Introduction

Harms: Let’s dive into the start of this guide and the focus we want to keep it topical and try not to avoid the conversations happening right now, which is coronavirus. The easiest thing to do is bury your head in the sand and what I would say is no business owner typically does that.

But a business owner would have got to a point or whether you’re a start-up or whatever it is, you already have something within you, which is going to win this battle.

But with that comes a different kind of feeling, for example, I’m a certain type of industry or company, how do we even get out of this? 

We’ve got some really smart people internally. I’m smart as a business owner, but I just don’t know a way out of this without just completely being suspended in time. That’s almost how I feel sometimes just suspended in time, which is why Kyle and I had a conversation to do this. Let’s do something proactive, which is helpful for the community.

What we are going to do is focus on a primary niche which we feel is massively affected right now.

Kyle: It is going to be a niche but this is going to be generally applicable. 

It doesn’t really matter what your business is because we are all being hit right now, but what we’re going to be focusing on in particular are people, businesses, individuals who offer classes and events, where they’re getting people into a physical space and providing a service.

Easy examples are people like yoga teachers or a personal trainer.

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Harms: Also physical events, I’m involved in sales orientated events, physical live events where you’re teaching people live. They came to our live workshop and it stopped immediately.

Kyle: Behind the scenes there we’ve just launched our own workshops so we’re getting people into a room and teaching them how to do online business, digital marketing. We did one, and then coronavirus hit.

Harms: We’ve taken it online and that’s one of the first steps I guess you can do. 

But this guide’s focus is going to be on live events and the initial conversation today rather than getting right into the idea of how do I market to people?

It’s really going to be around the business economic model.

Kyle: Yes, so we’re going to be following a framework that we use with our clients and with our own businesses, we’ve set up lots of businesses online. 

Over the years we’ve built this framework called the BATON framework, which we will be referring to. In particular, we want to just focus on the first part of the framework which is business.

It’s working out what is my core business.

What parts of this business and what units of value can I take and start to deliver now that the environment, the business environment has changed?

It’s really drilling down to the core basics so yeah, sure, we could just run off and start talking about Instagram and tiktok and all the different tools. 

That’s not what this guide is going to be about, we are always going to start with the fundamentals of business first before waving shiny new toys like TikTok in your face.

It’s always going to come back to the fundamentals and that’s something we can promise you and something that we think is going to be useful.

Harms: I hope that’s a relief for some people because often you find online and it’s not saying it’s a bad thing, but the focus is exactly on that.

How do you hack tiktok?

How do you get 1,000 people watching your TikTok video?

It almost feels like a smash and grab like, that’s great I got a short-term win on one particular platform, but the dangers are also very real, with focusing the entire business on one platform, which a lot of people are experiencing now on Facebook as an example. 

Those who had fantastic organic reach on Facebook are suddenly seeing nobody see their post and all of a sudden they’ve got to find a marketing budget.

I recently saw somebody that is a personal brand and they do artwork, poetry and things online and they said that their revenue via Facebook went from about £15,000 a month to about £3,000 a month the moment Facebook switches its algorithm. 

They were saying to the audience, do I have your permission to advertise because if I don’t, you’re not going to see my posts and they were really uncomfortable with the idea. I think there’s a danger there with just focusing on one particular idea.

Kyle: It’s relinquishing control and right now, especially during this time, when the business environment is being so affected by the pandemic control is what we need. 

We need to start resting back into our business and personal lives and taking control of the things we can control, and realising there are some things, whether it’s a virus, or whether it’s Facebook’s algorithms that are outside of our control.

We should not be focusing our energy there; we need to be focusing on what we can do something about.

Harms: Just to give some context, although Kyle and I did start our first workshop, we are not experts when it comes to the events industry and organising events. We’re not personal trainers. 

Although we have live consultancy clients and we do physically see them it’s very easy for us to say, hey guys we’re going to Skype today instead.

Whereas people who are personal trainers who have yoga classes, maybe they teach industry specific things whether it’s communication or public speaking or whatever it is, in a live environment where the student gets the maximum impact.

That’s not our field of expertise.

Although we have clients like that, Kyle and I don’t physically do that.

I guess Kyle this is how we would do it if we were in somebody’s shoes, looking from the outside at an events industry, how would we approach things now?

