Episode 618 · Jul 14, 2022

Justin Eli on the Magic Marketing Triangle: 3 Keys to Success

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Marketing is the engine that drives business growth, yet most business owners invest money in advertising before they truly understand who they are trying to reach or what they are trying to say. On The Daily Mastermind, host George Wright III sits down with co-host and marketing expert Justin Eli to break down what Justin calls the "magic marketing triangle" and give you a practical framework for building more effective marketing from the ground up.

George and Justin have worked with clients who have collectively done over a billion dollars in sales. In this conversation, they focus on the first and most foundational leg of the triangle: knowing your market.

What Is the Magic Marketing Triangle?

Justin frames all marketing around three connected components: market, message, and media. Think of them as the three sides of a triangle.

"There are three components. Kind of look at it as my magic marketing triangle. It's who is your market, what is your message, and what is the type of media that you're going to use to convey that message."

All three areas run deep, and each one depends on the others. You cannot craft the right message until you know who you are talking to, and you cannot choose the right media until you know where your market hangs out. Most businesses, Justin notes, are not deep enough in any of the three areas. They have a rough idea, but a rough idea is not enough to make your marketing dollars work.

How to Define Your Market: Geography, Demography, and Affiliations

When Justin talks about "knowing your market," he means something far more specific than a broad demographic label. He breaks market down into three layers:

Geography is the starting point. Where can your product or service actually be sold? An online coaching program can reach an international audience. A specialty retail shop may be most relevant within a 30-mile radius. Understanding the geographic scope of your business shapes every decision that follows.

Demography gets into who your customer is. Age, income level, marital status, whether they have children or pets, political or religious leanings, language. The more specific you get, the more useful your marketing becomes.

"Getting that detailed is important. When we get into offering things, getting that detailed is key. A lot of clients use the term avatar because we try to get people to really visualize who their client is."

For The Daily Mastermind, that avatar might be an entrepreneur with a side hustle, a small business owner, or a CEO. Naming and visualizing the ideal customer makes it far easier to write copy, choose platforms, and decide what to offer.

Affiliations round out the picture. What organizations does your ideal customer belong to? What magazines do they read, what blogs do they follow, what podcasts are in their queue, which social media pages do they engage with? This layer tells you not just who your customer is, but where you can find them and what messages will resonate.

Why Most Businesses Miss the Depth They Need

George pushes on a point that comes up repeatedly in business consulting: when you ask most business owners who their market is, they say something like "health-conscious people" or "older adults." That is a category, not a customer.

The exercise of going all the way through geography, demography, and affiliations forces you to close that gap. At the end of it, you should be able to describe a specific person: where they live, what age range you are targeting, their family situation, what they care about, and where they spend their time online and off.

What Is a Dream 100 List and How Do You Use It?

Once you have defined your market in detail, the Dream 100 list gives you a place to act on that knowledge. Justin references the concept from Chad Holmes's book on business breakthroughs. In a business-to-business context, a Dream 100 list is the 100 companies you most want to reach. You zero in on them, craft your message for them, and pursue them deliberately.

For consumer marketing, the same idea applies differently. Build a list of the top 10 podcasts your ideal customer listens to, the top 10 Facebook pages they follow, the top 10 Instagram accounts, YouTube channels, blogs, and periodicals. These are the places where you can observe your customer, hear what they are saying, and understand what they need.

"Once you know who your market is, who they are, where they are, and you develop this Dream 100 list, it gives you something to target. It gives you a place to go."

This list becomes a research asset and a media-buying guide at the same time.

How Often Should You Revisit Your Marketing Framework?

George and Justin agree that the market and the core message tend to stay relatively stable. Your product or service is built for a specific type of person, and that person does not change dramatically from year to year. The media side, though, is in constant motion. Where your customers hang out, how algorithms work, which platforms are growing, which are fading: these require ongoing attention. Staying current on media while keeping your market and message grounded is how you stay competitive without constantly reinventing the wheel.

Action Steps

Map your market across all three layers: where your customers are (geography), who they are (demography), and what they are connected to (affiliations).
Create a written customer avatar by naming a specific person who represents your ideal client, including their age, life situation, income range, and daily habits.
Build a Dream 100 list by identifying the top 10 podcasts, social media pages, blogs, and publications your ideal customer engages with regularly.
Audit your current marketing spend and ask whether each channel was chosen based on deep market knowledge or assumption.
Set a quarterly calendar reminder to review your media choices and update your list based on where your customers are actually spending attention now.

