Brand Marketing Bootcamn Actionable Marketing Strategy for any Brand

1. Welcome to Brand Marketing Bootcamp: Okay, so let's talk strategy. And before you ask, I have never ever used my strategic expertise to persuade my wife to do something that she does not want to do. She would absolutely kill me. Obviously, I'm just joking. She wouldn't kill me. She would just use hypothetical questions until I feel like I wish she would. Anyway, having a marketing strategy is just one of those buzzwords that seem to always linger around when you're talking about growing a business or even just starting a business. But why is having a marketing strategy super important? Well, the reality is that having a strategy is basically like having a roadmap towards your goals and objectives. You don't have a strategy in place, then you have no direction and no plan to get where you want to go. And having a strategy in place is not just for marketing. It's for literally every aspect of life. For example, if we're playing chess, the person with the best strategy will often win. Unless you're playing against someone with the IQ of a goldfish, then that's a different story. In essence, your strategy isn't your overall plan. It's essentially your direction and guide to help you work towards where you want to go and the objectives that you want to achieve within your business. So kind of think of it as your game plan for success. Strategy helps you to prioritize your focus and resources so that you can be more efficient and effective with how you do things within your business. Now, without a strategy, you risk wasting a ton of time, energy, and money on things that don't really matter. You seem busy and you seem to be making progress, but for some reason, you don't move any closer to the objective that you are wanting to achieve. Now, another great thing about strategy is it helps you to adapt. So in the ever changing world that we are living in, there is always the chance of change, and we need to be able to adapt to that change if we want our business to move forward in any given environment. So no matter what unexpected changes happen, we can always be ready to adapt and take advantage of the new opportunities that arise. And lastly, strategy helps to provide a certain level of purpose and perspective to the person who actually implements the strategy. See a clear strategy helps everybody within the organization to see the bigger picture far clearer. And this not only helps you and everyone in your organization stay very much aligned in regards to everything whilst building your brand, but it also helps you to get back on track if you ever lose your way. So as someone who wants to learn how to build an effective marketing strategy, you first need to understand that the purpose of having a marketing strategy is to make things a hell of a lot easier for you over the long term, to keep everyone aligned within an organization and to also clearly define your objectives and have a planned route to achieve them effectively. Now, if you've already completed the brand strategy phase of our brand building program, then you'll know how important it is to be able to communicate effectively as your brand. But if you haven't taken that course yet, then do not worry. By the end of this course, you're going to understand marketing to a certain level. Higher than 99.9% of people on the entire planet. And not only that, but you'll also have an actionable marketing strategy that you can use in the real world, which is going to help to drive sales and grow your business. This strategy is going to help you to move towards your objectives and achieve your business goals. And this is also going to give you a better return on any money or any time that you spend on marketing efforts in future. Which actually reminds me I should probably ask my wife what type of pizza she wants to order tonight, although she doesn't like pizza, but who doesn't like pizza? Pepperonils. I'll see you in the next lesson. 2. The 4 stages of marketing: Okay, so now we know what strategy is, but what specifically does it mean to create a marketing strategy? And how is that specific strategy going to help your business succeed? Well, put it this way. Starting a business without a well thought through marketing strategy is going to be like fighting a 25 foot anaconda with a feather. It's just not going to be very fun. Now, in terms of your marketing strategy, ultimately, its job is to help you to convert potential customers into paying customers. So this means understanding your target audience and then connecting what you offer the target audiences needs. Now, with a marketing strategy, there's no room for fluff. You have to prioritize and be extremely focused on what you are looking to do to help to convert those potential customers into paying customers. And this is especially the case if you have a limited marketing budget. Now, marketing can be made complex. It doesn't need to be. It's actually super simple, and it's made especially simple if you follow the four step framework that we're going to outline and ultimately learn in this very course. Because if we took every single thing and every purchase and every sale that ever happened in the entirety of the world over the entire history of the world, they all follow the exact same four step process. Awareness, education, sales activation, and retention. Now, we'll dive into these a lot deeper as we move through the course, and we'll be actually conducting certain tactics within each of those stages to help you to develop your actionable marketing strategy by the end of this course. Now, to be completely honest, if you've ever tried any marketing yourself and maybe it just hasn't worked or maybe you just didn't get the results that you wanted to, and you didn't have a well thought through marketing strategy which made 100% sense in your mind, and you had confidence that it would actually deliver on results and help you reach your objectives, then, to be honest, most people just end up being burned out and just thinking that marketing will never work for anyone. But the reality is that if you've never actually thought marketing through properly, you didn't actually understand the process to developing an actionable marketing strategy that can actually work for your particular business in your specific market, then of course, you're going to think marketing doesn't work. And the truth is, I see this exact same situation and work with clients to basically fix the situation every single day within my branding agency. Now, people think that a marketing strategy is going to take a ton of time to implement, but that couldn't be any further from the truth. A marketing strategy should help you refine your efforts and actually be less busy but get a better result for your time invested. You shouldn't feel overwhelmed or busy. You should feel free and confident. Basically, you should be doing less but getting better results. And this is ultimately the result of a successful marketing strategy. And if you take just one single lesson away from this entire course, let it be this. Success is not doing as much marketing as possible. Success is found in doing the marketing that really matters. Anyway, speaking of not knowing stuff, I don't know how my coffee cup has become empty. So I'm going to go and fill this up, but I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. The difference between strategy & tactics: Okay, I have a fresh cup of coffee. I am ready to go. So what is the difference between strategy and tactics? Well, think of your marketing strategy a little bit like a GPS. Your GPS marketing strategy is going to help you to get to your destination and to help you achieve your objective. However, your tactics are the twists and turns and individual directions within that journey to help you get to where you need to be. So if your strategy is ultimately focused on where you're going, your tactics are the little steps that you take to help you get there. Now, your strategy ultimately dictates what tactics you need to use to help you achieve your objective. And don't worry. We're going to be developing your strategy and actually deciding which tactics are best for your personal situation later on in the course. So you'll know exactly what to use at the right time and to the right degree. Now, especially for startups, understanding the difference between strategy and tactics is very important. And this is because you don't have an awful lot of time or resources to waste. You need to define your unique selling proposition. You need to understand your target audience, and also your business objectives. And once your strategy is clear, you can then start to develop the tactics and choose the ones that are going to help you to achieve those objectives. The reality is that if you don't have a well thought through strategy in place, then you may end up choosing tactics which are going to waste a ton of time, a ton of energy, and a ton of money, and you are not going to get the results that you need. Without actually understanding what objectives you want to achieve with your marketing strategy and also where you're it's kind of like just walking out the front door and just driving with no destination in mind. Your tactics need to align perfectly with your strategy and your personal situation, which is one of the main reasons why I wanted to develop this course to actually teach people that you don't need to do 1 million things to be great in marketing. And if you feel busy, then the reality is you're probably doing too much. You should be instead focusing on the stuff that makes the most sense for you personally, the resources that you have and the objectives that you're trying to achieve. For example, let's pretend we have two identical founders trying to start the exact same business. Now let's also pretend that one founder has zero marketing budget. But the other founder has $1 million as their marketing budget. So just to make it very clear, both of these founders are trying to get to the exact same destination, launching the exact same product in the exact same way. But although these two founders have the exact same product and they're trying to reach the exact same objective, they have a different level of resource, so they're not going to approach the situation in the same way. The reality is that the more money you have from a marketing standpoint, faster you can get results if you apply that money effectively. Now, the founder with zero marketing budget is still going to get to the destination. It's just going to take a little bit of extra time, and they are going to invest more time and more effort instead of the monetary aspect. So in this course, just to be very clear, we're going to first and foremost, make sure that we fully understand your marketing strategy and then afterwards, we're going to piece together the tactics that are going to help that marketing strategy become successful. So just try and remember that marketing strategy and marketing tactics are very different, but they also work together. A little bit like when I go to the supermarket, with a strategy of thinking, I'm going to buy a ton of healthy food, but then my tactics are completely wrong because I end up buying chocolate and lots of other incredibly delicious stuff. And this could have all been avoided if I just stuck to my tactic of eating before I went shopping. But anyway, that's a story for another day. