Marketing Plan by Joe Apfelbaum

So let's begin the program. Welcome everybody to the CHYE Business Plan Competition of 2016. This is the marketing strategy section, and hopefully you're going to pay attention now so that you can get the knowledge that you need in order for you to be able to win this competition. My name is Joe Apfelbaum. Our company is Ajax Union, and we help thousands of companies with their marketing strategy. And today I'm going to teach you a few pointers in the next hour that will give you some insight to help you be able to have a more successful business plan. So let's get started. The first thing to know when you're doing your marketing strategy is that you have to be able to Realize that it's not going to make your business. It's not going to make your or break your business if you have a written marketing strategy. Ultimately, marketing is about testing, but it's important to know what goes into a marketing strategy.

So we're—

today we're going to talk about the marketing strategy, which is Section 6 in the Business Plan Competition, and we're going to talk about a marketing budget, which is super important whenever you're running A marketing campaign. Many times clients come to us and they say, can you do our marketing for us? And I ask them, what is your marketing budget? And they say, I don't know what my marketing budget—

I don't know what it should be.

You tell me what my marketing budget is. I can't tell you what your marketing budget should be. It really will depend on the type of business you want to have and what you can afford and what you want to accomplish. And today I'm going to give you a little bit of insight into something that many business owners don't know, even ones that have very successful multimillion-dollar businesses. So take a pen, take a paper, pay attention, and if you have a question, please, please send it as an email to info@chyee.info so that we can engage together, we can learn what you're thinking, what's on your mind, and I can help you answer the questions live, real time, right now. And if you didn't take a moment to share this on social media, remember, put this on your Facebook, put this on your Twitter, put this on your LinkedIn, and have other people know what's going on right now because this is going on live. So what is marketing? Some people think that marketing is just about posting stuff on Instagram. Posting stuff on Facebook, posting stuff on Twitter. And the reality is that marketing is much more than just that. The first thing that marketing is is the promotion of products or services. The second thing is it's communication. It's communication of value. It's the market requirements for selling and it's advertisements, distribution, and selling.

So a lot goes into marketing.

Marketing can be very, very simple, and it could also be very, very complicated. If you think about marketing, some people tell me that their marketing is their customer service. You can be like, how is customer service marketing? Customer service is a function of operations. But the reality is, if you have amazing customer service, people are going to want to not only stay as customers and become return customers, but they're also going to want to refer you tons of business. So when you're creating your marketing plan, you don't just want to think about posting stuff on social media. You want to think about the big picture. Everything from where your product will be, what it will look like, who you're communicating to, where is it going to be put, and all the messages around it, and how it's going to be serviced, how's it going to be portrayed. The role of marketing is to have customer engagement, to create awareness, to let people know that you exist.

You're marketing your product. It's a verb.

It's something that you want to do.

You want to turn potentials, potential customers, into customers.

By having the right marketing, you not only create awareness that you exist, but you also take potential customers that are out there that are not yet customers, and then you turn them into customers because you have such a great marketing message. You want to generate and nurture leads for your business. Depending if you're a service business or you're a product business, there are different ways for you to be able to generate leads and also take leads that are not yet ready to buy and turn them into customers that are more ready to buy using the right messages, the right messages on marketing. And you also want to personalize the customer experience. All that goes into marketing. So there are 4 popular words, the 4 Ps of marketing, that a lot of people talk about, but many people have never heard of it before, and the people that have heard of it before don't really understand what it means. So I want to talk about these 4 Ps, and I want you to really understand that this may sound more complicated than it needs to be, and you might say, wow, this is so complicated, I can't do my business plan. The most important thing is to keep it simple. If you can't understand this, it's too complicated. You need to be able to understand this in a very simple term, be able to put it on a paper and get it so that you can show it to other people and they can get it right away. And if you can make it that simple that anybody can get it, that's going to be an effective marketing plan. If it's a lot of mumbo-jumbo and a complicated 500-page plan, it's going to be very difficult to execute on that type of plan. So keep in mind that as you're going through this presentation, write these things down. Write ideas down. Write what you're going to be doing as a result of learning this information. But don't get overwhelmed and think that you have to do everything. At the end, I'm going to show you how simple it can be to create a marketing plan. But right now, just pay attention and write down things and take questions and write down your questions, write down your thoughts. They say that when you take notes, you learn better, even if you're never going to read those notes. So make sure to sit down with a pen and a paper and write your notes down.

So the 4 Ps are number one, product or service, right?

That's the first one. The second one is price. You want to know what your product is. You want to know what your price is.

You want to know your promotion.

How are you going to get it out there? What is your advertising strategy or your promotion strategy? And then you want to know your placement. Where is your product going to be? Where's it going to live? How's it going to get to the customer? So we're going to show you these 4 different areas. And remember, we're only spending an hour together, so I'm not going to be able to get very, very deep into this, but I'm going to try to give you as much information as I can within this hour, and hopefully you'll be able to consume some of it.

And also, when you hear something, write it down and then research it online. There are so many resources.

You can spend hours and hours learning this stuff. You can watch videos on YouTube about each one of these things, and you can learn how to create a more effective marketing plan. This is just to give you a little bit of insight, a little bit of a kick in the pants to get you going, to even know what to ask. Sometimes people don't even know what to begin, what to ask. So it's important for you to realize that this is not for you to become an expert in marketing, by learning these few things here today. This is more for you to open up your eyes and see what the possibilities are so that you could do your research and take your business plan to the top and actually win this competition. And I believe in you. I believe that you can win this competition. But you have to put in the effort. You have to pay attention. So, take notes and remember, if you have a question, info@chyee.info. So, the role of marketing. The role of marketing is getting your customers engaged, creating awareness, turning potentials into customers, generating leads, and personalizing the customer experience.

We spoke about the 4 words.

So what is product? What is the first P? Product is what are you actually selling? What is the service? Does it match what the end users need or want? A lot of people decide, I'm going to come up with a product. I'm going to put together an app. I'm going to start a business.

