This Is Boring, But It Will Grow Your Business
In this video Elliott Botterill critiques generic, algorithm‑driven marketing advice and presents a practical, five‑pillar framework designed to help entrepreneurs break through overwhelm and consistently grow their businesses to seven‑ and eight‑figure months. He draws on his background running ads for major brands, building a seven‑figure agency, and leading Entrepreneur Circle to establish credibility. The pillars are: (1) a Human Brand built on a distinct voice, compelling story, clear enemy, and recognizable face; (2) Traffic acquisition focused on mastering a single primary channel (paid ads, organic content, or outreach) using a Market‑Message‑Media sequencing; (3) Nurture that leverages long‑form video, live webinars, and personality‑rich email to increase “time on brand”; (4) a Repeatable Sales Process that defines call vs. no‑call models, a structured series of “boxes” prospects must tick, and a cadence of repeated asks; and (5) Proof, a systematic loop of delivering an excellent product, gathering testimonials, case studies, and workshop footage to fuel a growth flywheel. Throughout, he emphasizes simplicity over shiny AI tools, the danger of inconsistency, and the necessity of a great product as the foundation for any marketing engine.
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Most marketing and business growth advice is generic and frankly a bunch of BS. It's primarily optimized these days for the algorithms on these social media platforms where these gurus talk about it rather than actually being good, sound, accurate advice. You know, the most engaging stuff gets distributed rather than the most effective and accurate stuff. And so in this video, I'm going to explain The boring 5-pillar strategy that we use in our marketing to scale our business past £1 million months. And hello, welcome back to the channel. My name is Elliott. All we do here is raw talk on growing businesses, sharing the lessons from scaling businesses to those 8-figure months and beyond. And I used to work at a big advertising agency for 3 years where I ran ads for some very big clients like Amazon, Audible, Pokémon, etc. I then spent 5 years building my own advertising agency to 7 figures, and now I'm the co-owner and chief marketing officer at Entrepreneur Circle, where all we do is help entrepreneurs. That is the mission. And so a little bit of customary proof so you know where this is all coming from. This is our ad tracking software, $241K in the last 7 days, $1.17 in The last 30 days. And so I'm going to start by just being honest with you guys here, because marketing and sales and growing businesses is low-key pretty hard. It's actually pretty hard. And, you know, I can sit here, share some big numbers and tell you about all these strategies. And to some of you, it'll look like I'm a genius who's got it all figured out. To others, maybe not so. But the reality is it's fucking hard, and there's ups and there's downs, and it's an ever-changing space. And so I'm a big believer in principles and tactics. Principles being the underlying reasons why things work, tactics being the ever-fleeting, ever-changing mechanisms that we use to deliver a result. So meta ads would be a tactic. But actually understanding we need to make people aware of our stuff would be a principle. And so the market changes all the freaking time. And so I make these videos really to help the fellow entrepreneurs out there pass down the lessons that we're learning, but also to document and keep track of these lessons for myself. And so if you run a business like when I was running my advertising agency, you may have felt overwhelmed when with what to do with your marketing. You may have felt a sense of FOMO for not being on so many different channels. You may have felt that chase of excitement pursuing the bright shiny objects, all these new AI tools and growth strategies and tactics that are popping up on our feeds. And you almost certainly would've felt some degree of inconsistent results and That is very normal. That is very normal. But perhaps the number one challenge that a lot of the business owners that we work with feel is that of overwhelm. Too many things to do to market, not enough time in the day. And so I'm gonna try and distill down the 5 pillars of a good marketing strategy in this video for you. Now I will say these issues are all compounded at the moment because of 2 reasons. Number one, AI springing up new tools, new ways of doing things left, right, and center. But also personal brands. The boom of personal brands, the boom of people trying to build personal brands, much like I'm trying to do now, to be fair, has contributed to this environment where there are seemingly infinite strategies being posted on Instagram, YouTube, etc. All targeting different niches, everybody sharing these things that have worked well for them. And on one hand, what a freaking time to be alive. This is amazing, unprecedented insight into how such a wide spectrum of business owners are growing their businesses. And for the people actually able to execute, fantastic. And in many ways, I love this, but it greatly contributes to this feeling of overwhelm because every few weeks there's a new AI model with new capabilities, new AI tools flooding the markets, another AI unicorn being launched, another AI outbound sales rep thing. And there's also a seemingly infinite amount of videos going up explaining all of the latest and greatest ways in which you must do these things. The death of this, the death of that. And so all of this can just leave us feeling very sad and confused. And I don't