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. The 6 laws of marketing: 22 immutable laws of marketing by Jack Trout and Al Reese is one of the most celebrated books in all of business. Now, I'm actually really proud to say that I've actually known Jack for around eight years, and he's taught me a lot. And I actually hosted a private surprise birthday party for him one year, which was super memorable, you know, and I'd learned a lot from him. So I really wanted to make this birthday super special. So I still remember buying tons of balloons and, you know, a huge coconut cake, which is his favorite, a big champagne bottle. So I would sit behind the couch just kind of drinking my champagne really quietly, waiting for him to come home. And, um I just remember, you know, just not being able to hold it in any longer. And as soon as I heard that door open, I just dreamed down in surprise, and you should have saw his face. It was a picture. It was so memorable, especially when he said, you know, who the hell are you and why are you in my house. Now, the truth is that the 22 Immutable Laws is one of the most celebrated books in the business world for a reason. It's very, very good and helpful. But the reality is that 22 laws is a lot, and it's also important to note that those 22 laws are probably going to be more useful for businesses that are a little bit bigger. They're not going to be as useful for smaller businesses and start ups. So what I wanted to do is actually take the six most important ones that I see help my clients the most in regards to marketing so that you can implement them into your own business and marketing strategy going forward. And usually the best place to start is at the beginning. So let's start off with the law of focus. Now, the truth is that if you think of all the best brands out there, they all associate themselves one common word, one word which really sticks in the mind of the customers that they're trying to attract. For example, FedEx has worked extremely hard to own the word overnight, which is pretty nice as a delivery company because it suggests that they can get your package from where it is to where it needs to be very quickly. Now, if you're a newer brand or an existing market, one thing that you do need to be careful of is that you don't use a word which is already being used by one of your competitors. Now, the most effective words are words that we already know in the language that we are most familiar with. And no matter how complicated your market or how complicated your product is, for that matter, to make sure that you do select just one single word to associate to your overall brand to make sure it sticks in the mind of the customer. And once you have that word and you decide which word that is, you then need to protect it within your marketplace and start to build associations with it over time. Some other great brands that have associated themselves with a single word are Red Bull and Energy, Tesla and sustainability. Cork and happiness, Volvo and safety, Google and search, Kleenex and tissues, Apple and Innovation and Disney and Magic. Now, the list goes on and on. And if you've already completed course one of our five step brand Builder program, then you should already have this word all tied up. But if you haven't completed that course, then do not worry. Best thing to do is to find a word that essentially benefits your target audience, and then just make sure that none of your competitors are also using it. Now let's move on to the second law of marketing, which is the law of candor. Now, you may be wondering what that means, so I'm going to explain it quickly. Now, when you admit a negative, you will almost likely get a positive back in return. And that is because almost all negative statements that we see about ourselves are essentially taken as the truth, just the way the world works, I suppose. Whereas positive statements, on the other hand, are seen as dubious at best, especially in marketing and public relations. Things simple, you have to prove a positive statement if you say it to a customer, whereas a negative will be believed straightaway. The reality is that it's almost always better to admit a negative first. But in all fairness, admitting a problem is something that very few companies do. But when a company does admit a problem or hold their hands up, the customer is at least then open minded to what they have to say afterwards. The next law is the law of sacrifice, and that simply means that if you want to be successful one day, then you have to give something up today. Ultimately, you need to narrow your focus and build up a perception in the customer's mind. But what can you give up as a brand? Well, there are a few things. One is your product line, another is your target market, and another is your constant change. If you want to be successful, you need to keep your product lines fairly narrow. This means not extending it and selling a whole range of different things, at least not in the beginning. Keep your product offering to just one single type of product. This is called single product focus, and it will make every aspect of acquiring new customers 100 times easier. Success in business is found by one of two different parties. The first is highly diversified generalists. This is the likes of Amazon that are huge and have economies of skill, and they literally sell everything. I mean, it's their actual tag line. They sell everything. And the other party that can find success are narrowly focused specialists. And as a new brand and as a brand with not a lot of revenue or resources, you need to be a narrowly focused specialist. Specialize at one specific thing and don't try to be the place to go for pretty much everything. The reality is that Amazon and Walmart and all these other big brands have already got that all tied up and they have economies of scale, so it's going to be extremely difficult to compete with them. And constantly changing means you don't have the chance to be consistent. And marketing, much like branding or pretty much any other aspect of life, only gets better with consistency. The fourth law is the law of opposite. A young brand, you should focus on your competitor and the market leader that you are competing with, and then look to do the opposite to what they are doing. You have to discover the essence of what makes the leader who they are and then basically do the exact opposite to what they're doing. In other words, don't try to be better. Try to be different. As Marty Neumeyer writes in his book, Zag, when everyone else zigs, Make sure you Zag. It's very often the new upstart versus the old reliable. And by positioning yourself directly against the market leader, you open yourself up to ultimately attracting all the remaining customers that don't want to buy from the market leader. You have to present yourself as the alternative, because as the leading brand gets a little bit older and maybe loses its way, it starts to get a little bit complacent. Not as shiny. But one thing that you do have to focus on is if you're going to do anything in regards to marketing, make sure you're bold about it. A great example of this is Burger King and how they essentially position themselves as being the exact opposite to McDonald's. McDonald's wants to associate itself with being fast and efficient. Whereas Burger King, on the other hand, wants to position itself in the exact opposite way, remember, zigging and zagging by essentially saying that its burgers are flame grilled slowly. This indirectly suggests more flavor and a better quality product. And their mouldy Woppa campaign from a little while ago is as bold as they come. The message was suggesting that the burgers from Burger King are fresher and more natural and just having a little playful dig at McDonald's and their business practices. Now, the fifth law is the law of category. And if you can't be the first in the category, then you need to make a new category that you can be first in. The trick is to find a category that you personally can pioneer. And the reality is, it's not as difficult as you think. So when you're launching a new product or your first product, for example, need to think, Okay, what else is out there, and how can I make what I'm offering either different or better than the other alternatives that my customers could potentially buy? It's far easier to persuade someone to buy something that's new, as opposed to something that you are wanting them to perceive as better. So when you're first in new category, make sure you promote the category. Don't focus on marketing the product. Market the category, and then the product will be promoted as a result. Netflix is a prime example of this. They started off as a DVD by mail service and then swiftly moved and transitioned into becoming the first successful streaming platform. So by creating this category and dominating it, because they were the first movers, they ultimately created, you know, terms such as Netflix and chill, if you've ever heard of that, and they dominated for a very long time and even still today. Now, what I'm about to tell you is potentially one of the most important laws of marketing, if not the most important law of marketing, and that is the law