#503: Top-down vs bottom-up marketing strategy - Tash Corbin, Heart-Centred Business Podcast

Full article and show notes available at: tashcorbin.com/503

Top-down vs Bottom-up Marketing Strategy

There are so many ways to grow a business online, and with all the advice flying around, it’s easy to get lost in strategy-hopping and trying a bit of everything. In today’s episode, I’m diving into something that doesn’t get talked about enough: the difference between top-down and bottom-up marketing strategy. If you’ve never considered these two fundamental approaches—or you’re not sure which one is right for you—this chat will help you figure out how to build a business that feels good and gets momentum.

Why Picking a Marketing Approach Matters

It’s totally normal to experiment with different strategies when you’re building a business. But if you’re constantly half-committed to lots of different things, none of them gets the time and energy it needs to work. You end up juggling audience building, offer-creating, social media, and wondering why nothing is really working. Your strategy needs legs—it should feel exciting and fit with your goals, your energy, and your lifestyle.

Honestly, any marketing strategy can work. I love tinkering with business models and strategies and have been obsessed with this stuff since I was young. University, consulting, working with thousands of entrepreneurs—trust me, you can make most strategies work, but only if you really commit and finesse the path.

But, there are two big-picture methods you need to choose between: top-down and bottom-up strategy. Each comes with its pros, cons, and is a better fit depending on your resources and your goals.