Marketing that converts starts with clarity. When you know exactly who you are talking to, where they live, what they value, and where they gather, every other marketing decision becomes easier and more precise. George Wright III and Justin Eli are building out this framework week by week on The Daily Mastermind, and the foundation is always the same: know your market before you spend a dollar. It is never too late to start living the life you were meant to live, and that starts with building a business that actually reaches the people it was built to serve.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

All right, welcome back to The Daily Mastermind. George Wright III here with my co-host on Thursdays, Justin Eli. How are you doing? Good, George. How's it going? Good to be here. Thursdays, we're going to be talking all business and today we got marketing up, so this is going to be great. But as you know, we're here with your inspiration, motivation, and education every day. Try to keep this to about 10 to 15 minutes and what we've started doing on Thursdays is talking about marketing. So if you remember last week and if you didn't, it was an extended podcast. So go back and listen to it. But Justin and I covered the seven steps for business mastery. And so just to kind of give you a quick review on that, it was mindset, mapping, marketing, monetize, momentum, mastery, and money. These are the seven steps that we believe if you implement, you can truly grow and build your business. What else would you add to that? I mean, anything in particular with the seven steps? Not really. Like we talked about last week, right? We've done a lot of business and worked with a lot of business owners. And these seem to be the seven things that are truly important. Yeah, and most people have missed like one or two of the steps, right? So I think that if people haven't listened to it, they got to go back and listen to it because Justin talked a lot about the individual steps. But today we're going to talk about marketing. And Justin, your background, because you've, I mean, combined we've had clients do over a billion dollars in sales, but you are absolutely a marketer. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to start with maybe breaking down, you've got this like three key steps for marketing or three critical areas, I guess I would call them. Could you kind of jump into that and start to help people to understand what the most important keys are to having an effective marketing? Sure. Yeah, you bet, George. So, you know, the way that I look at it marketing is that it's really, there's three components, kind of look at it as my magic marketing triangle. So when I envision that, it's got the three prongs of the triangle. It's who is your market? What is your message? And what is the type of media that you're gonna use to convey that message? So the, and I'm gonna put this in the show notes for everybody, but imagine a triangle that has these three sides being market, message, and media. And if those three areas, and they go deep, and we're going to go deep over the next couple of weeks with the podcast, but those are the most critical three areas. Do you find that there's one of those three areas that maybe people miss the most, or is it just they're not deep enough in all of them? Typically, they're not deep enough in all of them. I don't think people put enough thought into before they spend their advertising money as to who their target audience really is. And I think really digging deep into all three sides of the triangle and really analyzing who your ideal client or customer is is going to be very important. Well, today I think we can, in fact, maybe what we'll do with the podcast is over the next three weeks, we'll cover all three of those areas because I do want us to go deep and give some specific strategies something more tangible And today we talk mostly about market But I also think the market I wanted to just mention one other thing before we get into that The marketplace is so changing all the time that I know that those three areas of market, message, and media, even if they have a rough idea of what's going on, it's tough to stay up to date on the marketplace, right? I mean, haven't those things changed a lot? I mean, media alone, like with direct mail versus online and social, How often do you think people should kind of like readjust or look at these three areas? I mean, is this something they do strategically once a year, quarterly, often? Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I think, George, the first two, I think your market is your market. You know, your product or your service is going to be geared towards a specific type of person. The message is typically going to be the same. But I think what you're talking about is the media is constantly changing. Yeah. And where do you find those people? Where are they hanging out? How are you connecting with them? You definitely have to stay on top of your game with the media. Yeah. And I think that people adopt, as we get into growth strategies here in a couple of weeks, I'm excited about covering growth strategies with upsell, cross-selling, down-selling, bundling. I think people will start to realize that they can tweak their offers once we give them some of those strategies. So let's dig in deep here for a second on the market because I know people hear random terms like, who's your avatar? Who are you targeting? But surprisingly, most people, and we get deep into what their market is, but most people really haven't got a clue, right? Like I've asked people, who's your market? It's like, oh, you like older people or people that are health conscious. You're not talking about generalities, right? Like you're talking specifics. So let's dig into this a little bit. What do you mean when you say, what's your market? So good question. So digging in a little further, right? There's really three things that I now look at when we're defining the market. And that is geography, demography, and then their affiliate ties or their associations. Got it. Okay. And we could dig into those. Yeah, let's just go into those a little bit deeper. So when you say, so geography, demography, and affiliations, let's break those down. Well, I start with geography because that's the easiest one. So that's the way my mind works, right? So, you know, when we're thinking about, you know, we have a business, we have a product or a service, okay, what's the geography? Where can this product be sold? Where can it be available, right? You know, if you're selling, if you have an online business, you're selling a book or a coaching program or a t-shirt, right? That can be sold international, right? That can be sold anywhere. Or if you've got a business that is more retail driven or, you know, I don't know, you sell snowmobile trailers, right? I mean, that's going to be more localized. It's geared towards a different audience. So spending some time thinking about the geography and where your product can be sold is step number one. Do you talk, do you generally, when you're consulting with these businesses, do you generally try to keep people to stay local versus global? Do