of perception because marketing is not a battle of products. It's a battle of perception. Now, this doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that your product can be poor, but what it does mean is that as you're marketing and building these associations in your customer's mind, these associations and perceptions often become reality. So, for example, we think that coke is the premium Coke cola when in reality, it's just what we've been conditioned to think over years and years of marketing and conditioning by the brand. With that said, you need to focus on basically willing your customer's perception and building up associations that can benefit your brand from a marketing standpoint, as opposed to just continuously telling the customer how grey your product is because the reality is in 99% of cases, they really don't care yet. Apple is a great example of this. They want to be perceived as an innovative and creative technology company, but we all know that every single time they launch an event or a new phone, their phone is just a little bit bigger. A little bit faster with a better camera, but apart from that, it's pretty much exactly the same. So often it doesn't really matter what reality is. But most so what your customer believes reality to be, that's far more important. Steve Jobs knew this and used this exact same approach to rescue Apple from bankruptcy. Jobs was a creative visionary and a little bit of a loner, so I can really connect and relate to him because I am also a looner. Anyway, we're almost ready to start developing your brand's marketing strategy, so I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Understanding creative & distribution: So when you're developing your marketing plan, you're constantly trying to Google different things and fit everything together. What's the best social media platform to use? How many sales should I be getting? Why does my Instagram feed look like it's being managed by a 3-year-old? Basically what I'm trying to say is marketing can feel very complicated, but it doesn't have to be. So let's keep things simple. So there are basically two sides to marketing. Creative and distribution. So your marketing creatives are things like your advertisements, your content, campaigns, and copywriting. Now, your distribution, on the other hand, is how those ideas and how that communication reaches the customer. So this could be social media, for example, every platform included. It could also be handing out leaflets. It could be email marketing. It could also be Google. The list goes on and on, and we're going to explore all the different channels that you can use to distribute your content and creatives later on in the course that you can select the best channels for you. But in this very lesson, I just want to make sure that you fully understand the difference between the creative aspect of marketing and the distribution aspect of marketing because both are very important to get right. Now, it's also important for you to understand so that you can break down the two different types of work. This will in turn allow you to work more effectively, build better systems, and also work more efficiently. We'll cover more a little bit later on the course in regards to different marketing campaigns and examples of ones which worked really well and didn't work so well. So do not worry. We're going to cover plenty of examples later on, I promise. So just remember, this is going to become more and more important as we work through the course. Your creative marketing is what you say and do. And your distribution is how or where you see and do it. So with that said, we're pretty much ready for you to start developing your own marketing strategy, which I'm super excited about. So make sure that you download your official brand guidelines within this course, which is going to allow you to work alongside with me within this very course to actually fill in the different slides and develop your marketing strategy with me from start to finish. I just want to make sure that I'm with you every single step of the way so I can support you and just give my own thoughts in regards to how I think about marketing and developing marketing strategies that are effective. So on that note, download your brand guidelines, and I shall see you very soon. I'm looking forward to it. 6. The 4 marketing P's and how to use them: So the likelihood is that you've heard of the four marketing peas. Potatoes, pasta, pineapple, and pop tarts. Yeah, those sound great. Looking forward to dinner. Okay, love you Lord. See you soon. Bye bye. Where were we? Oh, yeah. Price, product, placement, and promotion. But before we get too big for our boots, there's a difference between knowing them and actually understanding them. It's kind of like knowing what a car is and how to actually drive it. One will get you from A to B safely and successfully, and the other will get you phase first into a wall at 33 miles an hour. So we'll start by fully understanding what the four marketing Ps are so we understand exactly how to use them going forward, and then we'll actually implement what we've learned into our brand guidelines where we'll be developing our marketing strategy together. So product or product development should be focused around satisfying your customer's needs. So for startups and new brands, innovation and differentiation are keys to success. As someone that's offering a new type of product or service, you need to think of different ways to cater to customers needs and offer a unique solution. So in regards to finding the perfect price, you should explore a couple of different pricing strategies to see what works best could include cost based pricing, value based pricing or competitive pricing to find the most effective pricing strategy for your particular brand and product offering. Companies like Netflix and Uber have found success with innovative pricing models, which helps to retain their customers for longer. We'll cover more about retention and pricing strategies later in the course, so do not worry. Next, there's place or placement. So this simply means choosing the right places and distribution to actually advertise your products or services. Not only need to focus on who you're selling to and what you're selling, but also why they're actually wanting to buy from you. Warby Parker, for example, tapped into the eyewear market after learning that people didn't enjoy visiting stores to buy expensive eyewear. So they disrupted the industry by offering online alternatives, and as a result, could offer better value eyewear solutions as they had less overheads to worry about. Then lastly, there's promotion. Promotion simply means your marketing and advertising. So effective promotion is essential. This includes social media, content marketing, advertising, just to name a few tactics that you could use. But this all comes to the talents and the resources that you personally have at hand to use at your disposal. We'll learn more about the different promotion tactics later on in the course, but I just wanted to make sure that you knew how important it was to get your promotion right. We know what the four marketing Ps are. How can we use them effectively in order to succeed? Well, we've actually made it super simple. In your guideline, you'll see Section 4.1, which is named the four Ps of marketing. And in that slide, you'll have four boxes, each labeled with a supporting question below. So for a product, try to list as many things and reasons why your product and service is unique or different. This could be your product, your packaging, the service that you provide, or any other form of experience that you provide to a customer. Think about how you can do things either different or better than your competitors and get creative. For example, if your product is made from a better quality material, then you could potentially charge more because your quality is essentially better than the competitions. Or, for example, if you found a new cheaper way to provide a certain service, or you just have less overheads and you can provide the service cheaper, then maybe you can undercut your competition and ultimately get more market share that way. The idea is to be smart with your pricing and also test and kind of experiment with things as well. You want to make sure that you give yourself the best chance of getting sales. And that doesn't always necessarily mean being the cheapest, so just remember that. Now, place is the easiest of the four simply state where you want to sell your products and where your customers are. This could be online, in retail stores, even pop ups and even conventions if you want to really get in front of people and see how people interact with your product. And remember to keep things super simple. Don't overcomplicate things. And that lastly just leaves promotion. Now, we're really going to dig into your promotion tactics later on in the course. So please stay tuned for that because that's going to be super helpful to you actually selecting the right tactics for your personal situation. But at this point, we simply need to understand what strengths we have in regards to our promotional skills. For example, if you're really great on social media on a particular platform, then you should use that to your advantage. Especially if your competition isn't as strong in that particular area on that particular platform, which we'll get to a little bit later. So do not worry. I'm just trying to put it into context so you understand how you can use your strengths to your advantage. So maybe you great in front of a camera so you can make great content that way, or maybe you can be great at copywriting, or you even want to be great at copyrting, but you're not great just yet, but you have the ambitions to be great, so you can write incredible blog posts to really help people and drive people to your website. So just be super honest with yourself and your own talents and resources and just try get a really clear idea in regards to where you can compete best. So again, just think about your personal talents, the people around you, what they're good at, and, you know, the people in your team, if you can bring family members or something on, that's going to be super important to you, really getting the biggest bang for your book when you actually get into the promotion space and start thinking about where your strength actually lie. And by completing this slide in the presentation, you're going to have better insight going forward as we start developing your marketing strategy. So on that note, I will see you in the next lesson. 