How would we change our business model?

Kyle: This is us coming at the problem wearing our digital marketing, online business spectacles. We work with clients in this respect, but obviously we would want to talk to people who are boots on the ground. 

Actually, in this situation right now, so that we can come up with ideas together.

We are here as a resource to help with that.

Harms: Kyle, how long have you been doing digital marketing and not being in a conventional job?

Kyle: I only ever had a commercial job when I was 18, I worked in a bar and I was a cycle courier, but after that, that’s about it. I guess the first big online business was about 10 years ago.

Harms: Kyle’s been doing this for about a decade and that is a long time when you consider the industry is still quite a new industry.

Kyle:  The industry changes so quickly as well as just being in the industry for that time you learn a lot and we’re going to bring in what’s working now to your businesses. 

That’s the idea here.

Harms: So events, what are the obvious things that people can do immediately and we’re seeing people do it.

Kyle: We are seeing this and it wouldn’t be a very exciting podcast if we just said this, but people are starting to do classes online.

They are setting up Zoom, Skype, Google hangouts, whatever it is, and delivering their yoga class or whatever it is to their existing students, that’s fine. 

Some of them are doing it for free to keep the regularity and make sure that their previous customers come back to them after the crisis and some people are charging.

Two different ways to do that.

Harms: I think both are okay because they really depend on where you are currently in your situation. 

If you are a start-up look you need the revenue. If the way your business is structured is that it pays you a salary and without that salary, you’ll financially be in a difficult space, then charge. I mean, at the end of the day you are providing a service.

If you are able to do it for free or reduce your rates that’s a bonus and I think your audience will appreciate that, but everybody right now and it is not easy to say because we are going through financial difficulties in some of the businesses that we have, but not everybody.

There are as a whole bunch of people who are working from home and getting paid full-time salaries, there are a whole bunch of people who are continuing to work as they have essential work to do and they can’t physically work from home.

I think it’s okay to charge and it’s okay to do it free.

The reason I say this Kyle is because I’m seeing a lot of people abusing people online who are having to sell maybe a bit harder than normal, because they are financially strained. 

They’ve got an events business and what they didn’t do was focus online prior to this, so now they’re going from a hard events business not being online to suddenly like, I need to get online ASAP.

Kyle: That’s what I’ve been seeing over the last couple of days, I’ve been having a look at what people have been doing trying to come up with a solution. 

The obvious is just do that, get a Webcam go or just use one on your laptop and do zoom classes, Skype classes whatever tool you’re using to get your existing student or to go out there and try and find new students and charge a class fee.

I was looking at Fuse fitness, they’re a small, independent studio in Brixton, London. What they’ve done is they’re saying normally you would pay £8 a class to come physically. Instead, you can come to any of our classes via online and it’s £20 a month. I think they’re doing three or four classes a day so you get a lot of value if you were to actually do these classes, fantastic. At £20 a month that’s fair, that’s okay and that was one good example.

But we want to talk today about going a bit further than that.

Harms: I tell you who I feel has nailed it and I don’t think they did it intentionally. Peloton allows you to cycle in your bedroom however they advertise it and your class is live streamed to you and this was way before this happened.

Kyle: Yeah they’re in a good position right now, so right now I’m in Canary Wharf and Peloton has an actual shop next to the Tesla showroom, but they sell these very expensive bikes on financing plans and then deliver these online courses. They are doing fine, I’m sure they’re doing really well right.

That’s an example of a business in the niche who set up from the get go for online.

They were there entirely online.

Maybe you can go to a physical studio I don’t know, but it’s really for people who are at home, give you high-end bikes and iPad or you use your iPad. Then you connect into their online lessons, they’re setup for the get go for online whereas a lot of the individuals a lot of the smaller studios right now are in this weird position like crap, I’ve been doing three yoga classes a day for the last five years at the local yoga studio, but now I have nothing.

So what do I need to give up?

It’s that transition which is really tricky for a lot of people.

Harms: Hopefully we can help with that but also I think look at other case studies like them and say what can I do in advance of something happening like this again.

I think we are having this discussion at an opportune time because if we can help a lot of people do that, as it doesn’t happen overnight. 

To get a whole bunch of people to pay for your online yoga class does not happen overnight.

