Speaker 1: In this episode, I'm going to be showing you the five steps you want to go through that will immediately improve the effectiveness and odds of success for any of your future marketing campaigns. Whether you're wanting to launch a new Instagram marketing strategy or Facebook ads campaign or email marketing strategy or YouTube content or anything like that, it's all the same and it's all going to rely on these five common principles and fundamentals that are behind some of the most successful and profitable marketing campaigns you see today. That's why I'm going to be pulling back the curtains, revealing everything inside that I use inside my business for all of my clients and all of my students to help them generate those multi-million dollar campaigns so you can do the same. Alright, let's get to it. Hey there, Adam Erhart here, marketing strategist and welcome to The Marketing Show. Alright, I've said it before but it's worth saying again, if you fail to plan, you're planning to fail. That's the right way. Essentially, when it comes to running those really strategic, really profitable marketing campaigns, you do need to break them down to their core elements, to the fundamentals, to the principles and to the strategies behind them that makes things work because when it comes to marketing, way too much emphasis is put on all of the tactics, all the tools and all these shiny objects. You've got one camp screaming about how Instagram marketing is the single greatest marketing tool available to you today. You've got another camp saying that the only way to succeed online is by running Facebook ads which are still really good just like Instagram is but it's never the Instagram marketing, it's never the Facebook ad, it's never the YouTube content or the YouTube video or the email or anything like that. It's always the strategy behind it by ensuring that you've got proper alignment with what you're trying to achieve and the methods that you're going about trying to achieve it and that's what we're going to be talking about here today and I'm going to be giving you the five steps that I go through every time I'm planning on launching a new marketing campaign so that you can use these inside your business and inside your marketing to hopefully get some really great results as well. Alright so the very first place to start and one if you've watched my content for any length of time you know I've got to start here but that's because this is the single pillar that all of your marketing is going to be built on and that is of course your market. This is the who. These are the people, the customers, the clients, the prospects, the leads, the whoever it is that you're creating marketing content for. The reason that everything has to start and essentially you live and die by your market is because if you get this part wrong nothing else is going to matter. After all if you don't clearly identify and articulate your ideal target market, that perfect person, that perfect prospect that you're trying to attract well then you're not going to be able to come up with the right messages, you're going to be advertising and marketing on completely the wrong channels, you're going to be saying the wrong things, you probably saying them in places that none of them are even active or present on so everything hinges on really dialing this in first and foremost. It's that important. One of the greatest ways to succeed when it comes to marketing, when it comes to planning and really designing that ideal campaign is to try to understand and try to know your ideal target market even better than they know themselves. One of my good friends likes to say that the one that succeeds with their market isn't the one who understands them best but the one who makes them best feel understood. And this is totally true but the way you make them feel understood is by understanding them because you have to know what makes them tick. You've got to know all the stuff that's going on upstairs, you've got to know their fears and their frustrations and their dreams and their goals and everything they're trying to achieve so that you can position your marketing campaign or your business or your offer as the solution to their problems and to help guide them to the promised land. So how do you get to know your target market better? Well there's no easy way to do this, there's no real fun way to do this. In fact, this is probably the most boring and tedious and laborsome part of the entire marketing process. It really comes down to doing some proper marketing research. Trying to read what your customers read, trying to watch what they watch, trying to listen to what they listen to, really trying to get into their heads and understand what they're going through, how they think, the words they use, the terminology, the jargon, all of that stuff. A little bit of a bonus insider tip here as well, a secret that will really help you to succeed and to understand them a little better, is to try to pick up some of the books that are being marketed to them as well for even more depth and even more insight. Here's what I mean. Let's say for example that you're trying to do marketing for financial advisors. Well of course you could go talk to financial advisors, you could interview them, you could survey them, you could find out what kind of content they read, what magazines they subscribe to, what websites they visit, all of that stuff. You could also go to Amazon and you could look up financial advisor marketing books and you could buy all of them, which I strongly suggest you do because it's going to be really cost effective to just go buy all of the books that are being marketed and sold to financial advisors so you can read them. You can understand what the authors are trying to communicate, what the authors believe is valuable information and hopefully the authors have done some decent research and they're using the right terminology and the right