:08:24] Kevin Dieny: And you can’t just hang it up on an automated solution. Now sometimes like business may be like, look, I’m tired of doing this. I’m just going to outsource that. That’s still keeping it unscalable, it’s just outsourcing that. And maybe your time is more valuable than, what they cost.

[00:08:39] Kevin Dieny: So you’re just like an operating cost at that point. So another thing is unscalable activities, can be dialed down by performing the activity less, and dialed up by performing the activity more. A person doing it more. And the ‘repeatable-ness’ of it is that. It’s important to really get specific here. Answering a phone call, the phone calls, never going to go the same every time we’ve talked about this, how different every call is after the first 30 seconds.

[00:09:12] Kevin Dieny: So the first 30 seconds, maybe a very, very, um, repeated, nuanced script. But then after that, there’s going to be conversational pivots and turns that, take that conversation, you know, any which way. It’s not that the call itself is repeatable after 30 seconds. It’s not, because you’re not going to say the same things, but what is repeatable, right.

[00:09:37] Kevin Dieny: Are, there’s probably not going to be more than, let’s say 10 or 15 objections to any businesses, products and services. It’s probably a pretty slim list. Like obviously price is going to be an objection for every single service unless you’re offering free services or something. But still there, there still may not be a cost of price.

[00:09:55] Kevin Dieny: It may be a cost of time. So cost or price or something is always an objection, always. So while, answering that may not come at the same position in the call may not come at the same time in every call. A question would not be asked the same way, and you may not want to answer the same way, the basics are.

[00:10:10] Kevin Dieny: There’s an objection of cost in our business. How are we handling that? That is still repeatable. You can still rehearse that. Get that down to the point where you’re like, I know how to answer this. No matter how it comes at me. Now, it’s become a repeatable part of my unscalable answering phone calls. So that’s why it’s still really important to know how this stuff is broken down.

[00:10:31] Kevin Dieny: So there’s lots of ways that anything can be broken down into just repeatable blocks of processes. and specifically in a phone call.

[00:10:41] Kevin Dieny: So how does marketing, how does the marketing strategy influence that, right. So the things that come up a lot in calls can be, if we see that through scoring, it may be an interesting pivot for marketing to be like, well, Hmm. What if we answer that question in the ad? What if we put that on the landing page?

[00:10:58] Kevin Dieny: What if that’s one of the blurbs that’s on the landing page? So, instead of having to ask that, cause obviously that’s on the caller’s mind. Now the marketing has positioned itself so that these callers have a better chance of having known the answer. Now, if you splash every ad and every marketing message with the 15 objections, you’re going to have no room for anything else.

[00:11:20] Kevin Dieny: There’s lots of ways to influence the unscalable side because the unscalable side is going to be smaller numbers, right? If someone’s only taking a hundred calls in a day, every missing one call is 1% of the calls.

[00:11:35] Kevin Dieny: Of the hundred calls, 50% turn into appointments, missing one could mean an appointment. Missing one could then mean losing a customer. You know, that’s big, that’s a big deal. So if marketing can influence the calls, the callers, the quality of that coming in. Especially before it hits up against an unscalable activity, then marketing’s doing a huge favor to them because they’re not wasting time on bad calls or things like that.

[00:12:01] Kevin Dieny: Now evergreen is a great term used for content, that is scalable. So let’s say you make a video, webinars, or something, but it’s really only going to be valuable to people for a few weeks. Think of like a sports game.

[00:12:16] Kevin Dieny: Everyone wants to watch that sports game live, right. Very few people are, are going to want to hold off from seeing the big game until two weeks, three weeks later. People who watch something way after the fact that it’s aired in sports is very, very low numbers. So why is that?

[00:12:32] Kevin Dieny: That’s because everyone wants to experience it live together. They don’t want to, you know, not know if they’re big fans, so people don’t care about sports, but if you are a big sports fan, generally, you love watching the sports live.

[00:12:45] Kevin Dieny: So evergreen is making content designed for anyone to watch it at any time and still get a lot of value out of it. Like who would want to watch something that’s recorded six months ago? Well, there’s certain types of content people would want to watch like that. Like TV shows, movies, people watch them decades after they originally aired because the content itself is still relevant to them.