But what we’re hoping is from this, yes, we’re talking about emergency measures right now, we’re talking about what you can do right now to make sure you keep paying your bills and keep eating, but a lot of this stuff you can continue to do in addition to your physical classes.

Harms: Getting back to the focus of what we are saying it’s the easiest thing to do right now is just to switch online, and there’s plenty of tools out there.

Zoom, Skype, a live stream like this, you can live stream into a private group on Facebook. You can have a slack channel it depends on if you’re video orientated or you’re advice or consultancy based you can have slack channel. There are other things like slack as well.

What’s the next step for this conversation?

Kyle: I think part of that transition is working out who exactly you’re going to be talking to.

So yes, obviously it’s going to be your current students. 

It’s just the existing students are now doing it online and paying a smaller rate. That’s fine, that’s the easiest thing you do, you go to your existing clients to say this is what I’m doing, these are the times, these are the prices are you interested?

Nice and simple.

The great thing about online, though, is that once you set up a zoom class or a Skype class there’s no reason why you need to stay delivering content to just five people, or just the 10 people.

As opposed to being in the physical world where there is a certain number of people you can fit into a room. 

Once you move online, once you’re in the world of bits instead of atoms we can take that same content and we can deliver it to a much larger number of people.

If I am a yoga teacher and I do kundalini yoga 30-day challenge instead of me doing it with the same five people I can now talk to 50, 100 people and that’s not going to negatively affect the quality of my teaching for the other people in the room.

That’s the key thing here and it also means that we move from okay, I might have been charging £15 an hour before and I had 10 people in the room so that’s £150.

Now I’m charging £1.50 instead and I have a hundred people in the room, I’m making the same amount of money, but it becomes a volume game rather than a cost game. 

It’s not about charging high prices but lowering the price that I’m charging but giving that service to more people and this is the first thing that we can do when we open up to online, and to do that we need to can we need to work out who our potential audience is when we are off-line, it’s who will come to our studio?

Opinion: This is how WE would do it

Harms:  It is not normally geographically located, you may have a room in the gym you may be an instructor who operates out of a large branding gym. You may have your own. If you’re in the events industry you will be advertising to your audience.

So what’s the best way and I guess what we are really identifying here is there a market size?

Who is our market audience and taking a data approach, a data-driven approach rather than a gut feel approach.

Kyle: And importantly not going too big because a lot of people will be like, oh yeah, everyone can do yoga. We need to narrow it down as unless you have a budget the size of Nike or Amazon to be able to talk to everybody you need to restrict who it is you’re talking to so you can better deliver your message to those people.

Harms: There is a famous article that a lot of marketers do anchor to which is one thousand true fans.

Imagine just having a thousand loyal customers that are going to continue to pay you X amount based on whatever you do, it could be yoga could be PT, it could be you have an online support group, whatever that is.

Think of it like that, get the thousand first and then think about scaling beyond that. Because the temptation I guess is you look at the celebrities, you look at these amazing marketers online, businesses online and I’m talking about actors and all the people who could have a massive following. Kardashians launched a make-up brand and got a billion dollars in sales overnight.

Some people have that leverage so we often feel like, unless I’m doing that then I’m not going to make any money, but scale that down to one hundred people, two hundred people and then aim for a thousand people and you might find that financially you have well achieved your financial goals.

Kyle: The article Harminder is referring to is called thousand true fans by Kevin Kelly quite an old article but he talks about how you don’t need 25 million followers on Facebook because most of those people aren’t going to be purchasing anything from you.

If you get a thousand people who will buy anything you put out because they love you, they love what you do. 

They love the value that you create and what you do for the world. Let’s say you have a thousand people and they’ve signed up to a £30 a month membership.

Harms: We spoke about a yoga class and assuming somebody pays £15 to go to a physical yoga class, what if they paid £5 for this premium online yoga class. You shoot it in a room in your house and you charge people £5 for that a month, that’s £5,000 per month. 

That is probably more than what the majority of yoga teachers or PTs or anybody doing physical events are earning. 

If you look at the Amazon or Netflix model look they have probably done a lot of data research to work out what people are comfortable paying. They just don’t feel it I guess that’s what I’m saying, the 7.99, 4.99, 9.99.

Looking at big companies as an example here can help you as well.

Kyle: There are financial models behind this and you can say okay, at what rate can you charge and people will still buy and then when does it start to drop off?