freaking blame you, okay? It is a goddamn minefield out there. And so this video is aiming to give you some clarity, because really marketing should not be that stressful. And one of the greatest dangers to the growth of a business, in particular with its marketing and sales, is inconsistency and overwhelm— spreading yourself too thin and not doing enough of the right stuff for a longer period of time to actually get the rhythmic, consistent results that you would like. So every good marketing strategy in this day and age, I believe, should be centered around these 5 pillars. I'm going to walk you through them. At the beating heart of any good marketing strategy is a human brand. I truly believe this is mission critical, meaning very, very difficult to build a business in most spaces without this. Because of the lack of trust and AI skepticism that is brooding and building in our society and markets at large. So what is a human brand? Well, there's 4 elements to it, and it is that behind the business, we as humans want to relate to humans. And as AI continues to level the playing field, I think people will be increasingly drawn to work with businesses that they vibe with, that have the people that they understand and want to be around and want to emulate. And so we need to have a human brand so that we can present out there clearly to the world who we are, who are the people behind this business, so the right ones can make their own decision and decide to come and join the tribe if they wish, and importantly repel all the people that we don't want. And so the first element to a human brand is a voice. I.e., not ChatGPT or Claude's native voice that you have outsourced your ideas, thoughts, and fucking opinions to. Okay, AI slop. We don't want that. You have to be a real human voice. Now, one of my clients that I work with runs a fantastic Argentinian meat company. Okay, so he distributes Argentinian steak, dulce de leche, nice wines, and he sends out. Some of the most fantastic emails I've ever seen. And the reason is they are just oozing with his real voice and personality, and they become so entertaining as a result. And so that's the kind of thing that you want. You want a voice that people understand, that feels real, that feels like you were actually speaking rather than AI-generated. The second part of a human brand is a story. How did you become who you are today? How did this business get born? What were the challenges it faced on the way, the obstacles that it overcame? And what was the journey that led you here? Story is an incredibly powerful thing. And I was in a fantastic restaurant down in Mayfair for my fiancée's 30th birthday the other week, uh, in the Connaught Hotel, Helen de Rouza, something like that. And I like wine. I'm a big red wine guy. And Luckily, the staff were so good in this restaurant. Had this fantastic meal, and afterwards they took us into these cellars to go and look at some of the wines. And the sommelier was talking to us about all the wines. And I like red wine, but I'm not a wine—I'm not a fucking sommelier, okay? But I do enjoy hearing about the provenance and the stories behind all of this wine. And like it struck me there were two bottles of wine whilst we're in there that one day I will hopefully get to try. One was called Screaming Eagle. It's like an American wine from Napa Valley. And the other one was called Petrus, which you might be familiar with. And so the Screaming Eagle, this was, I think it was £12,000 for one bottle of Screaming Eagle. And then the Petrus is like £7,000 to £8,000 per bottle, which is nuts. And one of the reasons it's so expensive is the story behind this wine. It's the story, the heritage of the vineyards, of the particular process of how they are grown that creates this incredibly visceral and attractive and in-demand brand. Obviously then leveraged with scarcity and not many of them, but the provenance in it is a big reason why. And if you go to the logical extremes, if you look at art, if you look at marble statues, if you look at how really, really wealthy people choose to buy things, A lot of the time it is because of the provenance or the story behind it. And you need that in your business as well, because that is why people give a fuck. Because in the age of information abundance, it's the person or the source of the information that matters way more than the information itself. And so if I sat here talking about marketing and sales and had no proof and couldn't tell you my story of how I worked in a big advertising agency and learned about advertising at a massive scale, spending millions of pounds every month, and then built my own advertising agency for 5 years, working with a range of different clients, generating £150 million in revenue for them, building a team of 15, 7 figures annual revenue, and then joining Entrepreneurs Circle where we continue to do it. Like, that's part of my journey that enables me, gives me some degree of provenance and credibility to speak on this subject. And so you need a fantastic story in your human brand as well. No human brand is complete without An enemy. This is the thing you stand against. And this is where people build brands that are way too vanilla and way too safe. And it stems from fear of upsetting anybody. And having an enemy is a potent thing. And it's the common thing— enemy, person, industry, thing— that we truly stand against, that me and you, prospect, We both agree this is the enemy. So my marketing agency days, my common enemy were all of the other bad agencies out there that would overpromise and underdeliver. The tale as old as time. All of our clients