Speaker 1: Hey there my friend, Adam here. Today I want to share with you seven marketing secrets or marketing hacks or marketing tricks. Essentially things that nobody's really talking about. Not even me that often. And it's because they're a little more complicated and a little more nuanced than the quick hits that we often get when it comes to social media. Things like post it this time or adapt your content for this algorithm tweak or use this kind of font or this kind of color or all of those things. What I'd rather do is get to the core of why your marketing may not be working as well as you want. And even if it is working okay, understanding the seven things I'm going to be walking you through here today will allow you to immediately upgrade all of it. Get better results, more clicks, more traffic, more sales from everything you do. And not only that, probably the most important thing that I could ever give you is to show you how to think about your marketing. How to process different marketing strategies and basically the crazy stuff that goes on inside my head when I'm evaluating different marketing tactics and tools and resources and all of that. So my goal here today is as ambitious as it is, is to try to pack seven secrets and seven hacks into a very short period of time so that you're going to be able to watch this and you're going to be able to extract these little golden nuggets and apply them to your business, to your client's business, to whatever it is that you're doing. And it starts right now. So the very first thing that we need to talk about is kind of what ends up happening when someone says, hey, my marketing's just not working. Like it's just nothing's happening. No one's clicking. No one's watching my stuff. The algorithm isn't pushing it or promoting it to people. Nothing's working. It's something that I hear all the time. I see it in the comments below. Very common. 90% of the time it's because they're just not doing enough marketing. It's just a question of volume. It's a question of quantity, not so much quality. So let me explain. I don't know who's to blame for this one. Maybe it's the get rich quick things. Maybe it's the, uh, all of the courses and the programs that promise that you can become a millionaire in 30 days with no work or whatever it is. But for some reason, when people think about marketing, they think that all they need to do is make a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad or post one video on YouTube and they'll just blow up and become the next viral sensation and everything will just work out miraculously well. And I seriously, I wish this was the case. That'd be amazing, but it's not right. It's like marketing is just a business function. I'm going to make this sound horribly boring, but it's like accounting or finance or legal aspects of a business or HR or sales or whatever it is. They're all just different business functions, which means that they require time. They require energy. They require money and investment in them in order to get them to work. Now, what ends up happening is most people will make one post on social media. It won't get the traction and then they'll swear off that platform. So they'll hop over here, try out Twitter now and make a couple tweets. Nobody engages. So they say, well, Twitter doesn't work and they'll make a YouTube video and then that won't take off. And they get frustrated and they get angry because it's just not working when the reality is they probably just haven't done enough. And that's why the first concept, the first sort of hack or secret is identifying the marketing sweet spot. So in the most rudimentary art drawing class ever, let me show you exactly what I mean by marketing sweet spot. And you can see where you fall and where the vast majority of businesses fall. And if you find yourself in this position, you know that the answer is to keep on pushing through. It's not to dial back. It's not to pivot. It's not to do anything like that. It's just to keep going forward. So let me show you what that looks like. So I want you to imagine for a second, a bell curve, kind of like the traditional bell curve. Of course, that'll be the, there we go. We'll get some ink flowing here. So this is our bell curve, our ugly, ugly bell curve. And it's going to have three, three different sections. Now over here on the left, this is what you're going to call the minimum effective dose. So the minimum effective dose, essentially what ends up happening here is until you're in this range, nothing you do matters. It's about sort of making that one post on social media that someone sees one time and then that's it. And then you wonder why it's not working. It's about spending $5 on Facebook ads or Instagram ads and not getting immediate sales. And then sort of swearing off the entire online advertising system and that. But the reality is we just haven't hit the minimum effective dose. There's not enough momentum. There's not enough touch points. There's, there's not enough exposures and reach and engagement with the audience that you're trying to reach. And we're going to talk about that one in just a second. But this is where 90% of businesses fall as they sit around here in this minimum effective dose, kind of half committing to different strategies and then wondering why nothing's working. And the