7. SWOT matrix and how to use it: So we now have your four marketing Ps in place. And in this lesson, we're going to be using a SWAT analysis to allow you to really empower your marketing strategy. Now, I was once offered $20,000 to basically conduct a SWAT analysis strategy for a stationary company that had created a revolutionary new pencil, but this wasn't just any pencil. This didn't use traditional lead like pretty much every other pencil in the world. Oh, no, this pencil marked the paper using lasers and heat. But I didn't end up getting the job because I kept asking there's the point. Anyway, by completing your SWOT analysis, you can give yourself a competive edge within your market. But let's first understand what a SWOT analysis actually is. So SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and it helps us to understand our brands internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats. Your strengths and weaknesses are internal factors. Strengths are what you're good at, weaknesses are areas that need improvement. Now, we need to be quite honest with ourselves when kind of really analyzing these internal factors. For instance, the strength might be a really unique product, whereas a weakness could be the fact that you have zero money to spend on marketing. Now, opportunities and threats are external. Opportunities are the external situations that your startup can benefit from while threats are the external factors that could hinder your progress. Market research and scanning the environment can help identify these. For example, a growing market can be a great opportunity, but also the fact that there's lots of competitors could be a I feel like every brand should conduct a SWOT analysis before actually developing your marketing strategy. But the good news is it doesn't have to be difficult or complicated. So we made it super easy with our pre designed four box system which you can use within your brand guidelines. Then we added carefully developed questions in each box to allow you to populate your SWOT analysis very easily. Just go to the SWOT analysis slide within your brand guidelines and answer each question as best you can. This will allow you to have a clear idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are and also what opportunities and threats you have to deal with externally. Remember, at this point, we're learning more about your brand and also the competitors in the environment that you're about to do battle in. So once we understand the competitive environment, so the terrain that you'll be traveling on and also where you want to go, AC, your marketing objectives, then you can start to select the tactics that are best suited for those particular situations. Anyway, we're making some great progress, so let's continue developing your marketing strategy. See you soon. 8. Porters Five Forces: So we've already completed your SWOT analysis and your four marketing piece. Now we're going to dive into Michael Porter's five forces model, which is another competitive advantage that you can add to your brand's marketing strategy to help you to find more clarity in regards to how you can win and how you can make sure that you do not lose against competitors. As we all know, having the tiniest edge or, you know, competitive advantage can be hugely influential in business. It's super important. Now, Michael Porter's model suggests that there are five forces at play when we are trying to develop a business or grow business. Even just compete within any potential market. And basically, what his model does is it allows us to assess the competitive landscape that we're about to compete within. And according to Porter, the five forces that are always a play no matter what type of business you're trying to start are threat of new entrants, basically new startups, entering the industry, bargaining power of buyers, essentially the influence of customers on pricing and terms, the threat of substitute products or services, basically meaning the availability of alternatives and intensity of competitive rivalry, basically the degree of competition among existing firms. Let's start with buyers or customers who are, of course, always happy to pay less and get more. In the airline industry, for example, price competition is face because so many travelers just want the cheapest flight. Then there are suppliers who ideally would like to get paid more and deliver less. Powerful suppliers can ultimately charge more and also negotiate more favorable terms. A third source of competition comes from the substitute products and services that meet the same basic needs that your product or service does. Now, these aren't always obvious rivals, and the toughest competitors could actually come from different industries. Then there are a new entrants that can create tension. For instance, Southwest Airlines ended up disrupting the airline industry by charging people less because they were only flying one type of airline. Therefore, they are cheaper overheads and they didn't have to spend as much on maintenance. And finally, you have to fight your existing rivals in competition because intense competition reduces everyone's profitability. The major airlines have been in this position for years, forcing them to defend increasingly narrow profit margins with fees for exit row upgrades, check bags, and even snacks. How can Porter's model help you personally compete more effectively with your competition and grow more effectively? Well, we made it super simple by creating a specific slide for Porter's Five Forces within your marketing guidelines. So just go on fill in that particular slide for the Porter's five forces model. We've actually arranged an example for an online company that is offering health programs for people who are super motivated and ambitious, just to give you an idea as to how to answer the question. To give you a little bit more of an insight in regards to how you can fill in each section, I want to go through it with you right now. So for threat of new entrance, how easy is it for a new brand to essentially enter your market and start competing with you? If it's super easy for someone to enter your market at any time, then the bubble should be red. But if you actually have a good mort around your business and it's actually quite difficult to create your product or service or even do it properly, then the bubble should be green. Then we've got the bargaining power for suppliers. You have to think, do your suppliers need you more than you need them or is it the other way around? Basically, if you can't survive without your supplier, then that bubble has to be red, and it's actually really high risk. However, if you've got plenty of supplier to choose from and you can actually, you know, negotiate between them, then that bubble can be green and you have plenty of options to choose from. Then we've got the bargaining power of buyers. Now for the threat of substitute products or services, this essentially means how many other options do your customers have? You know, is the thing that you are offering super unique or desirable in any way, shape, or form? It is very unique, then this bubble can be green because you've got lots of ability to ultimately stand out. But if you're just offering pretty much the exact same thing as everyone else in the market, then, you know, it has to be either amber or red because you don't really have much competitive advantage in that particular area. Now, the last box is intensity of competitive rivalry. Now this is basically how many different companies are offering the exact same thing as you. You know how many people are in your marketplace, how saturated is your market? You know, if your market is diluted and there's tons of competition, then you need to color this bubble as red, and you need to think of ways to stand out and really make your offer valuable. However, if it's a fairly new market, you've actually created a brand new category and no one else is offering the exact same thing as you, then ultimately you can color this bubble as green, and you've got plenty of competitive advantage to play with. Now, overall, this exercise should highlight out of the five boxes, which are your biggest opportunities and which are your biggest threats. Anyway, your strategy should be coming together pretty nicely by now, so I will see you in the next lesson. 9. 60/40 Law of marketing: The 60 40 principle in marketing is from the book, the long and short of it, which is one of the most celebrated marketing books of all time. Now, in this lesson, we're going to be covering the difference between short term sales activation and long term brand building. And we'll also cover how important it is for you to take your own personal situation and create a formula or a percentage that ultimately makes more sense to you. So let's start with actually understanding the 60 40 rule. Well, the 60 40 principle suggests that in marketing and brand building, you ultimately should be dedicating 40% of your budget for marketing to short term sales activation. And 60% to long term brand building. So, apparently, this is the best split to help a brand grow. However, I don't 100% agree. However, before we dive into that, and I'll cover that a little bit later on in the lesson, let's first understand what sales activation actually is. Now, these efforts are all focused on actually getting the sales, so actually persuading the customer to get money out of their pocket and give it to you for your product or service. This can include many different approaches such as promotions, discounts, you know, campaigns to ultimately get the customer through the door so they can give you their cash. Now, a real life example of this could be a car show room who ultimately holds some sort of promotion which gets more people to the showroom so they can buy more cars and make their sales figures. So now we've got an understanding of what short term sales activation is. Let's look at long term brand building. So long term brand building is essentially everything else that isn't focused on asking the