What's up Entre Nation, Jeff Lerner here to talk about the best digital marketing
skills for 2020 and beyond. It's no secret the world of digital marketing is
changing at a rapid pace, so whether you're just getting started or you're a
seasoned veteran with decades of experience, this video will help you
dominate 2020 and into the future. Go ahead and like this video if you would
and subscribe to the channel. Let's get into it.
Digital marketing is constantly evolving. I mean, there is always new
technology to learn. People's attention spans keep getting shorter and there's
much more competition and the way that customers engage with content online is
completely different for each social media platform. This is why it's
incredibly important to stay on top of your content by consuming content just
like this, by watching other people's content and following the trends so you
can always be in the know and getting the best possible results. What I want
to share with you today are some recession proof marketing skills as well
as some tips for the current marketing trends here in 2020 the number one and
probably the best skill to have is being able to connect with your audience. So
the first thing to learn is that there are two elements to the word digital
marketing, digital and marketing, and it's essential that you learn both
aspects. If you're going to succeed in this digital world in 2020 and beyond,
you will need to learn
not just how to use the various digital tools out there, but also in general how
to market skills like positioning, differentiation and branding, how to
build a solid and likable brand. It is crucial to understand the basics of
marketing as you can have the best product idea to launch, but if nobody
understands what it is or nobody even sees it and how are they going to buy
it. And marketing is all about relate-ability human connection and
human response. It's about knowing the different ways that humans relate and
that you can influence them to buy your product or service. Or if you do it
wrong, you can discourage them. Learning how to connect with your audience is the
most crucial skill to learn, and this is never going to change, and once you've
mastered this, you can use it through any campaign at any time, digital or
otherwise. For example, people make purchases based on an emotional response
rather than logical or rational. There can be two similar products. Let's say
for example, running shoes, and one of them, let's say talks only about its
features. You know, it's got the laces, it's got the cushiony sole, it's got the
lightweight space-age materials, and the other ad, the other marketing piece of
marketing material shows someone completing their first marathon,
smiling, celebrating, and looking down at the trustee shoes that got them
across finish line. Naturally, we're going to resonate with the ad with the
person
wearing the shoes because we can relate to that experience or, or we aspire to
that experience, right? Clever marketing relates directly to human emotional
response. The next digital marketing skill is to always keep the big picture
in mind. So when creating marketing material or marketing funnels, what we
call funnels, things that move people from one stage to the next stage, to the
next stage, closer to the point of buying. You have to think of the bigger
picture. It's not enough just to lead people to the point of sale. Even though
that is obviously important. I mean captivating your customer's attention
now and in the future and building knowledge, likability, and trust with
you and your business. That way clients will be able to help grow your business
in the future. You'll get feedback, you'll get positive ratings, you'll even
get referrals and repeat business. So how do you do this? It's by having good
quality marketing funnels that have appropriate content at each stage that
matches each of the buying phases for cold traffic, warm traffic, and hot
traffic. That means how the traffic heats up are the people that come into
your business, they heat up as they get to know your business better. Someone in
the cold phase doesn't know you or your product at all. So what you deliver in
the cold phase is all about gaining trust, building connection. It's like
saying hello to a stranger that you just met. Now,
someone who's warm is probably already shopping around and maybe interested in
buying, but are they going to buy from you? Are they going to choose to buy
from someone else? So what can you offer to the warm traffic that really connects
with that person and gets them to want to say yes to your product? Think again,
thinking about friends, somebody can be friends with you, they be friends with
somebody else. But if both parties ask them to lunch, which one are they going
to choose? It's about, you know, creating an even deeper connection. Then
you have the hot phase where your client just can't wait to join the program or
buy your product or use your service. And if they love it, then they're going
to want more. And this is all about delivering value, following through,
making them feel supported, making them feel assured that they made the right
decision. So the point of this is to think beyond just how to capture the
sale and think about the different stages of what they call the buyer
journey and how to meet them where they are. That's all kind of abstracts. Let
me give you a more specific example. You've just been perhaps introduced to
me for the first time. Let's say this is the first time you're seeing one of my
videos. Maybe you're checking me out, seeing if I can help you. Maybe you're
part of entre nation already and you're watching
this channel because you actually already know that you like what I do and
you just want more of it. So I'm trying to deliver content that simultaneously
because I don't know which one you are in this piece of content. I actually
have to meet two different needs. I have to simultaneously inform you about who I
am and what I do, but also hopefully entertain you and warm you so that if
you already know who I am and what I do, you're getting fulfilled in your desire
for more of it. You see how it's about positioning and really thinking in terms
of who it is that's watching or experiencing your product, not just what
you want and what you have to set. Speaking of all that while I'm here, I
might as well mention that you can check out entre nation on Facebook if you're
looking for a place to feel supported and become educated about becoming a
business owner or an entrepreneur. And number three on my list of the best
digital marketing skills is to be able to develop a digital Omni presence being
omnipresent across all the digital platforms. And this is where things are
constantly changing in the digital economy. You remember several years
back, maybe you do when Google used to just dominate SEO, which is search
engine optimization and the advertising game online was all about just running
Google ads, Google ads and search ads. And then along came Facebook and
then, well I guess there was Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat,
Pinterest, all these social platforms created a whole lot of competition for
Google and for website advertising, you know, banners on websites and they
didn't just create competition. They actually changed the way people thought
about advertising and the way people engage with advertising and now Google's
formula, which used to just be based on data. Now it's based on engagement or I
should say it used to be based on what they considered website relevance. Now
it's based on social presence and engagement. It's a completely different
paradigm, so as things come along, they don't just change your focus. They
changed the way things work. They changed the concepts that govern your
focus online. It's a very complex ecosystem and very, very cool, but you
have to decide that you're going to be attuned to it and understand it.