came from a bad experience with another agency before, and that's because there's no prerequisites to start a marketing agency. There are gurus online that would teach you how to start a marketing agency, and you have a lot of people that relatively untrained and unskilled trying to build marketing agencies purely to fill their own pockets rather than because they have learned this craft, which again, no shade on that, but it's just a reality. And so many people would be oversold and then greatly underdelivered. And so our enemy was those people. We stand against those people and we are here to try and rebuild and be a beacon of hope in this landscape. And that was what really bonded a lot of our customers to us during our sales process. And then of course, every good human brand, it needs a face. Very hard to build a human brand without a face. And we're seeing this more and more amongst big companies now as well that are investing heavily in the personal brands of their chief executive officers and their leadership teams. And their executives, because they recognize actually when it comes to building a brand, humans like humans. So once we've got the human brand nailed, that bleeds into everything that we do. And so what comes next might surprise you, because once we've got the human brand, the first pillar of our journey sits on the top here. This is all about driving traffic, because most businesses frankly just have a traffic problem. What does that mean? It means, well, if I could double or quadruple the volume of eyeballs on your business right now, would that likely solve a lot of your current constraints? In most cases, the answer is yes, and fantastic, then we just need to get some eyeballs. Where do we get these eyeballs from? Fundamentally, there's 3 ways: paid ads, organic content, and outreach. So which one should you do? Because you only need to do one until you are doing multiple 7 figures, then you'll reach a point where diminishing returns to solely invest on this one channel, so let's do something else. Until that point, we want to really nail one and build and embed the skill set of nailing that one. We run primarily paid advertising. That is where our primary skill set has been. We spend around £100 grand a month on Meta ads, and that drives most of our business. We are doing an increasing amount of organic content because we recognize that we probably missed missed the boat a little bit on this, and we see the potent potential in Instagram, in YouTube in particular, and we want to absolutely crush and nail that. Outreach— nothing against outreach, we just don't do a lot of it. We've never been big into the cold email, cold calling, that kind of outreach. Um, just not our preference, and that's okay. I think preferences are sometimes overlooked in business, as we have always wanted to do these things because they're lent into skills that we already had and that we just wanted to do. Okay, but the smart way to look at this is by using the market message media framework. And so this is where we first establish who is our market, who is the customer we're trying to reach. Once we understand who that customer is, what is the message we need them to hear? Why would that customer care about us? And how can we communicate that we are the ones for them, leveraging our human brand in a way that's going to convince them? Once we understand that, then we can choose the media or the actual channel. Now this sequential order order. Now this sequential order is actually really key because most people they zip line straight to media because they want to jump on Instagram or they want to jump on YouTube or whatever channel it might be, and they overlook. Their market and the message, and they leave that till after. And in most cases, that's a mistake. You want to build your marketing around where are these people at? Who is my market? Let's get really clear on them. What do I need them to hear and understand? And then what is my best mechanism of delivering that message? Simple flip can actually change the way you look at it. And again, you need one channel. For some of you smaller B2B businesses, direct mail could be the thing, direct outreach. For others, running paid ads on Meta probably is the thing. For others, it could just be posting organically on Instagram or TikTok if you've got younger demographics. Either way, the market decides where we should place our bets in terms of the media, not the other way around. Really critical distinction. Once we've driven some traffic and started to build ourselves some leads, then we want to nurture them. So this is where the game has definitely evolved, because historically we would run ads, capture leads, and then engage via email, SMS, phone calls to nurture and educate. And where the game has evolved is that people's consumption of purely text and email and that kind of stuff is way less than it used to be. And as a result, we now need to rely much more heavily on video, because in this world of finite attention and lack of trust. The best way to build something called time on brand— now, time on brand is how long somebody has spent with you, learning about you, consuming your stuff, before they are ready to actually make a purchase. And so we want to get this as high as freaking we can. And the best way to do that is through video, is through having long-form content where they can sit and watch and understand who you are, what you believe, demonstrate that you can actually help them to the point where they say, yes, this is the person I want, I'm gonna freaking do it. And so this is where long-form YouTube videos work really well. This is