words and all of this content you're going to be able to sort of integrate into your own messaging when you're talking to your market. Alright so the next part is the offer. Now that you've got that market really dialed in, you know who they are, you know what their problems are and all of that, well now it's time to come up with a compelling and an intriguing and ideally an irresistible offer to put in front of them because nothing's going to happen with your marketing campaign until you make that offer, until you go out there and you put yourself in front of them and you essentially invite them to do business with you or to take that next step. Essentially the offer is the what, it's what you're selling and you want to make sure that you're selling something that people actually want. I totally get it, that sounds so obvious, so painfully painfully obvious, you'd be amazed at how many times I do an audit or I'm looking over a client's marketing materials and I'm reading through everything and when I get to the offer it's just not that good. Not only is it not irresistible, it's really resistible. Often it's bland, boring, vanilla, it just gets completely lost. This is why the offer is such an incredibly important part of your overall marketing campaign and of your overall marketing strategy and you really want to spend some time here. Now the beauty is, is that the offer is going to be in relation or in regards or correlated with your target market so the way you come up with that really compelling, really irresistible offer is first by understanding your ideal target market. Again, what are their pains and their problems and their fears and their frustrations and what are their goals and their dreams and their desires and their aspirations and then your offer is that bridge that helps them cross the gap away from all the pain and towards all the good stuff that they really want. Another thing when it comes to offers is you always want to be trying to sell a painkiller rather than a vitamin. A painkiller is something that resolves an immediate need, an immediate pain that they're experiencing right now today whereas a vitamin is going to help them ward off some future problem or future issue or essentially something that they're not really experiencing right now today which means they're far less likely to act. This is why something I always say when I'm taking a look at offers is you want to sell them what they want and then give them what they need later. There's no point here in going out there and trying to change the world with your great product and your great service by telling them about all the future benefits they could experience when they just don't want it right now. Sure they might need it but they don't want it so they're not gonna buy it. Much better off to just sell them what they want, listen to what they want, give them that and then try to wrap in a little bit of the good stuff that's going to help them because that's of course what's really going to make the impact and the change in their lives. The other thing it's important to talk about when it comes to offers is the difference between a hard offer and a soft offer or a direct offer and a transitional offer. You see there's going to be a small percentage of your market who's ready to act right now. They've got their credit card in hand, they're looking for a solution and they're ready to buy but this typically makes up only around three percent of your potential target market. This is where you want to come out with that hard offer, with that direct offer and say all right here's the solution to your pain, here's how much it costs, here's how you buy it. This works great but what about the other 97% of the market who's not quite ready to buy right now? They might be ready to buy at some point in the future, maybe the near future, maybe even the medium or far future. Well this is where we come up with the soft offer or transitional offer and this is a really low barrier, really easy to do type of offer that's going to be something that requires very little commitment on their part but still gets them to take that first step, that micro commitment. This could be something like a free download, a free pdf or guide or cheat sheet, free video series, anything like that. You've all seen them before, you've downloaded them before, you know exactly what I mean. This helps to bridge the gap and it allows you to make that hard offer later when they're ready. Alright, the third element that you need when you're planning out an effective marketing campaign is a marketing funnel or a sales funnel. Essentially, when it comes to creating really profitable, really effective marketing campaigns, that initial sale, whether it's a hard offer or a soft offer, well it's just one piece of the puzzle and the way that massively profitable campaigns are built are through a series of different steps that you can guide and walk someone through which gives you a higher likelihood of increasing customer lifetime value or CLV. CLV, customer lifetime value, is probably one of the single most important metrics you could ever know when it comes to marketing because this tells you the lifetime value of a customer to your business. The higher the value of the customer, the more that you're able to spend to acquire that customer and the more revenue, potentially profit, that your business can generate. This is why if you've got a business that just makes a one-off sale for say 100 bucks, it's going to be really hard to scale because you're going to have to repeat this again and again and again with all kinds of different clients and customers. On the other hand, if you sell something for 100 bucks right away, then you offer an upsell or a downsell or a cross-sell, any of the other sells, or you offer a subscription service or a continuity or a membership or a back-end high-ticket offer or any of these other kind of marketing terminology jargony words that