What's the Startup?!

The 5 Levels of Marketing, and How to Get Your Startup to the Top with Josiah

• Kaylan Thompson

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What kind of marketing support does your business actually need?

Josiah joins us to break down the five levels of marketing support—from doing it all yourself to hiring a full-blown head of strategy—and how to figure out where you are (and what to do next). We talk cold email, copywriting, digital presence, networking as marketing, and why so many small businesses stall out after their first hire.

Whether you’re bootstrapping with a junior hire or thinking about your first marketing contractor, Josiah offers smart, practical advice to help you grow without burning out. We also get into his favorite marketing books, tools like Claude vs. ChatGPT, and how to craft an offer that actually converts.

This one’s especially for the DIY marketers, the solopreneurs, and the startup teams trying to make it all work.

Whether you’re starting your first business or looking to grow something that already exists, Sprocketwky.com connects you with what—and who—you need.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Sprocket Podcast! If you’re ready to dive into the world of startups and innovation, visit us online at Sprocket WKY to learn more about our mission and how we support entrepreneurs like you.

Ready to check out the space? Book a tour with Tiffany, our Community Coordinator!

Got a business idea? Apply for a mentorship session with one of our experienced mentors!

Stay connected and join our growing community on Instagram for the latest updates, inspiration, and behind-the-scenes looks at what’s happening at Sprocket.

Let’s turn your ideas into reality—together!

Sprocket is proud to be supported by Team Kentucky, the Commonwealth's Cabinet for Economic Development. Learn more about their initiatives and resources at ced.ky.gov.

Kaylan:

Welcome Josiah. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Josiah:

Yeah. So I live here in West Kentucky and I've got three kids all under the age of six. So it's pretty loud. Fun household. That's so fun. But, right now I do marketing strategy mainly for businesses, especially cold email and copywriting as a service and doing some advertisements for like local theater ads and things like that. But, I'm really seeing a need for focusing more on strategy for business owners. When one of my customers, I was mainly focusing on it companies and doing solely cold email. That's what I started out on. So cold email just basically means you're sending out an email to a person that's never received an email from them for me before. Same thing as a cold call, and so I'd structure these campaigns to reach out to their ideal customer and basically you need quite a few emails to be able to do that because you just don't get a whole lot of response compared to going and knocking on a door or talking to somebody at an event. So one of my customers ended up only having about 200 emails that I could find for his specific market. He only served nursing homes within a specific 300 mile radius. And so I was like, Oh, he's a really good friend of mine. And I, I can't just say, Oh, I can't service you because I'm focused on building businesses, not focused on doing cold emails. So I, I figured out what really would be the best method for him. And really it's doing cold calls and going to events with him. I'm actually going to another event with him, in a couple of weeks and then doing, we're going to start doing some LinkedIn ads as well, and we're going to be able to reach a lot more people in a more effective way doing that. So once I started doing that, I was like, Like, okay, so I need to expand my services a little bit. I fell in love with copywriting after I got into marketing and so I offered copywriting as a service and that opened the door immediately. As soon as I made a post on Facebook saying, Hey, I'm also doing this, got immediately within one hour, two customers that wanted me to do something and then several after that. So in talking with businesses, I've given them about five different levels of marketing that they're in. And the first level is they don't have many marketing and there's two different types of people. Some of them, it's a good thing and it's only one specific type of company that falls in the first level. It doesn't need marketing. It's a good thing. And that's like the window washer that he's so good at his job. He's very dependable. Everybody knows if they need a window washer, that's what they call. And so he doesn't need any kind of marketing. He just, he gets referrals all the time and so he doesn't need to do any outreach. The other guy is one who needs to grow and wants to grow, but they don't. They just don't know where to start., and then the second level is someone who's doing marketing on their own or they've hired a junior and both methods, since they're not a professional marketer and they don't really know the ins and outs of marketing and they're trying to do their own business, they really, they might get some new business. They'll usually get some new business, but it's not efficient. It's not cost effective. If they're doing it on their own, they're really stressed out. If they've hired a junior, they're still really stressed out, and the junior usually works really hard. So, they're working pretty hard, but isn't, they aren't experienced enough to figure out what's working, what's not working. The third level is someone that's hired a professional that's been doing it for a while. And there's two types of professionals in that level that I've categorized. And that's one that's really a specialist in one strong area and not really a specialist in other areas. And then one that's, I will call them scammers, but they, the first one generally, if they hit the right business, because they have the right method for that business. they, they do really well for that business, but then they try to go get other businesses and they don't do as well because that method doesn't work well with that business model. So there's, there's that type. Sometimes they'll do really good. Most of the times they, they will do average. And then the scammer is really good at talking. They're really good at making content. It just, it gets me very fired up because I see it a lot and they make good con, they make content that looks good to the business owner who's not a marketer. That's not their business. This, they don't know what's good and bad and it doesn't work. It doesn't make conversions, but they're good at talking their way through it for a couple years, before they get fired. and then the, the fourth level is someone who's hired multiple people, either they've gone through several times hiring different levels of, the juniors. The people are experts in one area, the scammers. They either have kind of a loose team of all of those, or they've just been through several of them. And that, that model seems to, if they've got the budget for it, it seems to produce decent results because they've got so many people hitting it at different angles. But it's still a lot of waste. A lot of times those marketers are not talking to each other, so the market, the messaging looks different in all different ways. we've all seen those ads where we get an ad on Facebook, then we get an ad on YouTube, then we get the same ad. And we tend to gravitate more towards those products because the messaging is consistent and hitting it different, platforms. And so the fifth and final level that I think most businesses should aim for is they've hired a head of marketing and they, they know they've studied marketing strategy. They know what the current trends are, the current things that are working for different models of business. And they're the ones that actually hire the different marketers that are specific to that businesses needs. And the most businesses that I've talked to have. I haven't hired somebody like that because they don't really know to hire someone like that or they know about them, but it's like, I'm not big enough to hire a chief of marketing. So that's, that's now where I'm really focusing in on is how to get businesses, and being the head of marketing for them and fitting in where they are because one guy I talked to has got a huge budget. We can do a lot of stuff right now. I talked to one guy yesterday who has no budget and so we're working on where are we going to go? What's the roadmap?

