Transcript:
In this episode I’m gonna be breaking down the 4 essential pieces you must know if you want to be successful marketing your company. Let’s get to it! Hey there my name is Adam Erhart, marketing strategist and welcome to the marketing show where we help you grow your business and generate more leads, customers and sales by making way better marketing. So, if you’re interested in learning the latest and greatest marketing strategies, tools, tips, tricks and tactics, well, you may want to consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell so you never miss a future episode. The biggest problem with marketing today is that it’s overwhelming. This is what I hear all the time from clients and students before we start working together. It’s basically way too many things to do, too many different strategies and tactics and tools to try and it seems like every single different marketing expert or “guru” out there is telling you to do one thing or another and very often they’re in complete disagreement with each other which leaves you either stretched or confused or stuck spinning in circles not knowing which way to go next. Fortunately, at the end of the day it’s actually a whole lot more simple than you may have been sold and that’s why in this video I’m gonna be breaking down the four essential pillars, the fundamental concepts those proven foundational marketing strategies and things you really need to know if you want to make sure that your business has the greatest likelihood of success with any of your future marketing endeavors or campaigns and the way that I’m going to be presenting these things to you today is in order of importance with everything getting built on the previous one, meaning, we’ve really got to make sure that we’ve dial in and really nail foundational concept #1 before we move on to 2 & 3 & 4. Problem with so much marketing today is that everybody seems to start with step #4, which don’t worry, we are gonna get there but you’ll see very quickly when we start to build these things out that if we don’t get steps 1 2 & 3 right, well then step 4 has pretty much zero chance of success which is why so many people are so frustrated with their marketing results. So, to get us started with essential #1 we have to talk about the market. Now, this is one of the most foundational and single most important elements of pretty much all of your marketing success, really dialing in and identifying and clarifying your ideal target market, that exact type of person that loves you, loves what you do, is happy to pay for the value you provide and that you want to sell to. If you fail to clearly articulate who this ideal target market is, who you’re trying to reach, well then it doesn’t matter anything else that we do because it’s always going to miss the mark. There’s this old saying that “If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one” well, what this really means is that when you’re trying to market to everyone or if everyone is your target market, well, your marketing is going to come off as broad and bland and generic and really be completely ignoreable or resistible and that’s not what we want, we want you to have irresistible marketing and the way to do that is first by identifying who it is that you’re trying to be irresistible to. The way we do this is through having that ideal customer avatar which is essentially, a fictional or composite representation that really embodies all of the best characteristics of your best customers. Typically, we build this out in three different stages: One of which being demographic details, like what’s their age and gender and income occupation or job title, what are their geographic details, where do they live, what city, state, province or country and then there’s psychographic details, what are their attitudes, interests, beliefs, affiliations and organizations, basically, all the head stuff. Also, if you’ve been following me for any length of time then you’ve likely heard me talk about really dialing in your ideal customer avatars, miracles and miseries. Their miracles being all of their wants and their dreams and their goals and their aspirations. And their miseries, being all of their pains and their problems and their fears and their nightmares and all of their frustrations. It’s really important to really understand where your customer is coming from, really getting into their shoes and being empathetic to their situation and all the pains that they’re going through because this is really gonna help us out tremendously in the next step but getting out of myself, we’ll get there in just a second. Another thing that really helps to keep in mind when you’re considering a market that you’re trying to market yourself to is a framework called the PvP framework, which essentially stands for personal fulfillment, value to market and profitability. So, let me unpack those for you now. Basically, the first “P”, personal fulfillment, is how much do you enjoy working with this segment of the market. After all, one of the worst things to do in business is work with people that you don’t really like because you’re not gonna like it, they’re not really gonna like you and they’re gonna sense that you don’t like them, so it’s lose-lose. Next up is “V” or value to market. Again, if we’re talking about really dialing in who we’re trying to serve, we want to serve people who are likely to experience the greatest benefits from your products and from your service and from your business, rather than someone who’s probably gonna get no reaction at all. A nice easy example here is, let’s say you’re selling one of the most beautiful pieces of steak ever, this is the most delicious, most succulent, most sought-after cuts of meat that’s ever graced the planet and you’ve got the honor of selling it. Well, in regards to “V” or value to marketplace, you can either sell it to a foodie or a food connoisseur or someone who absolutely loves food and loves steak and is all about steak or you could try to sell it to vegetarian or a vegan. Basically, it doesn’t matter how good the steak is, you’re not gonna provide any value to the vegan or the vegetarian who doesn’t want the steak in the first place. This is why it’s really important to clearly articulate what it is that your ideal target market really wants, what service that you’re providing and making sure that there’s really good alignment there, so you’re able to deliver your products and your services to the segment of the market who’s gonna get the absolute most value from it. The final “P” is profitability and this one’s kind of obvious but let’s say it anyways and it’s basically how much profit you are going to make from different segments of the market. Probably no surprise