[00:13:09] Kevin Dieny: Making videos is oftentimes unscalable because it’s costly and have to be edited. A lot of human editing going on there. A lot of times the first videos you make you’re like, these gotta be evergreen. Meaning that they’re going to always deliver relevance and value, even if I use this video six months from now or a year from now.

[00:13:26] Kevin Dieny: Cause you may say, oh gosh, I don’t want to be making a new video every week or every month or something like that. It’s, it’s costly. So in the content world, evergreen is considered the scalable side of content, right?

[00:13:39] Kevin Dieny: In live, one time, real-time content, you can only consume at one time or at the time that it aires is definitely the unscalable side. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that evergreen content is the only way to drive demand or drive value for a business to drive growth.

[00:13:55] Kevin Dieny: There’s plenty of one-off, one-time, launch only like, look at, look at sports. It’s a huge market entirely around unscalable, right. They had every camera angle possible. Every, you know, they have tons of people talking about it. Everything’s going on. Everything’s all about the moment. And so when you think about how can my marketing content add a splash of unscalable or how can it not a splash of scalable.

[00:14:22] Kevin Dieny: For the scalable think, evergreen. For the unscalable think, well, how can I make this so valuable and so relevant, so important for someone to watch this right now. When they do right now, that that has got to answer that question, right? It might be something where it’s like, look, I’m going to offer this Black Friday deal.

[00:14:40] Kevin Dieny: This is a one-time thing for another year. Not going to see it. It’s going to go off one time for a limited period of time. And you may devote a lot of resources to making your marketing, your ads, anything like that, to capture the interest that’s around that seasonal point in time where everyone’s like thinking, thinking about what am I going to get for Christmas?

[00:14:58] Kevin Dieny: So that’s kind of how you identify the activities that are scalable and unscalable in your own business too, is, is every, is everything I’m doing evergreen, right? Am I just throwing a website out there and redoing it in three years? Am I just posting social media? Just because I’m told to. What stuff is really driving value?

[00:15:16] Kevin Dieny: And you’re only going to know that if you have a good feedback loop, you have good attribution campaign, you know, recording, monitoring, stuff like that to tell you. And if you can separate what activities are unscalable from those that are scalable, it would be probably pretty fascinating for you to see.

[00:15:30] Kevin Dieny: Wow, hm, whenever I do something like a live video or a webinar or wherever I post something that just happened today, or I take a picture of the job site or, you know, a holiday party or something. That there’s some good interaction, there. There’s some good engagement there and get people engaging and talking.

[00:15:47] Kevin Dieny: And whenever I run a special offer thing, that’s the only time people come in or, you know, you can probably take a look and see how your unscalable and currently scalable activities are working, performing. So, and that’s also kind of how you evaluate right, how much influence they’re having. When it’s, when there’s a human part of the process, you do need.

[00:16:09] Kevin Dieny: Evaluate the cost of that as well. I mean, it may have greater influence, but it did cost more. So at the end of the day, you’re not just, you can’t just measure things by their, you know, front end performance. You have to put something on the other side of the scale in terms of cost. Okay. I got all that.

[00:16:24] Kevin Dieny: I got the great stuff out of it, but gosh, it cost me a lot of money. Like I went to this local event. And I put up a booth and I got to talk to a lot of people. I got four customers out of it. It was fantastic. The booth didn’t cost me anything, but it did cost me like a whole day. I did have to go buy a table and I did have to print out some flyers.

[00:16:41] Kevin Dieny: And if you had total light up, it’s like, My cost per lead there, it was actually pretty high or maybe it was pretty low, I don’t know. Maybe it did fantastic, but events in person stuff, very unscalable. And it has to be, there has to be a way that you evaluate every activity in your business to see how well it’s performing for you.

[00:16:58] Kevin Dieny: Now as an entrepreneur, you’re just like, look my own time, and going to events, or self promotion doing live stuff. There’s a cost, but I have to do it because I need to get, right. But as the business grows becomes very important to start looking at. Hm. How much of my stuff is unscalable? The way I grew in the past to get here may not help me keep growing from here.

