Episode #078: Growth Stacking: Where to Focus Next For Business Growth
Growth Stacking: Where to Focus Next For Business Growth
This week we're diving deep into the core elements of growing an online business with digital products or services - if you're wondering where to "go next" then this is the episode to listen to.
We'll explore four key areas to focus on for consistent business growth: growing the audience, making offers, automation, and optimizing & scaling. I'll share practical insights and actionable strategies for each area.
This episode provides a detailed roadmap for figuring out that next step to take. So, get ready to sharpen your growth strategy and stack the odds in your favor with this episode.
Enjoy!
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Zach Spuckler
Links Mentioned
Full Transcript:
Zach Spuckler:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 78. And in this episode, we're talking about growth. Specifically, what should you be growing next? We've talked to a lot of our members inside our membership and realized that a lot of people often wanna know where do I go now? So if you've been growing your business or trying to grow your business and you wanna know kind of what your next step should be based on what you have in front of you, this episode is for you. So stay tuned.
Zach Spuckler:
Hey. Hey. Hey. Not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you today because I met with my team, and I kinda talked to them because I was feeling, like, honestly, a little creatively short on ideas. We've got some cool ideas for shows coming up. But, you know, this week's show, I was like it was just kind of like a big blank. And I was like, what do we work on? And I talked to my team and I said, what are people asking about, you know, in our membership a lot. Right? I answer a lot of questions in there, but my team really supports me. And I was like, what can we really touch on that people are asking about? And what they told me was a lot of people say, Zach, I've got this or, you know, I've created this thing. I've got this result, but kind of what do I work on next? And so I kind of created this idea.
Zach Spuckler:
It's nothing fancy, but I call it growth stacking. And really it's understanding how things stack together to create consistent growth in your business. Okay? So if you're, like, not sure what to work on next, if you, you know, created an offer or you've tried to launch an offer and maybe it flopped or maybe it didn't. And you're kind of like where do I go now? That's what I wanna talk about today. Now I do wanna mention that growth stacking, I haven't even googled it. It could already be a name for something else. But it's just what I'm gonna refer to it throughout this episode, because I think it really kind of encapsulates as a concept what it is I'm trying to communicate. So the first thing I want to talk about is that when I look at growing my business or even growing as a whole, there's only 4 things that I really focus on.
Zach Spuckler:
Okay? And that is number 1, growing an audience. I'm always trying to grow my audience and I'm really doing that 247. So when I start to see things get slow or I feel like I'm not seeing the sales or the growth that I wanna see, I always ask myself, is my audience growing? The second thing I'm always thinking about is, am I making offers? I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs who say, you know, I'm not really seeing sales. I'm not really seeing sales. And I asked them, like, when's the last time you asked for the sale? Right? When's the last time you made an offer? And it doesn't have to be aggressive. It doesn't have to be every day. But if you're not actively asking for sales, you're not going to actively make sales. And so I always wanna make sure that I'm asking for the sale.
Zach Spuckler:
Once I'm clear that I'm, like, growing my my audience and I'm asking for sales, can I automate the process anywhere? Automation is huge in our business. We automate a lot of different things. If you're not automating, you have to always be on. And so we automate through Facebook ads. We automate through email marketing. You know, you can automate through funnels. You can automate through video. But are you automating the process? And then finally, are we optimizing and scaling? And optimizing and scaling is such a broad thing to say, I know.