customer for a sale. Basically, long term brand building is all focused around trying to build the perception in the customer's mind. Without asking them directly to spend their money. This could be posting stories about the team that you have within the business on social media. It could be marketing campaigns, telling people about what the brand stands for, and it could also be how the support team talks to a customer when they call you. Long term brand building is all about creating a brand that stands for something, and this ultimately over time can help you to sell more but you have to get the balance right between short term sales activation and long term brand building for your personal circumstances. Now, neglecting one and just completely focusing on the other is going to cause a little bit of an issue because you're not going to have that balance there. Even if you do need sales right now, if you do that, then you're going to be seen as a cheaper brand than is just desperate for customers. And on the other hand, if you just focus on telling stories all the time and you never actually give a customer a reason to buy from you, yeah, you might sell a few things, but you're not going to be selling as much as you could be. So the real magic happens when they both come together and work together. Short term sales activation can help to drive revenue and really get customers through the door and get them handing you cash so you can reinvest that back into the business, and long term brand building is ultimately a case of building a perception in your customers that your brand is very desirable so that when they have a need for your product or service, they don't mind spending that little bit extra to go with you because you've already imprinted in their mind what you stand for and they already desire what you can offer. So if you're a fairly new business and you haven't been around for maybe a decade, then I would actually suggest to focus more on sales activation. And the reason I say that is you need to start selling your product and services to get feedback from your customer base and also start building your customer base so you can actually get the feedback and the data that you need to improve. Now, the secret is to ultimately get the balance right for you personally. So take some time and really think about what makes the most sense for you. Now, maybe you don't have any marketing budget whatsoever, which in that case, that makes it really easy because you aren't spending anything. But this also applies to your time and resources as well. For example, if you're spending 100 hours on creating content or marketing efforts for your business, then maybe you'll spend 60% on brand building and 40% on creating promotions and discounts and stuff, it's all about balance, so it takes some time to think about it and I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. The marketing funnel: We're going to really understand marketing, we need to break it down into an easy to understand process because to be honest, life's just easier that way. Now, although there are lots of different types of versions of a marketing funnel, the reality is that no matter how complicated you try and make it, it's actually really simple. And when you can understand what a marketing funnel is and the different stages to the customer journey, that pretty much every single customer has ever experienced throughout every single sale since the start of time, you can really start to understand how to structure your business' marketing efforts and also which areas of your marketing and the customer experience that your customers are currently experiencing themselves, and also at which stages your customers are experiencing issues which are stopping them from buying from you. Now, this is really important because if you don't understand this, then you have no idea where your customers are falling off and you ultimately don't know what to fix. So by absorbing everything in this lesson, you can start to gather some structure in regards to fixing the problems within your marketing funnel so that you can ultimately convert more potential customers into paying customers. Now, I'm going to go through the four stages which I've mentioned earlier on in the course in detail so you understand exactly what each of them mean and how you can use them. So the first step is awareness. So what is the first step to buying a product? Well, you have to become aware of the brand and aware of the fact that that particular product actually exists. This is done by ultimately getting exposure and getting your product or brand in front of the right people at the right time in the right place. Now, please do not worry. We're going to be going over plenty of tactics to help you get awareness for your brand and product. So do not worry. We'll cover that later on in the course. But right now, I just need you to understand the importance of actually generating awareness for your brand and for what you do so that your customers can actually have you as an option. When they are considering buying your product or service. This is always the first step to any marketing funnel. Okay, so next, we have the consideration phase or the education phase. So at this stage, the customer is just wanting to learn more about you. So they are simply just wanting to educate themselves in regards to what you offer so that they can make the best decision for themselves going forward. Now, this particular stage of the marketing funnel is extremely important, and I'll explain why. So when you are in a state of thinking about buying a particular product or service, you are ultimately weighing up all your different options, and then you're going to go with the one which best suits you now, there are a lot of different things that you can do, again, which we'll cover later on in the course when we get to the tactics section, which can basically give you a better chance of converting potential customers into paying customers. And as the whole game of building a business is about profitability and generating sales, it's an extremely important thing to get right. And I'm going to share a couple of tips and tricks with you later on in this course to really help you to understand how to get your consideration phase, absolutely perfect. Now, after the consideration or education phase, we have conversion or sales activation. Now, at this stage, it's all about getting the sale. So what are we doing to push customers over the line and get them to give us their money? Not in a bad way, but we essentially want to persuade them to actually buy what we have to offer and to incentivize them in doing so. Now, before we move into customer retention, which is the last step of the marketing funnel, I want to share a little framework that I created, which has really helped both myself and my clients to understand how to improve their marketing going forward. Now, I'm going to dedicate a completely separate lesson to this later on in the course, but it's just super important that you understand the value of this particular framework when you're learning how to market your products and services more effectively. Now, I like to call this framework the Pipe model. And the reason I call it the pipe model is you're essentially using the analogy of water going through a pipe which represents the customers who are actually becoming aware of you, then considering you, then buying from you, and then ultimately being retained as a customer. And the reason that this is super valuable is that it actually gives you a visual representation of little leaks in the pipe so that you can actually tie that particular leak to something which you can actionably fix. And what happens when you do that is it essentially makes everything much easier to understand, and you can focus on the issues which need to be fixed in a prioritized order. So you're not fixing things at the end of the funnel when there's actually more issues at the start of the funnel where most of the water is getting lost. So it just helps to really structure your thinking and helps you to fix the most important things first and the least important things last. And lastly, we have customer retention. Now, what most business coaches and courses and stuff will focus on is basically, how can we get more clients? How can we get more sales? How can we do this? It's not all about getting new customers. In fact, if you look at some of the most successful businesses on the entire planet, it's all about customer retention. That is where the magic is made, and that is how you ultimately start to grow exponentially as a business. Look at Netflix, for example. They have a great customer retention strategy. Look at the likes of Petit Philipe, for example. They have a list of customers that are waiting for when their watches are released so that they don't have to pay anything on marketing to actually activate sales, they have a list of people that are ready and willing to buy their new products when they launch and develop them. And the reason that this is important is because when you're constantly paying a ridiculous amount of money to acquire a customer, that instantly eats into your profit when you actually sell the product. Whereas if you're paying nothing to sell back to a loyal customer again and again and again, you don't have to pay anything to keep them. They are there and ready to buy your product whenever you develop something new or when you have something else to offer them. Going to look at each stage of the marketing funnel more carefully later on in the course, but I just wanted to give you an overview in regards to how we would be approaching the marketing strategy development process so that you understand exactly what we're doing and why we're doing it. Anyway, I'm getting super excited because I cannot wait to start actually developing your marketing tactics with you, so I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Analysing your competitors: So before we start developing our marketing plan, we first need to understand who we are up against in regards to our competition. Now, if you've already completed your brand strategy within the first course of our five step program, then you don't actually need to take this lesson because you've already completed it. But if you haven't taken that course, then do not