The Formula Behind Every Successful Business - How to Combine Product + Marketing for Real Growth

What's up everyone? Actually, for the last few years I have been figuring out marketing and I guess generally I have started some businesses and I've gotten them to the point where I have a good product, right? And in order to make a good product, you need good user experience. There's, there's all these things that go into making a product, but if no one sees your product, it doesn't matter how good it is. It's just, it just lives, right? It just lives in, in the ether and doesn't, doesn't build a business. In order to have a business, you actually have to have the, the business side of it, which is the money coming in and improving people's lives in some, some fashion, right? You have to be doing something for people to be shifting their lives that they're willing to give you money. Anyway, so that being said, I have been doing some, some learning on this, and I've had some experiences, and I've worked at companies and, and kind of looked at how they succeed. But specifically, I have this broken down into the, the primary components of building a successful business is marketing plus product. Now let's break those down into each component. Let's talk product. Product is one I know very well. I've been doing user experience for 10+ years now, so I've— I realize a lot of times, though I think user experience is any touchpoint the user has with the company, it's usually pertained to whatever product they're talking about. And it's usually like the digital product or the store, if you will. Like, so if you're an e-commerce brand, sometimes your digital product is, is your store. It's not like your t-shirts you're selling or your apparel you're selling. It's, it's the store. But a lot of times that's what the UX is associated with. So you have UX design who designs whatever it is you're going to build. You have development that's gonna actually build it out. You have the product that connects all the people involved. And then you also have some other teams like business that'll represent the business need. You'll have analytics, you'll have research, you'll have writing, you know, what other positions that go into Product teams, it ranges. There's, there's lots of other people that, that can be part of this, this ordeal, uh, but usually that involves making the product. And this is like, like I said, the digital product. It's not like the physical product. You may have some of the similar areas for the physical product too, but in this scenario, if you're building an app or you have some kind of physical thing that you're selling, they'd probably be working on the store. Uh, so now let's say you have built a sick product, right? You have a fantastic store, it looks great, it's optimized, it's fast, you know, you've tested it, you know it's usable. All these things are good. Well, so now you have to get people to see it, and this is the marketing aspect. And this can be, uh, your brand, this can be paid traffic. There's, there's different, different areas. But one thing specifically I think is, is important to note is that you need some sort of content machine or something that's going to create content, whether it's a person or a department or something, namely because you need promotional material, right? You can't, you can't market with nothing. So a lot of times there will be graphic designers, there will be photographers, there'll be some kind of brand or content creation team that helps create those assets for usage in advertising. Sometimes they're also used in the product too. But, uh, so that's— I think that's important to note. So now that you have that, let's say you've built that, you have pictures, you have videos, maybe you have writings, you have blogs, you have stuff, right? Well, now you need to leverage that in order to get traffic. Now you're going to get people to your site, and there's really two kind of ways you get traffic. It's either paid or organic. Through paid, obviously you're going to spend money through some kind of platform, being via Facebook or, um, Google, or there's all kinds, right? You can do TikTok, you can do Pinterest, there's all kinds of places you can advertise or whatever, billboards, whatever. And that's how you're going to pay to drive traffic to your site, to your store, to your product. And then there's organic, which is just building stuff, right? That's people discovering you and staying along, staying around for the ride, for the brand. And, you know, it's usually done through content marketing. You might create videos like this one, you'll post it, someone says, oh, I really like their stuff, I want to stay around, and now they'll sign up for an email list or they'll follow you on Instagram or something, right? But it's organic, it's usually not paid, it's through Blood, sweat, and tears. So now that you are getting these people to your site, now you're going through like this funnel. Now this is where your, your digital product meets your marketing side, right? Okay, cool. They're— they know of your company, they come to your store. Now we start getting into the marketing funnel, which is like a stepped process that users take in order to eventually convert or purchase, and then whatever happens next. Sometimes there's a loyalty, there's retention, there's stuff that happens after. Um, you ideally— your brand's good enough where people are now referring other people, which are bringing them into the funnel, now feeding into your traffic. So there are— that's, that's kind of on the marketing side. Like I said, I've worked in companies that are very big on, on analytics on analyzing how users move down the funnel, trying to increase the number of traffic you get, trying to increase the conversion you get in between steps from parts of the funnel. The stages are awareness, interest, considerate— I guess interest and consideration are often similar— conversion, and then loyalty. I thought there was more steps. I guess I'm looking at this right here and there's like awareness, interest, desire, action, and loyalty. Others have awareness, interest, awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, advocacy. But I feel like loyalty and advocacy are kind of similar. So depending on what you look at, there are different steps. That being said, it's awareness— for the one I kind of like leverage or why I go by is awareness. They're now aware. They saw your ad. They've seen your brand. They showed interest. By clicking on it and now browsing the site, going through it. Maybe in that interest you also have— they have interest in a product and they looked at it, they've considered it, they want to, you know, they may even add it to cart and eventually leave, and then you retarget them and you bring them back. You're all these steps that are trying to get them to convert or purchase. Once they've purchased, then you follow up, you send them a thank you, you do these things, right? You send them a discount for another purchase, and now we're building this like brand loyalty where people are— the experience was so good that they're telling other people to come back. And that's the marketing side, right? Because you now have to sell your product or get people to use your product. If it's a— say you're making an app, you need people to sign up and use your product and tell other people. If it's buying, you know, buying products, you need them to go to your store, browse your store, be able to find what they're looking for, add it to the cart, check out, and then come back. Maybe you have some loyalty program or something. And that, that's kind of, to me, that's how you make that successful business. So once you, once you've seen how it goes, you're obviously iterating, you're improving your product, you're taking steps to try and find out how to make them that, that combination of product and marketing better. You're adding new features, you're adding new products to your, your listings. And once you've figured out how to kind of the equation for the marketing, right? Do I run this type of ad and we improve our conversions on this and it helps create a predictable stream of traffic or predictable stream of income. You can now use that to fund other features. Maybe you add, I guess if you're a digital product like Instagram, right? We're making X amount of money from this, we can now add stories and this is a new way people will wanna advertise or, new stream of connection people. So it helps you expand your business when your business is making money. A lot of the times the struggle for most businesses, they can build a product or they can come up with a good idea for a product, but then it comes down to getting it to, uh, getting it to people. And that's usually where it's challenging because they think it's just, just run ads or just tell people about it, but that just gets traffic. And then once you get traffic to your site, you have to basically tell people about it. Your site has to do the work to kind of convince that it's gonna solve their problem or gonna fit their needs or that show them that they're gonna like it. And there's a lot of factors people go into this like trust factors and imagery and stuff like that. But I don't know, I guess metaphorically you can think about it. If you're looking for a car and you don't know what car you want, but you know you need a car, you'll go to a dealership and then you talk to a dealer or a salesperson who's gonna like show you the functions. It's gonna try and help you find the best car for you. And that's essentially what your website has to do, is show off the features and things like that. And if you like it, you purchase it. And if you like it, you come back in 3 years when your lease is up or whatever. I don't know. So this is, this is general, like, general knowledge. It's not specifically how to get into this. I think knowing this, this knowledge will help, uh, some of the strategy, strategic steps you take in there. I know as a design— like, as a UX designer, there are steps I take when I'm actually designing the product As a business owner that's marketing, there are steps I take to test different ad campaigns in order to see which one gets people to the site or gets more interest or gets more— just more activity or more engagement. So all these are very high level and you can start funneling your way into the details associated with the business.