Zach Spuckler:
But really what I'm saying when I say optimize and scale is, am I making all those previous three things better? Am I growing my audience more efficiently? Right? Are there places that I can work on growing my audience more efficiently? Are there places that I can work on making my offers more efficient? Are there places that I can work on automating more efficiently? Right? Optimization is really for me, and I say optimization because that's the word that stands out in our our space. But really optimization is also about efficiency. Am I being efficient where I need to be efficient? And then scaling. And once you have something that works, scaling is really in this scenario doing more of what works. Right? Doing more of what is actually working to get the result that you wanna get. So I kinda mentioned at the beginning of this episode that I would talk to you about, like, where do you go next. Right? And I'm gonna come back to these four things all throughout because really, to me, I always wanna be working on one of these things. My next step is always to be working on one of these things.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So the first place you could be in your business is that you don't have a big audience or you feel like your audience might be stale. Right? And so that comes back to the first thing, we want to grow an audience. And so what I do first, if you feel like, hey, I don't have an audience or my audience is stale or maybe people aren't opening your emails or you feel like, you know, another thing we see a lot in in our space is people say like, oh, I grew this list to, you know, a couple 100 people, but I haven't emailed it a year. Right? And that's okay. No judgment. But if that's where you're at, then you wanna start with growing the audience. And there's a few different things that you can do in the audience growth phase, and the first thing is organic marketing. Right? I'm not a huge organic marketer, so I won't do a whole podcast episode where I sit here and pretend to be, like, here's the best Instagram strategy you can use.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? We're always experimenting. We're always having fun. We're doing, an experiment over on Instagram right now. I'm @zachspuckler if you wanna check it out. But you want to do organic marketing is a great place to start. Right? I'm a huge advocate for advertising which I'll talk about in a second. But if you're like, I'm just getting started. I don't wanna throw a ton of money into this yet.
Zach Spuckler:
Organic marketing is a great place to start. And when I say organic marketing, I'm talking Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, anything where you can use social media to grow your business without having to pay. Right? Second thing is you wanna be creating consistent content. So a lot of people are really great at social media, and and I envy people when I see them on social media because I'm, like, they're crushing it. Their social media is so good. They're growing, but they forget that they need to curate and create regular content. And I'm not just talking about social media content. I'm talking about having a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel.
Zach Spuckler:
You don't have to do anything crazy, but you do need something that you can email that list that you're growing to keep them engaged. If there's nothing engaging your audience, what you're gonna find is that they don't stay engaged. Right? So you remember I mentioned earlier that I talked to a lot of people who have a list, but they haven't emailed them in a long time. That's not a great place to be. We don't wanna be in a position where our list isn't hearing from us. And so we don't just wanna randomly email for no reason either. Right? And so for me, I find that creating consistent content for us, it's this podcast, gives me a solid reason to email my audience. And then once you're creating, you know, your organic content and you're creating your or I should say social media content plus you're creating your own content consistently, then you wanna nurture that audience.
Zach Spuckler:
It's important that you make sure you're emailing your list on a regular basis and nurturing them. Because if you don't send them regular content whether it be free, paid, I recommend a combination of both, then what you're gonna find is people just stop opening emails, they forget who you are, and you're not gonna see progress. Now the last thing that I'll say about if you're kind of at this part where you're like, I don't have an audience or I don't have an engaged audience is, I'm a huge fan of lead generation ads. And we have ads running every single day to grow our email list. Our email list is consistently growing. The only exception is when we clean it, sometimes we lose some people and it dips down a little bit. But we are consistently growing our email list every single day through Facebook advertising. And the reason I like to do that is because number 1, I don't have to create content.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? I don't have to be on social media. And if I am, it's just like gravy. It's just icing on the cake. But if you want to grow your list every single day regardless of like the circumstance, like whatever you have going on, whatever you need to work on, you really should consider running lead generation ads. And I've done some episodes on this on the podcast, but the biggest thing is if you want to learn how to run ads to like grow your audience, if you feel like you have a stale audience or you don't have enough people in your audience or you feel like when you make an offer, you know, you're not getting enough people clicking to the sales page, audience is where to focus. And you can go to theadsbootcamp.com. I have a $25 lead generation training. We recorded it in January of 2024, so it's super current.
Zach Spuckler:
And it's literally a 5 day recording, of a challenge that we did that shows you exactly how to grow your email list with Facebook advertising. So if you are like, I know I wanna grow my audience, but like my Instagram isn't great or my my Pinterest isn't working. And I'm like doing the blog and I'm doing the podcast, but no one's seeing it or people aren't opening my email, consider checking that out. It's $25 and I know it will help you out. Okay? So let's get into the next thing. If you feel like you have this audience or your audience is growing consistently, the next thing that you wanna do in the process is engage them and make offers based on feedback. Right? So I said this earlier, but I'm gonna keep coming back to those original four things. Grow an audience, make offers, automate, optimize, and scale.