But they don't take a moment to think about whether or not it's going to meet the needs of the end user, whether or not there are end users that actually want this product or service. So you really have to take this into consideration when you're thinking about your product or your service, whether or not it meets the needs of the market.

The second thing is price.

Why did you set that price?

Some people just choose a price randomly. They completely choose a price randomly for their service. I know that I was guilty of it. I just picked a random price when I started my company. For the services.

I just guessed. And you know what?

I guessed right because many, many people signed up to it. But what I could have done is I could have taken a step back and done research and figured out, okay, what do people pay? What do other people pay? Why do they pay that? What are the competition doing? And I'm going to get into pricing, which is very, very important, but realize that I missed tons of opportunity because I didn't do this research when I started my business, and you can do things differently and learn from the coattails of what I did. Promotion, advertising. What's your promotional strategy? So many businesses out there are just doing social media. They're just doing SEO. They're just advertising in circulars. I used to love calling people up that are advertising in circulars and say, hey, how's this ad working out for you? And they're like, huh? What are you talking about? I was like, yeah, what's the ROI? Like, what are you getting from this ad? They're like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I just advertise and I advertise. That's what I do. I just advertise. That's what we need to do. We need to make a Kaylee, right? You really have to understand why you're promoting your product, why you're advertising in that medium. What are you trying to accomplish? What is your ROI? We're going to talk about promotion and ROI. And then placement. Where's your product going to live? How are you going to get your product from your hand into the client's hand? Your geographic, your market segment, your environment. Are you going to do it online?

Are you going to do a brick and mortar? What are you going to do? So thinking about these 4 areas are super important.

We're going to go through them. One by one. But there are other Ps to consider. And people is something that people often overlook in business. You know, business is all about relationships. And it's the people behind the business that really matter.

Some people say it's B2B. Other people say it's B2C.

But the reality is it's P2P.

You're dealing with people.

You're not dealing with companies.

You're dealing with people.

with people behind the company.

So it's important to keep people in mind both within your business—

people are driven by emotions— and also outside of your business. Your customers don't take action because you have a compelling offer. They take action because you make them feel a certain way. So, think about who— the right people in the right seat within your company, outside of your company, the vendors that you're working with. Really think about the people. It's a marketing strategy to think about the right people. The impact that you're having on the people, the training, the support, the culture. That all matters tremendously.

Then think about the process.

A lot of people get so caught up in everything in their life, but they forget that there's a process to everything. There are checklists. There's this winning way. There's a way that it would work, and there's a way that it's not going to work. You're not the first person in the entire world that's ever opened up a business before. And there's a right way to do it. And when you take the time to research the right process, the likelihood of you being successful is much, much higher. And then having a playbook, having a way that you are going to do things. A lot of people run their business with no playbook, with no plan, with no checklists, and you have the opportunity to create a checklist, to create a playbook, to create the winning way so that you have more value in your service, more value in your product. And the last thing which is often overlooked even by the fastest growing companies in the United States, did you know That of the top Inc. 5000, the fastest growing companies in the United States, over 70% of them lose money? You're like, wow, they're growing as the fastest growing company and they're losing money? Yeah, because people forget to pay attention to the most important thing, which is the profit. Why are you doing it? At the end of the day, you're doing it for the profit, for the benefit that you get, both personally, professionally, for your family. If you're not getting profit out of this, I don't know why you're doing it. So, you really have to be thinking about your profit and it starts with your marketing, having a profitable marketing strategy. So, really consider those things, think about those things. So, let's talk about your products. You're launching a business, whether it's a product business or a service business, what makes you special? You want to be as specific as possible when you're thinking about what makes you stand out from the competition. There are so many other people out there doing everything. And people have a limited amount of time, a limited amount of effort, a limited amount of money that they could invest, a limited amount of bandwidth that they could invest. And you want to make sure that you're in front of them with the right product and be as specific as possible because it's going to be about communicating why your product is the right product. The second thing is there's a concept called features And there's a concept called benefits. Often salespeople get so caught up on discussing the features of a product and they think that that's going to make the person buy. And the reality is it's important to show the features, but it's so much more important to show the benefits that the product will give you. And remember to think about what are the benefits of this product? Is it going to save you money? Is it going to make you money? Is it going to make your life better? And especially for entrepreneurs, that all sounds very fluffy because we're these experts and we're out there and we're killing it and we're doing it and we're bottom liners, right?

We're bottom— we just want the bottom line. Just give it to me how it is. Tell me what the features are.

I want to compare them.

But the average person, the average person is not like that.

The average person doesn't think like you think.

If you think like you think, you're not going to be able to succeed. You need to think—

Like other people think. You need to get yourself into other people's shoes, into your customers' shoes, into your competitors' shoes, into everybody else's shoes, and then make sure you don't have athlete's foot. Packaging. You want to think about your packaging. What does your product look like from the outside?

Do you know how beautiful it is to buy an iPhone from the outside?

You have this—

not only is the phone beautiful, but Steve Jobs went into every single detail of the package. How it is and what's in there and what materials included and the box and the outside of the box and the shiny logo and every piece of material because that's all part of your marketing.

That's all part of your product. The packaging matters. It really, really matters. And then think about your USP. Let's get into your USP a little bit over here. So USP stands for unique selling proposition. And it sounds like this complicated thing for many people. I know the first time I heard the word USP, I got really excited because I learned something new. And I didn't really realize, grasp how important the USP is. Your unique selling proposition will sell to your unique audience. You could have 10 people in the same room that do the same thing, but they all have a unique selling proposition that's unique to them.

And they will attract a specific market segment based on their unique selling proposition.

Some customers care about speed. Other customers care about price.

Other customers care about how nice you are or how much experience you have.

