YEAR VLOG CHALLENGE DAY 8 | Is your Marketing Strategy on track?

Good morning. It's a beautiful day. We are off to work. Lots of good things going today. I have some thoughts I'd like to kind of talk about on the morning commute. I think it'd be helpful. And really, it's a— this topic of discussion is a result of some conversations I've had over the last couple of weeks. Even the last couple of months with some business owners that I think is relevant to really anyone who wants to grow and build their business and kind of take their business to the next level. And, you know, the question, the topic of discussion comes from a question. The question is, how do I know that my marketing is going to work? How can I essentially take as much risk off of my plate possible when I'm launching a marketing campaign, when I'm spending money on my ads, because the last thing that I want is to have a marketing campaign quote-unquote not work or fail, and I'll be left with having spent money on the ads, having invested time and energy and resources to pull it off, and then it never actually came to fruition. So how do I do that? Well, I want to start by saying failure in marketing, failure in anything in my life is essentially not continuing or halting your progress entirely. So I look at failure on a marketing campaign differently, but there are a lot of ways you can hedge your risk and maximize your success. So first things first, consider investing your marketing the best thing that you could ever do because If it works and it always works in the long run, but if it works, happens to work out in the beginning, then that's the best thing that ever happened. Like, that's the best money you could have ever spent. And if you simply stick with something, learning a campaign, learning your different angles to approach an avatar, an exact customer prospect, to speak the language that needs to be spoken, that they communicate your value proposition in a clear way and you can generate leads and sales, there's nothing better that you can do for your for your life, to create more income and impact for yourself. There's no other investment that can top that, that can overproduce or outproduce in terms of return on your investment there. That's my professional opinion. But there are some ways that you can hedge that. So how can you hedge that? How can you make sure that when you go to market, you put your best foot forward? Well, you got to do a little bit of research. First things first, put together a marketing pro forma. A marketing pro forma is going to be just a little financial calculator that we're going to try to predict our outcome. We want to know reasonably what we can expect and lay out the pro forma with specific key performance indicators for every piece of your funnel. So for example, you have the first click cold traffic. Maybe you are, um, trying to calculate and, and project your cost per click on average. Of those clicks, if you're sending to an e-com funnel, for example, what percentage of those will actually initiate checkout, add to cart, and then ultimately purchase? That's gonna be your overall store conversion rate. So try to plan and figure out what your store conversion rate is historically. And then based on what your average order value is, which you should, if you're an e-commerce business, you should have a pretty good idea of what your AOV is gonna be, average order value. Then you can calculate what your return on ad spend would be relative to the cost per click. So that's a simple pro forma. It doesn't need to be anything that's crazy or, you know, too complicated or complex. It needs to be very simple, but just give you a snapshot of what you can reasonably expect when you go to launch your campaign. Now, if you're a lead gen business or you're trying to acquire leads or book calls or appointments, same thing. What's your average cost per click? —of those clicks, how many people are going to go and check out your landing page? Maybe it's a webinar, maybe it's a little video sales letter. How are you going to get an opt-in? How many of those opt-ins or how many of those people that hit your site or your landing page are going to then opt in for an application? If you're going like an application funnel or if you're doing a book appointment, how many actually book an appointment or schedule an appointment? And then of those, how many will actually go through and have a call? Is it 70%? Is it 90% of your schedules are gonna actually attend and show up for a call? And then of the calls, what's your historical close rate? You should have a pretty good idea of what that might be. And if you don't, try to put something together that you feel may be conservative, that you could pull off, uh, under basically any circumstance that you would feel confident in performing. So then based off of that, you'll be able to see for the amount of money that we invest to put into our marketing campaign, what is the amount of return that we're gonna see on the other side? And how is that they going to kind of drip through the entire funnel? So we have to have something to test to know, okay, we need to be kind of playing within these numbers for our marketing campaign to even work. Because if it doesn't play within these numbers, then we know that we actually can't even spend money online successfully. So before you spend a dime, you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect and where you need to be at for every part of your marketing campaign. And that is something that very few people actually do. Very few people are going to say, oh, hey, you