[00:17:21] Kevin Dieny: I may need more scalable campaigns, more scalable stuff. I may need more specialized education, more people, more consulting. I mean, uh, an agency, I don’t know, whatever you need to then at that point scale, the business is going to be very important.

[00:17:36] Kevin Dieny: The next big part of this episode that I want to talk about is something that I’ve done a talk on. Talk at conference on, and I spoke on this and that’s intimacy. So, which do you think is a more intimate, a more engaging experience? Okay, so you get to our website and our chat box pops up and says, Hey, would you like to book time or set an appointment so that we can landscape your yard, or you get to a website and someone named Jen says hi, I see you’re looking at, you know, our landscaping services.

[00:18:17] Kevin Dieny: If you have any questions, please let me know, I’m here. You know, I’m actually right here. If you want to talk to me. So let’s take a pause here. They’re both getting the same information. They’re both funneling you down toward an appointment, something like that.

[00:18:30] Kevin Dieny: Something toward whatever you’re after. Now, the bot is just going to be like, Hey, look, I have one purpose, right? My purpose is to get a sale and appointment booked. And if you go through that process, to the bottom it’s like, yeah, I did it. I got an appointment, but the goal of the person may be different.

[00:18:46] Kevin Dieny: Now with the Jen side, they’re asking you what your problem is, what your questions are. You could type in anything you want. Jen’s going to interpret it and understand what it is, the bots, not going to be able to perfectly understand what your problem is. So that’s why the bot has like more guided experience.

[00:19:01] Kevin Dieny: And on the Jen side, the person’s side, you’re really able to communicate what’s happening. What’s going on. The same thing happens with a phone call, phone call, hey, if you’re here for sales, press one and IVR right here for support, press two. If you’re here, you know, if you want to talk to somebody else, press zero or reception or whatever it is. That IVR that’s think of that like the robot experience, that’s the scalable side.

[00:19:26] Kevin Dieny: And that is not intimate at all. That is, it’s one of those things you’re like, let me just get through this fast. I can’t, um, it’s not the most rewarding customer type experience generally. So we don’t want to, obviously, if you have a conversation with someone who’s rude or whatever, probably prefer the robot, but when generally speaking.

[00:19:51] Kevin Dieny: Someone whose job is to answer the phones is going to be doing that because they’re providing an experience for the customer, who’s calling. That can’t be matched by a robot. We wouldn’t want it to work that way, right. They want the first interaction, like the first touch with that customer the first real, real time, intimate touch with that customer to be a lot more real.

[00:20:13] Kevin Dieny: And that the value of that intimacy, the closer you are to the real time being in right in front of a customer, the better. If every customer had to show up in your store, in your place of business to talk to you. A lot less would, but the experience would be, it would be a lot more telling about how serious they are, how committed they are, how interested they are.

[00:20:37] Kevin Dieny: How committed they are. How willing they are to, to buy, to spend, to work with you. But that’s a pretty big deal. That’s how it used to work back in the day before phone calls and everything. Maybe they would write letters. I don’t know. Anyway, so, at scale we’d love phone calls.

[00:20:55] Kevin Dieny: We love chatbots. We love, we love everything that helps us do all this stuff at scale, because it’s expensive to have a person do all this. But at the end of the day, at the end of this funnel, the business is most often, unless their e-commerce right, is most often positioning a person with the customer or with the potential future customer with the potential future patient.

[00:21:20] Kevin Dieny: Everything has that human interaction at the end. Generally. Now, if you’re on Amazon, right? You’re not talking to a person ever. So they cater to that experience of look, you can figure it on your own. You can buy whatever you want on your own. No, one’s helping you. So some products and services are that way. Like, they’re like, look, you’re here, you’re out in the cold by yourself.

[00:21:40] Kevin Dieny: You’ve got to figure it out like that. They will provide reviews, product descriptions, but if you buy the wrong thing then it’s on you, it’s like eBay. If you buy it, if you buy a little house thinking you bought a whole house and it arrives in your mailbox and it’s just a tiny little. Like doll version of a house. And you thought you were buying a whole one for a steal for 50 bucks and you know, that’s on you.