Kaylan:

I love having that visual, that hierarchy, because I can imagine maybe a lot of people who are listening are in that second or third tier, and that second tier is the one that really gets my heart because you may have a junior next to you, which I'm assuming is like an assistant, but they're still looking to you for support, no matter what the strategy is, they're there to help, but you're still the one that has to figure it out and tell them what to do. Right. Which I can imagine is so exhausting. And I've personally seen some businesses fail out when they make that first hire because it just burns them out. It was almost easier just doing it all themselves. So how can people who are in the budget of the second tier start moving their way up and get to that fifth one pretty quickly? What's some, what are some must haves or some things to ditch?

Josiah:

Yeah. It really depends on the, on the business model. If it's service based. Based like you're creating something for somebody or you're doing a service like marketing or you're doing, you want to start doing IT for people, really leveraging your network is going to be really important. my first three customers in my first month of business came from reaching out to people I knew making constant posts on what I was doing now and physically, you know, calling people up or messaging them on their platforms of, Hey, I'm doing this, I'm doing it really cheap or really more free. And I would love to, to work with you and learn together on it. That's really important if somebody is just starting out, but like I said, it does depend on the business model. So if they have some budget for marketer, the first things you want to work on is getting your offer right. And that doesn't necessarily cost anything unless you're really bad at making offers and you need to hire someone to help you, but making your product or your service something that. It's very attractive to your target audience, is, is really important because no matter what marketing you do, if you don't have a good offer, nobody's, very few people are going to buy it. next would be making sure that your website looks good. It doesn't have to be optimized for SEO right away, but that is a SEO for anybody that doesn't know is basically doing certain things to your website, putting certain keywords in it that make it rank higher. This is important for all businesses. Get your business listed on Google maps, especially, you can do it on Apple maps as well. It's a little bit more of a process, but, and get all of the people that have bought from you before or people that have done business with you to give you five star reviews. So stuff like that, making sure that your online presence looks good is, is something that you can hire somebody off Fiverr to make sure they have good work that they can show. But,, some good money you can spend just little bits at a time to make your business look presentable and have your offer presentable. And there was, reaching out to your network.

Kaylan:

Yeah. I love the idea of networking as marketing. We think that marketing has to be digital, but marketing at its core is just talking to somebody else about what you do and getting to know them. And I love the concept of leveraging the connections that you already have and focusing on building more, which I don't think about. Especially if you're an introvert.