And based on your unique selling proposition, the likelihood of you succeeding is going to be much higher based on the demographic that you want to target. You want to think about your company's image. You want to think about the brand, what it looks like. You want to know how your product and service is different than your competitors because the reality is that competitors are not really competing for the same exact customers because many times if you change your USP, what one company has is very, very different than what another company has even though they're selling the same iPhone, even though they're selling the same mouse, even though they're selling the same product, when you change the USP, you actually change the reason why customers will buy. So you really want to think about what your USP is. I remember when we were targeting certain clients in our marketing agency, we had a unique selling proposition and our unique selling proposition was very simple. It was hassle-free, you own everything because in those days marketing companies would want to own all your stuff. Rightfully so, it's recurring revenue. They never want you to leave. So we said, no, you know what? Everything belongs to you.

Everything is month to month. Because it was a big trust issue, trusting companies that do search engine optimization.

So we had to remove all that. And right away when we showed our USP to our customers, they said, you guys are really, really standing out because this is exactly what we need. And we tested it and it worked. And as a result, we've got thousands of clients from that. So some examples are reliable, friendly, fast service, high quality, convenient, great customer service, innovative. There are many, many other USPs. You should go online, research USPs. There are so many. This is a Venn diagram that I found online. You could either have something that's really, really good. You can have service that's really, really fast. Or you can have service that's really, really cheap. But you can't have it all. It's just not going to work. If you try to have a little bit of each, so it's not going to be good, it's not going to be fast, it's not going to be cheap. And you're going to be dead in the middle. If you're good and fast, you're expensive. If you're good and cheap, you're slow.

If you're fast and cheap, then you just have a crappy product or service, right? And for some people that like to buy Kobe, that's fine, right? For some people, that's what works for them. Those people shop in the 99-cent store. They want fast, they want cheap, they just want it. And other people want the Rolls-Royce of the product. They don't care how long it takes. They just want to know that it's very, very good, right? And other people just don't care how long it takes. They don't care if it's fast or slow. They don't care if it's good. They just want to know that it's the cheapest price.

You have to know what your unique selling proposition is, and you have to decide based on your value, based on what you value, based on what you can get, based on what market segment you want to target.

You might resonate really well with the people that like cheap, cheap, cheap. There are so many daily deal sites that targeted that demographic. They want the deal. They want the daily deal. They want the deal. They go for cheap. They don't care if it takes 6 months to get the product. They just want the cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, right?

They don't care if the product's a good product.

So think about where you want to be.

That's super important. What is your brand promise? I recently heard the founder of EO, Verne Harnish, ask a question to the audience. He's like, what's the 2 words that you stand for? Volvo stands for safety.

Google stands for search. For search.

That's the one word that describes Google.

Think about what your word is, what word you want to own, and then think about what promise you're going to make to the customer.

Your promise might be, when it absolutely, positively has to be overnight, FedEx. Your promise might be, it melts in your mouth, not in your hand, M&M's. So think about your tagline, your slogan, and the message that you're sending the people around you, because this is your promise. This is the promise that you're going to make. to your consumers, and that's the reason they're going to want to buy from you, and it's going to lead into your USP. So that's your product.

Let's talk a little bit about your pricing.

And remember, if you have questions, email them to info@chy-e.info so that we can answer all your questions here live. So let's talk a little bit about price strategy. So what is your price strategy? Why are you charging what you're charging? Some examples of pricing techniques is markup on cost. Something costs you a certain price and you mark it up higher than what it costs you. Some of it has to do with MAP pricing, MSP, manufacturer suggested retail price. You cannot charge products— it becomes very, very difficult if you're selling something on Amazon. You can't suddenly charge 4 times the price for the same product because no one's going to really want to buy from you. You could charge maybe a little bit more if you offer free shipping or if you offer something like an extra case or some extra value in some way or you offer unlimited returns or whatever it is you want to offer. You could charge a little bit more, but you can't be all the way out of the water. You want to be within your competitive space.

And also, what are the market expectations?

In every market, people have a certain expectation of what they are used to paying for something. People are used to paying for transportation a certain amount. They're used to paying for cleaning people, cleaning help a certain amount. They're used to paying for milk a certain amount. You can't just come and charge $50 a gallon of milk. It's just not going to work, right? You can charge maybe $50 a gallon of water. For some reason, water is more expensive than gasoline, right? You go to the amusement park, you buy a bottle of water that's tiny for like $5. That means a gallon costs like $50, right? So you think about that. People are willing to pay that because that's what they're used to paying. That's the market expectations. You could charge $5 for a bottle of water at an amusement park. But you can't charge that in a bodega because no one's ever going to buy it unless it's Fiji or some other water that created that market expectation and they have the USP. And they're able to charge that amount of money. So you can charge that if you have the right USP, but know what you're pricing. Have a strategy behind your pricing and get ready to document that strategy because when you're creating your business plan, it's super important for you to know why you're charging what you're charging.

Payment terms.

I remember there was a CEO that called me up and he said, hey Joe, I have a really big problem. I can't figure out how to get my business over $100,000 in revenue. And I said, really? Tell me what's going on. So he says, I rent these products and I have this service. I rent them out to consumers and every single time I rent them out to a consumer, it takes a toll on my cash flow because I take 10% upfront. I take 10% upfront, and then they pay me 50% when I drop it off, and then when I pick it up, they pay me the other 50%. And I said, how much does it cost you to buy the product to rent it out? He's like, it's $400. And how much does it cost to rent it out? $400. So I said, okay, hang on a second. Why are you not asking your customer for all the money upfront?

This is a luxury product.

Your consumer is not a bottom-of-the-barrel cheap type of consumer.

They're willing to pay $400 to rent something that costs $400 because you're gonna come and inflate it and create it and do everything, right?

So he's like, yeah.

So I said, why don't you just charge, when they RSVP 6 months in advance, just charge them the full amount and then go buy the thing and then rent them out their thing that you bought so you could have unlimited growth. And he's like, no one's willing to do that.

No one's willing to pay me upfront.

Why would they trust me? I was like, I don't know, it's marketing, test it. Create a landing page for the full price and see what happens.

And he's like, it's not going to work, Joe. I was like, listen, if you're right, you're right. And if you're wrong, you're wrong.