[00:22:02] Kevin Dieny: Like that’s kind of as a e-commerce retail buyer, that’s sort of on you. Some people don’t don’t like that. They don’t like buying shoes online and then getting them, they don’t fit or clothes they’d much rather go in person to a place and try it on physically, really. And the intimacy there is greater.

[00:22:19] Kevin Dieny: That’s a big deal. When the intimacy point happens, it’s usually the highest cost interaction. The highest cost conversation in a business is going to be at that point where human beings talking to another person. Because the person on your team is unable to talk to anyone else, while they’re talking to that one person. They are a hundred percent consumed by that call.

[00:22:39] Kevin Dieny: So when they get there, you want that experience to be stellar, but you also don’t want to waste you don’t want to waste that your call handlers time answering calls that are fake and not real, or, spammy or anything. That’s that’s, that’s frustrating. Obviously you want them to be answering calls.

[00:22:55] Kevin Dieny: You want leads to be coming in. You want business to be rolling in and that’s going to help your business grow. But at the same time, you don’t want it to be terrible, horrible experiences. You don’t want every person that calls to leave hating you because the call handler was rude or something.

[00:23:08] Kevin Dieny: So that, that conversation, that intimate point is so vital to do well. A lot of what we do is all based on this concept of the intimacy of a customer is paramount in marketing. When someone sees your ad and they click to your website and then they click around, that’s all happening without someone guiding them.

[00:23:28] Kevin Dieny: Right? If, what, if you can position the chat bot there to be like, Hey, how are you doing? But if you can position of someone who finally decides to call say hi, I’m putting a face and a name and a voice to this, this, this for the first time, that’s gonna leave a big impression on that visitor. Just because you build it that way, doesn’t mean it’s all going to work out that way.

[00:23:46] Kevin Dieny: You have to create an operational system that feedbacks to you, whether it’s working or not, right. Every unscalable activity is very costly. So if you don’t have a feedback system telling you how your call handling’s going, how your chats are going, they’re handled by people. How any human things going, the feedback loop on that isn’t giving you the answers you need start there.

[00:24:07] Kevin Dieny: Cause that’s so costly to operate in a business without having any feedback loop whatsoever. It’s a big deal. So another thing to consider when we’re talking about what strategies, what unscalable strategies should we be looking at? Right. What should we do? That’s going to be the last pivot here. What strategies should I be running?

[00:24:26] Kevin Dieny: So look at your competitor. What unscalable marketing activities are they doing? Are they going to events? Are they putting up billboards? Are they, you know, standing around twirling signs on the corners? Are they calling out?

[00:24:41] Kevin Dieny: Are they, you know, how has the process of them calling in. Visit their website. What kind of stuff do you think they’re doing? Are they promoting? Are they running ads? If you go to Facebook, you can look up any brand, any company on Facebook and you can see if they’re running ads. You could see what ads they’re running, it’s called the ad tool, ad library.

[00:24:59] Kevin Dieny: So if you want to see if they’re running ads on Facebook, you can go there. With Google, you can’t quite see that there are tools I’d recommend. There’s a tool I recommend that I use called SpyFu. It will give you a, a good ballpark of what ads, uh, and other businesses running. I think you can even go for free and just see like an example of one, if you want to S P Y F u.com.

[00:25:18] Kevin Dieny: SpyFu, uh, they’re great company for that. To doing some competitive research. So things that you’d really like that that are really good ideas to improve is what I mentioned it. Phone calls, monitor, score, record, you know, get alerts when you miss an opportunity. Like that handles the phone call that could be for sales support, anything. You could consider call centers, things like that to help offset that. Outsourcing, uh, things like partnerships are also unscalable.

[00:25:49] Kevin Dieny: You may have a deal where you’re a business that, that specializes in, let’s say plumbing during the day, but very special kinds of plumbing. Like let’s say, old homes or something like that. You may say anyone who calls in the middle of the night. You may say, oh, okay, anyone who calls for not that kind of service.

