Transcript 

Welcome to the Hundredfold Business Podcast, where Christian men learn the principles, strategies, and tactics to grow their businesses top line, bottom line, and finish line. I want you to discover the secret to applying Biblical truth to business growth for the greatest kingdom impact, so in the end you hear from your Heavenly Father, well done. Welcome to the 100-Fold Business Podcast, where Christian men learn how to grow their businesses top line, bottom line, and finish line.

I'm your host, Josh Fonger, founder of 4th Soil Ventures, and today we'll be covering the 6th essential in a series of 12 essentials all about how you can grow your Hundredfold business, a business that is multiplying its talents biblically. During these 12 essentials, we'll be discovering what God's Word says about a particular business issue, and then we'll be applying this teaching to our businesses for the maximum results. And of course, if you need help beyond this podcast, you can always reach out directly to me at 4thsoilventures.com. Now for this particular episode, we'll be talking about the importance of expanding your marketing, because generally speaking, if you're doing good work in the world, expanding your reach, impacting more people in Jesus' name is a good thing.

So if God's put on your heart to expand maybe 30, 60, maybe 100-Fold, then this is going to be the episode for you. Today we're going to be looking at the book of Acts, chapter 1, verse 8. Let me go find it and read it now. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

And for some context on this passage, this is Jesus talking to his disciples on the Mount of Olives, and this is right before his ascension, right before he's taken up some of his last words. So again, this would be after Jesus is crucified, this is after he resurrects, and this is just before he ascends. So with this very dramatic exit that Jesus just does in front of his disciples, the ascension, is also embedded in these final words, a marketing plan.

A marketing plan that is capable of equipping just a few Jewish believers to reach the entire world with the gospel. And the three foundational marketing principles I want to draw out from this passage today are, number one, the disciples had a transformational message. Number two, they were credible messengers.

Number three, they went from descending markets, or hot to cold markets. So now let's start with the first foundation, which is transformational message. But you receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.

On the day of Pentecost, the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit, they were filled with power, and his power allowed them to do miraculous signs and wonders that were visible. But on top of that, they had the power of a transformed life. They had been transformed by Jesus, and they had this message from Jesus of transformation.

This transformational message from death to life, from condemned to forgiven, from hell to heaven. And so inside of them, they had this message that they were compelled to share, and that was the transformational message of the gospel. Now for you to have effective, expanding marketing, you're also going to need to have a powerful, compelling, transformative message as well.

All about your company, about your products, and about your services. So what are the components of a transformational, powerful marketing message? One that captures attention, that communicates value, and drives action. Well the first thing it must do is it needs to resonate with the target market.

So therefore, you need to know your target market inside and out. What their needs are, what their desires are, what their wants are, what their pains are. You need to know your target market well, so you can deliver that message that resonates.

The second thing you have to do is you need to effectively communicate your value proposition, your unique selling point. What makes you different than the competition? What are the pain points that your product or service solves, and what is the solution? And lastly, there needs to be a strong call to action. So those who see the message, and they hear about the value proposition, they need to know what are the next steps.

So whether you're selling life insurance, or chiropractic services, or septic tank pumping, you need to make sure that your message is transformative, it's powerful, and it stands out. As you read on in the book of Acts, you can see that their message was resonating with their ideal audience. You can see that they were communicating value, how to be saved, and you can see they had a strong call to action.

I'm sure we'll talk about Peter's sales pitch in our next Essential, Essential 7, all about growing your sales. But needless to say, they were equipped with powerful, transformational message, and it was effective. People were being saved.

Now let's move on to the second foundation for effective marketing, marketing that is expanding. So let's go back to the Bible, and you will be my witnesses. A witness is someone who's bearing a message, and for our context, we're talking about carrying the message of your company.

And of course, we want our messengers to be credible, just like the disciples were. They were credible messengers because, of course, they had walked with Jesus, they had seen his resurrection, and they had been filled by the Holy Spirit. They were doing miraculous signs and wonders, and so as they were going out, as they were being sent out, they were very credible messengers.

So who carries the message of your business, and are they credible? Now this can be a very broad topic because essentially anybody who has ever had any contact with your business in any fashion could be a messenger of your company. But of course, most are not. And every piece of physical or digital communication that's coming from your company is bearing witness to your company.

They are sharing a message. This is your packaging, your website, this is your uniforms, this is your PR, this is your billboards, digital ads, physical ads, everything that is associated with your business is projecting a message. Some of them are doing it well, and some of them are not doing it so well.

Knowing all that, who is the most important marketing messenger for your business? Well, it's you. So if you are the founder, the owner, the CEO of your business, no one is going to actually rise above your level of belief, your level of faith in the products, the services, the transformative nature of your business, the vision, the mission, the values. It has to be you.

And so that's why it's so important that you as the leader lead the charge in terms of sharing this message and lead your people in terms of your belief and in terms of your faith, in terms of your confidence in what you do so that those underneath you can also carry that message and be credible, powerful witnesses as well. Now, going down from you the leader, everyone else in your business should also be a credible messenger. And this is not just your sales and marketing team, this is your admin team, your finance team, your operations team, really anybody who works in your business.