If you’re charging £50 a month for yoga probably too much, but if you are charging £5 a month that is at the point where people are it’s almost too low to bother cancelling.

Harms: If I went to Starbucks or Costa or any other company that would cost me £4 something, a cup of that.

So people don’t feel it.

Kyle: This is the kind of level we are talking about.

You don’t need 25 million Instagram followers to generate an income for yourself. If you are the sole operator an individual running these classes if you get 500 people 1,000 people which online is a small amount. 

If you can get that kind of number paying you on a regular basis a few pounds a month, £5, £30 a month if you have enough value to give them, then that is enough to support you extremely comfortably.

Harms:  This is how WE would do it.

Let’s look at the data

You can get 500 people who are interested in yoga. But what’s the process behind it just to check that we have a good sound business model before we go and start to attract this audience.

Kyle: What I want to talk about is the fact that you can say I’m just going to market to everybody who does yoga.

I’m just going to talk to everyone who does cross fit, it is too expensive to do that.

Instead, we want to find a particular niche of people we only need that thousand people that we were talking about. We need to find these people and talk to them repeatedly.

So instead of talking to a million people and spreading out really thinly, the amount of value we give to them, we instead want to talk to a much smaller group and deliver a huge amount of concentrated value for them.

This means we need to go online and look at some of the information that is available about the size of markets and we can also at the same time learn if we are talking to male, female or no particular gender markets.

What age groups we’re talking to?

What kind of education levels?

What kind of interests?

What magazines do they read?

What TV shows do they watch?

We can get all of this information directly from Facebook using this tool.

I’m going to jump into Facebook audience insights.

We are going to be looking at yoga with Adriene.

We’re going to use that information to narrow it down who we could be talking about.

It’s one of the tools that Facebook provides their advertisers with. It is free to use and this is how Facebook makes money. They make money when we create adverts. You can see there’s a create ad up here.

Let’s go straight to yoga with Adriene, if you’re a yoga teacher great if you are in another niche you’d put in a company name or a famous YouTuber, Instagram celebrity in that particular area. If you were doing cross fit for example you can put in cross fit and it will give you what you need. If you’re doing pilates you can also just put in pilates.

You could do yoga and the reason I’m doing yoga with Adriene is because I want to focus on the audiences who can see yoga content online. If I just put in yoga by itself that would be off-line same with cross-fit obviously, that’s going to be people who are going to crossfit studios. Ideally, I would find the name of a famous YouTube who does cross fit and put them in here to get the same kind of information.

I want this to be all ages, so 18 to 65. I’m leaving gender as all, at the moment I’m putting in no location because I just want the widest amount of information possible, then I’m going to click on demographics here.

This has already given me a massive amount of information on Facebook about half a million people who have liked, or in some way interacted with the yoga with Adriene. So this tells me that the size of the market around yoga with Adriene is about half a million. This is half a million people worldwide who are interested in learning yoga online.

These are people who could be if you teach yoga online, they could be your customers.

Then we can look at the information that Facebook has about them, and this is really useful when we are starting to decide who our online audience could be because we can start to adjust our messages.

If I was looking at this, I would say 93% female and 7% male. If I was marketing to this particular audience I’m going to be going with a very heavy female marketing plan. Married is a much higher percentage this is the percentage difference compared to the average Facebook user.

Compared to the average Facebook user the people who follow yoga with Adriene are 228% more likely, 2.3 times more likely to be postgraduates, university postgraduates. And they are 61% less likely to be just high school graduates. That’s what these numbers mean. I can also see what kind of jobs they work in.

I can now jump into location.

Top countries are America, so 40% of her audience is in the US and 11% in the UK. That’s not unsurprising, and then everyone else’s is going to be different countries.

If you were focusing on a national celebrity or national hobby, then we could use top towns and cities. London is massively disproportionately into yoga with Adriene compared to everywhere else in the world. London is 500% more engaged, so we can get a huge amount of information here.

Not all of this is going to be useful, but it allows us to start to build up a profile of the audience that we could be talking to when we go online.

We’re not asking you to become the next yoga with Adriene, instead what we’re going to do with this information is we are going to start to niche it down and use it to learn more about the people in either your local area or nationally to you.

