if you know that marketing is important if you know that you
want to grow your business you want to get more clients get more customers
make a bigger impact increase your revenue make more profit any of the above but you have no idea
where to start or worse you know where to start but you just can't seem to get yourself to take
that first step to take that first action and to get things rolling well then you're going to
want to stick with me because i've got some tips and some kind of some strategies and some ideas
that i want to share with you and some lessons that i've learned over the last 10 years and
having worked with over 800 clients many of whom have the exact same hesitancies and
fears and doubts about when it comes to putting themselves out there and creating marketing and
publishing something online for everybody to see so with all that said let's dive right into it
all right so it's no secret that marketing is important after all it's marketing's job to
bring in new clients new customers new attention to grow your business to make sure that you have
a business in the first place so we know that we need to be doing marketing however when it comes
to doing marketing there's a nearly endless supply of different strategies and tactics
and tools and tips and tricks and hacks and all of these things that you can do we've got social
media which comes with facebook and instagram and twitter and pinterest and youtube and everything
else you've got email marketing which has to do with autoresponders and daily broadcast emails and
should you have this type of software that type of software should use templates or plane formatting
you have video marketing which comes with an entirely separate form of discussion on quality
and video and lights and editing and all that and we haven't even talked about all the other
kinds of content marketing like blogs and books and podcasts and articles and things like that
or funnels or strategy and the list goes on and on so it's very easy to see just how many people get
completely overwhelmed and completely frustrated when they sit down and they look at their business
they're like all right i want to grow it i want to get more customers i want to get more clients
but i don't know where to start it makes total sense the way that marketing is being marketed
for lack of a better term by marketers is horrible it's terrible in fact the goal of most marketers
when they're trying to explain marketing is almost to try to overly complicate it and to confuse it
because the reality is is that confusion and complication well that makes money that's how
people sell things because the more complicated and more confusing you can make something seem
well the more value it's going to be by kind of pulling back the curtains and revealing the
process and the secrets and the insider secrets that nobody really knows and all of that and then
charging a premium to tell you now i'm not going to sit here and pretend that marketing isn't
complicated and that it's not challenging and that it's not it's not going to take some time
and some energy and probably some money as well to do it right but it is learnable it is
a skill that you can acquire and it's one that you absolutely should acquire because in my humble but
accurate opinion marketing is the single most important element to your business success for
all of the reasons that i talked about before with marketing being responsible for driving
new clients and new attention and new leads and new sales for your business so you've got to make
sure that you've got that right now of course you can outsource this to someone that you trust
to an agency or a consultant or something like that but it's still going to make a whole lot of
sense for you to understand why they're doing what they're doing and so you can guide them in the
right direction so you can oversee and make sure that you're not wasting time or money and energy
on things that really aren't going to matter and that aren't going to drive your business forward
and that aren't going to be relevant and relatable to your market so with that said if we're taking
a look at marketing we appreciate that we've got to be doing some marketing well where do we even
start and that's why i want to walk you through a bit of a framework here for you to sit down and
think about all right what is the first step that i can do to sort of get my marketing off
the ground what are the things that i need to be thinking about when i'm structuring out a campaign
or a plan or anything like that and then also what kind of content what kind of messages should
i create so i'm going to cover all of those but first we've got to understand that when it comes
to marketing your business there's going to be a certain amount of work you need to do behind
the scenes before you start seeing immediate returns and that's the problem is that marketing
has a bit of a lag to it so the work that you do today well it may not pay off tomorrow or next
week or next month but if you do it properly it'll pay off the month after that and definitely the
month after that and it'll only compound and grow from there but you've got to be aware that there
is going to be this period of time where you're going to be putting in energy and effort and if
you're not seeing something immediately back this is where most people quit they give up completely
they pack it in they say marketing doesn't work rather than thinking well maybe i wasn't doing
the marketing right or maybe the marketing was doing right but it just hadn't had an opportunity
to accumulate to sort of hit that kind of that tipping point actually on that note one sec i'll
be right back i gotta grab a book and i'm gonna i'm gonna read you something from it all right
i'm back so the book is uh the 80 20 principle this is one of my absolute favorite books on
business productivity life in general essentially most of what i do in my marketing is governed by
the strategies talked about in this book if you're not familiar with the 80 20 principle
or predos principle it's essentially the fact that 20 of your efforts are going to result in
80 of your return so your job as a business owner or an entrepreneur or a marketer is to find and
identify those twenty percent of things that are going to give you the eighty percent of results
and then do them sadly what most people do is they spend eighty percent of their time on things that
are only getting them 20 of their results then they get frustrated give up and move on but that's