know, I need my cost per click to be X because I know my conversion rate is gonna be Y. And because of that, I know that I'll probably be within this type of a return. Because guess what happens if you do that? When you do go to launch, guess what happens? If there's any part of that process or any part of your funnel your marketing campaign that is off, maybe it's a little bit lower than you'd like to see. Now you know that you can tweak and try to kind of focus on that piece of your process. And if you can then dial and refine that, you can then go and tackle another piece of your funnel or your campaign that needs to be improved on. And this is the iterative process that actually over time is going to yield you results, which is why going back to the very first thing that I said, stopping the campaign entirely, stopping the progress of testing and learning, in my opinion, is the only way to fail. Is the only way that you can fail. And it's because if you just do this process consistently and think through how to make tweaks and changes over time, you are going to get your campaign to become profitable. You're going to get your campaign to exactly where it needs to be. You're going to get great results. And those results are gonna be scalable because you will have really thought through every piece of your funnel and made iterative tweaks and changes that over time compound into a lot of learning and knowledge. Now, the other thing that you can do here, this is something that once again, very few people will do, but it gives you an insane competitive advantage, is to, before you launch, put together the pro forma, step number 1. Number 2 is you actually go and you do some research. You create a marketing campaign. Now, this research and the creation aspect of it boils down to a couple of things. Number one, understanding the competitive landscape. Number two, once we understand that competitive landscape, what we want to do is we want to then create a unique selling proposition based off of the unique opportunities and the competitive differences of our products to our competitors. Then we want to understand our avatar, who is the person or the composite individual that is our ideal customer that we want to try to target and speak to in all of our advertising. And then ultimately we want to think about how to create a powerful offer to speak to that individual. And of course, as you do this process of first understanding the competitive landscape, then what you do is you think through and mull over and get clear on your unique selling proposition. You then actually go and think about your avatar, know how you can create messaging that's attractive and sexy for them, how you're gonna communicate your value and your offer, and then you think about your offer creation, that's how you can then go to market with number one, a clear understanding of where your ads need to be at to perform well. But now you actually have a higher likelihood of your ads actually performing well because the content of the ad campaign is going to be very specific and well thought through as it relates to creating a customer. So how do we do this? How do we understand the competitive landscape and do these other, these points? Well, understanding the competitive landscape is something that just needs to become a part of your day-to-day life. But there is an exercise that you can do that I think will help a lot, and that is going to be to get on, you know, Semrush or to get on SpyFu. Either of those platforms work to kind of interchangeable. And these platforms are gonna give you a little bit more insight into what your website or your competitor's website looks like in terms of number of monthly visits. If they're spending money on Google pay-per-click campaigns, you can actually see the average, you know, amount of spend and the amount of traffic that they're getting to their site, as well as the keywords that they're currently bidding on. Not just that, you can see the keywords organically that they're ranking for and the average monthly of, you know, site users, site visitors that are coming as a result of those keywords. So you can see kind of from a search engine perspective, get a pretty good idea of what that campaign might look like, of how we could go to market, because you might find in there, hey, they're dominating these keywords. These keywords are basically like, check, they've got it. And it might take me a lot of work to try to I can, you know, siphon and take some of that traffic for my own campaign, but maybe there's some low-hanging fruit opportunities that they're maybe not focusing on because for whatever reason, they just don't have the time or attention, or maybe it's just not worth it for them to go after some of these smaller, lower keywords if it's a big competitor. In either situation, you'll have a really good idea of how to create a marketing campaign to go and take some of that traffic from Google. Now on the social side, let's talk about, You know, Meta, which is probably where the majority of your spending needs to go in the beginning, to be honest with you. But Meta has something called Facebook Ad Library, and this is a tool that's free for anyone that has a Facebook account. So you log into Facebook, you go into Google, and you actually type in the search bar Facebook Ad Library. You click on the link that says Facebook Ad Library, and then what you do is you can search any and all campaigns that are currently being ran. You can search in the page, so your competitor's page, and you can see all of the ads that they're currently running