The reason we’re doing this is we don’t want to necessarily, well we do want to become a global brand eventually if that’s what you want to do, but it’s not very easy to do straight off the bat.

Instead we want to start locally and nationally and then expand out like that. 

What I’m going to do is I still have yoga with Adriene selected here, but I’m going to click on location and put it in the United Kingdom. I would do this if I am a yoga instructor and I want to do something similar to what yoga with Adriene is doing, but do it in the UK only.

Already I can see that my audience has fallen by a factor of 10, so it’s 10% of the size of yoga with Adriene, that’s fine. I’m still seeing a high female skew and still seeing mainly married people, mainly highly educated, probably similar types of jobs, education means that there’s going to be a lot of teachers who are into this.

There is slightly different information here because I’m now focusing just on the UK. Top countries are no longer going to tell me anything because it’s 100% in the UK but now I can look at the top towns and cities and get more information. Edinburgh, Aberdeen, seem to be highly skewed. Imagine London is quite a big one here somewhere, 11% of the audience is in London.

We can get a lot of information from here which tells us these are the people that we can be focusing on moving forward.

The best thing about this is it actually gives us numbers, it gives us data and this makes me more excited than maybe it does for you.

But if you come in here and you cannot find your particular niche that means it’s probably going to be too small and it’s not worth focusing on online and at that point, you need to decide okay what can I do to expand it?

What else can I add in in order to find the tribe of people and my audience that I want to talk to online?

The other issue is if I put in something like yoga it’s going to be too big.

Generally we want to find an audience of about one million people. If I put in yoga by itself in the UK alone there are 10 to 15 million people who are interested in yoga, that’s going to be too wide.

The information I get from here is it’s not going to be that useful because I cannot focus on the market this large. Which is why I’d use something like yoga with Adriene from a finer and far more refined view of people who are specifically interested in consuming yoga content online. Rather than just yoga as a whole, which is too large to pick.

With all of this stuff, you can then go ahead and start to contact these people directly using Facebook ads, that’s not what we’re talking about right now.

We are talking about using this tool purely to get this information to learn about who it is we need to be talking to online. To get information like okay 90% female if I’m doing yoga online I should go with a female focus.

Of course you might decide now I’m going to go the other way, I am going to do male that’s going to be my line in the sand. That’s going to be my defining business message absolutely fine, but at least using Facebook audience insight we have the data and we can make decisions based on the numbers that we’re actually seeing.

That is audience insights, again it’s free you can jump in and grab that.

Harms: Hopefully, you’ve got a benchmark now because Kyle has said if your audience is about a million, then let’s say from that million all we need is a thousand paying customers, and even less than that. 

Just look at your numbers and your pricing and say how many do I actually need for that?

Often you’ll find it’s crumbs,

What we’ve done so far is we’ve spoken about the conventional or the most obvious way that we can get our off-line business online immediately. Then we have to say who do we talk to and actually, is there an audience online big enough for our business to actually talk to anybody.

If there’s not, then what’s the point?

Comparing this online business to a conventional business model

Kyle: Something like yoga is too big and we need to work out what our place within that niche is. There are certain niches like health, wealth and relationships.

Most businesses really fit into these, especially online, health, wealth and relationships. If you’re niche and your focus is health, too big, too wide. 

Unless you are a company like Nike and you have an advertising budget of hundreds of millions or billions even, instead we need to go from something large like health down to something smaller like yoga. 

We are still seeing 10 to 15 million people in the UK interested in that, that’s still a lot of people to try to talk to at the same time.

So we need to niche down again and it might be people who consume yoga content online and we saw that drop just about 50,000 UK. If we use yoga with Adriene so that’s a lot smaller.

Harms: 50,000 is that worth pursuing?

Kyle: If I was doing this myself, I would be adding in other yoga channels of course yoga with Adriene is American-based, so if I was in America I would go for it, using the information I’ve learnt about her viewers.

In the UK I’ll probably want to look into other influences other brands that offer online yoga and I would also be putting them into Facebook audience insight to see what else I can learn. That will allow me to go up from 50,000 to I’m guessing half a million or one million, but you can play with the numbers basically.

Harms: That’s the summary of what we’ve done so far and now being us, we always like to go for the extra ambitious method, but also this is probably the method that we would recommend.