[00:26:08] Kevin Dieny: You may say, wow, I’m getting a lot of people just because I’m inherently a plumber. I’m getting a lot of calls for services. I don’t like to offer. I don’t prefer to offer, they’re low margin for me. My guys are more skilled. I need these higher margin jobs. I don’t want to be sending them out in the middle of the night.

[00:26:23] Kevin Dieny: Cause that’s not, you know, that’s not the business, I am. My business runs with these margins at this way. So you may say, Hmm, what if I have a partnership with another plumber who is, who is specialized in the 24 7, simple plumbing, uh, that’s their margins, that’s their business type.

[00:26:40] Kevin Dieny: What if we partnered up and they all send the calls to them that are insufficient, that are not ideal for me. And they will consider sending the jobs over to me that are not great for them. Maybe there’s a partnership there. Maybe there’s another way you can partner with another type of business altogether.

[00:26:58] Kevin Dieny: You can complete more jobs because they’re doing something and you’re doing something. Partnerships or unscalable, they’re repeatable, but they’re unscalable because they require some agreement in place.

[00:27:11] Kevin Dieny: There’s still things around it. There’s still a lot of checking to make sure everyone’s complying and everyone’s still happy and good. You’re, you’re still delivering value to the customer and they’re happy that you may not provide the service, but you’re giving them a recommendation from someone that you prefer, you trust to do, perform the service.

[00:27:28] Kevin Dieny: You’re still helping them, which still at the end of the day, that customers can be like, wow, that was great. If I ever have a, you know, an old plumbing job or a specialized job, then I know who to call or I know who to recommend. That’s partnerships. I mentioned before events, webinars, things like that, live webinars, especially on the unscalable type that, that provide a lot of value.

[00:27:47] Kevin Dieny: There’s tons of people trying to do this, do it yourself, plumbing online, right. Trying to do jobs online. And so if you’ve make a whole channel devoted to, you know, how to do this and that, on YouTube. That could be huge, for people in an interesting way to get your name out there.

[00:28:04] Kevin Dieny: And all it would take is, you know, someone record what they’re doing in a home and get permission by the owner, the homeowner to do so, or maybe for a discount or something. You can put those videos on your website.

[00:28:14] Kevin Dieny: People might be like, okay. Yeah, this guy really wants to help do it yourselfers, but obviously when things go wrong, they know who to call, right. Something like that. If you really want to tell a story, like on your website, it’s the content, the messaging. Maybe seen by a lot of people, but creating content, creating a way that you can tell your story.

[00:28:35] Kevin Dieny: It may be an unscalable process to get it done. There might be a video, an interview. You may have to write some stuff in person. Like you may have to write it. A compelling story. A compelling messaging is usually done by a person at the end of the day. Handwritten letters to clients and customers, favorite customers after big jobs, you know, thanking them for their time or anything. Or, if a patient had a rough time.

[00:29:01] Kevin Dieny: You may have like five letters, you know, templates, you have, you may open one up, change a few things and then, you know, send it off to that patient to say, Hey, you know that you had a hard time. I hope you’re doing well. Some people have, might be like, wow, I’ve never gotten a letter like that from my dentist before that could be a big deal.

[00:29:18] Kevin Dieny: I don’t know. Taking that time, even though it’s a template taking that time to write it or change it or update it, unscalable, right. So unscalable strategy there. If you do things in house, generally, it’s going to be considered, unscalable, if you’re like, Hm. I like a social media person to help me everyday.

[00:29:33] Kevin Dieny: You know, post pictures, post things, get the word out. I’ve seen a lot of businesses do really well that way expand their reach, especially that. And then asking a customer to, to leave a review, to give you feedback on their experience. Right? Very unscalable.

[00:29:52] Kevin Dieny: Now it’s unscalable, especially because your end of the day, your customers, your patients, whoever’s coming in, you know, your, your jobs are not at tens, thousands hundred thousands, like degree changing overnight, you know, and you’re getting however many jobs or however many patients you’re getting, it’s fairly unscalable, but.