on any of Meta's network or platforms. You can see the placements, if it's Facebook, Instagram, you know, WhatsApp, other places, and you can actually see the whole ad. So you can see the ad copy, the call to action, you can actually see the ad creative itself, if it's static, carousel, or maybe it's a video. And then what you can also do is you can click on that link, the call to action link, and you can go to the landing page or the place where they're sending that traffic. So in terms of doing competitive research, you can literally see everything that your competitors are doing in real time. And you can kind of go and do what's called funnel hacking, meaning you can go through their funnel, buy their products, buy their resources, see how they're selling it. And if the ads have been running for a significant amount of time, well, what does that tell you? It means either A, they're really stupid at managing their ads, which if they're a competitor that you're looking up to, they probably— it's not the case. Or B, that ad is performing really well because the only reason why an ad would be running for a consistent or extended period of time is that it's working. So you can start to see here how from a social side, a Meta side, hey, if I take this type of a campaign, this type of copy, this type of an ad, this type of landing page, this type of sales process, and I customize it for my product, my business, well, now this is giving you a better chance of launching with a campaign that's going to give you I guess your, your, your best opportunity, your best chances of succeeding. Okay. Now here's some other things that you can do to understand the competitive landscape. You can get on sales calls. You can actually sign up for their newsletters, their email lists, get on their SMS lists, see how they're nurturing in their prospects over time. I have an entire Google— I use, I use Gmail and G Suite for my business emails. And I have an entire section of all of the newsletters of people that I'm on. And I filter all of those emails that come through. So I essentially have a swipe file or a compilation of email resources from all of these marketers and all these businesses and brands that I admire and look up to. And what I can do is I can go through that, I can sift through that compilation of information, and I can take the, the best performing emails that worked on me, that had, you know, got my attention, that were captivating for me, and then I can customize it and tweak it for my own business. So you can see here how if you just change your approach and change the way that you think and this becomes something that you're doing on a consistent, regular basis, how over time you're gonna get so much more advanced and so much better at thinking through your business, thinking through how you can become a better marketer. Now, that's com— understand the competitive landscape. Let's talk about your unique selling proposition. Well, this is simple. A unique selling proposition is just a marketing statement that clearly explains and differentiates you and your business, your product from your competitors. So how are you going to essentially be different and sell your product differently than your competitors? So this is really easy to do once you understand the competitive landscape, because let's say you go through, you see how all of your competitors are selling their products and services. Well, now you know how you can be different. And how you can be better and how you can tweak and change and maybe give yourself a competitive advantage as it relates to your unique selling proposition. And this is just a couple of pro tips here. Think through your unique selling proposition as it relates to your business as a whole. Every single person in your business, your organization needs to know what that is and they need to be aware of it. They need to be able to rattle off what your USP is and how you're selling your products differently at any given point in time. Because if somebody doesn't know that, How are they going to be effective in any type of conversation, marketing conversation, as it relates to your business? The reality is, is that they just won't. So anyways, I got a lot of thoughts about this. Hopefully this was valuable this morning. Just rolled up to the office. Maybe we'll continue this conversation on the drive home. We got a lot to do today. Let's get it. Oh man, today was a whirlwind. It's one of those days where literally it's like, where did the time go? You look up from your computer and it's like already 6:30, 7 o'clock. Time flies. But I wanted to— didn't have a ton of time to shoot any other content throughout the day today. Apologize for that. Did want to continue the conversation though from this morning's drive, this morning's commute, where we're talking about— so we talked this morning about understanding the competitive landscape. Also, we talked about creating a unique selling proposition. What is next? Well, it's to understand and identify your customer avatar. So this of course becomes really easy to do once you understand what your competitors are doing in the marketplace, how they're communicating to their avatars, AKA their ideal customers. And then you also know how you're gonna be fundamentally different. So you're gonna be basically taking the complete embodiment of your ideal customer, right? What that person is, what they like, what they consume, their fears, their objections, their wants, their desires, ultimately, the breaking down the exact reason why someone would buy from you, why somebody would transact