answer here, the solution is again, you've got to push through. You've got to move up here. And this is the sweet spot. This is where you're going to find sort of the saturation of your market. You're going to be hitting the number of touch points that are required. Again, we'll talk about that in just a second. You're going to be making sure that the people that you want to reach are actually seeing your content. You're going to make sure that you've essentially saturated everything that you can. Now, the reality is this sweet spot is huge, massive, massively huge. Like when we're thinking about your business, your market, or your industry, these are huge, huge industries, billions and billions of dollars. So unless your business is doing a billion dollars a year or more, there's more that you can do. It's crazy when I hear about someone that thinks that, well, look, I'm already posting once a day on Instagram, or I'm already making one YouTube video a week, or I've got a podcast. I'm pretty much maxed out. There's nothing else I can do. And they're sitting at home, say a million bucks a year. And they're in, let's use health and fitness. So if you're in, let's say the health and fitness industry, this massive multi-billion dollar industry, and your business is doing a million a year, two million a year, a hundred grand a year, whatever it is, you haven't even scratched the surface for what you're capable of doing and for the amount of people that you could reach. So you could go from one post a day to five posts a day. You could make one video on YouTube to a week to one video on YouTube a day. You could do two videos a day. You could start other channels. You could have other podcasts. There's so much that you can do. Now, of course, at some point, you're going to reach this third area, which is diminishing returns, diminishing returns. There we go. D for diminishing, diminishing returns. There's going to be some point where eventually more money, more effort, more time isn't going to pay off. But I can't even begin to tell you of all of the businesses I've worked with over the last 10 years, the tiniest fraction falls in here. And typically it's when they're spending like a million dollars a month on ads, and they simply can't get in front of more people with their ads. So they're doing blogging, they're doing podcasting, they're doing SEO, they're running Google ads and Facebook ads and Instagram ads and all that. The biggest example here is if you're running some kind of search based PPC, pay-per-click advertising, like a Google search ad. At the end of the day, you can't make people search for more stuff. So you can max out. But again, you can make that broader. You can go for discovery ad platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where you can put things in front of people that may potentially be interested. There's a lot of ways. So the reality is let's find a bright, happy, colorful marker. This is where we're going for this sweet spot here. Like everybody is down here in this sort of minimum effective dose. They haven't even scratched the surface for what's possible. And then they're wondering why their marketing is not working. The biggest, the best piece of advice of everything that I could give you here is really, you just have to do more. Now, of course, you need to be strategic. You need to think through it. That's what the rest of this is going to be about, but more is your answer. So on that note, how much more? And that leads me to the marketing rule of seven. Now, depending on your business or market or your industry, depending on if you're selling something for low dollar value or high dollar value, it's kind of universally agreed that for somebody to make a purchase decision, for someone to take action and actually buy from you, they need around seven touch points, which means seven engagements, seven interactions with your brand. You can't simply put something in front of them one time, expect them to buy and then call it a day. You're going to have to do this multiple times. Seven. Now, if it's expensive, it's going to be seven to 14. If it's significantly cheaper, like you're selling a pack of gum for 99 cents or something, you probably don't need seven touch points. One should be sufficient. But that rule of seven is important because it forces you to not give up too early. It's just like when you're looking at the statistics around sales and you realize that most conversions, most closes for sales happen after like five rejections or five follow-ups, five emails, five extra calls. It's rarely, if pretty much never, the first time. Same thing goes with marketing. A bit of a side note here, but marketing is kind of selling one to many. Sales one to one, marketing one to many. So we use the same concepts, the same strategies, all of that with sales. But I like to think of marketing as a little more exciting and a little more challenging even, because instead of trying to convince one person at a time and overcome their objections and their fears and their concerns, we have to do this en masse and we have to do it without really getting much feedback from our market. So rule of seven, that's important. Now, how do we do this? Well, we do this by showing up in front of our ideal target market, where they're present and active, which means that we need to be