Zach Spuckler:
So if you have the audience but you're not generating revenue, you've gotta figure out what they want. And I tell people the easiest way to figure out what your audience wants is to get feedback. Ask what they want. Shoot an email. Hey, what are you guys working on? Now, I will say, don't send an email that says, what should I make for you? People don't respond well to that. But you could send an email that says, hey, I'm creating some really great podcast, blog, YouTube, whatever you like to create content. And I'd love to hear from you about where you're stuck, what you're working on, what you'd like to see from me. Hit reply and let me know.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? That can be really effective. Now, you have to kinda read between the lines on those emails about, like, what people are asking for in terms of, like, free content versus paid content. But you wanna find out what your audience wants. And that's why I'm a huge fan of building an audience. I believe it's easier to build an audience and then offer them what they want than it is to try and create an offer that you think your audience is going to want once you build it. Okay? Once you kind of get clear on what people want, I always say test your offer and experiment. You know, business is in a funny way, it's just a game. It's just an experiment.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? We don't know what's gonna work. People ask me all the time, is this gonna work, Zach? And I say, I don't know. But let's try it. And whether it's my advertising or my offers, I'm looking at that all the same way. It's just a big experiment. So try different offers. Maybe you first try 1 on 1 coaching, or maybe you first try a low ticket offer, or maybe you first try a course, or maybe you first try a group coaching program. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those.
Zach Spuckler:
What I will tell you is for me personally, when I work with clients, I like to start lower ticket and then increase my prices over time. There's no right or wrong though, and I always wanna mention that. Right? Some people wanna go right into a $300 product. Some people wanna go right into a $3,000 product. There's no right or wrong. Both work. Okay? What's really important to understand is that you can do whatever you want as long as you're curating an experience that people can get behind the price tag. Right? So what I mean by that is like a lot of people are new to the online space, and this is no judgment.
Zach Spuckler:
It's just an observation. And they charge like $3,000 because they had a mentor do that, but they don't have a $3,000 back end. They don't have the infrastructure. They don't have the processes yet. They don't have the team yet to support a $3,000 program. And so I like to start with low-ticket, and here's why. Number 1, it's easier to test. Right? It's much easier to get somebody to invest say $25, $35, $47 with you than it is to sell a $3,000 product.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? It requires less lifting. It's more easy for people to say yes. I like to start with low-ticket, because it's easier to test. The second thing is there's less pressure and content to create. Right? If you wanna build your $1997 Mac Daddy course, there's a lot of pressure around building that. What does it look like? What does it contain? Where are you gonna host it? All these things come up. And, yes, some of those questions still exist low-ticket. But really what I'm getting at is you don't have to build this massive thing to start selling.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? The other thing is that it's easier in my opinion to promote a low-ticket offer, because you can do all kinds of things with it. You can pre sell it, you can put it as a trip wire, meaning when somebody opts in, it automatically offers that to them. You can set up simple retargeting ads for people going to the trip wire page. It's so easy to promote a low-ticket product that I love to start with them. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, wow, Zach. You're making it sound so simple to do low-ticket, but there's so many moving parts. I won't I won't disagree with you. There are a lot of moving parts with any offer.
Zach Spuckler:
But I like to start low-ticket. And if you're listening to this going, that sounds great, but what are the intricacies? How do I do this? How do I create, map, sell, grow, promote a low ticket offer? We do teach inside of our membership. We have the Low-Ticket Laboratory, which is like a a 2 day event that I hosted live, that's now inside the membership. And it's essentially how to build your low ticket offer. It's like how to figure out what to offer, how to map it, how to build your sales page, how to write your presale emails, how to launch it, how to sell it. Like, everything you need to know is inside our membership. I'll link that up in the show notes or you can go to join.notyouraveragemembership.com. So it's join, j o i n, dot not your average membership.com.
Zach Spuckler:
Our membership is called Not Your Average Membership. So if you're, like, loving this idea of low-ticket, it's $67 a month to join our membership. You get instant access to The Low-Ticket Laboratory and you can check it out if that's something you'd be interested in. K? So once you have your offers working, there's a couple different paths you can go. Right? So just to kind of continue the the conversation. Right? So like your audience is kind of growing. Maybe you now have found like a good low-ticket offer. The next step in the process, there's 3 options.