Otherwise, you're basically just guessing and you're always behind.
Always be thinking of ways to diversify on the internet. Don't just put ever put
all your eggs in one basket. I know a lot of people in my industry who just
put a ton of eggs in the Facebook basket or they put a ton of eggs in the YouTube
basket and they're basically always one problem away from losing their whole
business. You need to take an Omni platform approach to your content,
create content. For one platform just like I'm doing right now for a YouTube
video, but then
chop it up, reformat it, extract images from it, change the shape of the video.
For example, if I'm going to take a video off of YouTube and post it on a
Facebook, I'm going to actually chop the sides off so that it displays better in
the feed because the Facebook feed is a vertical format. YouTube has more of a
horizontal layout where a lot of people turn their phone sideways and then you
can even take videos and you can turn them into blog posts. You can take blog
posts into videos. You can pull the audio chalk off of videos and turn them
into podcasts. I do that too. The point is to take content and share it in as
many places as possible. You can even put your audio files into SoundCloud.
You have Spotify, Apple podcast, Google podcast. You can even put links into
Pinterest. Take an image, put a link to your podcast, put a link to your YouTube
video. Even Amazon is starting to allow you to publish content. Your content
sharing becomes like this big giant machine. And while it may seem like
there's a lot of platforms to learn, think about what people used to have to
do to make a living. People used to have to dig ditches. You don't have to dig
ditches anymore. Just learn how to click buttons and click a mouse and post
stuff. It's really not that hard. And in the long run you
get so much leverage. You've got 300 million users on Snapchat, 300 million
users on Pinterest. You've got two and a half billion users on Facebook. You got
over 2 billion users on YouTube, you got however it was a 600 million on Twitter,
a billion on Instagram. You have all this reach. It's insane how much you can
grow your audience by simply reusing simple pieces of content. And then the
next tip on digital marketing is actually what we're seeing right here.
Video video is all about conversation and connection and generating traffic,
getting people to click stuff. Once you become proficient at these skills, it's
not that hard to get people to click stuff. Think about all that. And I'm not
advocating for this, but think about the clickbait stuff out there with the
images and the captions, the headlines, things that grab people's attention.
It's not that hard to get people to click stuff, but then are they
converting? Are you building a connection with your audience? Do they
trust you? Do they like you? Do they feel a relationship happening? It takes
the average consumer around seven different experiences to decide if they
want to do business with you or or with a company so you've got an opportunity.
If you're good on video and you develop your skills of video and that doesn't
mean you have to necessarily be a talking head on video just means
developing video skills to create that connection that goes so much further
than just getting the click. Ultimately anybody can start a conversation.
Anybody can run up to you on the street, go, Hey and you go, what? Well
technically they started a conversation but it's where it goes from there that
determines whether or not they actually want anything to do with you. Right and
conversation equates online to conversion in the way that you do that
is with video. Think about all the time that you spend on the internet. What are
you doing? Most of the time you're watching videos. Video is how people
connect to you. Video is how people relate to you, and video is ultimately
how people explain and entice you to be interested in whatever they have to
offer. So when it comes to video, consider who is your audience and does
the format of your video actually relate to them? If you're trying to attract,
kids can require a very different approach than adults. If you're trying
to attract men, it's different than women. If you're trying to attract the
older, let's say baby boomers is different even than you know,
millennials are younger adults. Tailor your videos based on your audience. And
one universal formula for successful video is to connect with your audience
through lives. This means a live streaming in real time so that people
feel like you're speaking directly to them. People love lives. They're not
always polished, they're not produced and people feel great connection. The
nice thing about
the internet is that authenticity very often outperforms high production value
and what's great about that is authenticity doesn't cost you anything
other than maybe a little bit of risk and vulnerability production. You've got
to have staff, got a team, you've got to have facilities, you've got to have
technical skills, authenticity. It's got to be a human being who's not too scared
to let him or herself be seen. Look at all the social media platforms that
offer live streaming or live broadcasting and know that those
platforms tend to push lives more than prerecorded videos because lives get
better engagement. Even as I mentioned, Amazon is now letting their, their
sellers do live streams, live broadcast about their actual products that they
sell on the platform and you can even simulcast them so that when you're
creating one live, it can be shared simultaneously on Facebook, LinkedIn,
Instagram, Twitch, YouTube. There's actually systems you can buy on, on
Amazon and on software sites that allow you to simultaneously streamed all those
platforms. It is huge. You got to check it out. A lot of people don't get
started on video because of honestly the number one enemy of all entrepreneurial
success, which is perfectionism. People don't want to get started because they
want things to be perfect. Watch this this was not a perfect a perfect video.