that different segments of your customers are going to spend and basically have different levels of disposable or discretionary or even mandatory income if you’re selling, say a B2B product, well, different segments of your market are going to have different levels of money and are also going to be comfortable spending different amounts with you. It only makes sense then to clearly identify those most profitable segments of the market so you can serve them better. And the final thing that I want you to keep in mind when it comes to your market is the RFM framework, very similar to the PvP framework in sort of enabling you to grade or scale or evaluate different customer segments that you may want to do business with. The “R” stands for recency, this is all about how recently a potential customer or prospect has either bought from you or from a competitor or in your industry in general. Basically, the more recently they bought, well, the more likely they are to buy again. The “F” stands for frequency and this is all about how frequently people buy. Probably not surprising here that if you’ve got a segment of the market that frequently buy stuff, well, the odds of marketing to them successfully goes exponentially. After all, makes a lot more sense to sell the people that buy a lot of stuff and then the “M” stands for monetary and this is basically the same as the profitability part but basically how much are they spending. Again, it makes a whole lot more sense to market to people who already spend a lot of money on the type of thing that you’re selling. Alright, so now that we’ve got market completely wrapped up it’s time to move on to the second essential which is: The message. And this is essentially how you’re going to structure a position your business in regards to communicating your value and your offer to your target market. This is where we’re really gonna draw on those miracles and miseries that I talked about earlier. Essentially, really dialing in all of their end state or benefits or goals or dreams or areas that they’re trying to get to and really hammering on all the pains and frustrations and miseries that they’re trying to get away from. Basically, it’s your job as a business to structure a message and an offer that helps them move away from pain and towards pleasure. Your business is the bridge that helps them cross the gap from pain to pleasure. But to do that, you obviously have to have a really clear and really detailed understanding of what exactly their pain is, after all, way too many businesses make way too many offers trying to solve pains that don’t actually exist, then they wonder why their marketing isn’t working and this is why it all comes back to that target market, really understanding all about them all about their pains, all about their frustrations and have you’re uniquely positioned to solve it for them. After all, customers don’t buy when they understand what you do, they buy when they feel understood by you. Alright, enough high level stuff on messaging, let’s get some tactical nitty-gritty stuff. Essentially, when it comes to your messaging, you’re gonna want to have two different types of offers that you put in front of your target market: a hard offer and a soft offer, so let’s unpack those now. A hard offer is something that you make when someone’s ready to buy and it’s essentially the the buy now or the book now or the apply now or whatever it is that is really the action that you want your customers to ultimately take. A soft offer on the other hand or transitional offer, is a bit of a step back, this could be like watch this video or download this guide or listen to this audio or maybe partake in this free training. Essentially, it’s something that requires way less commitment and is a little bit of a softer more transitional step to get them where you ultimately want them to go. One of the worst expressions in marketing is that “it doesn’t hurt to ask” because yes, it does hurt to ask. You can’t just go out to someone who’s never heard of you before and shove an offer in their face and expect him to buy. Gonna be disappointed. It’s kind of like proposing marriage on a first date, odds of success are pretty low. Rather, what you want to do is be cognizant of where the customer is in their buying journey, are they just doing research, are they already familiar with you, are they familiar with competitors, have they bought this type of thing before, are they in a follow-up meeting, whatever the case and then making sure that you’re putting the right message in front of them at the right time. Alright, so now you’ve got your market dialed in and you’ve got your message, it’s time to move on to the third essential which is: Media and my biggest cry for you here is to avoid what I call the marketing wasteland. Essentially, the media channels and platforms where none of your customers are active or present on but for some reason, someone, somewhere along the lines has told you that you’ve got to be there. One of the worst pieces of marketing advice I have ever heard and sadly took back in the day, is that you need to do everything and be everywhere. Again, this is terrible advice and it’s gonna quickly lead to overwhelm and burn out. Not to mention, it’s not effective, because your customers, your clients, your prospects, well, they’re not everywhere, they’re not doing everything, so neither should you. Rather, you should be very selective and very strategic with your time and with your energy and with your money, really clearly identifying exactly where your ideal target market is present and active and then going there ignoring everything else and again, this leads us back to that target market, because by better understanding our ideal target market and who we’re trying to reach and who are trying to basically sell our stuff to, well, it’s gonna be a whole lot easier to figure out where they’re spending their time online and it’s gonna quickly eliminate a whole lot of channels and a whole lot of different networks, that you may have been told might be useful but may not be useful to your business. The other thing you do need to consider when it comes to media is what kind of media, what kind of content you’re gonna be producing, whether it’s video or audio or text-based content, a lot of this has to do with your target market and what kind of content they like to consume but another part of it which is really relevant is what kind of content you like to consume. After all, if you hate doing video the video, video is probably not a good choice and if you hate the sound of your voice, you’re gonna probably want to stay away from audio and if the thought of sitting down and writing makes you have flashbacks of years and brings back