Zach Spuckler:
Okay? Option 1 is create more offers. I work with clients who have multiple low-ticket offers, mid-ticket offers, high-ticket offers. I have a friend who runs a really profitable 7 figure business with, like, I think they have over 12 different offers. Now I'm not saying that that's the way to do it. Remember, I mentioned earlier, there's no right or wrong. There's just options. Right? And it's about determining what option makes the most sense for you. But the first option is you could add more offers.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So like for example, you may do I'm just gonna use my own business as an example. I might do a Facebook ads course. And then people are like, this is great. My ads are working. How do I, you know, create my perfect freebie so that my ads do better? And I could do like a course on freebies. Right? Maybe not the best example, but you get the gist. I could create an ancillary or connected course where I'm still in my niche, but I'm making additional offers. The second option is to charge more and expand your offers.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So like, I could take my Facebook ads, like, low-ticket offer and I could turn into, like, a full blown group coaching program or a 6 week training. Right? So that could work really well. The other thing you can do is just keep doing what's working. And I know that this one this is the hardest one for us as entrepreneurs because I think we're creatives at heart and we want to, always be trying something new. But you could just do more of what works. So if you have a low-ticket offer that works great and it's selling on your list building and it's selling via emails and automation, just do more. Grow the list more. Put more into ads.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So it's kind of like that scale up factor. And I think that that really intertwines with this next step, which is automation. Right? So again, we have those 4 core pieces: grow, offer, automate, optimize. And so the next step would be, like, automate. What can you automate to make this more efficient? And for us, we always start by automating our email marketing. So when someone joins our list, we start really simply with like a 5 email sequence on all new offers. But over time, we try to expand that to at least 10 to 14 days. So when someone joins my email list from my list building ads that are always running, they're gonna go through a 10 to 14 day email sequence that's basically gonna encourage them to buy a product.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? And that is like a simple email marketing flow. We also set up funnels. And just to clarify, like, I consider that an email funnel. But when I say, like, funnels, I'm talking about all the elements that go into it and the things that we're doing inside and outside of email. So So for example, when I build a full funnel, I'm also talking about, like, optimizing the sales page. I'm talking about making sure that the checkout process is good, adding cart abandon sequences. I'm putting all of that into play so that I can see what is working well. Right? So I'm gonna start building out additional funnels.
Zach Spuckler:
That also includes my, like, retargeting advertising. So everything that I do is, like, I want it to make sense for automating the offer. And then once I have, like, my emails in place, my funnels in place, simple retargeting, then I may do ads and scalability testing. And that sounds really complicated, but really what it is is just saying, I'm gonna put more into ads that aren't just lead generation. I might start adding ads directly to my low-ticket sales pages. I might do, you know, like a a promotion. But basically, I'm gonna test how can I scale this thing up? Right? And that kinda comes back to that first thing we talked about which is growing the audience. Like, once you set up the email marketing, the funnels, and the ads, you can also say what can I do to amplify my audience so that it grows faster? And ultimately, because of my solid tested offers and my automation, I know that if I do that, I'm gonna see more sales.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So it gets to this point where these three things kind of work together to ultimately say, if I'm growing the audience, I'm making more offers because of my automation, and I'm gonna make more revenue. Right? So that's a really cool little thing that you can do. Once you have all that working, once you feel like my audience is growing, my offers are good, maybe you're making more offers, maybe you're not, that's okay. There's no right or wrong. There simply is what you're doing. But once you have all that going, then the the last step is what I call optimize and scale. And this is where first things first, this is where I might layer in a launch. Even though that's not, like, optimization, launches let you scale. And we're not necessarily I wouldn't say like a launch dependent business, but we know that our quarterly launches are gonna bring in great revenue for our business.
