I recently stepped down as CEO at Yoga International after our sale to Gaia Inc, in late December, 2021. This has given me time to help many colleagues and friends with business planning, strategy, growth marketing, and big ideas! The past month has been incredibly fun dreaming new ventures and ideas, and also exploring how I can help existing companies, big and small—everything from local business ventures, to software organizations, startups, and helping nonprofits.
Being involved with Yoga International from creating the first business plan, to raising funds, to developing the growth strategy, people operations, leadership, and planning technology roadmaps, there are a lot of areas where I can help. But my core focuses are on strategy and growth marketing in the technology, fitness, and wellness spaces. I am passionate about helping people and businesses that aim to make a big difference in the world.
Strategic focuses
I love to help businesses find the right product-market fit and discover the right strategies to grow. These can be big strategic shifts or small tweaks. Strategy is all about your unique brand and strengths, and how to build on those.
- Core strengths – leverage your unique brand and strengths to build your business.
- Market – understanding the broader context of competition and the overall market is so important to your product positioning and your strategy.
- Differentiation & positioning – making your product/service unique is critical.
- Customers and personas – obsess over your customers and their unique needs.
- Pricing – price points and options for your products and services can make a huge difference.
- Roadmap and vision – you need a strategic plan that will come together over time.
Growth marketing focuses
Marketing is in my DNA. You need to have a great product and great marketing. This means messaging, channels, and execution all have to come together and work synergistically across your comprehensive marketing strategy.
- Content marketing – every brand, big and small, needs to be producing content to remain relevant in 2022. But, content strategies are complex. What content should you be producing and what channels should you be exploring? You need aa strategic content plan that helps you grow over the long term.
- SEO/Organic – organic traffic and exposure is an important channel to consider. This exposure often takes time, but has the potential to bring long term growth. Successful organic strategies at brands like Yoga International were similar to Hubspot’s incredibly successful organic content plan.
- Paid Media – directly managed successful campaigns in Facebook, Instagram (case study), Youtube, Google Search, Google Display, Bing, Pinterest, Tiktok, Twitter, Quora as well as connected television advertising. Depending on your product or service, some of these channels may perform much better than others. You have to consider your message, your creative, and your customers.
- Email marketing – This was a massive part of our focus at my previous companies. Having a comprehensive email plan and strategy can help you grow your business. This almost always starts with lead capture strategies, nurturing, and then conversion. Great email copy and headlines often make all the difference. We use a ton of A/B testing.
- Landing page optimization – Your landing pages can be greatly helping or harming your business. The only way to know is to test, test, test. Images, colors, copy, pricing all should be tested!
- Affiliate marketing – for many brands, employing an affiliate network can help accelerate growth.
- Influencer marketing – this is a buzz word, but it actually works (when you do it right). You need the right influencers and the right messages.
- Customer referral programs – these can help your top customers refer more great customers to your product! You need the right incentives and the right messaging to make it work.
- Product – your product should be your best marketing channel. The best products have marketing built-into the product. Retention and repeat buyers should be the primary focus of everything you do.
- Growth hacking and modeling – find marketing channels that not only work, but also scale. You need to model how you can reinvest and grow each channel, or maximize profits within each channel. Focusing trends, data, and testing can make a huge difference.
I’m excited to learn about your project and passion and see if I can help. Because strategy and marketing are relevant in every business, nothing is off the table. In the past month, I have talked to folks interested in building personal brands, large payment providers, local insurance providers, local entrepreneurs, b-to-b and b-to-c subscription companies, venture capital firms, government organizations, public speakers, tech marketplace startups, and others.
Feel free to book 15-minutes below to chat with me, free, any of my open times. I’m excited to learn about what you are doing and more than happy to help!
Peace,
Todd