Get Millions of Leads With This Strategy

About this video

Martell shares three ‘crazy ideas’ from his own companies. 1) Find your pond: for Clarity.fm, an expert-advice marketplace, Quora and LinkedIn were locked down, so he turned to SlideShare — searching a topic surfaced experts on it, and their last slide typically contained an email address. An internal tool plus a team in Manila let Clarity source experts on demand. 2) Who’s got my list: at 17 he built Maritime Vacation, a cottage-listing site seeded by his father. Instead of advertising, he took a New Brunswick tourism guide that already listed every cottage and bed-and-breakfast, had his brother enter it into a Microsoft Access database for, as he tells it, three dollars an hour, and sent mail-merged form letters offering a $30 listing. Replies arrived with cash in envelopes. The riskiest part of a business, he argues, is not building but getting in front of the perfect-fit customer. 3) Viral content: for Flowtown, a social-marketing tool for small businesses, he copied Mint.com’s infographic play — partner with owners of interesting SMB marketing data, visualise it for them (working with agency Column Five), publish on both blogs and promote through sites like Digg and Reddit. He claims the blog reached 350,000 unique visitors a month organically, with posts getting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of shares.

Key takeaways

• Find your pond: look for a non-obvious place where your customers or partners already gather and are contactable, as SlideShare was for Clarity’s experts.
• Ask ‘who’s got my list?’ — an existing directory, guide or partner may already hold your exact buyers in usable form.
• Building is not the riskiest part; distribution is — focus on getting a compelling, easy-to-act-on offer in front of perfect-fit customers.
• Create viral content by visualising other people’s interesting data: co-create it, let the partner publish too, and share the credit.
• Borrow what works in another industry (Mint’s infographics for consumers) and adapt it to your own B2B audience.

Episode details: published July 26, 2021 · 14:20 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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