Josiah:

Yes.

Kaylan:

So one of the things that I think was one of the smartest things I ever did as a copywriter was I stopped selling. I stopped pretty much marketing myself online, but I joined groups with designers

Josiah:

and I

Kaylan:

made lots of friends and then before I knew it, all the designer friends that I had were sending me clients. Yeah. Because, of course, designers are great. Often have their clients write their own content. Right. Which either takes way too long Yep. Or it's crap

Josiah:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Kaylan:

So they're always like, can you do this?

Josiah:

Yes, absolutely. So they started

Kaylan:

packaging me into their package. They were making the sales and of course I would do discounts or kickbacks or whatever Right. To say thanks. Yeah. I never had to make a sale. Yes. And that was a huge hack for me.

Josiah:

That's awesome. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Finding out little things like that are, are really cool. Where. Where you find, you don't think of just everybody's your customer. You find that a niche doesn't have to be your only one longterm, but finding one where you could focus on and would it be a good lead source for you, whether it's a partner like you had or just a very specific industry that you can really focus on learning everything about and start joining Facebook groups and talking about things and yeah, that's really good.

Kaylan:

And then it makes so much more sense if you're building a network of partners because that kind of anchors you.

Josiah:

Yes.

Kaylan:

Um, and then you always have kind of like a safety net to fall back on if for some reason you don't have a Facebook ad budget next month and you have to just go talk to people, Talk more about optimizing your offer. Cause I know that's something that you've talked about on the slack channel. You've been sharing it with members. And I was like, oh, that is something to talk about.

Josiah:

Yeah,

Kaylan:

what does that mean to optimize your offer?

Josiah:

Yeah. It's, it's really presenting your business or your service or your product in a way that's very appealing to your target market. And so there's a lot packed into that little thing that I said, a really good book to read would be Alex Ramosi's Million Dollar Offer and Million Dollar Leads. They come as a pair or you can buy them separately, but those are really good books to read when thinking about your offer if you're doing this on your own. I can give you an example from me selling my own service. So I started out in cold email and so to get customers, I sent cold emails to get my customers. Brilliant. It was very cool. Yes, and my offer was, not, Hey, I do lead generation services because that's generic. They don't, may not necessarily know what that means. Generally my market, which was MSPs, they take care of it for small, small to large companies, they generally know what a lead is, but everybody's saying that. And so I crafted it carefully. Caring about what they care about first, which is growing their business. I know that MSPs really struggle to get more companies interested in their company. It's almost all referrals, but their referrals usually aren't good. So part of it, a really big part of it is understanding your target market really well. And so when you understand really well what somebody's likes and dislikes are, you can market to them in a really attractive way. So if I know you like Spicy hamburgers and not just any hamburger, but you really like spicy hamburgers Well, then I can show you a picture on my billboard of a spicy hamburger And that's going to bring the people that like spicy hamburgers in rather than we've got the best food in Western, Kentucky You can get really specific on that type of customer so my offer was basically different variations of I I can give you two new customers per month with no big upfront costs and you only pay when I get you a customer. So that, that comes from knowledge of the market, but also big knowledge of my own product. So my own product was lead generation services. And I know that usually they charge an enormous amount upfront and they also charge you per meeting booked. And so what happened a lot of times is that these companies would pay 400 for a lead that wouldn't be that good. And so they'd be burned on that and they wouldn't want to do that at all. And so my offer was that you're not going to pay me unless I give you a quality lead that you actually make a sale on. And two customers a month for an MSB is a lot of money. That could be anywhere from 10 to 20, 000 per month that they're going to get for the next five years. So it was a very attractive offer that got lots of responses and got several customers off that.

Kaylan:

How'd you go about finding out what they cared about?