you talk to them about trying to just pick a geography or is it more just about identifying where the geography is? I mean cause there we out here in Utah there a lot of network marketing companies health and nutrition companies Somebody thinking about going globally with health and nutrition versus locally Is there anything around geography or is it really just identifying where your product could be sold at an overall level? Are you trying to get people to kind of niche down into something in particular geography-wise or no? A lot of that's going to depend on budget. And a lot of that's going to depend on how we look at the next couple of questions as we drill down. So we're going to start with geography, but our next step is we're going to look at demography. And what I mean by demography is that could be political views, that could be religious views, that could be language. So this is like really identifying who the customer is? Yes, absolutely. So we've talked about the geography, which is where the customer is. Now we're talking about who that customer is. Like I said, it could be the background, right? Religious, political. It could be... Everything from like age and... Are you categorizing like their income, their age, and all those types of things? I mean, get as specific as possible. Yeah, yes. So all of those fit into the demography, right? The age. Who's your target age of your customer? Who is the, you know, are they married or are they single? Do they have kids? Yeah. Do they have pets? So getting that detailed is important, right? Because when we get into offering things like that later, getting that detailed, right? I like the idea that a lot of clients use now where they, the reason they use the term avatar is because we try to get people to really visualize who their client is. And so sometimes having an avatar or you name your client, it's like, you know, here's a guy. So with the Daily Mastermind, it might be entrepreneurs that have a side hustle or a small business owner or CEO. When you get very specific about who that person is, their demographics, then it's easier to really pull your marketing message together, right? Right. Absolutely. And find them now. It's so easy to find people by targeting those specific niches. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So the third thing that we're going to look at is, you know, who are your customers, clients? Who are they associated with? What is their, you know, a term that is often used as affinity relationships, right? So what types of clubs are these people involved with? What types of organizations are they involved with? Okay. What types of magazines do they subscribe to? What types of blogs do they read? Where do they go on social media? Who's their pack? Who are the people that these people are hanging out with? So at the end of this exercise, we should be able to know where these people live, what age we're targeting, married, not married. Are we selling a pet product? Do they have dogs or cats? Like who exactly is our, as you said, avatar? Yeah. Who is our perfect ideal client that we're going to now focus on? I like that. The level of detail you have, I think, can't be emphasized enough. I mean because we talking now with this whole idea of your market as who you going after where they are and their affinity and association so you can find out where you can communicate with them So I really like this because if you do that exercise and you really drill deep on it and people have heard this topic of, and I know you're a big proponent of the Dream 100 list. What is a Dream 100 list? Why would you and how would you use a Dream 100 list? So there's a couple of ways to look at Dream 100. I know that we're both fans of the book, Business Breakthroughs by Chad Holmes. He refers to that in the business-to-business sales world as drilling down. And if you're selling a business-to-business product, identifying the top 100 companies that you want to go to as a salesperson. And that's your dream 100 list. And that's who you want to focus on. That's who you want to zero in on. That's who you want to craft your message. That's a great place to start because once you know who your market is, who they are, where they are, and you develop this Dream 100 list, it gives you something to target. It gives you a place to go. So the thing I would add to that is that nowadays, Dream 100 list is also referred to quite a few times about a way to really identify how you can start communicating with your customer. Because you want to know what they're saying and how they're acting and what they're doing. And so you can make this Dream 100 list by listing out the top 10 podcasts they listen to, the top 10 Facebook pages, Instagram pages, YouTube, Twitter, the top 10 blogs, the top 10 periodicals. Because when you list these out, those are places you can go see your customer, hear your customer, get feedback from your customer. And so I like the idea of that, but I think it's a great exercise. In fact, maybe we'll throw some things in the show notes as well for that so that people can really drill down a level deeper. So in review, because we're going to be short on time here, the marketing triangle that you have is basically going to be your market, your message, and your media. and the market really drives deep into geography, demography, and affiliation. Do I have that pretty much right? Is there anything you'd add to that? That's it. You got it. Okay. So once they get this market really identified, then what we'll do tomorrow when we get together and for our podcast this next week is we'll get into the message. And that's the part I think we can go really super deep in, like how do you communicate your message? And so what I'm going to also do is I'm going to throw a link in the show notes because, you know, Justin, if you're okay with it, if anyone has any questions on this particular area or they're having some trouble really identifying their market, would you be okay to take some consults with a few people, just some free consults to be able to talk with them about that a little bit deeper? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. We want to be able to provide value. One of the things we're doing here is trying to give you great information, education. But if you happen to have some questions on your market or some things that you'd like to go deeper into, whether you're a high achiever, a business owner, or maybe just you've got a side hustle and you're thinking about launching a new product and you want to get a little bit more strategic, click the link in the show notes and schedule a consult. I think what I'll do is I'll link them right to your calendar and you allocate just a couple of openings. And so I'll try to put that in there for them. Okay, sounds good. Awesome, cool. Well, that's our message for today. Thanks for listening. If you would do me a favor and share this podcast with someone you think would benefit from it. Also hit us up on the Daily Mastermind on Facebook or Instagram. But that's our message for today. George Wright III here with Justin Eli on the Daily Mastermind. Have a great day. We'll talk with you soon.