I don't know what's going to work. When it comes to pricing strategy, when it comes to dealing with your customers, I don't know what's going to work.

I'm not arrogant enough to think that I'm God.

I don't know, I can't predict the future.

All I know is I can test it. I can poke at it and see what happens.

And he's like, you know what, Joe?

I'm going to prove you wrong.

I'm going to create a landing page.

It's going to cost me $1,000. And then I'm going to prove you wrong. And then what are you going to say then? I was like, I don't know. It's marketing. You might lose the $1,000, but I say do it. He did it. He took his company from $100,000 to $1 million in revenue because his customers financed his growth. Pricing strategy can make all the difference because you may not have to get that loan. You may not need more resources. You might just have to be more resourceful. It's super important to remember that. It's not all about the money. It's about how you do it.

So let's talk about promotion.

So we got pricing down, we got product down.

This is my favorite part, ladies and gentlemen. I love promotion. I love this part. Why? Because this is fun.

Pricing is not fun.

The product is not fun. Getting it out there is so much fun. You get to do all these fun things to get in front of people and jump around and get them to see if they do something, if they take action. This is where it happens. So pay attention here. This is where it counts. Even if you did all the other stuff wrong, if you get this right, you will be successful. This is the biggest, most important part of your marketing plan. So how are you going to promote your product or service?

You have something, whether it's a product, whether it's a service, it's a cleaning service, it's a rental service, or it's a product. You want to sell dresses, you want to start a store, sell shoes, sell electronics, sell something.

How are you going to get people to come?

Now, I spoke to a store owner yesterday and he said, I heard a myth. I heard that if you build it, they will come. Is that true, Joe? And I said, it used to be true.

It used to be when you were the only one in the neighborhood, all you had to do was build it and they would come.

But now in the global economy, with the internet connecting us all, you can't expect to build it and just rely on them just coming to you. You need to promote it. You need to have a plan to get out there, even if you have a store.

Your store is a marketing function. Your storefront is a marketing function, but less and less people are paying attention when they walk down the street. Guess what people do these days when they walk down the street?

I was recently approaching the crosswalk and I— on the bottom of the crosswalk it said, look up, because everybody's on their phones.

Everybody's on their phones and it says look up, so you should look up so you don't get hit by a car. When somebody's walking by your storefront, guess what they're doing?

They're doing this. They're on their phone the whole time. And if you don't have a good promotion strategy, you're going to miss out on their attention and you're going to miss out on their dollars as a result. So, the first thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you're consistent with your image, making sure that if you're promoting in multiple different areas that you have the same image, that you're consistent. Number 2 is you want to focus on the benefits. People forget about this.

They're like, feature, feature, feature. You should buy from me because we're so great because we have all these features. Forget about the features, focus on the benefits. Yes, features are important.

At the end of the day, you got to tell them what they're going to get, but don't focus on that.

When you're putting out your message out there, focus on the benefits, even if it doesn't sound good, even if it doesn't sound good to you as an entrepreneur, it's not going—

it's never going to resonate with you because you're going to want to know the bottom line. Most people don't want the bottom line. Most people want that romance. They want to know that you got them covered, that you have their back, that you care about them. And think about the channels. Think about channels like objectives. Think about budgets. Think about capacity. You may not be able to get— somebody said, I said, okay, how many customers do you want on your online store? Tell me right now. How many do you want?

You know what he said? He said, I want billions of customers to come buy from me.

I said, really? You want billions of customers? How many products do you ship a day? He's like, 40. I said, how many can you ship if I filled up your capacity? He's like, 80.

So I said, so why do you want billions of people on your website? He's like, I don't know, it sounds good. If I had billions of people on my website buying, I'd have a terrible name because I wouldn't be able to ship anything and I wouldn't be able to get a loan to buy the inventory. And even if I did get a loan to buy the inventory, it would take 6 months for the inventory to get here from China. So I would be able to lose all those orders anyway. So I would lose more money on credit card processing and blah, blah, blah. His head exploded.

He's like, oh my gosh, I don't want billions of people. I don't want billions of people at all. I just want another 40 people to buy from me. And then I'm at my capacity, and then I can grow. And he was like, wow, I could actually afford to do this.

I thought I couldn't afford to do this. I can actually afford to buy another 40 customers at $100 each.

I have the budget for that.

And I know that I can do that because I've been doing that till now.

I just have to ratchet up a little bit.

Wow.

When you're looking at your promotion strategy from that angle, from the constraints, then suddenly it changes your whole business.

It changes your whole perception because We were built to be generalizing.

We have this mentality that we just want to generalize, generalize more and more, and we want as much as possible. I say, okay, you know what? How much money do you want? Ask yourself this question right now. How much money do you want? And most people will answer, as much as possible. Did you know that 80% of people that win the lottery, that have as much as possible, that win the lottery lose the money In the first 3 years, and another 12% commit suicide. So no, you don't want as much as possible. What you want is to be specific as possible because if you know where you're going, you're going to get there much quicker. And if you don't know where you're going, you might get somewhere else. I know that sounds confusing because it is.

And most people are living a confusing life. Most business owners don't know where they want to go. You need to be specific, and when you're specific, you're going to know how to promote your business.

So capacity matters, budget matters, objectives matter. Think about those things. Moving on. Promotion strategy. So when you're going out to promoting, whether it's advertising or promoting, so you can think about digital marketing and PR. You could think about branded products like, you know, Like Logitech has Logitech on their phone, so you can give out pens and you can give out all types of swag, right? You could think about printed material like catalogs and business cards and brochures. You could think about samples that you can give out with your logo on it and get people really excited about your samples, networking events, referrals, PR events and trade shows and all types of partnerships, but those are just tactics.

And those tactics are great.

People like getting right into the tactics. But before you get into the tactics, you want to think about what your strategy is. You want to think about what you're trying to accomplish at the end of the day. And once you know what you're trying to accomplish, you can build your tactics around that strategy.

So for some people, it's ecommerce sales. That's a strategy.