Josiah:

So I had the advantage. This is something. new business owners should consider to add the advantage of I worked in MSPs. So, and I have lots of friends that are MSP owners. So I had the advantage of just knowing a lot about it. So if you know a lot about your target market, you have an advantage, but if you don't have the advantage, you want to hit it from several different angles. So read up a lot on Reddit and find out, you know, ask different questions like, you just put in there, your target market. target market. So if I'm targeting MSPs, I would say MSP struggles and read what people are really struggling with in MSPs. If I'm doing MSP lead generation, I'll say struggles with MSP sales. And so I'll be able to see what are people complaining about when it comes to sales? Are they, are they hurting because their sales people aren't trained or are they hurting because they can't get enough leads in? You definitely should ask to chat GPT and I've been using Claude, Claude is an amazing resource if you're doing any kind of marketing. It's better at creative writing than Chat GPT. But they will both make stuff up. So you definitely want to fact check, but it will definitely give you new ideas and you can certainly ask it,"how would you go about doing more research?" Another, and the best way to do market research and loved Monica's, the last podcast you did with Monica, because she mentioned just talking to the people so especially if you You have one customer, you definitely should talk to them, ask them, why did they buy? What were they doing before they started working with you? What do you, what do they like? What are some things they would like to see? Because we all have in our head what we think would be attractive, but we don't actually know for a fact. And so you can ask your customer. If you don't have any customers, just go to business and say, Hey, I'm, I'm not trying to sell anything, but I have this service and I'm just doing some market research to figure out. What would be attractive about that? And that definitely will turn into some sales as well if you have a good product.

Kaylan:

One of the things that I like to do with chat GPT is have it become the person that I'm wanting to get to know, which is so fun because then you could ask it lots of questions like what keeps you up at night and it'll say, here's my fear. And I'm like, but why does that actually scare you? And then it'll go deeper. And I'm like, but why does How does that actually scare you? But it kind of gives you, it's, it's an easier way to get into the psyche of somebody. And of course you have to get out and prove it. You can't just rely on it wholeheartedly. But as an aside, tell me more about chat GPT versus Claude, especially as a writer. I think I use it for, for sprockets marketing quite a bit and I've been able to get it to this point where it knows the brand voice pretty well. And then if it shifts off of it, I'm like, that does not sound like us. And it's like, I'm so sorry. And then it nails it, but I'm interested in trying something new.

Josiah:

Yeah. So chat GPT, I did finally get it in some aspects to write like me, and back then I was doing only cold email. So getting it to pretty much get to where I was going, but as soon as I switched to a different customer, which needed a whole different market, I'd have to do that process all over again. There's still like, like you said, times where it's like, Oh, that wasn't good. So when I started to do some SEO blogging, which is basically just creating blogs with SEO keywords in it to get a website to rank higher again, I started to look at how to train AI to, to write like you, because that's the main problem is you, you ask chat GPT to write something and it comes up with a very generic thing, which is, which is good. But most people don't realize it's, it's a foundation that you can then train to write like you. So, in looking that up, I found out that people were moving to cloud for creative writing. Basically, it has, it's the same price if you get the pro version, which cloud you definitely do. Chat GPT is better if you're using it for free. Cloud is minimum 20 a month, but it's definitely worth it. so what you can do with cloud is create a project and you can give it a prompt of what you're trying to do, and you can load tons of. The files of what you're doing into it. So if I'm doing an SEO blog, I can put all the information from the company's website into that blog, their services, and then tell it which tone I want to write in. And you can have your base tone that you generally write in as a base layer for all of the things that you do. And then once it spits out what, what it thinks you want, what you want to talk about, I'll give it an outline for, for the SEO blogging that we want to do, give it all the headers. You can ask it to refine it, or you can ask it to refine these things, hey this was too cheesy. I went from doing like 17 variations until it finally gets, gets where I want it to be to now it's, it's pretty much on point every single time.

Kaylan:

I don't know why chat GPT doesn't have a better archiving or filing system, like, why does it not function like Google Drive?

Josiah:

Right.

Kaylan:

I have so many qualms. So right after this, I'm going to be a little bit quiet because that sounds so much better. Let's talk about consistency and messaging. That's one thing that you mentioned in the beginning. We usually connect better with brands that are consistent across YouTube and Instagram and all the places. what can startups do to Make sure they're staying aligned, especially when they're working with different contractors or different team members in the beginning, before they get that chief of marketing,

Josiah:

right? Yeah. That can be, that can be challenging. I would say if you've got several marketers that are doing things for you, typically, some of them you won't really meet with them hardly at all. But you, you know, you do things, things through messaging, and so if you've got several people that you've hired that are not all from the same company, typically they won't be. You want to have a group meeting bi weekly, at least once a month to where you talk about what you really want them to be messaging., that would be really important. If you're doing it all on your own, there are several softwares and they escape the top of my brain right now, but that you can create some content and it'll publish them to all your different platforms. And so if you've got a video, you can do a Facebook live, but then it also finishes the recording and publishes it to YouTube. Yeah,

Kaylan:

we use go high level. Yes We like that one. Before that we looked at HubSpot, it was a little too expensive for what we needed. I want to take a little bit more into what so you mentioned in the beginning. I give someone is just starting out, they need to make sure they've optimized their offer, refined their digital presence and then start leveraging their network. but then one Once they make a marketing hire, what are some of the first, heavy hitting tasks they can have them do or marketing tactics.