worry, we're going to cover everything in this lesson so that you know exactly who you're up against and how you can beat them. Now, you may be wondering, why do we actually need to assess our competition? Well, put it this way. If you were competing in a race with a shock, you'd likely want to compete with them on land and not in the water. Otherwise, they're certainly going to beat you and they'll probably eat you afterwards. And to be honest, I'm not sure which is worse. So assessing your competition is super important because it allows you as a brand and as a business to look at who else can your customers buy from and then ultimately decide how you can position yourself effectively in the market to give yourself an advantage. And what I mean by advantage is I want to give customers a reason to choose my brand and my business above everyone else who they could buy from. And when you look at your competition and you assess their weaknesses and their strengths, you start to develop a much better understanding in regards to how you can effectively compete within that environment. Now, the first step to assessing your competition is you guessed it actually finding your competition online. Now, I suggest looking at and analyzing around two to three companies just to give you enough information to make the best decisions going forward. And one thing to remember is, when you're assessing your competition, do not ever get disheartened by how far they are ahead of because this is all part of the game, right? They've been around for much longer, I'm assuming, and you are ultimately looking to steal market share away from them. So it's all part of the game, and it's all part of the fun, so do not worry. And plus, if you get your marketing strategy, right, which is the exact purpose of this course, then you're never going to have to worry about getting customers because you're going to be able to attract them from those competitors fairly easily. So once you have your competitors, you now need to start researching them and filling details on your brand guidelines worksheet. Now, you can actually find most of the information fairly easily using either Google or Chat GBT. And once you get these more basic pieces of information, you can then start looking into the competitors target audience and who they are ultimately trying to sell to. And you can usually get a really great taste of the type of person who is buying from or interested in that brand by simply just looking at their followers on social media and people who comment on their content. If you spend enough time on their Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube or wherever else, whatever platform tickles your fancy, you can find and see the types of profiles and the types of people that are actually interested in the content that they're creating. For giving you an ideal insight into the demographic that are interested in not only their products, but also potentially yours. Next, look at their social media following and note down which ones are the biggest so that you know where you have to work the hardest to basically gain market share or share of voice within that particular platform. Also note down if they're a more premium brand or more affordable essentially get as much information as possible in regards to that particular brand so that you can understand them and how they're approaching their marketing and their positioning as effectively as possible. Next, make sure you check their pricing. This is going to be super useful for you because this is going to give you a benchmark for how much you can charge in the market. Because ultimately, if all of your competitors are charging $100 for the exact same product that you're going to be selling, it's going to take something really special to be able to charge more than that because your customers are going to just see your competition and basically choose them if they feel like they're not getting any additional value from you and you're charging a lot more. Now, one thing to remember is when it comes to pricing and, you know, ultimately figuring out how much you should be selling your products and services for, realize that when you're assessing a company who's been around for maybe one decade, two decades, three decades, even, even longer, then the pricing structure that they're using has been tested maybe hundreds of times. And the reality is that you can try and spend an awful lot of money, time, and effort, figuring out how much someone's willing to pay for a pair of trainers or whatever you're selling. But the reality is, if that particular business is selling the product at that price, then you shouldn't stray too far away from that. That is ultimately the price that the market is willing to spend. Obviously, that's just my humble opinion, but it's actually from a really great book called Ready Fire AM, which if you haven't read already, you should probably read. Next, check their strengths and their weaknesses. Now obviously, this could be anything. This could be that they have a really great Facebook community or that they have just a really strong brand, and their weakness could be they accidentally swore at someone on Instagram or something else that just puts them in a position where they aren't really classed as being very strong. The reason that we're looking at the brand's strengths and weaknesses is we need to highlight where we can invest our efforts. Let me give you an example. So if a brand is absolutely smashing it on Instagram, for example, then we should probably look at the other platforms where they're not as popular to get our share of voice there far more easily. Maybe they aren't as prevalent on Tik Tok, and maybe they haven't really, you know, kicked up their strategy on TikTok just yet. That would be a great opportunity for us to basically take advantage and start growing our audience on that platform. Before they start to grow their own audience to compete with us. For example, if we wanted to start a video content platform like YouTube, then we would have to make a different to YouTube because otherwise, people would just go to YouTube. They'd have no reason to come to us. So we would maybe have to niche down and, you know, focus on a very specific niche to give people a reason to, you know, levitate towards us. The same goes with any type of business or brand. You need to make sure that you have some reason that the customer is going to choose you, whether it be that you're cheaper, whether it be that you're better, whether it be that you're different, whether it be that you add some extra value, which they can't get elsewhere. It's all part of the game. You need to figure that out first before you start to invest too much time and energy into actually building your product and service. Now, for example, if you were a luxury brand competing with Louis Veton, you know, Louis Vitan has been around for a long, long time, and they have a very strong pretty much all over the world now, how could you compete with Louis Buton? You know, if you're thinking outside the box, you can maybe angle it in the way that you are, you know, a craftsman, you're a craftsman and an artist with leather, you know? So you make, you know, maybe the best belts in the entire world, and you're known for making the best belts in the world, or maybe you're known for making the best wallet in the world. The wallets that are going to last the test of time and they actually develop character as the leather, you know, kind of matures and, you know, cracks and, you know, gains character over time. Ultimately, it's all down to creating a little story behind your brand, and we'll get more to that a little bit later on in the course. But right now, you should start to have at least one competitor fully finished. So work through the others and obviously, make sure that you reach out if you need any support in regards to this particular section of the course. I know it can be a little bit new for some people, but other than that, I will see you in the next lesson. See you there. 12. Confirming your target audience: So how do you define your target audience? Well, there's a few ways to find out more about your target audience. The first way is to find someone that fits the customer persona you want to try and attract to buy your product or service, and then essentially spend more time with them and just keep them in a room locked up for maybe 30 days until you fully understand their mind and everything that they love and everything that they hate. Or we could just learn from how Apple perfected their understanding of their customers and potentially not go to prison. So I think it's fair to say that Apple, out of all the brands out pretty much know their targal audience down to a T. They know that their customers are probably quite tech savvy, they're quite modern, and they also can be often quite creative, too. So how do you find your targal audience? Well, first, we need to know who we should target and why they should care. And we should also probably figure out who is going to want our product or service most. Now, realize that I said most, and this is where so many brands go wrong because there are tons of different people who you could target in regards to your brand. And listen, no matter who you target and no matter how well you try to target a certain demographic other people are still going to buy your product and service that become aware of it and just like it. So that's just the way it is. Now, something that's really important to remember is that if there are three types of people that you think could potentially be interested in your product or service, then you need to select the one which you think you have the best chance to convert and also the one who is going to be the cheapest to acquire as a new customer. Ultimately, one of the most famous things in marketing is if you market to everyone, you end up marketing to no one. So narrowing your focus and making sure that you are trying to appeal to one specific type of person is super important. So that's the first step before you even start thinking about who actually wants your product or service. Make sure you understand you do not need to appeal to everyone. You just need to appeal to one certain type of person. It may seem counterproductive, but trust me, it is one of the most important lessons