...full article available at: tashcorbin.com/503

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Transcript

2:58

Today's episode of the Heart Center Business Podcast is going to be a little more around a specific style of marketing development that you may or may not have heard about before. So in today's episode we're going to be talking about top down marketing versus bottom up marketing. And if you're into learning some of those more technical components of marketing and how to make them work for you, I think you're going to get a bit of a kick out of this one. This is episode number five of the Heart Center Business Podcast, which means you can find all the relevant links in the show notes for today's episode over@tashcorbin.com 503 so let's get into this one. What is top down versus bottom up marketing and how do you choose which one is the right fit for you? Hello, I'm Tash Corbin, a business strategist and mentor based on the Sunshine coast in Australia. The mission of this podcast is to help heart centered entrepreneurs to make more money and in doing so change the world the better. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Gubbi, Gubbi and Jinnaburra people. Always was, always will be aboriginal land. There are a lot of different ways to build a business and to grow it online. Every single different strategy, different approach has its pros and cons. But if you don't decide on your approach, sometimes there's a risk that you kind of half do a bunch of them and nothing gets the traction and the momentum that it needs to get you across that tipping point of being self sustaining, being sustainable, long term, being profitable for you, taking into consideration your time and energy. So we want to ultimately ensure that we are creating a strategy and a strategic approach that is going to get legs, that is going to confidently bring you towards your income goal and the alignment with the type of model and lifestyle that you want to have as a business owner as well. So any strategy can work. That's one of my strengths. I can make any kind of marketing strategy work. I can make any kind of business model work. I can see where there might be gaps in the buyer journey, in the, um, audience development, in the profit model. I am someone who is a dedicated lover of business model, marketing strategies, all of those sorts of things. I've been fascinated about it from a very young age and I've been studying it for a very long time, both in university, but then also as a business consultant and then now in running my business and working with thousands and thousands of different business owners. So any strategy can work right Like, I think that's one of the things that a lot of people get wobbly about is that they worry their strategy isn't going to work and so they start looking for other strategies rather than finessing. Okay, well this is a strategy that I can get excited about. How do I make this work? What is my pathway to this strategy being sustainable, being profitable? So when it comes to building out your strategy and your marketing approach, I pride myself on the ability to kind of identify where those gaps might be, what the fixes might be, and also come up with something that feels like you can get excited about it. But there are two core fundamental methodologies where we do need to choose one or the other, and that is this top down approach versus the bottom up approach. And each of these has strengths and challenges, and each of these may or may not be a fit for you based on the resources you have and the goals that you want to achieve as well. So top down marketing is where you have an idea for a business or an area or a focus that you would like to have. And let's say you know you want to do something in pet products, right? So you decide that you're going to take a top down approach. Top down means we build the audience first. So you might then embark upon creating social channels and content that attracts in people who have pets, people who have a certain type of pet or a certain kind of relationship with their pets. And so you set about building that audience and you're creating content, you're maybe making Instagram reels, you're looking to go viral, you're generating followers. But at that point in time, you haven't necessarily got the clarity on exactly what it is you're going to sell, exactly what your pricing model or structure might be, what your business model might be. But you know, you want to work in that area. So you set a, about creating the audience first. You create channels, you create content, you focus on socials, maybe building a mailing list and your website. And all of that is built based on what you know so far, but it hasn't necessarily been validated as generating income. Now one of the amazing things about especially the last five to ten years in online business is that having an audience alone can, can be a business model you can monetize. In certain countries, a lot of the monetizations are not available to us in Australia, like creator funds, those sorts of things. But in other countries you can literally be paid for audience, you can be paid for viewership. So in on certain platforms and in certain Ways you can actually simply monetize that you've got an audience of tens of thousands of pet lovers and you create content that gets tens of thousands of views each time, sometimes hundreds of thousands of views. And platforms will pay you because your content is keeping people on their platform, it's drawing people to their platform and so that can be monetized in that way. Now, often on social media, that model of business is the most prevalent that we hear and see because they are the ones creating the most content. They are the ones creating content with the most viewership as well. But it's also very clear that for a lot of people, they embark upon that model of business and the monetization takes a lot longer than they expected. Especially if you don't have the budget to grow your audience quickly, to grow your audience with paid advertising, it can be challenging to simply focus on content creation as an organic reach strategy, an organic growth strategy, and get the level of audience that you need to then be able to monetize. Now, the second part of a top down marketing and business building approach is then once you do have an audience, getting clear on what you could sell to that audience and monetizing by making offers, by making sales, rather than just being paid as a creator or as an advertiser, as an advertising space. So what can happen there is then you're going to need to do a lot of testing, and a lot of that testing is going to be to try and validate that the audience you've built will buy this offer. You've got an idea about. Now, there are ways that you can validate earlier before you make big commitments. Things like establishing wait lists, doing a lot of audience research on your mailing list, doing a lot of inquiry, asking questions, surveying your audience. But at the end of