with your business, do business with you. You want to get crystal clear on who that person is. And one of the ways that you can do that is doing something that we call host an interview with your avatar. It's a really simple exercise, thought exercise. And the whole goal is to put yourself in the shoes of this person, this person who is your ideal customer. You want to ask yourself a series of questions, questions like, you know, what are the fears that I have as it relates to, you know, buying this service or transacting in this service? What are the pains that I'm feeling currently? You know, what am I willing to pay for? What are my objections? What would hold me back from purchasing from me? Another really good question is, is what is the tone that I would respond to ultimately as a person? And as you're asking yourself these questions, You know, it's a good thing to kind of go with your first instinct as you're thinking about your prospect, but it's also probably a good idea to think a little bit deeper and to write down what your first instinct would be, your first reaction, because oftentimes that can be gold, but also to think through about the deeper meanings. Get deep. There's often layers to these questions. There's layers to the responses. And if you can kind of peel back those layers, Ultimately, what happens is you get to a really clear understanding of exactly who the person is that you're trying to attract, you're trying to market to. And why is that super important? Well, because if you sell to everyone, if you service everyone, then you service and you sell to no one at the same time. Specialization sells. Specialization is really important as it relates to creating and scaling a marketing campaign. So, you know, we understand the competitive landscape. We've decided on a unique selling proposition. We now have identified and understand our customer avatar. Now we got to put together an offer, something that will attract our ideal customer, an offer that's going to be teed up to them on a silver platter that hopefully is a no-brainer that they will then take advantage of. And there's a million ways to do this. The biggest feedback and the biggest advice I'm going to give you is that ultimately you're not going to know until you test. So it's okay if you don't get it right on your first, second, third, fourth, fifth time. That's not the point. The point is that you have to test, you have to spend money, and oftentimes you have to fail. So that you know how you can make your offer better and ultimately how you can serve your clients better. So that's once again, going back to what I was saying this morning about failure. The only real failure is giving up entirely. That's the only real failure. And when a campaign quote unquote fails, it didn't fail. We just are taking the next step to make tweaks and changes to make it that much more successful, that much more powerful, and that much more effective. Okay, so I want you to often to remember that as you move through this. But there are a couple of things that you can do to give yourself once again, the best opportunity at success. And these are kind of high-level recommendations that I might have for you or for any business or brand. But these are really, really powerful. Here, here they are. So thing number 1, you want to make sure that you're focusing on the pain. We've talked about the pain. We've talked about the pain as it relates to your avatar. But ultimately, I want you to think about as relates to your product or service, your product or service needs to be a pain relief, a pain reliever. If it's not focusing on the pain, then you're actually missing out on making your offer as high converting as possible. And without getting going into too much detail, I mean, study after study has been, been, been done on human purchase behavior, the human psychology that goes into making buying decisions, etc. And what The evidence suggests is that— let's not even suggest, what the evidence shows clearly is that we as human beings are much more apt to make a decision based on overcoming a pain that we might feel or to prevent us from feeling and experiencing pain than we are to focus on the ideal outcome like joy, happiness, et cetera. We would rather, and it's more urgent to focus on the pain than anything else. So, that's a really clear takeaway. One of those recommendation I'm going to give you here as I'm just pulling in to wrap it up for the night is focus on the customer. Nobody actually cares about you, and that's not to be offensive or any means. I mean, you're great, your mom loves you, your grandma loves you, etc., but your prospect doesn't care about you at all. So don't make your marketing about you, how great you are, how amazing you are as person, how great your product or service is. Make it about the customer. Once again, if you're focusing on the pain that they're feeling, you're tuned keenly into who they are and the challenges that they're facing, it becomes really easy to be able to do that. So anyways, some thoughts, food for thought today. Um, obviously not as much content as we normally would have, but hopefully the content was valuable. And of course, like I say, I'm sticking to it, we're going to be hitting you with another vlog tomorrow, so stay tuned. And obviously like and subscribe if you guys find this stuff valuable on the channel. I'd love a follow. I'd love you to spread the word as well as let me know kind of what else you want me to talk about. And I'd love to provide and add value in any way that I can. With that being said, I'll see you guys tomorrow.