you can take from this course or any course from anyone that knows anything about marketing. Narrow your focus and make sure you are focusing on appealing to one specific type of person because that is going to be the ultimate decision that you make for your business and your marketing efforts. So to summarize, have one product focus, so sell one type of product and market to one single type of person. Okay, perfect. Let's move on. Now, if you want a more in depth guide in regards to actually developing your target audience or customer persona, whichever way you want to call it, then I will provide an unedited version of me actually filling in the customer persona worksheet to make sure that you fully understand exactly how things can be done and how I'm thinking about things as I'm filling in that particular slide. Now the next step is to think about the type of problem that your product or service solves and then basically think about the types of people who will be interested in having that problem resolved. First section, we basically think about the simple stuff like, how old are they? You know, are they male or female? Do they have family? You know, what's the occupation? How much do they earn? All the regular stuff. This particular section is just to give us an overview of who the person is and ultimately giving us an idea as to how we could potentially market to them in future. Now, once we have the basics in place, we can then move on to the customer persona's bio or story. Now, this is ultimately a little insight in regards to, you know, who they are, how they spend their day, what they do. How they think, simply as much information as possible to give us a little all view in regards to who that person is and why they should be attracted to our particular product or service or the solution that we are trying to provide the market. You know, are they a busy person? You know, do they have a lot of things to do, but they don't end up doing them, or are they extremely driven and they end up getting everything done in the morning so they can have the afternoon off? Just let your imagination run free and just think about all of the things that this person does in a day, how they feel, you know, are they a loving person? Are they quite selfish, so that you can really start to craft an idea how this person may react to the marketing that you're going to develop later on in the course, if that makes sense. Obviously, you can do research, as I said before to basically see what types of customers and what types of people are attracted to your competitors. So you could always look at social media, for example, to look at the types of customers that are attracted to your competition, to get an idea as to, you know, what types of people actually buy the products that you're looking to sell or market to your target audience. So next, we're going to be collecting some brands that we think that this particular person may be interested in so for example, first thing in the morning, when they're walking to work, did they pick up a Starbucks, or do they go for a less expensive option? When they do their shopping, do they shop at a place which is very cheap or do they like the more premium supermarkets? You know, what type of phone do they have? What type of laptop do they use? You know, how do they spend their money? We need to know the types of brands that this particular person is interested in so we can understand a little bit more about them and why they buy things. So add four logos to the slide to ultimately give you an idea as to what makes that person. Next, we need to start summarizing everything about that person into four words. This is going to become super important later on in the course. But at the moment, we just need to focus on basically giving a snapshot of who that person is in four words or less. Now, the different types of words that you could use are limitless, but, you know, the person could be, you know, really likable or smart or courageous or cowardly, you know, we just need to get an idea as to what type of person they are, so we can start to craft their character in our own minds. And last, we need to answer some questions about the customer so we can understand where they're spending their time, what they spend their days doing, and just how they function their life. Basically, what we're doing is we're trying to get the best and clearest picture possible in regards to how this person lives and how we can connect with them. Now, if you've been following along in this lesson and filling in your customer persona, then you should have your target audience pretty much cemented in your guidelines. Now, if you've completed it, then you'll know who your target audience is, what their goals are, how we can connect with them better, what their fears are and where they spend their time among many other little details. And trust me, once you know how to speak to your target audience, it's just going to make everything so much easier. Or if you don't want to really do the process of understanding your target audience, then just hope for the best and do whatever you want to do anyway and just maybe give them free delivery. Maybe that'll work. Just joking. I know you want to do things right, so let's keep the momentum and move on to the next lesson. I'll see you there. 13. Creating your marketing objectives: Now we know who your target audience is and we've assessed your competition. It's now time to arrange your marketing objectives. Now, it's super important that once we actually define our objectives and we have our strategy in place, we then select the correct tactics to help us achieve our objectives. And this is super important because if we just start diving in and saying, Okay, I want to invest time in YouTube and Instagram and Facebook, and blah, blah, blah, you're not going to be doing anything with purpose, and you're probably going to be wasting a ton of energy and resources on doing the wrong things as opposed to doubling down on what is actually right for you. It's a little like going for your weekly shopping and not having a list to work from. You are basically just going to pick up anything that you find, and it's probably going to waste a ton of time, a ton of energy, and you'll end up buying things that you don't necessarily need. So in this lesson, we're going to be covering how you can find your business objectives that you are going to be able to achieve with the tactics that we put in place later in the course within 12 months. And once you do find them, you should add them on this slide of your brand guidelines. In order to find your business objectives and your marketing objectives, you need to first be realistic with what you can achieve within that time period. And then once you found the objectives, you can then work backwards and define the tactics that are going to help you get there step by step. For example, a 12 month target could be to have 1,000 monthly users on your software product. Or if you're ecommerce company, it could be to have 500 sales. Now, the first 12 months of starting a brand new company is always a huge learning curve. Ultimately, you're wanting to learn more about your target audience. You're wanting to learn more about what makes them to you can sell to them, what they like about your product, what they don't like, how you can improve it, and lots and lots more. So in order to find your key objective, so this is the most important primary objective that you're going to set for your business, you need to think about if you could make one single thing reality, for example, 1,000 monthly users or 500 product sales, you could look back on it and think, we're on the right track. We have product market fit. And this milestone has to be realistic. You can't just say, Okay, I want to earn $12 million by the next three months. It just isn't going to happen unless you know something that I don't know, which, you know, is entirely possible. But, you know, in the last ten years I've been doing this exact process again and again and again and again, I have never seen that happen, and I think that being realistic with your goals is super, super useful because it helps you to stay on track, and it helps you not to get disheartened if things are not going as planned. Now, once you have your 12 month objective, it's now time to start breaking things down into separate milestones, and your milestone should be focused along that long term journey and just making it a little bit more manageable. So, for example, if the 12 month objective is to get 1,000 monthly users, then the first step to that is to actually get 100 users through one single marketing channel within three months. So all you want to be doing in the very beginning is just finding out what channels work and what works to help bring users on board. And then the next step, once you actually find the channel that works and you have 100 monthly users through that channel is to accelerate that and start digging into why that works and how you can double it and triple it over the next three months. For example, if you were acquiring those 100 users from YouTube and you were posting one video a week, then that channel simply works, and you should maybe post three videos a week or four videos a week. And that is going to very quickly give you an indication as to, you know, how much you can skill that particular channel to get monthly users from it. And then the next milestone that I'll probably set if I'm trying to reach 1,000 monthly users is to probably set up some sort of affiliate program so that the people who are actually signing up can market my business for me and actually get paid for it. So can you see how we broken down the big goal of 1,000 monthly users into three milestones that seem far more achievable and far more logical using tactics that we can every single day. For example, to get 0-100 users, we were going to use YouTube or whatever other platform to basically find the channel that can achieve that. And then for the next three months, we were going to double down or triple down and generate more content to ultimately accelerate the process of gaining followers. And then for the next six months, we were basically going to set up some sort of affiliate program to accelerate the process even further. And when I'm making the decision as to how I'm going