Zach Spuckler:
So we do them. Right? We have good automation in place. We have for the past 33 days, we've we've made an we've made a sale every single day in our business. But we also know that when we launch, we're gonna make more sales in a short period of time. So this is the phase where I might start launching. I might start scaling up. I might start offering a higher ticket offer. Right? And the second thing that I always say in this phase is get experimental.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? We are kind of in this phase with our membership and our low-ticket, the ads bootcamp offer. And so what we are doing is, like, we're doing like a 30 day Instagram challenge experiment. And And so if you go over to Instagram, again, I'll link it up in the show notes, but it's @zachspuckler, z a c h, and then my last name is Spuckler, s p u c k l e r. We're doing a 30 day challenge over on Instagram. And what I'm doing is every day of the challenge, I'm posting what's happening. Right? I'm I'm posting how things are going. So I'm posting an update every single day on what we're doing to get a 100 people in our membership in 30 days. So I'm doing like this real time marketing experiment.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? And it's going pretty well. I'm excited about it. I think it's great. So that's something that I wouldn't traditionally do. And it might not necessarily be scalable, but it's that optimization part where it's like I'm just trying and experimenting with new things. So if you wanna see our 30 day experiment, you can check it out. And then the other thing that I'll say about this piece is try other things. Right? So like one thing that we're doing is we're in this phase.
Zach Spuckler:
So now we have done a ton with Facebook ads, huge fan of Facebook ads. We're starting to experiment with Google retargeting ads. So you can at this point start to experiment with other traffic sources. You could try Google Ads. You could try to scale up your SEO, your search engine optimization, getting more organic traffic from Google. Right? You could consider JVs or affiliates, joint ventures or affiliate partners. Because at this point, you now have it where you're kinda starting to see what what's working. And if you bring in these outside traffic sources, you're gonna have the opportunity to make the most of them.
Zach Spuckler:
And so that's why you might be like, well I want to affiliate partner sooner or I wanna try Google Ads sooner. And I'm not saying you can't. Again, remember I said this earlier. There's no right or wrong. There's only trying and it's all about experimentation. But my thing is, like, I really wanna dial in my audience, my offer, and my automation. So that when I go into this experimental stuff, I know that even if the experiment flops, even if we don't see crazy good results, we still know that our traffic is gonna be optimized. We still know that everything we put out there is gonna have the best possible experience for people.
Zach Spuckler:
Right? So let me do a quick recap on the entire episode. K? And I hope that this has been helpful. But essentially, you've got like 4 things to focus on for overall business growth that you can stack. So grow your audience, make your offers, optimize or I'm sorry. Let me try that again. Grow your audience, make your offers, automate, and then optimize. So if you don't have an audience, think about organic marketing, think about content creation, think about nurturing, consider that lead generation boot camp. Once you have that audience, ask them what they want.
Zach Spuckler:
Test different offers. Experiment. I like to start low-ticket and go higher, but there's no right or wrong. They're simply creating offers that have value. Once you've got offers that are working, you can add more offers. You can charge more for your offers and expand on them or you can just keep doing what's been working. Once you got that dialed in, you wanna automate. So email marketing funnels, ads, testing to see if you could scale things up.
Zach Spuckler:
And then once you feel like you're getting things to start to scale, then you get to have fun. Optimize the process, update your sales pages, Work on making all your conversion rates a little better. Get experimental. We're doing that 30 day Instagram challenge. Run ads and explore different traffic sources, SEO, Google, joint ventures. And there you have it. That's kind of a a a a primer if you will on where to focus in your business next. So I hope this has been really helpful.
Zach Spuckler:
As always, if you enjoyed the show, I love hearing from you over on Instagram. I'm @zachspuckler, but I also love hearing from you guys over on iTunes. We're trying to get some more reviews over there, and if you want to leave us a review, we would super appreciate it. I don't think it's called iTunes anymore though. It's now like Apple Podcasts. But if you wanna leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or if you're listening on Spotify, we appreciate reviews there too. And we will link everything up in the show notes. So if you wanna link to anything, I've mentioned a few different things in this episode, but you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap078.
Zach Spuckler:
Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap078 for Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 78. We'll have everything linked up over there in the show notes for you. We'll also have a complete transcript of the episode for you to check out. I hope you got massive value today. You know, this is something that we get asked a lot about. And my goal was just to put something together that supports you. So if you enjoyed it, let me know. And I hope you have an incredible weekend or week depending on when you're listening.
Zach Spuckler:
So that's it. That is growth stacking and building consistency in your business. I hope you enjoyed. And until next time, stay not so average.