I want more sales to my website, and I don't just want to acquire customers. I want to acquire customers that are profitable customers. on the first time, that's really going to limit you. That's going to limit how much you want to grow. If you think about LTV, lifetime value of a customer, and you're thinking about long-term, you can grow much quicker, but you'll end up losing money in the beginning. So thinking about what your strategy is is very important. You might have a service business and you might want to generate leads for your service business. You might consider telemarketing, email marketing, PPC, and other things.

You might say, you know what, I don't care about lead gen. I don't care about ecommerce sales. I don't even want sales.

I just want branding. I just want awareness. I just want everyone to know who we are, because if they know who we are, eventually when we launch our product, they're going to want to be with us. They're going to want to sign up. They're going to want to download our app, or whatever it is. So once you identify what your strategy is, once you identify where you want to go, then you can create a set of tactics that will help you be able to execute that strategy.

Most people don't know what they want. They're like, you know what, a little bit of branding, a little bit of lead gen, a little bit of sales. I want it to be profitable, but I don't mind if it's not profitable. And they're not specific when they're creating the promotion strategy.

They want a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And if you do that, you're going to get a whole lot of nothing. So you really want to consider what your strategy is, how you're doing it, and you want to be very specific and move with intent. It's better to have one strategy, do it really, really, really well, figure out how to monetize it, figure out how to be able to move it forward, figure out how to understand what your return on investment is, and if you do that, you can move on to the next strategy. People get all caught up with all these tactics.

They're like, I just want to do SEO. I just want to—

why? Why do they want to do SEO?

Why?

Why do you want to do SEO? Why do you want to be number one? Because it's free?

It's not free.

It's never free. Nothing is free. Free is overrated. What you want to do is you want to figure out how much it costs for you to acquire a customer, and then you want to go out there and acquire as many as possible in a profitable way. That's what you want to do. You don't want free stuff. Free stuff is not going to get you anywhere. Luck is not going to get you anywhere. You're not just going to get lucky. You need to create a solid strategy, figure out a solid number. If you're creating an event, if you have an organization and you're creating an event, Don't just say, I want as many people as possible.

Say, I want 15 people to come to my event consistently every single month.

That's a success. Set a strategy based on something specific that you want, because if you want as much as possible, you're not going to get there. So once you know your strategy, you can sit down and write all your tactics. And you can go online and you can find tons and tons and tons of tactics that you can use for your specific business, whether it's product or service. You can research your competition. You can figure out what they're doing. Again, there's digital marketing, there is offline, there's online, there's networking.

Whatever you're comfortable with is super important.

Whatever you understand is also super important. If you're the type of person that loves cold calling, many people say, oh, cold calling doesn't work anymore. Yeah, sure, I get annoyed when someone cold calls me, but somebody cold called me today and I picked up and I gave them the time of the day.

It still works.

Maybe it has a smaller percentage of success, but I built my whole business on cold calling. I built my whole business on email. Oh, email just goes to spam. It doesn't work.

Don't dismiss tactics because they don't work for you.

They work for the masses. And they'll work for your customers if you do them right and if you're smart about it. Everything works.

All forms of marketing work. Some forms of marketing work better than others in specific industries. Did you know there are specific industries that only work with mail?

There's no other way to tackle those industries and they have to do with seniors, getting in front of seniors. Certain types of seniors only read their mail and they don't read their email. They don't read their text messages. They don't take phone calls. But they'll— when you send them a postcard, they'll read the postcard and they'll call you up and you'll get a return on investment. But people stopped sending postcards because it's not popular anymore. You just have to know how to do it. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And it's not what you do.

It's—

when it comes to marketing, if you want it to be effective, it's how you do it. It makes all the difference of whether or not you're going to be successful or you're going to be a miserable failure. A lot of people try a marketing tactic and then they give up because it didn't work.

Guess what?

Marketing is about testing. And I'm going to repeat this over and over and over. Marketing is about testing, whether you're testing your pricing strategy, whether you're testing what product or service you're going to sell, or whether you're testing your promotion strategy. You need to continue to test because what worked yesterday is not going to work today. And what works today is not going to work tomorrow. So you need to embrace that change and realize that you're going to have to keep adapting and changing in the world of business. And if you want same old, same old, if you say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, guess what? Soon you're going to be broke. And that's not going to make you very happy. So, So if you want to be happy and you want to be successful, be prepared to enter the world of marketing where things are constantly changing. So, once you know your strategy, let's move on to distribution. Do we have a couple questions about strategy?

No. Stay.

Send in your questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you're watching this and you have a question, remember, now is the time to send in your questions. The email address to email Is info@chy.info. Send in a question, whether it's a question about your product, whether it's a question about your price, or maybe you have a question about a promotional strategy that you were wondering about for your specific business. Just send in something.

And you know what? If you don't have a question, send an email to Rabbi Worthy.

Tell him how much you appreciate watching this video.

Rabbi Worthy's lonely and he wants to hear from you. He wants to know that you're there. He wants to engage with you. So send him a message. Did you just get a message? Look at that, it worked. It worked. I poked you and prodded you a little bit on the other side and I got a response out of you. That's marketing. That's what marketing's about. You want to get a response from the other side.

You want to provoke somebody to take an action.

Sometimes it's a little jab.

A like, a comment. Sometimes it's a right hook, a sale. And in this case, we're not looking for any sales. We just want you to win the competition. So pay attention, have the courage to ask a question, even if it's a stupid question.

Just send the question.

There's no such thing as a stupid question. Send the question.

Let's talk a little bit about distribution.

Distribution, distribution is super important. How are you going to get your product? How are you going to get placement?

How are you going to get your product into your customers' hands? What are you going to do? How is your product and service going to get to the customers?

What are your sales channels? Are you going to be online? Are you going to have a storefront? Are you going to be on trade shows? Are you going to do it through a catalog?

Are you going to use distributors? There are companies that just use distributors. Are you going to do delivery only?

It was a company that opened up a pizza shop in our local neighborhood and they said delivery only.