You should be able to train and equip them so they are effective, credible messengers for your business. And then a layer beyond that, obviously, is going to be all of your customers who should have transformed lives and all of the vendors you work with as well. And so there's a lot of layers to this, but it always starts from the top, from you, and of course the products and services that you provide need to be transformational.

You can see that a large part of Jesus's expansive marketing plan had to do with the witnesses, with messengers who are carrying your message. You can see it very clearly in the story of the Samaritan woman. Jesus spends a little bit of time with this woman, and then she goes out and helps evangelize her entire town just after one meeting with him.

Now, how about non-human witnesses, non-human messengers? What does the Bible say about that? Well, of course the Bible is totally fine with that, right? That's literally why the Bible was written. So all those 40 different authors who are compiling God's words together, they're writing it down because they want it distributed, they want it spread, they want it spread far and wide, and they know that having it spread far and wide is going to happen faster than just through human-to-human contact alone. So using non-human mediums and tools and techniques is biblical, can be very effective if done right.

If done wrong, it can have very negative consequences. But the tools we're talking about are things like PR and billboards and digital ads and social media and all the things that are not human-to-human interaction. Those are very effective ways to expand your marketing.

But of course, the key is to do it right. It's to do it with the right heart. And I think it's important that I share an example of what happens if you expand your marketing and you're scaling it out and using all these tools and techniques, where you can really expand quickly because it's beyond human-to-human interaction.

And sometimes this can go wrong. I once had a personal care product company come to me asking for help, and they were just a few years old, but they had gone from zero startup to a multi-million dollar business really quite rapidly. And a lot of it had to do with their marketing.

They had a powerful, transformative message, and they were distributing it wildly. They're on Facebook spending over $70,000 a month on ads for just a small team. And it was effective.

It was working. They were getting a lot of customers, a lot of customers fast. But they had a problem.

And the problem was that over time, their cost of new customer acquisition was getting more and more expensive. And also, simultaneously, their customer lifetime value was going down and down and down. So their costs were getting higher and higher and higher, and the business was getting less and less profitable.

And so they're really close to financial ruin when I started talking to them. Here was the problem. Even though they had effective non-human paid-for messengers going out at scale, what they didn't have is they didn't have any human unpaid-for messengers carrying the message as well.

And the reason being is their product was not really that transformational. And so as these various humans tried their products, their lives weren't transformed. They didn't really see the transformation.

They didn't really tell others about it, and they didn't repurchase either. They ended up just buying alternative products that were less expensive. And so this company didn't really have any messengers.

They weren't building up an army of messengers that were real humans to carry the message forward. All they had was paid-for messengers. And this is what happens when your marketing message does not actually match your products and services.

I'm going to get into a lot more on this particular topic in Essential 9, which is all about delivering your promise. But needless to say, it's a problem, and there's a few lessons we can draw out of this story. Number one, you need to be honest.

You need to have a good heart. You need to be trustworthy. You need to be credible.

And if you're not in your messaging and your messengers, it's going to backfire. It's not going to go well for you in your business. And the second point is that there are 12 essentials to a 100-fold business.

So if you do one really well, but you're missing another one, you're not going to do well, right? Your company is going to plateau. It may even plateau and crumble. And so stay tuned for all 12 essentials, because they all work together, and they all help to align you to expanding and having that multiplying growth.

Now we can get to the last point of this passage. In Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. So now we're talking about descending markets, or going from hottest to coldest, or going to your ideal customer in a laser-focused manner, and really owning that, and then spreading out from there in strength.

You don't want to do what most people do, which is to spray and then pray, which is not very effective in marketing. Instead, what you want to do is first pray, then plan strategically, and then put one of those nozzles on your hose, and then spray very specific, very laser, very targeted on your ideal market, and win and own that, and then grow from there. Here's an example of this.

Let's say that you were to start a home cleaning services business. And you could think to yourself, well gosh, everybody who has a home is an ideal customer, and we know that essentially everyone hates cleaning their house. So we can just get started with some billboards, and we put direct mail out to all the home owners.

Maybe do some local TV and radio, because everyone should buy the service, right? But of course, we know that's not going to work, right? So to be more strategic and more thoughtful, you think, who's the most ideal buyer of this service? First thing that comes to my mind would be vacation rental managers, right? Those who are managing those vacation rentals, they need cleaners. And of course, they need those cleaners again and again and again, and they have the money to pay for it, right? So you could just go directly to them and say, hey, would you like to try my services? You get a few dozen contracts pretty quick. And of course, I'm making it sound easy, but if you do that kind of strategic marketing, you could own an area faster with less money spent and be a lot more strategic and directed.