all sorts of terrible memories, then you may not want to do a text-based platform, certainly not yourself. Now, if I did have to recommend one over the other, you do have to push you pretty strongly towards video, because just gives you so many different options when it comes to syndicating your content. After all, you’ve got the video content, you can also strip away the audio, now you’ve got podcast content, you can have all that audio transcribed and now you’ve got texts and blog posts and all sorts of different social media posts and essentially, this gives you all kinds of different content for all kinds of different platforms from just one single piece of content. Alright, and that leads us nicely to the fourth essential which is what I call the Matrix. This is all the fun and flashy and shiny object stuff that everybody is cramming down your throat telling you that you have to do. The reality is you don’t have to do any of this but if you’d like to and if it’s in alignment with your market and your message and your media choice, well, then by all means: go ahead. Alright, so the first part is easily my favorite and that’s online ads, whether we’re talking about Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Google Ads, basically, online advertising is one of the single most effective and cost-effective ways to get your message directly in front of your ideal target market. Also, thanks to just how robust and how built out these platforms now are, it’s easier than it’s ever been before to really dial in a high converting campaign. Didn’t say it’s easy but it’s easier than it’s ever been before. The success however, of your campaign is gonna lie heavily on just how much work you’ve done, really dialing in that market, really clarifying your message and really making sure that you’ve got your media right and basically putting it on the right platform whether it’s Facebook ads, Instagram ads, YouTube ads or using Google. You see, when it comes to running online ads or basically any kind of direct response marketing, there is a hierarchy where basically 40% of the success of your ad is going to come down to your list or to your targeting. This is your market. Another 40% is going to come down to the offer that you’re making and just how irresistible it really is, this would be your messaging. The last 20% has to do with a copy and the creative, basically, the video or the text or the images that you’re using in the ad. As you can see, we really do need alignment across all of these different things in order to have success. The next part of the matrix that I absolutely love is the funnel. Basically, a funnel if you’ve never heard of one before, is nothing other than something that guides the customer through the journey and basically takes them from having no idea who you are, all the way through to becoming a loyal and loving, paying customer. For lack of a better term it’s essentially, building know, like and trust factor in the smoothest and cleanest way possible. A funnel helps to guide people from where they are to where you want them to go and essentially, takes place especially in the context of the matrix and what we’re talking about here, well, the way this might work would: be they would go from an ad to a landing page, which is really just a simple page on your website that’s gonna offer them some kind of value in exchange for their name and email address, once they do that will take them to a Thank You page, another page on your website where we can either deliver on the promise or offer them the next step and then after that, we can follow up with an email nurturing sequence or some re-targeting ads, which probably not surprisingly, are the next steps in the matrix. First up, when it comes to re-targeting and nurturing is email and there’s really no better platform than email, yes even still today. All you really need to do is think about your content consumption habits and how you choose to consume information, especially from industries and authorities that you respect and that you have to do business with. Think about your dentist or your doctor or your lawyer or your accountant, also pretty good that if they need to reach out to you and contact you they’re sending you an email. Email is the perfect way to reach your customers and to continue to increase touch points and be relevant and provide more and more value. Plus, you’re gonna own your email list, which means that once a customer has given you their contact details and giving you their email, well you’ve got a database of that that you can reach out to again and again. This is very different than say building up a giant Facebook page or Instagram following, where Facebook or Instagram are free to pretty much cut it off whenever they like. Makes it a bit sketchy if this is your primary marketing material. The next step of the matrix is the re-targeting ads. Now, technically re-targeting ads are part of online ads but because they kind of come after someone has already gone through that know like and trust factor, they’ve already given you their contact details or maybe even made a purchase, well, we’re gonna put them at the end here. Now a re-targeting ad is really nothing more than an ad that re-targets or re-mark it to somebody who has visited your website or taken some kind of action. So, these ads are structured very different than a cold lead generating ad to someone who has no idea who you are. Basically, with a re-targeting ad there’s no need to reintroduce yourself or reintroduce your service because people would probably already have a pretty rough idea of what you do. Therefore, the goal of the re-targeting ad is really just to provide more value to increase touch points, to show up again and again and to try to essentially nurture them even more and get them to take the next step in the relationship. Fortunately, thanks to the online ad platforms like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Google, while setting up re-targeting ads has never been easier, all you really need to do is get a pixel which is a little bit of code from these different platforms, install it on your website and drop to the races. The beauty of retargeting ads as well is that it’s incredibly cost effective because you’re not going to be marketing to everybody, you’re just going to be marketing to a very small segment of the population who already know, like and hopefully trust you. Alright, the next thing you’re gonna want to do is check out the video I have linked up right here on 20 digital marketing strategies for small business. So, make sure to check that out now. Thanks so much for watching and I’ll catch you next time on The Marketing Show.
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