I love that. That was amazing. They didn't have to deal with a storefront. They didn't have to deal with anything. It was great. Think about what your strategy is.

Think about how you stand out from the competitors, from the other people that are out there. And your distribution channel could make or break your business.

Think about the percentage of sales Think about the percentage of sales that you have from each category.

Somebody emailed us, and thank you very much for the email. I really appreciate this, Yosef. Is the marketing part of the plan— in the marketing part of the plan, should we go beyond our initial marketing strategy or just stick to what we plan on trying out first? Like, if we feel strongly about starting with telemarketing, but are also curious about ads and other strategies. Is that part of the official plan? I would say that whatever you want to test out, whatever the market will bear, you should put into the plan. You don't have to execute everything that's on the plan at once. But put everything your competitors are doing into the plan.

Put everything that you could possibly do that makes sense to do into the plan.

Don't just write what you're going to do. Write what you can do because then you can go back to the plan and you can decide what you're going to select from, what you're actually going to start with. You could do phase 1, phase 2, phase 3 based on your results, right? You don't have to start everything at once. But if you start a telemarketing campaign and you complement that campaign with an ad campaign, the likelihood of you succeeding is much higher.

Because the people that you're calling, you can actually target them with Facebook ads.

How cool would it be if you contact somebody and you leave them a voicemail and the next time they're on their Facebook, they see a message that says, I'm just curious to know if you checked that voicemail. I know that it would be a little creepy, right? But it would be very effective because you can target people directly based on their email address. Based on what they like, based on their interests, where they work. You can retarget people that came to your website and it can cost you very, very little to do that. There are a lot of technologies that you can use that you might be scared of right now, but once you discover them, it'll take your business to the next level. So put those things into your marketing plan even if you're not going to execute on them right away. Maybe write phase 2, phase 3 there. But ultimately, it's important for you to see it there so at least you have action that you can take. Later when you're in executing mode, it's very hard to get back into planning mode. So if you're in planning mode right now, plan, plan, plan. And then just get into execution mode and start executing, baby.

So let's get back to distribution. You want to think about the percentage of sales from each of your channels.

I know some people that have a website, they have eBay, they have Amazon, and they have wholesale.

If you're going to go out there and sell a product, there are different ways that you can sell. And in your marketing strategy, you want to write the percentage of how much you're going to be selling in each area.

Think about that. That's super important.

Another question?

Thank you for sending in your questions, ladies and gentlemen. Don't forget. If you haven't sent in a question, there's still plenty of time. You could send it to info@chy-e.info.

Distribution. Let's talk about your sales force.

If you're going to have a sales force that's going to be promoting your product, you want to think about the structure. You want to think about account managers. You want to think about lead prospectors. You want to think about closers. There are different categories of salespeople that you're going to want to have.

In addition, are they going to be commission-based or are they going to be salary-based?

Salary-based. Salary-based.

Thank you.

Are you going to have any strategic partnerships with people that are going to refer business to you and you're going to give them a percentage of it? Are you going to have a cross-promotion strategy with your competitors or with your non-competitive but friendly business, right? If you're a mortgage company, you might want to work together with a real estate company. All this you want to dictate and put into your marketing plan. Somebody asked a question. Abraham asked, does TV and billboards make a difference to a small business or is it only good and effective for a big brand or business? TV and billboards can be very effective for a small business, but it's not what you do, it's how you do it. And if you have a limited budget that you want to invest, think about what your objective is. Think about what you want to get out of it.

What is the most effective way for you to use your money?

If you say, okay, I have $100,000 to spend on my marketing, is it more effective if I want to generate leads, if I want to sell watches, is it more effective for me to put an ad on TV, primetime TV with that $100,000?

Or is it better for me to spend that $100,000 over the course of 3 months using Google AdWords?

I would bank for Google AdWords every day. Every day, I would just go for Google AdWords and the TV. But, if you're targeting people that are really sleepy and you're targeting them with a general message and you want to get the word out there and you want to target them at night in random cities all over the United States, TV's a great option to get in front of them while they're kind of half asleep and you want to sell them something and they have their remote in their hand and their frozen dinner in the other hand and they're laying back and they're hypnotized by your message and you go in there. For $13, you get in front of them for 40 minutes. And you're like, hello, you must be really sleepy. You should buy our product, or whatever it is, right?

So, think about your strategy.

I remember I once wanted to advertise on the radio.

And during the day, it's $180 for like a 15-second spot on 1010 WINS.

I ended up getting on there for free because I became friends with Joe Connelly, and he loves interviewing me and putting me on there.

But when I wanted to advertise and try it out, I said, what's a more cost-effective way for me to get on the radio? And they said, well, if you take midnight on weekends, you can get it for $5 every 30-second spot.

I was like, wow, how many of those can I buy? And I decided I'm going to try it during prime time and I'm going to try it during the evening. And I'm going to do this, I'm going to alternate it, and I'm going to see which one works better.

First of all, I love hearing our company on the radio.

So, some people say, you know what? I just want my company on the billboard because when I drive to work, I want to see my company there and it gives me more motivation to be more successful.

And if that's good for you, then do it.

It's fine. But if you want to see ROI, it's all about testing. And see what your competitors are doing.

See what's going to work.

If it's about branding and awareness and you're in a small town and it's not that expensive, then do it. I love that the questions are coming in, by the way. Keep them coming in. info@chyee.info. I'm going to keep going and then I'm going to get to these other 2 questions. The answer to your question is, it won't necessarily work. See what your competitors are doing and do it the right way. It's how you do it. It's not what you do. Let's talk about a marketing budget now.

I want to make sure we get this in before we wrap up because—

You can overextend. I can overextend this. Okay. I really, really want you to understand that a marketing budget is so important. It's so important for you to understand that understanding your budget is going to help you be able to take your business to a whole new level. I recently asked somebody, I said, what's your marketing budget? They are a $5 million business. Okay, they do $5 million a year in annual sales. And they sell everything on Amazon.

And I said, what is your marketing budget? And you know what they said?

