The DOMINION Podcast Episode 7

NOTES on PYROMARKETING

By Brent Metzger

If you want to understand surviving as a creative, think about it like this:

·         You’re lost in a freezing wilderness, like the protagonist in Jack London’s To Build a Fire. You’ve got to build that fire or freeze to death. This represents how serious it is for creatives to survive in a brutal marketplace.

·         Fire represents sales.

·         You’ve got one match (limited marketing resources), so you’ve got to make it count.

Pyromarketing is comprised of four steps:

1.       Gather the driest tinder: promote to the people most likely to buy your product or service: it only takes a spark to get a fire going—but only if you begin with the material most likely to light, the people most likely to buy. Relevance is more important than reach or frequency. Ask yourself, who is your audience. Who is most likely to buy with the smallest nudge?

2.       Touch it with a match: give them an experience with your product or service: don’t tell em’ you’re funny, tell em’ a joke. There is no faster way to move people to purchase than by letting them actually experience the benefits you claim.

3.       Fan the flames: help them tell others. This means equipping people to spread your message through word of mouth. People spread messages more effectively than advertising. Don’t just create customers, create evangelists. Can you encourage people to use your product publicly? In the presence of similar people? Find groups where they congregate. Allow the entire group to try.

4.       Save the coals: keep a record of who they are, so you can promote in the future. Don’t respend budget to re-acquire customers.

Proof of concept:

·         A single email and 1,200 pastors lead to the best-selling hardcover book in history (outside of the bible)- on the USA Today bestseller list for over 107 weeks.

·         The Purpose Driven Life by Pastor Rick Warren, a Southern Baptist pastor known primarily in religious circles, sold 26 million copies

·         The Passion of the Christ was an independent film in an obscure foreign language, with a modest marketing budget. It turned into the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time: 622.3 million.

Twitter is a great medium for sequential artists, because it's words + pictures, and it tends to attract and aggregate driest tinder.

Don’t worry about getting the biggest “platform” as they call it in publishing. Target the most likely to be interested. They’ll become not only your customers, but your greatest sales force, driving exponential sales.

Two economists studied 2,000 movies and found that the only real predictor of long-term success is word of mouth. “After a movie opens, the audience decides its fate.”