the day, there's a big difference between someone saying, yes, I would be interested in buying that versus you offering it and them actually paying for it. So that's why in most cases wait lists convert at around 15 to 20%. So you have a hundred people who say yes. If you create a course for $97 on how to get my baby to sleep, I'll buy it. And then when you actually tell those hundred people, here's the course, it's the $97, it helps you get your baby to sleep. About 15 to 20 of those hundred people will buy it in most cases. So knowing that information, it just means that you know the metrics you need to chase for wait lists or the metrics you need to chase for validation. In order to have a financially viable product or offer. Right. So that top down approach to marketing and building a business is a very consistent and common one. It is one that can absolutely work. It has some benefits in that you can just get about creating content and showing up. And especially if you love creating content, if you're excited by social media, if making viral reels is the thing that you get most excited about in business, if you want to be that person who builds the giant audience and be an influencer, like it's a really aligned business model for a lot of people. But the challenges on that side is it takes a lot longer to monetize. In a lot of cases, it takes money to establish that audience if you need to fast track it. And by money, I would say, you know, in once you've got your initial kind of organic seed audience, you probably be spending between 500 and$1,000 a month to get that audience growth. You know, taking off to try and get to around let's say 10,000 to 20,000 followers in a year. I would say spending between 500 and $1,000 a month is a minimum spend. You would still need that organic content to go quite viral. And then the return for that spend, the return on that audience can take a little longer. Right? So that is the top down approach. We're going from the audience, right? We're building the audience, we're doing the content, we're doing the socials, we're starting to build connection, we're starting to build the, maybe the mailing list, which is a little of a commitment. So you're almost following the buyer cycle, the audience cycle, and you're building out as you go. Then you craft and validate the offer. Then once you've got an offer that's validated, continuing to grow your audience makes financial sense because for every 10,000 new followers you get, you make $15,000 in new sales, right? So we can see then the audience in equals money out. So that top down approach, it does require much larger audiences because it's not validated from the early stages, but it definitely suits certain personality types and certain structures as well. A lot of people who start their business as a side hustle on the side of a job tend towards that model because they're investing all of their time and energy into audience growth and development, content development, that's something that they can kind of batch up and float in and out with. And also they often then have the resourcing in terms of the spend to be able to grow the audience without needing that audience growth to return money to them straight away, they see it more as a long term strategy because they're building it on the side of their job. Now, when it comes to the bottom up approach to marketing, that's where you have the business idea, right? And it might be a topic area or a piece of content or a type of service that you're very excited to deliver and you, you want to have a validated and viable business from that as quickly as possible. The bottom up approach then validating each foundation from the outset. And when we talk about foundations bottom up, we start with niche, then message, then offer, then marketing and audience growth. And even then, when it comes to marketing and audience growth, it's bottom up. So we validate your conversion, then lead generation through invite, then nurture, then reach. So the client attraction process is reversed when we take that bottom up approach. So we are validating each foundation by making sales. So how do you make sales to validate your niche? The only way to really do it in the bottom up approach is one by one, one at a time. So tapping into your existing network and your network's network, borrowing other people's audiences, like being in other people's Facebook groups, looking at your current network from all different angles and areas of your life and asking them to help you find people who might fit that niche. Right? That's how we validate that niche. But we validate it by making sales to that niche. We validate your messaging by making sales with that message. We validate your offers by making sales of your offers. And by taking that bottom up approach, it requires less time, it requires less audience, but it's more confronting. It requires more risk taking. Because. And when I say risk taking, I don't mean with money, I mean with your ego. So you need to be willing to ask your network, hey, do you know anyone who might want help with getting their baby to sleep? And could you connect me to them? Hey, do any of you, my friends, want to be my test students for getting your baby to sleep? Now, I don't know why I've chosen getting your baby to sleep as an area I'm not in parenting, I'm not a parent, I don't have a baby. I'm not sleep deprived. Really weird. But anyway, it just popped into my brain. So that's what we're running with. So we do that one on one directly. But by doing that one on one directly and validating that, you can make those sales, validating that you know how to generate leads and ask qualifying questions and do the invitation. Validating that you know how to nurture relationships with people who are within your niche. Validating then that you know how to go and reach the right people and bring them through that process quickly. What we see there is it requires a lot less in terms of resourcing in, especially in terms of money, but it might require more time per sale in, in that it might require more time for you talking to one person at a time and it might require then that you face up to the rejection of having someone say that sounds really good, but no, it's not a priority for me right now, or no, I can't afford it. And when you do it bottom up, you'll hear no, I can't afford it. Quite a. So that validation though allows you to then build out your content and your assets and your audience growth strategies more effectively and probably more narrowly because of that proven concept, because of the proven messaging, because of the proven value proposition of your offer and because of that bottom up approach being so much more connected, it's got such high one to one conversations as part of that process. It can also mean that the audience size you need to build is significantly smaller for the same amount of income as someone who spent a year building a 10,000 strong audience. And so depending on what your desire is, you would