Because online I think people often miss this technique and it’s often hidden, but it does require a bit of extra work.

Take control of the conversation

Kyle: This is a question of how do we reach those half million people, one million people, we can just run adverts to them and probably reach all of them for a couple of hundred pounds quite easily on Facebook. That’s a basic way to do it.

It’s not what we’re going to be suggesting right now.

Take control of the conversation

Right now, because of what’s going on there are a lot of resource lists being sent around.

I received this PDF which was I think eight pages of all the different shows all of the different times, the links to go there and how much they cost, fantastic resource.

I’ve also received one like that again from another WhatsApp group, which was different ways to stay fit at home. It had lists of YouTube channels so people like yoga with Adriene who we’ve been talking about as well as fuse fitness, which is one I mentioned before. 

There were two lists one which was specifically for south-west London businesses and all of the online offers that they were doing.

It was saying support your local businesses in this time fuse fitness are doing this and this restaurant is doing food etcetera. Again it’s a resource list, a master list of all of the different businesses you could support in the area.

What we want to suggest is that you take control of that conversation for your particular niche.

There are already these lists going around and they’re being spread like wildfire because people want to help each other and if there is a list of the top yoga classes in the UK or globally, that has been sent around if you take control of the conversation.

If you take control and you help compile that list if you put it together, if you format it nicely, if you make it easy for people to access. If you verify what stuff is good and what stuff isn’t good and you do all that work and you spread that list out, you are in control of that resource list.

You become the spokesperson, you become a leader within that particular community.

Harms: The host of the party and imagine a networking event and you become the host of the networking event. So that kind of mentality and approach.

Kyle: I know some people are sitting there saying, why would I want to advertise my competitor’s yoga classes, what are you talking about?

Harms: The resource list that you created I’ve started to distribute doesn’t have any of our stuff on. 

We’ve got lots of resources ourselves but the question then is and you raise a good question. It’s often something our clients always kick back at which is, I’m sorry we’ve got a database why are you advertising other people’s? 

If I’m a yoga instructor, why am I going to send out a document with all of these other competitors yoga YouTube channels?

Which already has a large following, why would I do that?

That is a solid question.

Kyle: The first answer is that when you control a list you control the order of the list. People are lazy so you put your stuff at the top of the list.

Harms: Kyle and I are teachers by nature.

We did a personality test before we actually became business partners. We did a really detailed personality test and ultimately both of us are very similar personalities, we are both teachers, creators, we both want to share what we have and we get our fulfilment through that mechanism.

Suggested sales funnel structure

Kyle: The first thing you can do is obviously put yours at the top of the list. If you made a nicely formatted PDF you can bold your offering. You can put a big star next to it, that’s one way of doing it, not subtle but it works.

You can also brand the list again if it’s a PDF if you stuck your website on it people are going to be coming there. The main thing here is yes, we want people coming our way, but the main point of having this resource list is to get it into as many hands as possible.

By creating a resource list which is not just about you if it’s just you sending your class schedule out to people, who is going to spread that?

Nobody.

This way, it actually gets spread, it gets spread naturally and if you’re in any WhatsApp groups you’ve probably been sent lots of these lists already for opera or for local businesses or food delivery.

By making it a list which includes everything which is a genuinely helpful ultimate resource list, you can actually co-opt your competitors into spreading it for you.

You can send it to your competitors and say, hey, I’m putting together this list of resources you’re on it, send it to all of your people who are looking for yoga or for services in your niche. I think this would be helpful, you’re on the list as well.

You could send it to someone like yoga with Adriene and say, hey, I’ve put together this great looking list of yoga resources. You’re on it as you’re a great resource and I love your work. Could you tweet it out to your followers, or could you send it to your followers via email list and then suddenly the resource list that you put together is now in the hands of millions of people.

Rather than you putting together a price list or a timing list, a schedule of your classes and sending it people.

Instead, it becomes a community resource that you created, yes, but it’s for everybody, not just for your business it’s a different way to think about it.

Harms: Yeah and what I’d say is it also gets directly to them, so it’s not like they have to go to a website. They’re going to be directly downloading it on their computer or mobile phone, so they’ve got this resource list right in front of them.

There’s no better marketing method than WhatsApping somebody via a friend or a friend sending somebody a recommendation, or list that’s come from an original source which we want you to be the original source.