They said, we don't have a marketing budget. Our marketing is free. And I said, whoa, stop that.

Your marketing is what?

They said, yeah, my marketing is free. And I said, your marketing's not free. What do you pay Amazon? I don't know, 10, 15%, 25%, whatever it is.

Really? So you're telling me that you're getting a 4-to-1 ROI from—

you're paying 25% That means if you're making $5 million, $1.5 million or so, $1.25 million is going towards marketing, because that's what Amazon's doing with your money.

And you're not even owning the customer. The customer belongs to Amazon. So you're spending 25% on marketing.

You're telling me that you have no marketing budget because you're postpaying, because you're acquiring customers for them instead of for yourself. And you're saying you don't have a marketing budget. I recently went to a not-for-profit organization.

I said, what's your marketing budget to sell tickets?

Because they have an annual event that hundreds of people come to. And they said, we don't have a budget. We have zero budget. I love when people say, we have zero budget.

And I say, okay, so what are you doing to get out there?

And they're like, well, we hired a PR guy for $5,000 and we invested in advertising in this magazine and that magazine and that cost us $3,000 and $2,000. So, I said, hang on a second.

You spent $10,000 in marketing and you say you have zero budget? It takes a pretty—

a lot of chutzpah to tell me that because you do have a budget. You're trying to make $30,000 and you have $10,000 to spend and you're spending it like an idiot. You're not spending it the right way. And as a result, you're not filling up your room.

And as a result, you're losing money.

So, you really want to consider your budget. Think about your budget. So, how do you come up with a marketing budget? Well, there are many resources online that could help you come up with a marketing budget, but you have to understand that looking at your competitive landscape, learn what other people are doing in your industry, how much people are spending, and what they're getting out of it is super important. Doing the research. Think about how you can best reach your market. Sometimes you have to have a minimum budget in order for you to reach your market, and if you put too little money into it, it's just not going to work. You want to see how much capital you have to invest and what ROI you need to be able to keep scaling. Some people say, I want to grow.

And I ask them, can you afford to grow? Can you afford to grow? I want to be a million-dollar business. I said, could you afford to be a million-dollar business? Could you make that type of investment? Could you hire 20 people? Could you hire 10 people? Could you hire the people that you need to do in order to get there?

They know, no, I can't.

I first need to sell.

Chicken or the egg?

This, that, the other.

We start having a conversation. In the meantime, they have no money. They have no strategy. They're not sure what they're going to do, but they want a million-dollar business because they have big eyes. I get big eyes too when I go to a restaurant and I'm hungry, or when I go shopping for Shabbos and I'm hungry. I get big eyes too, and I buy a bunch of stuff that's not good for me that I'm never going to eat. That's what happens when you have big eyes in marketing. You want to know, make sure that you can grow. Make sure that it's reasonable. Don't just decide that you're going to grow to a $50 million business overnight because you just woke up and wanted to do that, right? You want to get to $250,000 in revenue, then to $500,000, then to $1 million, then to $2 million. That's even growing. That's even growing super, super fast as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States. You want to grow at 10%, at 20%, at 30%? Think about how fast you can grow, but that's all going to dictate based on your marketing budget. So there's a calculator you can go to. You go to marketingtoday.com/tools. /ROI_calculator.htm. If you Google it, you'll find it very quickly. You can measure your ROI by putting in exactly what your— how you're going to promote yourself and how many clicks you're going to get and what your percentage is going to be. Very, very powerful. So estimate your ROI for each individual marketing strategy. So what's a return on investment?

If you spend $1 in marketing and you make $2, you got a 2-to-1 ROI.

Got it?

If you spend $100,000 and you made $300,000 in sales, you made a 3-to-1 ROI. That doesn't mean that you made $300,000 in profit, right? If you want to make $1 million and you spend $250,000 to make the million, you spent 25% on marketing.

So depending on where you want to go, that's how much you're going to need to spend based on your competitive landscape. You can't just decide this. You can't just decide to grow a multimillion-dollar business and not spend any money on marketing.

Sometimes the money on marketing goes into customer service.

I know a guy who has a $10 million business and he spends $2 million a year on customer service, on extra customer service.

$2 million. He's spending 20% of his top-line sales on his customer service marketing strategy, and that's how he got to $10 million in revenue.

That's how he opened up 10 locations.

That's how he did it, because he understands that in his business, it's all about taking care of his customers in a very intimate way.

He got that, and that's how he did that, and that's his marketing.

He told me, this is my marketing.

This is how I spend my money in marketing.

For other people, they spend their money in marketing by educating their sales reps. By having the best trained engineers.

So understand what your budget needs to be in order for you to need to get to where you want to go. Everybody needs a budget. Everybody has a budget. And it's all based on number one, you have to go back to your business plan and look at what your revenue is, what your gross profit is, what your net profit is, what your lifetime value is.

You have to know all these numbers in order for you to determine your marketing budget.

There's a lot of marketing guys out there that don't understand business. And if you don't understand business and you just know how to do tactics, you're just technical, you just understand SEO, you just understand how to make a nice printed brochure and send it out, that's ultimately not going to help your business grow very much. That's going to get you some tactics and it's going to create activity. It's going to make you happy for the moment. But when you can't pay your bills, what are you going to do? You got to go back to your marketing budget. You got to have a budget.

And just because you set a budget doesn't mean you're limiting yourself.

Just because you say, my budget's $5,000, I want a 2-to-1 ratio, I need to have a 2-to-1 ratio, that means for every $5,000 I spend, I need to make $10,000 in revenue. I'm going to test out the first $5,000 for 3 months. My goal is to make X amount. If I make more, I'm going to increase my budget.

That makes sense.

That's a marketing plan right there. That's putting your budget in and understand what you want to get out of it.

But don't expect to spend 15 cents and make $15 million. That's not going to happen. You're not going to be able to buy leads for a penny a lead.

That's not a lead. That might be an email address or a half email address that doesn't even work. You got to be realistic with your expectations because if you're not, you're just going to say that you failed and that business doesn't work and that life sucks. And life does suck when you have mismanaged expectations. When you go into life with these expectations that everything's going to be perfect and nice and dandy and you're not going to fail.