choose a different strategy. But this is where it gets tricky because for a lot of people they're seeing so much focus on audience growth in social media because so many people are doing the top down approach, right? I would say 80% of people who start a business start with the top down approach. Um, maybe Even closer to 90% of people start with that top down approach because it seems logical. I want to have a business, I need to build an audience, I want to have a business, I need to get followers on social media. Right? That is the top down approach. So most people will start with a top down approach and then if they then learn about bottom up, lean business foundations first, business models, foundations first, business growth. Fast tracking their income to profitability through high ticket models. It's very challenging to let go of the top down piece. And so what ends up happening is people spend a lot of time on social media trying to grow their audience and, and they're also trying to validate and do the bottom up piece. But what they get frustrated with is that those two pieces don't connect with each other for a long time. And so people will often come to me and say, well, I've got 1500 followers on Instagram and I've made 12 sales of my VIP package, but none of them have been sold to followers from Instagram. So I'm doing all of this work to grow an audience they aren't buying. But I have no control over the sales I make because the only sales I'm making are coming from referrals or word of mouth or people that I meet at barbecues. And I don't want to go to a barbecue every second day of my life. Right. And so what ends up happening is there's this frustration that they can't get the two ends to meet. Often what we need to do is let go of a lot of the top down, a lot of the social media stuff, a lot of the content creation, and instead focus on applying rigor and structure and strategy to the validation strategy for the bottom up piece, knowing that when you've got that validated in the bottom up piece, yep, you've learned a bunch of social strategies that you can then apply validated messaging to that you can then apply to a validated client attraction process. Rather than telling yourself you're just going to keep going, keep going, keep going with all of this effort and workload, building a social media audience that may never match up with what you're validating with your bottom up approach. So that being half in the top down and half in the bottom up often is where people find themselves the most frustrated because those two pieces aren't necessarily connecting. And it feels like a lot of the time and energy they're putting into audience growth, content creation, social media, even mailing list growth feels wasted. And in essence, if you're deciding that you're going to do the bottom up approach, it is kind of wasted. I mean, I can make use of any asset, right? It isn't necessarily wasted. There's always ways for us to make use of it eventually. But I just think about all the hours that you've put in, all the years of effort that you've put in to try and grow that audience, when if you just let go of a bunch of that audience growth stuff and dived directly into bottom up sooner and put all of your energy and attention into bottom up, you would have validated and got back to the point where you were in the audience growth phase, but now you're growing your audience knowing that every single new AUD is connected into eventually becoming a client. And that's a powerful thing to experience. So I wanted to break this one down for you in today's episode. I know it's a drier topic for me to cover. But I do think a lot of people are in that in between phase of trying to do both or they're 80% top down and 20% bottom up. When if we switched it over to be 80% bottom up and 20% top down, they would be generating results much faster. So if this really resonates for you, I hope that you've found some insight in it and that it's inspired you to potentially consider which approach is going to be the right fit for you and then start to make some changes to the time and energy you're putting into different activities in your business growth strategy. Part of the reason why I wanted to cover this in the podcast is that I would say in 2025 I had dozens, probably close to 50 conversations with people about this on a one on one basis when people were considering the takeoff program and I could see they were split between top down and bottom up when I was working with people one on one and that was something we needed to address. I also attracted for some reason in 2025 quite a lot of people who had very large audiences whose sales and income generation just did not reflect their audience size and they had recognized that validation was a critical missing component for them, particularly of their offers and messaging. And so that was something that we worked on together in one to one packages or I had a couple of VIP retreats in which we really nailed that down in 2025. So it's very top of mind for me at the moment and hopefully it's helpful for you to be able to potentially apply a little bit more conscious choice of what approach you're going to take and therefore the parameters that you set for yourself, the milestones that you're looking to achieve. Because if you're taking a top down approach and the core metric you're measuring your success on is sales, you're going to feel flat and disappointed a lot of the time and for a long time to come because because that's not the model that generates profitable income quickly. The bottom up approach is far more profit driven and short term than the top down approach. And again, I think I shared this in last week's episode or the last episode of podcast. Just because the bottom up approach is more one on one and can therefore be more confronting doesn't mean that it's not the right fit for someone who struggles with one to one connection. There are ways that you that's very fast tracked. You don't have to have that one on one conversation with a lot of people, but a little bit of validation goes a long way, especially when you're making a lot of assumptions about what people in your audience might value and their willingness to invest in solutions and help. If you're interested in learning more about the bottom up model of business growth, I have a free training. It is self study. You can do it anytime. It's called fast track your business and step by step it goes through that bottom up approach to validating and getting profitable in your business faster. And fast track your business is focused on VIP high ticket packages as part of that profitability and that business viability in the early stages. So if that is something you're wanting to explore, Fast track your business is a great free resource to come and check out. I'll make sure I pop a link to that with the show notes of today's episode over@tashcorbyn.com 503 thank you so much for joining me for this episode and until next time, I cannot wait to see you shine.