Josiah:

Yeah, I get it. It depends on what type of business they have and you can get pretty close what you should do to begin with based on what type of business you are. So if you are a B2B, you sell the businesses, you should hire someone that's a specialist in LinkedIn, who's a cold email specialist, someone who's good at cold calling and those things, especially cold calling. The following is gonna be really effective at getting you some more revenue. So where you can go in and hire someone who's really good at just overall marketing, if it's B2C, you want someone who's way better at creating an email list. That's very important. Um, someone who's good at doing Facebook ads and, Instagram ads but someone who is generally all around good at doing social media advertisement. The way you can check to make sure they're actually good at what they do is you ask them to show you what they're currently doing, not just examples of the work, because that can look really good. But if, but you need to ask them to show you examples of stuff they're actively doing and you can go and look and see how many people are liking this. What are the conversions? How many sales are they getting from these advertisements? And that's, that's really important. It's a very important thing. I've seen a lot of marketers fail at is that they've, they've created really cool content, but it's not actually reaching the right people and if it does, it's not actually converting into a sale.

Kaylan:

How do you start shifting how long do you test the waters and when do you make the shift?

Josiah:

People will talk about the rule of one in marketing and it's basically talking about one idea, but there's a further breakdown that I really like. It's not original to me called the rule of one RIOA. So it's R I O A. So that's one reader, one idea, one offer and one action. You don't always have to have an offer in whatever you're creating, but if you're writing something that's supposed to be for any kind of marketing, you're going to have one type of person in mind per advertisement and you want to have one idea, not several ideas. Just one idea per advertisement and one audience per advertisement. So making sure you have stuff like that really firm is all you can do. You can do. And then as far as what platform you're using, it depends on, that's, that's how you view your metrics. So on YouTube, you'd have to find someone that's really good in YouTube, shorts and content in general, because if I understand it right from when I was doing it before, it's a very long game for the most part. Whereas other platforms are very short, like Tik Tok, it's, it's very easy to skyrocket on Tik Tok just because the way their algorithms work. So to wrap all of that up, I'd say make sure you. You have firm, the fundamentals of marketing and your messaging so that it's not, it doesn't have any chance of being lost because of you. And it only depends on figuring out the actual algorithm of the platform

Kaylan:

you're using. I like long games. It's less pressure.

Josiah:

If someone does like doing Tik Tok, I, I would really encourage them. Cause we don't know whether it's up or down these days. it's very good for building an audience and then you can start pointing them to a longer form of a longer game, whether it's your email list or your YouTube channel or stuff like that, point them to courses. Cause it's, it was really effective at getting a quick audience.

Kaylan:

Well, I feel like. We're probably going to have to do a series with you, but for those who are listening and, they're probably in those couple middle tiers that you mentioned in the beginning, what is one piece of advice that you would give to them as we wrap up today?

Josiah:

Yeah, I would say if you're, if you're looking to do it all on your own, make sure you're spending a lot of time studying marketing and some good, some really good books would be. The ad week copywriting handbook by Joseph Sugarman would be a really good book to read. And those two books I mentioned by Alex Ramosi are really important for marketing and, funnily enough, how to win friends and influence people is a very important book for all types of all kinds of things in your business, but especially in just how to message to people is, is really important. Keeping them in mind first., if you're. wanting to outsource it, find someone that's doing something similar to what I'm doing where they're thinking overall making a plan for you. Someone who's willing to help you make a game plan so you know what to focus on and the milestones where you should start hiring a specialist in each area is it's probably the best advice I can give. That could give for someone in those first couple tiers.

Kaylan:

So where can people find you and connect with you?

Josiah:

Yeah, they can, they can email me, at Josiah. It's J O S I A H at optrivo. com is O P T R I V O.

Kaylan:

Thanks Josiah. No problem.