essentially just mean ways to provide more value in exchange for different levels of service, well the greater the likelihood that you're going to increase that customer lifetime value which gives you a way bigger marketing budget to play with and allows you to deliver way more value, way more services to your customer. The point here is to understand and to appreciate that that initial sale is really just one piece of the puzzle and you've got to make sure that you understand how this marketing campaign, how this offer, how this product or service or whatever it is you're selling, how it fits into the overall picture and the overall customer journey so that you can continue to offer greater and greater levels of service and generate greater and greater levels of revenue. Alright, time to talk about step number four which is placement and one of the few areas that I see people still making a ton, a ton of mistakes that's costing them time and energy and money and just wasting all of their marketing so let's make sure that you avoid that by doing the right things in the right place. So how do you do that? Well it all circles back again to that market, to your ideal customer avatar, to that person that you're trying to market to. You need to really understand who they are and what they're all about so that you can understand where they're spending their time both online and offline so you can go there and ignore everything else. Where they are is prime real estate, it's the gold mine of where your customer's attention is. Everywhere else is the marketing wasteland, places that they're not active, they're not present so neither should you be. This sounds so simple in theory yet when we get excited with all the new platforms and the new strategies and the new videos that come out saying we need to be over here or we need to use this social media network or we need to use this strategy, well it's easy to understand why people get caught up in the excitement and in the euphoria of finding new untapped markets and new untapped channels when the reality is if your people aren't there you really shouldn't be going there. You want to go where your people are, focus there, double down there and your odds of success increase exponentially. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about traditional marketing or digital marketing or any other kind of marketing that ever comes up, the principle is still the same. You need attention, you need eyeballs, you need your customers to understand who you are, what you do and how you can help them and the only way that's going to work is if you locate where they are and then put your stuff there. Alright, let's move on to the next step in designing a really profitable marketing campaign which on the surface is probably going to sound like the most boring part but I assure you this is the most exciting part because this is where the real money is made and I'm talking about of course metrics and analytics. The reason that this is such an incredibly important part when it comes to designing effective marketing is because you really need to know what's working and what's not and the only way to really do that from a quantitative point of view is actually take a look at all your numbers and really figure out what's working and what's not. Beauty is, is it takes emotions right off the table. This is not an emotional decision, rather it's purely logical. You can just lay out all the stuff in front of you and see alright this is providing a two-to-one return on investment, this three-to-one return on investment and this channel is losing us everything. Probably unsurprisingly then you want to do more of that, even more of that and none of that and yet nobody does this. Nobody spends the time to really break down all the numbers, figure out what metrics are important and which ones they can ignore and figure out which channels are delivering the results and which ones are just wasting their time, money and energy. This is why you don't need to have a PhD in marketing analytics or metrics, not even sure that exists, but regardless you don't need to have this super super in-depth knowledge of marketing to understand what actually works. You just need a basic foundation, a really sort of rudimentary level and understanding of what metrics and what key performance indicators or KPIs you want to pay attention to so that you can sort of put them against each other in a cage match where only the strongest marketing channel wins. For example if you're comparing how much it's going to cost you to reach different segments of the market you want to look at the metric CPM or cost per mil which essentially says how much it's going to cost you to reach a thousand people. If you want to measure obviously the cost per click you'll look at CPC and you'll be able to see which sites and which metrics and which networks and all of that stuff is going to provide better leads there. Same thing goes with CPL or cost per lead or CPA cost per acquisition all these other terms that are somewhat confusing but once you've looked at them enough times it starts to become really clear and really evident which channels are making you money and which ones are losing you money which comes down to the most important metric of all ROI or return on investment which is really what this all is all about. You see marketing's goal is to get you more customers, to increase revenue, to make you money so if it's not doing that it's not doing a very good job and you need to hold it accountable. Alright I covered a lot of concepts in this video which is why the next thing you're going to want to do in the next piece of the puzzle is to check out the video I have linked up right here on introduction to marketing so make sure to check that out now and I'll see you in the next episode. PR, market research, social media, content marketing, search engine marketing or search engine optimization, pricing and pricing psychology.