another subject for another day so what i want to read from you here is on page 15. if you happen to
have this exact model but regardless it's called this subsection the tipping point and it says
related to the idea of feedback loops is the concept of the tipping point up to a certain
point a new force whether it is a new product a disease a new rock group or a new social habit
such as jogging or rollerblading do people still rollerblade finds it difficult to make headway
a great deal of effort generates little by way of results at this point many pioneers
give up but if the new force persists and can cross a certain invisible line a small amount
of additional effort can reap huge returns thus this invisible line is the tipping point and that
that's the premise with your marketing with your content with your videos or your podcasts or
whatever it is that you're doing you need to put in a certain amount of work and a certain amount
of energy and investment to hit that tipping point in order for things to start to compound
kind of on their own and naturally there's another way to look at this which is essentially marketing
as a kind of i guess you could say a volume equation of minimum effective dose to that ideal
perfect sweet spot and then a point of diminishing returns in fact let me go draw you a quick picture
i'll be right back all right and i'm back now bear with me this is hardly uh hardly my best
artwork not that my best artwork is uh is very good anyway but the point is let me show you this
little graph right here and what you're looking at is a bit of a bell curve and you'll see there
on the side with kind of the orange thing that med and in the middle a bit of a star and then the dim
because that's about as much space as i could get with that marker so what i want to draw your
attention to essentially is the side where things start to go up is the med the minimum effective
dose and you'll notice that there's absolutely nothing it's kind of like a stone cutter that hits
a rock a thousand times nothing happens then that thousand and first time the stone splits apart
into a million different pieces that's kind of where you're at with minimum effective dose this
is where you're just barely putting any effort or energy into your marketing into your strategy
and nothing's happening and then finally you you sort of increase it just enough where you start
to get some results this is where you want to double down 80 20 style on what's working do a
little bit more until you hit that sweet spot now here's the thing this sweet spot is where
you're putting in that dollar you're getting two dollars out you're putting in a dollar getting
ten dollars out putting in a dollar you're getting a hundred dollars out whatever it is and this is
the goal you want to just keep ramping up until you hit this point where you're putting in money
and you're getting money back out now of course inevitably there's going to be a point on the
other end of that curve where it starts to tailor off dramatically this is where you hit diminishing
returns this is where you're spending a dollar and it starts to only give you back a dollar
fifty and then a dollar and then 99 cents then 50 cents or whatever it is but here's the kicker most
businesses basically all businesses that are sub a billion dollars rarely if ever hit this point
of diminishing returns the reality is is that most businesses 99 out there should be doing more and
can be doing more which means that whatever you're doing for your marketing right now there's plenty
of room for you to invest in that 20 of things that are going to get you 80 of results and really
really capitalize and take over new market share there is a ton of opportunity for you just sitting
there this being completely ignored and neglected and basically taken over by your competitors so
it's only way way later on that you have to start worrying about that diminishing return
thing so with that said knowing you're going to need to put in this energy and put in this effort
let's talk about the model for how you're going to do this how you're going to put it all together
and what to talk about and how to structure your marketing but before we do actually one quick note
here's the thing the reason that most people don't create the marketing that they should be doing
is fear for lack of a better term in fact that's the reason that i'm recording this video like this
kind of low budget off the cuff got the camera and the mic set up but that's about it there's
not going to be anything too fancy going on here simply to show you that you don't need to raise
the bar to these crazy hollywood level styles of production what's important is the message the way
you communicate the fact that you're talking to an audience that you're trying to provide value that
you're sharing your insights and your stories and your expertise and your knowledge and all of that
that's what matters not fancy graphics fancy images fancy videos fancy whatever it is that's
really not important if the content's lacking so with that said now let's talk about how to
do this so the way that i like to think about it being in marketing is with alliteration so we're
going to go through a number of different m's the first m we want to talk about is model this
is your business model what is it that you sell how much do you sell it for how do you deliver it
all of the things that go into your business model now business models on their own are
completely other discussion but we can kind of come to some rough consensus rough agreements here
that well if you want to make a certain amount of money you're going to need to sell a certain
amount of things at a certain price one of the common misconceptions is that it's easier to sell
a ten dollar product than to sell a hundred dollar product or a thousand dollar product and that's
that's rarely the case the reality is is that it's just as much work to sell any of the products
the difference is it's going to typically be more work to deliver the higher quality product because
the expectation is going to be higher there but important to know that if you're trying to
build a business of a certain size or achieve some kind of financial goal it's important to
have your business model structured right so that you're charging the right amount serving the right
kind of people doing things in the right order that's in alignment with you and your market so