selective about what social media platforms we're going to, about what kind of content we're creating, about where we're putting that. And we need to make sure that it's in alignment, not only with you and your content style and what you like doing and hate doing, but also where your people are. In fact, that's the most important element. There's no point on being on Twitter or Pinterest or TikTok or Instagram or YouTube if your people aren't there. So you've got to find out where they're present and active online and then you've got to make it your mission to follow up and to make sure that you're consistently showing up in front of them with value, with content and with offers. So that's the marketing rule of seven. Now, the next point is more of a psychological phenomenon, more of a mental hack that you can use. I've talked about this a ton on this channel here, but it's called the mirror exposure effect. And what the mirror exposure effect is, is a psychological phenomenon that says we as people, as humans, we associate frequency with trust. So the more often that we show up in front of people, the more often that they see us, the more they know us, the more they like us and the more that they trust us. This kind of stems back to caveman days, where if we saw something enough times and it didn't try to kill us or eat us, we assumed it was safe. Well, all of that programming, all of that evolution is carried forward to today. So now when we see things again and again and again, we naturally start to like things more because we're familiar with them. They're less scary and therefore we're more likely to trust them. So this is why that marketing rule of seven is so important. This is why following up is so important. This is why making sure that you've got a solid email marketing strategy in place is paramount. It's crucial. Probably the second most important thing I could offer here. The first one is to make sure that you get out of that minimum effective dose zone and into the sweet spot by doing more. The second, probably most valuable piece of advice I could give you is to make sure that you're doing some kind of email marketing and you're doing it more than you think. So for some weird reason, there's this rule, this gospel in the marketing world that you should send one marketing email a week at most, maybe one a month because you don't want to bother people. Garbage. It's absolute garbage. There's plenty of businesses and industries where you could send one email every three days. You could send one email a day. There's some businesses and companies that I've consulted for and done work with and own and have a stake in that do two emails a day. And it works. People don't get angry. They don't have subscribed. You've just got to know who your market is. At the very least, however, I'd say that you should be shooting for three emails a week, kind of at minimum. Otherwise, again, you're not going to have the chance to establish yourself and to take advantage of all of those touch points and the marketing rule of seven and the mere exposure effect. And that leads me perfectly to the next kind of secret, which is that you really want to go deep rather than broad. So let me tell you what is probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to marketing. And that's whenever I ask somebody, well, who's your target market? And they say, everyone or people with money. And that's amazing. That'd be great. But there's like 8 billion people on the planet. And I promise you, you don't want all of them. Even if they all wanted to do business with you, some of them are just terrible, terrible fits for your business. So why don't we reign that in a little bit? And even if we were to say, separate men and women, well, now we're down to like 4 billion, or then we separate to this country. Now we're down to like a hundred million and then maybe this area. Now we're down to 30 million. I mean, still, we're going to want to carve that down to a significantly lower number, someone that you're going to be able to connect with on a deeper level. So the easiest way to do this is to take a look at yourself and your business. Now, I appreciate you are not your customer. You know, things that they don't know, you have experiences that they don't have. However, most people, when it comes to business, they're solving a problem that they had at some point. They're solving something that they know about, that they care about, that they want to share and help other people. So you probably understand a little bit about your situation and what they're going through. And therefore you're more likely to attract people similar to you. It's another kind of same reason that if you're a personal brand or a coach or consultant or someone like that, you tend to attract people, give or take 10 years around your age. So if you're 30, you'll attract like 20 to 40. If you're 40, you'll attract 30 to 50, whatever it is. There's like this 20 year sliding scale, 10 years on each side that tends to work. That can balloon out a little bit here and there, but on average, you'll find most of your people fall in that range. Again, it's just because you relate to them better. You know the words that they use. You grew up in the similar time. You have the same references, all of that stuff. But the point is you want to go deep here and