Think of it as the most direct, powerful method of marketing. 

One of the things at the moment text message marketing has suddenly become very popular again because people actually open WhatsApp. 

You’re going to see a bit of a trend where you’re going to get lots of sales text messages over time, until it depletes itself, it just becomes another averagely converting marketing method.

Kyle: People don’t open emails anymore

Harms: Also the emails go into the promotions tab or spam tab so, Gmail as an example, has a specific promotions tab.  

Kyle: We are aiming to create this resource list which, yes, has your brand on it, yes it highlights your classes as one of the resources there. Depending on how you want it to be you can put it at the top, you can put it in stars, glitter, etcetera.

But the main thing is this is a really useful resource which can be spread by the community, whether it’s the people who do yoga in the UK, whether it’s worldwide doesn’t matter. 

It’s something that is so valuable that people will actually spread it around and you’re going to be the curator, the leader of this list, which is a very cool place to be.

As we said at the beginning, the most basic thing you can do is just start talking to existing customers and doing online courses with them.

Harms: But what we’re saying here to get beyond those people, let’s use this and I would call it is like growth hack marketing or guerrilla marketing.

Think of this as that we are in a guerrilla marketing period where we have to do stuff which is out of the norm that maybe we wouldn’t, and learn some marketing tactics as a business owner that actually we would have just thought no, I don’t need to do that as I’ve got a good steady stream of customers.

Whereas now we don’t because you’ve taken your off-line customer base which is maybe 15 students, a guide, to online which could be a thousand students a month or whatever it is.

So how do we get to those people?

This is a very direct and potential viral way of doing that.

Kyle:  Think of how many of these resource lists, think of how many of these links you’ve been sent during this current crisis. 

They are not necessarily going to be about your niche, that’s fine, but these are spreading by themselves from group to group to group in WhatsApp, so if you are in control of one of those lists you’re in a very, very powerful position.

Harms: Think of it from a heart place as well, and a place of giving, where you’re just doing something useful.

For example, the work from home list that we created and Kyle compiled actually for us is very few of those links are ours. 

I think one of my podcasts was on there, but apart from that, there’s a whole bunch of people who are going to be going into a changed environment that they’re not used to, how can we help them?

I think that’s just to keep it simple as that, if you pulled from that mechanism and we are all pulled from different ways. 

If you’re pulled from the need to help people, then this is a great way to do that and benefit off the backend.

Kyle: That’s the reason why we put together that list.

We are used to working at home.

I’ve got lots of friends suddenly working from home and aren’t used to the office environment and suddenly they’re going crazy. 

They don’t know what they want to do, they don’t know how to structure their day. They don’t know about some tools I’ve been using for years, so for me to download information is nothing, it took an hour to put together this list and we made it look nice and that could be very valuable to people.

It’s the same with you and your particular niche, you have the expertise to see what’s online, you’ve probably received a few of these lists already. All you need to start doing is putting everything together, curating it using your expertise, reformatting it, making it nice and then spreading it out into the world.

Putting the value out, expertise out into the world and then saying I did this so if you do want to check out stuff we do great.

Harms: It’s going to be a lot more work than you may have expected, because this could take you half a day to put together a really quality list and then send it out and say this might be useful.

What happens after that?

I just wanted to get the idea of what we’re going to be doing.

The next steps will be let’s say you’ve got this 20 page PDF of all of the online fitness resources. All of the ways to stay fit while you are at home. Fantastic list, people are sending it around. We want to have a mechanism for getting the people who receive this PDF.

We want to get them into our orbit somehow, we want to get them into our tribe, we call it.

One way is people signing up directly for our classes, but we ideally want to have something that’s even lower friction and we’ll talk about that in two days.

One thing that we want you to take away, we are going to create some mass value, which to you right now you’re probably thinking no, I just need to get people signed up for my online classes. I just need to generate revenue.

Instead, we’re going to spend a bit of time creating something of mass value and get it out to the world to help as many people as possible, and then we will be talking about how this will directly benefit you as well.

Harms: It depends on what pulls you and there is no judgement there, it’s really very much where you are and how Coronavirus affected you because we are all connected.

Some people don’t, some people win, but the majority seem to be struggling in this transition stage, so hopefully this guide has helped so far.

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