with that said let's talk about your market these are the people that you want to serve these are
their kind of basic demographic details like age gender income occupation things like that
geographic details figuring out where they live what city state province country etc
psychographic details like what are their values their attitudes their beliefs and all of that
it's incredibly important to really try to drill down who it is that you're trying to serve who is
your ideal target market because the better that you understand them the better you're going to
be able to make them feel understood and that's when clients and customers buy so of course to
do this well we need to take it a step further and take a look at the message which is our next
m and the message is all about their pains and their problems and their fears and their
frustrations and all of the things they're trying to get away from and then all of their dreams and
their goals and their wants and their desires and all of their aspirations and things they want to
move towards now here's the thing i call those miracles and miseries miracles being obviously
all of the good things they want miseries being all the bad things they want to get away from
your job your business is to serve as the bridge that helps them cross the gap away
from all the miseries and things they want to get away from towards all the miracles
and things they want to move towards when you do that and when you're able to communicate
how your business is uniquely positioned to solve their problems and help them achieve their goals
that's when you're really heading in the right direction of course with that message you need to
put it somewhere and that moves us to media here's the big thing with media most people feel they
need to do all of the things they need to be all of the places they need to do
everything be everywhere all of that stuff and nothing could be further from the truth
the reality is you need to be where your ideal clients where your ideal customers are present
and active online or offline that's it just because someone says that a new social media
platform is incredibly important or incredibly cool or this thing is the future whatever it is
if your people aren't there it's kind of really no point in you being there unless of course you want
to try and uh be one of those early pioneers but even then even as someone who is always pushing
the the boundaries and the limits of technology and of marketing and of psychology and where
this field is going i will test but i'll test very cautiously and i'll hold back and i'll never test
with my clients i'll always test with myself and figure out if something's going to work because
otherwise you end up start to go in these random directions that just may not be right for you and
your business and the reality is is most of the new fun sexy shiny object type of stuff
it's not the best strategy for most people most people are served by the good old boring standbys
talking about the basics really nailing down your business model nailing down your message
and their pains and your ability to sort of strike a nerve with your message in your target market
and then communicating that on probably one of the big four social media networks either facebook
either instagram either youtube or linkedin that's really it and then of course driving
those people to probably the least sexy but most effective marketing media of all time which is
email marketing there's really no excuse for any business anywhere out there to not be prioritizing
email marketing today so if you're not using that yet let this be kind of a wake-up call a
bit of a friendly reminder that you really got to get on that you've got to be emailing more you've
got to be emailing better trying to refine your strategies making sure you're doing things in
the right way all right so now that we've got the media done next we can move on to the machine the
machine is that lead generating source this is sort of uh i guess another way to look at
it would be like a marketing funnel or a customer journey but it's a way of guiding someone who has
no idea who you are and working through an entire process to where they become a lifelong loyal
brand ambassador someone that loves you loves what you do wants to tell everyone about just how great
you are now of course my recommendation here is through the use of some kind of a lead
magnet some piece of valuable content that you can offer to your market in exchange
for their email address unsurprisingly we want to get their email address so we can follow up with
them provide more value stay in touch continue to nurture and engage and offer them things to buy
that'll help solve their problems and the best way to do that of course is with email and that
leads me to my last stem which is all about moment now moment is one of the most overlooked aspects
in all of marketing strategy moment understands that not every single person is ready to buy right
now and it accommodates for this and it bakes it in to the overall marketing strategy meaning those
that want to buy right now we're able to serve them but those who aren't ready to buy right now
are able to still provide value we're able to still engage with them start a conversation
and then position you and your business as the best solution to their problems when the time
comes that they're finally ready finally able to make that purchase decision so with all that said
there's a whole lot of m's appreciate that but very important that we line these things up and we
make sure to check off all of these boxes now even with that said i know that we covered quite a lot
of stuff in this video so the thing that i really want you to take away is that it's very important
that you just get going that you just get rolling we're going to find quality from quantity we're
going to be able to start and create and produce and from there we're going to be able to extract
and analyze and look at what works well and what works what doesn't work well we can do more of
what works less of what doesn't again that kind of kind of brings us back to our 80 20 principle
i sound like i'm an affiliate for them which i'm not but it's a great book so if you haven't
read it highly recommend checking it out and of course with all that said the next thing you're
going to want to do to help you make this even more effective and even better is check out the
video that i've got linked up right here so check that one out now and i'll see in the next episode