And then of course, you can expand from there. Yes, and I know this particular step sounds very simplistic, very easy, very obvious, but I've seen it skipped over so many times as people look at the next shiny object, the next technique, the next tactic, the next new flashy way to get clients, and they forget about the fundamentals. A question you could ask yourself at this point is, have you, in a laser-focused way, taken the time and the energy and the effort to focus your marketing and direct it directly at the most ideal, the hottest potential buyers for your products and services, and then have you really owned that market and saturated it such that it makes sense to go into the next market? Or have you just distributed your efforts and therefore possibly squandered a lot of your time and money? And if you need some help strategizing an effective marketing plan, then reach out.

I've certainly been a part of hundreds of these campaigns. I've watched them roll out. I've been a part of the implementation, and I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, and hopefully I can steer you in the right direction.

Now, to wrap up this concept of expanding your marketing, I'd love to share a story of a client that I had who did this right. They had an effective message that was transformational. They had credible messengers, and they worked from descending markets.

So they started from the hottest, and then they worked their way down to the cooler markets. I think that sharing this story is going to help you understand how to do it right. It was a B2B chemical company, and their product was able to improve the performance of fuel and do it in a scientifically provable way.

So they had a transformer product, and they took their product, and they put it in the hands of credible messengers, which was their sales team and the owner and the founder, and then they put that into the hands of their ideal customer. And you think, well, improving the performance of fuel, that could help everybody who uses fuel. But instead of that, they focused on the markets that would matter the most, the ones that would care the most about high performance out of their fuel.

And so they just picked a couple of verticals in a small geographic area right where they were located, and they had some success, and they provided some more services associated with the product. And as that grew, they realized they could reach more verticals, and so they expanded their verticals, and they also expanded geographically to more of a regional products and services business. And as they were doing that, they're building up an army of messengers who wanted to repeatedly buy their products and then use their service as well.

And as they were growing, they realized that they could reach other service providers in other parts of the country and teach them about this particular product and how to service with this product as well, which they did. And so they developed other messenger pockets around the country. And so as they had a new messenger or another salesperson in that area, and that person then spread out their geographic area.

And so year over year, they had more messengers. Year over year, they had more customers, and those customers continued to buy year over year, and they kept opening up new geographic areas without losing the initial area they had. And then as those messengers were in those different areas, they expanded from the primary vertical to more verticals over time.

And so it was a beautiful thing to watch because you got to see this company grow year over year, faster and faster and faster. And it all started off with, of course, a transformational product and great service, and really the other 12 essentials they had as well. But they had this transformational message with equipped messengers, and they were able to ultimately go from descending markets.

So from the hottest market to cooler and cooler markets further and further away, but it continued to expand. So let me end this session by sharing the passage from the Bible again. Again, this is from the book of Acts.

This is chapter 1, verse 8. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. Now let's get to the application. And as always, prayer is going to precede progress here because in marketing, there are a lot of ways to waste a lot of money, a lot of time, and you can do it very fast.

And so make sure you pray and plan first. Number one, write down who your ideal customer is, and then take some time to write down what your USP is, your unique selling proposition for your products and services, so you can make sure that you have a transformative message that resonates with your ideal customer. Number two, make sure your messengers, starting with yourself, are equipped with the transformational message and that they're credible, that it's honest, that it's true, and that this message is going out in physical and digital mediums, human, non-human.

And as it's going out, make sure that you're building an army, that you're expanding your reach, and that as you're getting more and more messengers, they're experiencing the transformation so that they can be credible messengers as well. And of course, if you do that right, you can see multiplication and duplication. And lastly, make sure your marketing messengers are going to the hottest, the most targeted, the best markets first, and that you're really penetrating and saturating and owning that market to build a foundation there with your marketing, and then expanding outwards in strength.

Now, if you need more help with this, make sure to schedule a call at 4thSoilVentures.com, and there I can assess your situation, and then together we can develop a winning marketing strategy. Before I close out the recording today, I want to take a moment to read a passage from Genesis chapter 1, verses 28. This is where God is talking to Adam and Eve, and let me just read this passage to you.

And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Now, the immediate context obviously is for Adam and Eve, for them to have children, and for them to take dominion and to expand. But what I want you to see is that, you know, obviously in the New Testament, Jesus has no children, but he is fruitful and multiplies and expands God's kingdom, and so does Paul.

He's fruitful and multiplying. So what I'm getting at here is that I want you to be fruitful in your work. I want you to do good work.

I want it to expand. I want to multiply, and I want it to impact and reach more people, because I know that God has assigned certain people for you to reach, and you can do that through your business, through the marketplace, as you're expanding and serving more people. So therefore, go expand your marketing, expand your reach, expand your impact, and do it faithfully, and do it in love.

Now, stay tuned for the next episode, which is going to be Essential 7 of 12, all about how you can grow your sales. So if one of your missions is to grow your top line, then this next episode is going to be the one for you. Finally, if you like this episode, all about how to expand your marketing, make sure to like it on whatever platform you're watching this or listening to it, and also leave a review and leave a comment.

All those things are going to help it reach more business owners and help them to see that the Bible actually has a lot to say about business and how to expand it, in this case, some really good sound principles that will help you expand your business vis-a-vis marketing. I appreciate you, brothers, and until next time, grace be with you.