Look, I just stumbled like I've messed up my words. It doesn't have to be
perfect. The most important thing,
the only, in fact, the only thing you really have to get right on video here,
your, your visuals can be grainy and they can be messed up, but you gotta get
yourself a quality microphone. You got to have decent audio. A good friend of
mine says, 51% of video is audio. As long as the sound is good, a people
won't turn it off. People that are actually way less tolerant of that audio
than they are bad video plus, then you can reshare your videos and turn them in
to podcasts. You can have them transcribed into blogs. You can do a lot
of that syndication and repurposing that. I talked about utilizing video. As
long as you have good audio and the barrier to entry for video has dropped
dramatically. If you go back on my YouTube channel right here, you will see
well over a hundred videos that I made with this bad boy right here. Right now
I'm actually shooting on a decent camera, but I think I was almost 200
videos in before I got me a decent camera. You can start making videos
immediately. There are people that run ad agencies with business clients, with
you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in business clients
creating video ads for them and all they're using is their cell phones and
this is a deep entrepreneurial truth. I want you to hear me. It's not just the
truth about video, it's a truth about everything that
I do. Everything that you can do if you're trying to build a business that
can power your new awesome life and maybe get you out of your job, imperfect
action trumps all forms of inaction every day of the week. Get comfortable
taking action however, in perfectly so that you get momentum, you get cadence,
you get in the habit of always taking action and eventually you can refine and
perfect your action over time. But that paralysis around the desire for
perfection is the number one thing that I see cripple aspiring entrepreneurs. So
don't be afraid and and recognize this when it comes to making videos. A lot of
times you will wrap your insecurities in perfectionism. You will find a million
reasons to delay because the lighting isn't perfect. My hair isn't perfect, my
makeup business perfect. I don't like the sound of my voice. I look chubby.
Whatever you come up with, just realize you're, you're hiding your insecurity
behind perfectionism and use it as an opportunity to grow personally and
become more confident by not giving yourself the excuse that things need to
be perfect. Here's, I'll give you a big, a big secret, and I'll say this from my
own personal experience. I'll say this about me. I won't say this about you. I
don't know you. Maybe you're perfect, but if I'm, the one on camera is never
going to be perfect because this guy is so far from perfect. I don't even bother
aspiring to
it anymore. But where I would be screwed is if I stopped doing it. So just get
started. Your audience will actually appreciate the relate-ability of you
just being you. And number five, the last and really mission critical skill
that you have to learn around digital marketing is automation. Learning
automation is essential for any digital marketer to know now and it's probably
only going to get more so in the future. Automation is all about working smarter,
not harder. It's basically the offloading or the delegation of
repetitive tasks. It comes down to using good tools, using good software, and if
you can afford it, having a good team, but ultimately tools and software will
get you a long way to taking care of the things that you do over and over on a
daily basis. You can just get so much more done if you eliminate and automate
the repetitive tasks. Somebody becomes a lead in your business. They can be going
through your sales funnel. They can be watching your videos, reading your
emails on your products, talking to your customer support that's overseas. Using
an automated ticket system, going through a knowledge base where all the
answers are prepopulated. There's so many different ways that you can be
working your business while you're either, you know, the dream is, Oh, I'm
at the beach, I'm playing golf. That's cool, but what I like to do is actually
be taking my time to improve my business
rather than having to work in my business. They call it working on your
business, not always being in your business. Automation is amazing and
automated tools are so much faster and you talk about perfection, you want
perfection, get automation because they are, automation is way more consistent
than any human being could ever be. It's like having full time sales support and
tech working for you. 24 seven only. They're smarter, they're more
consistent. They never call in sick. They always get it right. As long as
things are set up properly and you are free, you're free to work on your
business and grow your business. Okay, so in summary, the best digital
marketing skills to learn are how to connect with your audience, how to lead
them through a quality sales process, how to frame the bigger picture and know
where they are in the buyer's journey, how to use automation, how to use video
to captivate your audience, and then how to recycle and repurpose content for
podcasts, blogs, and multiple platforms. This Omni platform presence that we
talked about, you have learned in this video that digital skills are always
changing, but what must remain constant is that you connect and relate to your
clients, so don't get bogged down in skills for skill sake. Always remember,
it's about one to one human communication, okay? That is the gold
and the power of digital marketing is it's about amplifying and facilitating
mass one-to-one communication.
Think about that. Mass one-to-one communication. I can be having one to
one communication with a million people a day. Dots the power of digital
marketing. Okay? If you learn something new today, I will ask you to hit that
like button for me. It helps me get more of these videos done and bring more
content to more people, and if you gained value from my channel, I'd love
it if you would subscribe and do let me know in a comment below if anything in
this video landed with you, if you've tried any of this stuff, if you have any
questions, anything that's worked well for you, and I just appreciate your
time, appreciate your support here on this channel and I'll look forward to
seeing you on the next video. Take care.