[00:30:11] Kevin Dieny: If you can, you know, not every person that don’t leave a review or leave you 50 or a hundred reviews, they’re going to take the time to write maybe one or two and that’s it. But reviews can be a big deal for a business. Other people are going to see it trust you more. It’s it’s really hard to get reviews.

[00:30:26] Kevin Dieny: That’s why, you know, asking for them in an unscalable way is frustratingly difficult. You can train your team, your staff. I dunno everyone in your company, if people on the phone to be, to remember to ask, and it’s hard to follow, you know, remember to ask every time or remember the right moment to ask after someone’s upset and yelling.

[00:30:45] Kevin Dieny: Maybe not the best time after someone’s excited and happy, it might be better, you know? I don’t know. It’s important to consider that unscalable marketing activities at a business have a pretty high ability to generate an influence revenue, to influence growth, just like scalable activities do.

[00:31:05] Kevin Dieny: And they shouldn’t be discounted. They shouldn’t be tossed out just because they require a person to do. Just because they’re unscalable in that way. And obviously anything that’s not repeatable. You’re going to have a lot of chance involved there, right.

[00:31:17] Kevin Dieny: But if you can make something repeatable, even though it’s done by a person and it’s still, you know, ROI positive, look it’s worth considering keeping that, or, making sure it’s still a part of your overall plan, your overall marketing plan.

[00:31:30] Kevin Dieny: So if you can identify, unscalable marketing strategies and scalable ones that you’re already doing or new ones you’d like to try, maybe from the suggestions I gave you. Then I think that will really set you up in a place where you’re, you’re both running strategies, but also you’ve got to be considering how they’re being measured, how they’re being tracked, right?

[00:31:51] Kevin Dieny: The feedback loop like episode one, how that’s all giving you information, you need to do it better. And then once you do know, okay, these activities, marketing, sales, otherwise, whatever it is, unscalable or scalable, this is the return I’m getting. Then you have a very good case to say, okay, I’m going to stop these, or I’m going to do these right.

[00:32:12] Kevin Dieny: You’re after growth, you’ve got to be after more profit. So it, it means trying things constantly cutting things out that don’t work and pushing, putting more gas to things that do work until they hit a ceiling. I have never seen any marketing strategy that, that didn’t hit a ceiling. And just because it’s unscalable, you might think, well, this is only going to impact like 10 patients or a hundred patients, right.

[00:32:35] Kevin Dieny: If the potential is there, even if it’s small, it could still be a positive thing to do. It’s just gotta be evaluated by someone in the business and owner, a leader in the business who can see the whole, the big picture. And then finally, the last thing I’d want to mention here is the intimacy part.

[00:32:58] Kevin Dieny: So, what are you doing? What is your business doing today to improve the quality of the one-to-one human to human interactions your businesses is having with customers today, with patients today? How are you improving that? Because that is such an important part of any business, right?

[00:33:21] Kevin Dieny: How will the customer interacts. The experience of the patient, the customer, the consumer that they have with your business is really going to pave the way for the future in a way, in a way that it’s okay to make mistakes in the short term, but in the longterm, you have to be progressing in a customer centric way.

[00:33:40] Kevin Dieny: Your customers are going to tell you how well things are performing that you’re doing today. You have been doing in the past. It may not be the golden ticket to know what you need to do in the future, but it is going to tell you how well things are working that you’ve been doing.

[00:33:52] Kevin Dieny: That’s really critical and really key. I’d say give unscalable marketing a shot. Give it a try. Look at it, measure it, track it. Don’t throw it out the window, because you know, there’s a lot of bottlenecks. Like you can only do it in, you know, one at a time. Writing a letter of one at a time, but there’s value there.

[00:34:14] Kevin Dieny: It’s worth trying. And. Uh, I’ve done it. I’ve been surprised and shocked by it. I never thought I’d be an advocate of unscalable. I just love the scalable side, especially in I’m a, you know, I’m a digital marketer at heart, so everything there is all about scalable, but the blending is where it’s all at.

[00:34:31] Kevin Dieny: It’s what it’s all about. So I really appreciate your time. You can find me on LinkedIn, you know, comment, let me know if you have any feedback on this episode. I’d love to hear it and good luck with the unscalable marketing.