you want to make better connections with fewer people than these superficial surface level connections with a ton of people. The big reason here is because when you go broad, when you go after everybody, you're forced to naturally water down your message. It becomes more vanilla. It becomes more bland. And it has to, because if you were being specific about someone's unique pains and unique problems, well, it wouldn't be appealing or interesting to like everybody else. So therefore you have to make it broad. And when you're broad, you're boring and everybody just ignores you and you sound like 99% of the other businesses and marketers out there saying the same things. Like we offer higher quality and we offer better service and all of that stuff that everybody's heard a million times before and they're completely blind and deaf to. So the best way to solve this is to move on to our next point here, which is that you need an ICA. ICA is Marketing Talk for Ideal Customer Avatar. I'm not completely strict on this exact fictional representation of your ideal customer and you've got to give them a name and a hair color and they've got to wear this kind of shoes and listen to this kind of music. I don't think that's necessary. It's helpful at times. What I think is more important is that you get really clear around the commonalities, the common characteristics that your top customers, your top clients, your top audience members have in common. And we typically divide this into three different categories. The first of which being demographic. So what's their age, their gender, their income, their occupation, their title, all of those stereotypical marketing things that we associate. Number two, what are their geographic details? What city, state, province, country, where do they live? Number three, their psychographic details. This is all of the head stuff. And this is where the bulk of your ICA should really be formed. So what are their values, their attitudes, their interests, their beliefs, their organizations, their political affiliations, their lifestyles, things that make them them. After all, we often want to group people into these broad buckets like men or women or this age or that age. But the reality is depending on what product or service you sell, you may have a wide range of that and it may be more problem-based. On the other hand, you may also have multiple different ICAs, ideal customer avatars. That's cool too. I'm all right if you've got like, look, we work well with women who are 20 to 25. And we also work well with men who are 40 to 45. But those two different ICAs are going to have different pains and problems and fears and frustrations. We'll talk about that in just a second. So you can serve them both, but you need to serve them both with different messages. You simply can't appeal to them by using the same generic brand, broad, bland terminology, because you're just going to turn the other one off by talking about things that are completely irrelevant to them. So you have an ICA, but make sure that it's specific and you can have multiple. On that note, the way to dive into that is with the psychographic details of their values and attitudes and interests and beliefs. I call that their miracles and miseries. So let me find my pen and let's talk about that now. All right. So when it comes to creating your ideal customer avatar, when it comes to thinking about your audience, your clients, your customers, the money is, the value, the real results that you're going to get from your marketing come down to identifying their miracles and miseries. Now, there's this great expression that I love that says, customers don't buy when they understand, they buy when they feel understood. The way to make them feel understood is with this. So their miracles, that's over here. That's all the things that they want, their needs, their desires, their dreams, all of the things that they wish would happen, the desired end state of where they're trying to get. And then of course, over here, we've got their miseries. These are their fears, their problems, their pains, their frustrations, all of the things that they're trying to get away from, at least in regards to your business and to your offer. You need to identify what these are and ideally drill down into which the most important and the most painful ones are, and then what the most desirable end states are, because then you're going to be able to position your business as the bridge that takes them from miracle. There we go. Memo to self, I got to buy some smaller tip markers, but that's it. This is your business right there. Your business's job, your offer, your product, your service, whatever it is that you sell, its only mission is to move them away from their current state that they're in right now that they don't want to be in, whatever that pain is, and towards the desired end state. And the better that you're able to communicate that, which is essentially the job of marketing, it's to communicate the value of what you have to them in regards to your offer, your product, your service, the better you're able to do that, the more likely you are to get somebody to take action and to actually buy from you and move them here. And that's, this is where the conversions happen. It's right here. It's moving them away from miseries and towards