Why Your Business Stopped Growing

Why Your Business Stopped Growing

Sean: From Niño, I’m 19 years old. I currently have three businesses – affiliate marketing, e-commerce, and local business. Wow, congratulations.

Toni: Wow.

Sean: It somehow hit a plateau. I’m in analysis paralysis. What do you recommend?

I’m not sure why and how you hit a plateau, but I think it’s about marketing. When your business hits a plateau, usually it’s about marketing or product or service. Those three things are the major things that I look at. Is the product or the service being saturated already in the market that the demand is low and supply is high?

If that’s the problem, you have to innovate a new product, a new service, or on top of your product, or on top of your service, some value adds. If it’s a marketing problem, it could overlap. The product and service saturation could also be a marketing problem at the same time. So usually it is a marketing problem. You’re not marketing well enough and smart enough.

I’m not sure what your business is, but the first thing I’d look at is search. My business is SEO. I manipulate search results for a living. So what I look at is what people search for in that industry. I use aquascape.ph. We had a lot of questions last time. Aquascape.ph is a website I set up just last year because of my aquascaping hobby. We’re selling almost every day, aquatic plants and livestock.

Now I’m going to look at what people are searching for, like what plants are being searched for the most. And you can look at it on Google trends or you can use SEMrush. We’re affiliated, so you could use my link. Go to from.seo-hacker.com/semrush. They have a free tier, so you could use their software for free actually. And you can check what people are searching for. How much volume does that search term have a month? So people are looking for blue shrimp, a hundred a month. Did it grow to 200 this month? Did it grow to 300 this month?

So you can check that data and see, do I still have a really good market? How many competitors do I have sprouting up? What are they doing? You could also take a look at that if you’re not so innovative, because there are people who lack imagination. They are not that innovative. So what you could do is you check out what competition is doing, either from here or competition that’s not really your competition because they’re from abroad. You could also look at the internet. Use the internet.

That’s what I’m going to be doing. Check the market, check your marketing, check your product and check your service and see where you could create a new niche market that you can serve.

Toni: Actually I have a question to ask, because on TikTok, there’s this content creator and she’s the CEO of Colourette. And then she said, in terms of marketing, if you’re not the first, then you have to be the loudest. So what do you have to say about that strategy? Does it apply in inbound and outbound marketing?

Sean: Look. I’m going to use this example. Are you familiar with Lyft?

Toni: Yes. The app like Grab.

Sean: Yes. It’s like Grab. And are you familiar with Grab and Uber?

Toni: Yes.

Sean: Do you know who came first?

Toni: Grab. I’m actually just guessing.

Sean: It’s actually Lyft.

Toni: Ah, okay.

Sean:  Lyft was years ahead. They were years ahead before Uber came to be. So it’s not about whose first, because look, Lyft right now, a lot of people don’t know them. They’re not in Southeast Asia. You thought they were not the first. Right? We don’t know these things, but Lyft was actually the first one and Uber copied them. Uber saw that business model and they really made it, they blitzed on it. It happened so fast, investors pump money in, marketing, they did a lot and they crushed Lyft.

So if you’re the first and you do it really well, then that matters. But if you’re the first and you’re slow, clunky, or didn’t do it so well, then the loudest will definitely get the lion’s share. And when we say loudest, it’s not just ads. When we say loudest, it’s usually word of mouth. A lot of mouths are babbling about who you are, your product and service.

So with Uber, they had a word of mouth strategy. That was very powerful. And that is if you invite someone into the platform, you get money. Literally you get money, because you get Uber credit.

Toni: Yeah, I remember that. I remember that free 100 peso credit or something.

Sean: Right?

Toni: Yeah.

Sean: They actually pay for that. They burn VC cash for that. They burn venture capital cash for that. So Uber pays for you to talk about them and invite someone in. And your friend also gets certain discounts, so Uber also paid for that. So imagine how much money they’re burning. PayPal is the same. Their structure is whenever you invite a friend to PayPal, that friend gets 50 bucks. You get 50 bucks. PayPal pays for that because they’re not creating their own currency back then. It’s US dollars.

Toni: Right. Yeah.

Sean: No PayPal cryptocurrency back then. Right? They can’t pay in crypto. They’re paying you in dollars. So they’re burning a lot of money just to get word of mouth. This is where a lot of businesses get it wrong. They have an advertising strategy. They may even have an SEO strategy, but they have zero word of mouth strategy. You’re not going to go places when you have zero word of mouth strategy. You have to have that. I hope I answered that question.

Toni: Great. So many learnings. But wow, you’re 19 years old. Last time it was 13 years old, now it’s 19 years old. This generation is just different.

Sean: When I was 19 years old, I had nothing. I had zero money in my pocket and I was playing DOTA 18 hours a day.

Toni: But you became CEO at 22. Right?

Sean: God slapped me in the face. That woke me up.

And this, I can’t answer. Our TikTok is not in the radar. It’s existing, but it’s not in the radar. So this is your question. How do you structure or plan your TikTok content? It seems like you know your listeners and niche.

Toni: Hmm. Okay. So I would say, before, I just randomly post content and then see whichever works and then I do more of that. But now I have become more structured. If let’s say you’re starting out, you need to first figure out what your goal is. Is it to drive brand awareness? Is it to position yourself as an authority in your industry to appear more credible? Or do you simply want to be like a celebrity or an influencer?

And then once you’ve finished your objectives, then you determine what you’re good at. That includes your hobbies, basically your core competence. Once you figure out what you’re good at, then you have to choose your niche. That way you also get to build a community of your own. And then after the niche, you know now what your category is, and in my case, it’s personal finance, then you research your target audience. So the way to go about that is look at the content creators within your niche that are doing quite well. You look at their videos and then you look at the content that’s performing well. Then, not to copy it, but you sort of replicate that same structure and make it your own.

So what’s good about TikTok is that there are trends that keep people on the app, that keep people attracted to content creators and the videos that they put out. So in terms of planning out, what I like to do is I look at the comment section. That’s where I get most of my video inspirations. I look at the most asked questions from the viewers and I make a video, literally just answering their questions. So for me, that’s the type of content that gets the most engagement because you’re building that connection with your own audience and you’re making them feel that, “Okay. So she reads my comment and she actually cares about me enough to answer my question.” It’s like that.

After you’ve created your creatives, then you have to check your analytics and then see, do less of what doesn’t work and more of what works. So that’s how I structure my content. So it looks like a pyramid. Right? You start from your goal and then at the end you analyze your data. So I know it sounds technical, but I guess it’s the best way to go about it so that you can do it consistently. And at least it’s not something like YOLO, whatever, I’ll just post random content.

Sean: Good stuff.

Toni: That’s how I do it on TikTok.

Sean: Good stuff.

Toni: And a lot of trial and error also.

Sean: Yeah. So I’m assuming you’re going for the celebrity or influencer route.

Toni: No. Technically, all of us are influencers. If everyone can be an influencer, but not everyone can be a content creator. That’s what they say.

Sean: Yeah.

Toni: So for me, I went on the app simply just to raise brand awareness. It’s to let people know that this is Money Health Check. This is what I teach. This is what I can do. And then it just so happens that there was a video that got viral. And then, from there on, people started following, people started asking me to make, oh, talk about this one or about crypto, budgeting, and all of that.

Sean: I really enjoyed this episode. I really did. There we go. That’s the money heart.

Toni: And I learned a lot, always new learnings from you.

Sean: Likewise. Thank you so much for tonight. Again, this is Sean and I have Toni as a guest here. I learned a lot. I hope you guys did too, and I hope you guys are better for it. Thank you and keep on leading. God bless you guys.