where we rely a lot on live events or live webinars, because we are able to compress, you know, a huge amount of consumption into a single 90-minute session and take people from cold to effectively ready to buy there and then. But video is really key for this nurture piece. Now, not to say we don't do email. I'm still incredibly bullish on email, and emails with fantastic personality that also link to videos to further expedite the growth of time on brand. So that is where you win— email and long form. That is the place to focus. So once we've got our little nurture engine going, then we can focus on closing some deals. And this is where you just need a locked-in, repeatable sales process. Too many people leave sales to chance. Emphasis on repeatable sales process. This involves several things. Firstly, do you use calls or no calls? It's gonna depend on your offer. So, can people just buy, or do we wanna get them on the phone? Either or are fine. Either or are valid. Now, typically, if your offer is more complex and higher price, then a call is needed. If it is a slightly lower price, and less complex, simple to understand, then very straightforward to just sell them it. I'm a big fan of calls because it enables us to position our offers very specifically as applications where there's strict criteria for us to work together. And on a call, we're going to discuss it and see if we're the right fit or not. And that enables us to really get very high-caliber customers on board and learn a lot from those calls to make our marketing even better. But equally, a lot of effort having calls in place. And so if you want to run a no-call model, that's absolutely fine. The key thing is you understand how to get somebody from consuming our videos and being nurtured to actually buying our thing. And that journey needs to be really specific and logged and tracked. And I just think about it as these prospects have got a series of boxes in their head that need to be ticked in order for them to believe that we are the right person for them at this particular moment in time. So what are those boxes and what am I doing to tick them? We also then make sure we run repeated invitations. What does that mean? It means every single month we send out emails, we send out text messages asking if people want to buy our thing. Sounds really silly, but most people don't do this enough, and there is a direct correlation between the number of asks that you make and the number of sales that you make. Now the final little piece of the puzzle proof. And this is really important because this is actually what makes this whole little wheel spin and compound, because it's actually a flywheel. And so proof is once we have got the deals over the line and we have got customers, we have a system in place to collect proof, reviews, evidence that this is working, specific case studies. Now this we can only do if we do deliver a fantastic service. And this is a reminder that you do marketing because you suck at product. Is a Naval Ravikant quote, I believe, which is kind of true. And the best marketing is having an amazing product or service that truly delivers, because if we have so many happy customers coming out the other end that want to tell their friends about the experience, that is unbelievable. And if we have that in place, and that should be the first priority, then when we layer on this marketing, we amplify it and it grows majestically. I've seen businesses actually die, like literally go bankrupt, because they built their sales engine and did not have a good enough product or service at the base. And so they scaled lots of unhappy customers, and that spread very quickly, and they made a lot of money over the course of 2 years, and then literally went freaking bankrupt because their reputation was tarnished, torched, and they were done. So don't do that. We don't want to skip out on the great product. Then the key is asking people for a review at the right time, whenever they have a significant moment of truth. I.e., they get a sufficient amount of value from our thing that they obviously would feel happy to give us a testimonial in this moment. And you need to pinpoint what those moments are in your customer journey and then trigger automatically the review request to go out and do that in the right way. We're also a big fan of— we will host periodically throughout the year workshops at our HQ, and we'd invite our best customers in for a day of extra value, totally on us. And a little bit of a retention play there to just keep our best customers super close and super happy. And we'll obviously use that day to get some video testimonials and to beef out our library that we have online as well. So hopefully, so hopefully having gone through this, you can see there's really only 5 things you need to do. Have a clear human brand that people want to actually vibe with. Drive traffic from one channel or source. Nurture the traffic when it's coming in, particularly leveraging video to build that time on brand. Have a repeatable sales process so we know whether they're getting on calls or not, how they're going to buy, and we are making sure we are asking for the sale enough. And we are also having a fantastic service that we deliver and asking for proof at the right points in time to gather that evidence and to further spin the flywheel. If you enjoy videos like this, you're in the right place. Drop a like, drop a comment. What video shall I make next? I'll let you decide. I'm having fun making these videos. I hope this was useful to at least somebody out there. God bless, and I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.
