Hey - Matthew here!

Before I dive into today's email, wanted to remind you I'm hosting Inbound Sales Ninja in 2 weeks! It's a live, 4-week cohort teaching you the 80-20 of getting leads from LinkedIn. You can click here to join the VIP waitlist.​

I posted this on LinkedIn the other day and got some good feedback and opinions.

So I'm going to expand on the idea in 3 ways:

1. Fastest-to-slowest advertising methods
2. Most effective to least effective advertising methods
3. My personal sequencing of advertising methods

But before we dive in, let's first list out the different advertising methods (in their core units). Hormozi calls these the "Core 4":

• Warm outreach
• Cold outreach
• Content
• Paid ads

You can do these, or you can have others do them for you (Hormozi calls these the "Lead Getters"):

• Referrals = customers do them for you
• Partnerships = partners do them for you
• Employees = employees do them for you
• Agencies = agencies do them for you

For simplicity's sake, we're going to focus on the "Core 4", not the "Lead Getters".

Fastest-to-slowest advertising methods

Paid ads

Paid advertising is the fastest way to get leads.

You can post an ad today and close a client today or tomorrow. You are paying a premium to go where the eyeballs are *right now*. This can be:

• Radio ads
• Newsletter ads
• Podcast ads
• YouTube ads
• TV commercials
• IG ads
• FB ads
• Google PPC ads

Or using any other number of platforms.

Warm Outreach:

Warm outreach is fast.

And that's because:

• You already have the list of people to contact
• You already have some relationship with these people (they know who you are) - so they're more likely to respond
• It takes $0 to send someone a text message, give them a call, or DM them (so psychologically, you are less likely to have a "hold up")

Cold Outreach:

Cold outreach comes next.

It takes longer than warm outreach, in general. That's because:

• You have to create a list of your ideal prospects and find a way to contact them
• You *may* have to warm domains if you're sending emails
• You will either need to do mass outreach or hyper-personalized, low volume outreach (to compensate for the fact that these people do not know you).

It will be more difficult and take longer, on average, to get leads from cold outreach than warm outreach (or ads).

Content:

Content comes last.

It takes the longest for a few reasons:

• You compete with everyone in the entire world (or at least in your niche)
• You have to add significant value BEFORE people are willing to give something in return
• Your content has to be good enough that other people share it—or else your audience won't grow

It's time consuming to create and takes a while to reap the rewards.

Most effective to least effective advertising methods (for most businesses)

Note: there's so much nuance here, you could make rational arguments for different orders. But let's define "effective for most businesses": you the same amount of inputs into a system over a long period, each method produces a different volume of outputs. Most effective = most outputs.

Content:

Content is the most effective, long-term advertising method.

Here's why:

• It has the highest ratio of giving-to-asking (and goodwill compounds faster than dollars ever will).
• Your audience (and the trust you build with them) is the asset. You can monetize that in any number of ways.
• The "perceived likelihood of achievement" that your customers will get their dream outcome increases dramatically.

Content is the *only* advertising method that gets less expensive to reach more people over time.

Paid Ads:

Paid ads are highly effective and will continue to be.

The downside is the costs look like this over time (whether we're looking at Super Bowl ads or Facebook ads) 👇🏼

That's how Facebook and Google keep growing ever year. More users + higher CPCs and CPMs for ads.

But here's why they're so effective:

• You spend a dollar to get five.
• You spend five dollars to get twenty-five.
• You continue spending more dollars until the money-printing machine breaks.

The input is literally spending more dollars (+ introducing new ad creatives).

And if you have good life-time values, you can scale this.

Cold Outreach:

Cold outreach is effective.

The downside is over time people become less and less responsive - time works against you.

But it is quite scalable. Think of door-to-door companies that sell solar. You've got several billion dollar companies that *only* use cold outreach.

Here's why it's effective:

• You can reach out to almost infinite numbers of people
• You can reach out to them an almost infinite number of times
• You can reach out to them with infinite different offers

Traffic x quality of offer = sales velocity.

Warm Outreach:

Warm outreach is highly effective but much harder to scale.

If we were looking at effectiveness alone, warm outreach does well, but we're looking at effectiveness over time - and this method becomes much harder to scale (unless paired well with content).

Here's why it's effective:

• You can contact the people
• They already know you
• They're more likely to respond—and respond positively—if you make them an offer

But it's the least effective because you will quickly run out of people to contact.

My personal sequencing of lead-getting methods

I started with cold outreach.

That's because I didn't have a big list of warm people to reach out to (not everyone can buy my service - I have a pretty specific niche).

I landed several partners and clients this way.

Then I started posting content.

Content took a while to turn into leads. But what it did do quickly was get me some followers. Warm contacts.

Then I turned to warm outreach.

As I kept building my content engine, I had people to reach out to. So I'd give in public via content, then ask in private via DMs.

This worked well and continues working well.

Now, my content drives 40%+ of my total leads directly. But it took me a long time to get there. The good news:

It keeps compounding.

Grateful I got started with content as early as I did AND I would encourage you to do the same!

Best,

Matthew

PS - if you missed the link at the top to join the VIP Waitlist for Inbound Sales Ninja, you can click here to join.​