Success is built on failure and marketing is all about failure. Test, test, test, test, test.

I can't say this enough.

Marketing is about testing. You're never going to know if something's going to work. Yes, you can predict the future, but guess what? People suck at predicting the future.

We try to do it all the time, but it doesn't work.

Just because something happened in the past Doesn't mean it's going to happen in the future.

As a matter of fact, it probably won't happen the same way.

That's just life.

And marketing is a beautiful thing if you're able to embrace change, if you're able to embrace uncertainty. And if you can do this, you'll actually be successful. It's not about how many times you succeed. You only need to succeed once. It's about how many times you're able to keep failing over and over and over and keep standing up every time you fall down because eventually you'll learn to walk. But if you just fall down, you're like, "Wah! I can't walk. Someone teach me. I wish I knew how to walk." No, that doesn't work that way. Okay? You know it doesn't work that way. So why do you think it works that way in business? Question came in. I opened a videography company.

Congratulations!

That's amazing. The videographer is throwing his hands up in the air, like, "Woot woot!" I believe my selling point is I do all the work myself. Yes, a lot of people believe that their selling point is that they don't trust anybody else to do the work. It's one of the challenges that small business owners have. We just don't trust anybody else. My clients are companies. So he says, from the initial call to filming through editing, I call this my selling point because I can maintain complete communication on top of every single way. My clients are companies who want videos to promote themselves. Great, great.

So how would you market my services that will appeal to big companies?

Companies that do everything, but they have teams of people that specialize in those areas. So you really want to think about your niche, where you're going to go, where you're going to start, and start small. And when you do that, suddenly your USP comes out. You're alive. You're the expert in that industry. They have to use you for video. You're the expert at creating testimonials. You're the expert at covering events. There are people that just do event videos. There are people that just do live streaming videos like this video here.

ZK.

What's the website? ZK?

No website.

No website.

You see, he doesn't have a website.

Word of mouth. Just look for ZK or email info@chyee.info if you want a live streaming event because Ravi Wordi will promote him.

So it's not about your USP for some people. Some people think that they have to hide behind their business.

They have to say, ooh, I want to look like a big company, so email me at info@ and sales@ and customer service@ and really they're a one-man band. And for other people, that's a USP. It's a USP that I'm a one-man band. Some people want that. Some people want to work with the owner and the owner only because they know that they're going to get that quality. Other people, they want to work with big companies. So you're catering to the people that care about— there are some airlines that want to work with the freelancer that does it all themselves. The way to get in front of them is to make a list of the companies you want to go after and go after them, and you're going to get them. Do spec work for them, which means what I would do is I would literally just make videos for companies and say, hey, do you like these videos? Especially if you have plenty of free time, go find the companies that you want to close, find out if they value video, and then just make a video for them and see what they think. And if they like it and they could afford it, make videos for them.

Let's talk about more.

Another question from Shoshana. Shoshana asks, how long do you give a tactic? It's a great question. Like ads in a magazine, how many weeks or months? It really depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you just want brand awareness, you have to realize that that tactic is just ongoing. You want to try to engage people to see if the brand awareness is working. Create a sweepstakes, make a coupon, tell people to call you, ask people if they see you in the magazine. It's an ongoing thing. Marketing is ongoing.

It's not—

all the tactics that you're using, if you're trying to achieve sales and you set a budget of $10,000 and you use that budget and you got zero sales, well, maybe it's time to change the tactic or change how you do the tactic, right? Think about that. Think about setting a budget and saying, this is how much I'm going to test this tactic out for. This is how long I'm going to give this tactic in order to be successful.

And speak to a marketing professional that will help guide you through the process of knowing if this tactic was successful. Speak to your competitors. They'll tell you. People think they're afraid of their competitors.

I can't trust my employees and I can't trust my competitors. It's not true. Your competitors want you to succeed because they have a different USP than you do. And they want more good people in the industry. If you're actually good, they want you to succeed and they'll give you the tactics.

Successful people want other people to be successful.

I love helping people start marketing companies. I love showing other people what I do and how to acquire customers. It's very, very difficult to start a company.

It's very difficult to take a company from zero to a few hundred thousand, and it's almost impossible to get it to a few million. But people figure it out and they do it, and you have to be able to relentlessly try and fail and keep trying over and over again.

But you have to have a plan. You have to have a budget.

You have to know your promotion strategy, your pricing strategy, your placement strategy, your pricing strategy, and know exactly what product you're going to offer.

And if it's not working, you've got to be willing to change it. So with that, I want to conclude this competition, this session. There are some questions that— If you continue to ask questions, you can email them to info@chy.info. I'm going to take a look at that. Rabbi Wordy will forward them to me. If you're watching this online, please feel free to share this online. Remember, be creative, be innovative, think out of the box.

You got this. You can do this. Keep it simple. Keep it simple because you can do this.

And hopefully you'll be able to answer the questions that are on, which is how do you promote your product or service? Hopefully this seminar taught you how to do that.

What will it cost?

Describe your sales force and the structure. Know what you're pricing on and what your pricing is based on. If you know those 3 things and you can answer those well with a couple of bullet points, you might win this competition and you're going to get that money. Take care, everybody. Etz l'choraba, and may the best person succeed. All right, everybody.

I hope you I hope you enjoyed. Yossi, awesome presentation. Thank you very much. And as Yossi said, you could keep on sending in your questions. I'll forward them to him if, as you formulate your plan, you have those questions. My friends, 2 more weeks left to the deadline. June 5th is submission deadline. I hope all of you have created your drafts and you're working actively on your working plans as we speak. And then as you go through each class, you're modifying them and correcting them.

One class left to go.

Next week, Monday night, 7:45, we have the market research class. That's the final class. All other classes, including tonight's class, are recorded and you can watch them at any time in the comfort of your home. We have all the links up on the website. Have a wonderful week and we're looking forward to next week.

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