🗺️ Tactics To Grow Your Tribe, The blueprint you can execute on for success 💙

After deep diving into our strategy of niche community building and what a niche is, it is not important to look at a few tactics we can use in order to build up this tribes engagement with us. The ultimate goal here is to solve the group problem in a way that is shareable and become a thought leader but how should you go about this and what does this look like?

🔗 Direct Response Marketing

This is your PPC marketing play, ideal on Google or some other search engine. Your looking for users that have the exact problem you solve. Our niche community is around people who have Italian Grey Hounds, from the last post, so our direct PPC might be people searching for “(summer|winter) cloths for Italian grey hounds”.

Building a product is not enough, we have to make sure that we get the word out, if you have the money direct response marketing is a ideal way to grab the attention of a niche member while searching for a solution. However we want to make sure of a few key things outlined below but the main thing to keep in mind according to Traction is:

• How much does it costs?

• How many customers are available?

• Are you getting the right customers?

Without this your direct response marketing could turn into a loosing playbook very quickly. At the early stage its important not to dive to deep into maybe start with $250 in AdWords spend and get a rough idea of the above metics.

📣 Helping Your Tribe and Facilitate Communication

Being an active member of your niche is extremely helpful, when someone has a problem you can offer advice. The key here is that not every single comment you make includes a link to your product, but every single comment you make provides value to your community.

Once you have started to provide real value in the form of comments you can start to take this level of communication to the next level by interviewing community leaders, showcasing community content on your blog, podcast or newsletter and linking this back to the community. See your goal here is not to push your product hard but to build up the community engagement and convert regular people in the community into influencers though the power of your own content.

“People want to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves” - Traction and when we do just this we generate trust with our community and users. Trust is a key part of buying a product.

You just want to make sure that as you scale you keep your standards high and do not let the quality of the content suffer, these quality metrics depend entirely on your strategy and if your using user generated content vs self generated content.

📧 Email Marketing

Email is a direct way to reach prospects and customers who have opted into your information. You can mix helpful content and direct sales into your email marking plan. This is an opportunity to have a voice for your brand directly in the targets inbox. A prominent part of the above content generation, and comment playbook should be a) converting community members into customers and then b) converting community members into email subscribers. A highly engaged email newsletter list in your target niche could lead to the opportunities to create cash on demand as you have built trust and become a prominent thought leader to the reader.

Email marketing also provides the opportunity to A/B test landing pages, or copy before investing in direct response ads. Best of all email list is an asset that you own, and control its completely independent of some social media company. Keep some key things in mind with your email marketing

• Don’t Spam.

• Be a human!

• Use the right tool for the job, (I love Beehiiv for this.)

• Email on a regular cadence.

• Provide value

• Automate when possible

📫 Real Mail?

In an age when people seem to be spending every minute of the day online if you can find your target niche though direct mail you might have a chance.

The thought here is that no one prints out an email and holds onto it for years, but a thoughtful postcard can become a something people hold onto for awhile or even years. I get “junk mail” all the time that I put in a draw over throwing away, and am reminded about that company each time I open the draw.

🎁 Wrap Up

While not an exhaustive list above these are a few tactics you can use to bootstrap your startup. Don’t try and use every tactic when your starting out, after you have found your niche, and understand the customer problem its important that you stick to only one marketing tactic and work it to perfection, only making minor tweaks to the tactic in order to increase ROI, trust, or based on community feedback. Our goal as a bootstrapped business owner isn’t to a generalist marketer but to become a expert in a single niche tactic.