miracles. And on that note, let's hit the next point here, which is a very cliched thing to say, but I want to break it down a little bit more. There's this super cliched saying in marketing that says you want to sell the benefits, not the features or sell the sizzle, not the steak. The problem is, is that like most cliches, there's that element of truth to it. That that's absolutely the fact here is like when it comes to marketing and to representing what it is that you're selling and what you're trying to promote, it's not about the features. It's about what those features are going to deliver through the benefits. That's what they're after. They don't care about features. They care about how those features are going to positively impact them. So yes, we can make a cursory mention of the features. We've got to highlight them. We'll talk about them and we'll talk about kind of the flip side of that in just a second, but the real value is in the benefit. Now, one of my favorite examples, and it kind of stems from like, Hey, sell me this pen. Well, it comes down to this pen doesn't actually have a pen cap, but we're going to use that analogy anyway. It's sort of like, well, why does the pen have a pen cap or fictional pen cap? And the reason that this pen has a pen cap and the benefits it provides, that's what we want to highlight. So the feature is a pen cap. The benefits is, well, it prevents you from getting ink all over yourself. And then of course, we could elaborate on that. We could explain it a little further and so on. Bit of a side note. Do you know why pen caps have like those tiny little holes? I don't know if you've got a pen around, you can find one, but like they've got those little holes on the pen lid. It's actually so if you swallow it, you don't choke to death. Random. Hey, anyway, the reason that benefits work significantly better than features is because benefits are emotionally driven and emotion far more powerful driver than logic. Doesn't mean we can't have logic. Doesn't mean we shouldn't use logic. We absolutely should. But emotion is the moneymaker. That's what compels somebody to take action when they feel it like deep down in their core, this is going to make my life better. This is going to help me achieve the goals that I want. This is going to increase my status. This is going to make me healthier or happier or wealthier or any of those intrinsic drivers that we have as humans. When we're able to properly communicate that, that's when conversions happen. That's when sales happen. Now here's the kicker. When you're first creating your marketing, whether it's through an ad or a sales page or a social media post or an email or anything like that, we always want to highlight the benefits. And then of course, we're going to talk about the features. But if for some reason people don't convert, we flip it. And then the next time we lead with features and we back up the benefits. And the reason that we do this is because we know that emotion is a significantly more powerful driver than logic. The logic still has a part. Not to mention, it's not that some people are, or it's not just that some people are more emotional than logical. We all know those people that fall on one end of the spectrum or another, but it's also that we as people, we have days where we're more emotional or more logical. And within those days, we have hours where we're more emotional and more logical. And there's situations and circumstances that you can't always control for, which is why we really want to cover our bases. We want to of course lead with emotion because it's the most powerful driver, but we want to back it up with logic. The next time somebody interacts with us, if we tried emotion and it didn't work, we'll lead with logic and we'll back it up with emotion. And we'll kind of go back and forth. We'll sprinkle in social proof. We'll sprinkle in other forms of testimonials. We'll sprinkle in guarantees and risk reversals. We'll use all of the tools in our toolbox as marketers to get somebody to take action, knowing full well that we don't have control over where they're at right now in their current situation. And it's funny, I didn't actually plan this, but this actually kind of leads us full circle back to that beginning statement of minimum effective dose of you're simply probably not doing enough if you're not getting the results that you want. I mean, you can see here when we look over the rule of seven and the mere exposure effect, we need to go deep. We need to have ICAs talk about their miracles and miseries. We need to highlight benefits. And if that doesn't work, we go for the logical element. And then we go back to benefits. All of this is going to take time. It's going to take energy and it's going to take investment in your marketing, which is why if you're at this stage right now, where it's just not delivering the results that you want, you need to do more. Now, of course, I'm not going to leave you hanging with just that, which is why I'm going to link up a video right here that's going to show you a digital marketing strategy that's going to help. So make sure to check it out now and we'll see you in the next video. Now, the worst defense here is not having a marketing funnel or more accurately, not thinking about your marketing funnel and instead just hoping and wishing.