to be acquiring those customers or users, I'm looking at where my competition is weakest. I'm looking at, you know, do they have a really popular YouTube channel, or are they more popular on other platforms? And can I really take YouTube by the horns and, you know, really utilize it to build my following and build my customer base? Once you have those measurable milestones in place and you understand exactly what you're trying to achieve over the short term, then you can just simply set up habits every single day and tactics, which again, we'll do a little bit later on in the course. Achieve those goals in a nice, simple, smooth, easy, and measured way. For example, imagine I'm a solo pnur with no money and no team, but I've got a fantastic software product, and all that I have is time to market it. All paid advertising options are completely off the table because I have no money to actually invest in paid advertising. So I simply have to look at free content marketing, I guess. So I know my competition has a pretty big following across every single platform. So my next option is to basically look at where my target audience spends the most of their time. And let's say, for example, that my target audience spend most of their time on YouTube trying to find solutions to the technical faults that their current software is basically doing. So we should be looking at using YouTube ultimately as a platform to share our expertise, to offer solutions to that particular target audience, and basically start to build a relationship with them. And at that point, I can then think, Okay, do I have the resources, the talent, or, you know, the time to make it happen and really invest in building a YouTube channel which, you know, has the value and the essence, which is going to attract a target audience that I need. So can you see now how we're using the research that we did for our target audience and also our competitive analysis to make better decisions going forward, we're making more educated decisions instead of just investing our time equally across all platforms and all efforts, and then just hoping for the best and seeing what works. Now, once you've actually written down and planned what you want to achieve within each of those objectives and milestones, it's now time to confirm exactly what you want to achieve within that objective, and at what date. So going back to the YouTube example, if we are essentially looking to generate 1,000 monthly users through YouTube, and we have essentially found that this channel is working, and I know that if I invest more into this particular channel, it is going to allow me to basically reach my future objectives and future goals. We should be looking at developing systems. So what do I mean by systems? Well, a system is ultimately templates, building a team, putting in place SOPs, so standard operating procedures so that no matter who manages that particular aspect of the content creation, it's always the same. It's kind of like a McDonald's conveyor belt, right? The big MAC is always the same at the end, no matter who makes it. And this is something which is super important when you are ultimately building a business. You can only fall to the level of your systems, okay? And creating extremely efficient and effective systems is without shadow of a doubt, going to be a competitive advantage for you going forward. It's going to save you time. It's going to save you effort. It's going to save you tons of resources. Really focus on building systems in the very beginning because it's going to be super important going forward. Now, once you finish the slide and your brand guidelines connected to this lesson, you're going to start feeling a lot better about your marketing strategy and ultimately how things are coming together. Before you kind of knew you needed a marketing strategy, you didn't really know a whole lot about what a marketing strategy was. But now, you understand not only what you're going to be doing, what you're trying to achieve, how you're going to achieve it. And most importantly, you now know why you're doing all the things that you're doing. Does that make sense? And that's one of the most powerful things because there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there and people trying to create marketing strategies, whether it be for themselves or for clients, and they just haven't got a clue. They're just guessing. And I don't like guessing. I like knowing what I'm doing. And I know that when I'm dedicating my time or money or energy to anything, I know that I am looking to get the best result possible. And that is just ultimately the result that I want every single time. I want the maximum potential return on everything that I invest. And something that you may be wondering as you're working through this course is, is marketing really supposed to be this simple? Shouldn't it be more complex? And, you know, to be honest, you're not wrong. You can make any topic or anything as complicated as you want it to be. And to be fair, most founders do. But put it this way, if you had ten marbles in front of you and you had to push those ten marbles as far as possible at the same time, how far do you think they'd go? On the other hand, if you had one marble that you focused on out of the ten marbles and you push that one as far as you could, how far do you think that one would go? Now, the lesson here is not groundbreaking and it's not rocket science, but it's actually really important. It's because most people struggle with focusing on doing one thing exceptionally well and instead, they focus on trying to spread themselves too thin, and they ultimately end up disheartened because they don't get any results. This is one of the saddest things in all of business because there are tons of people who have a great amount of potential when actually developing a brand or making a product or marketing or whatever it is that they are but they don't focus. They don't give it their. They don't give it 110%. They just give it 90, you know, and then they just end up burning out because they are spreading themselves too thin, and they're not getting the momentum that they need. They're pushing all ten mamas at the same time, and that can only last for so long until you realize these marbles are not going anywhere. They just keep coming back. Now, this lesson I've learned the hard way many, many times, and obviously, I can't force you to do something that you don't want to do, so you do whatever you think is best. But what I can guarantee is that I've worked with thousands of founders and people who have tried to develop marketing strategies and tried to market their businesses and brand, and they sometimes think that they know better, and they think, Yeah, I know Scott said just to do this, but I'm just going to completely ignore him, and I'm going to do this and this and this and this and this and this and that, and end doing, like, 1 million things. And then they end up coming back to me and saying, Scott, nothing's working, like, what do I do? And then they tell me what they've been doing, and then I tell them, why don't you just pick one? Just pick one and just do that for six months. See what happens. Develop that channel, and that's it. Because at the moment, you're completely mediocre on every single thing that you're doing because you can't just focus. You are up against people who are the best at what they do on those particular platforms, and you don't have the resources, the time or the expertise to get good because you're spreading yourself too thin and you're just trying to rush everything. Doesn't work. It is the stupidst decision anyone can make to try and beat everyone at everything. You can have anything that you want in life, but you can't have everything, and that is the truest quote I have ever heard. But anyway, enough of my quotes and my ranting and raving. I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. See you soon. 14. Pricing your products perfectly: So now you have your marketing objectives. The next step is to get your pricing in place. Now, the perfect price for your product or service is simple. It's the maximum amount that a customer is willing to pay for your product or service. I actually once remember paying $100 for a dictionary once. But when I opened the pages, they were blank. I had no words to describe how angry I was. Now, at the moment, you may have absolutely no idea how much you can sell your product or service for or how much you should be selling it for. And while you can always just look at your competition and copy off them, I want to give you a couple of other strategies to ultimately adopt to help you to strategically price your products and services a little bit more effectively. But first, let's actually understand what pricing strategy actually is. Now, at its very core, pricing is something that can help to craft a certain perception around a brand or a product. For example, imagine you're shopping online and you're looking for a white T shirt, and you see two identical white t shirts on offer on the same website. Now, one t shirt is $10, and the other T shirt is $300. Both look exactly the same. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you see those two t shirts side by side? Well, you're probably going to assume that the $300 t shirt is made from a higher quality material, or it has something else about it, which makes it a little bit more special to warrant the $300 price tag. But how do you price your product or services if you've never sold anything before? Well, the first step is to actually figure out how much it costs you to actually provide the product or service. So this could include things like, you know, overheads, the cost from suppliers to actually provide the product uh, chipping, packaging, all that good stuff. Now, depending on your costs and also what your competitors are charging, there are a few different ways that you can approach the pricing process. For example, let's pretend we are a software company, and we are ultimately providing a platform where you can automatically post and schedule all of your social media content across all platforms. So if we look at our competition and all of their services cost $30 a month, and our costs to actually provide the service, so everything included costs $10 a month. This opens up a couple of opportunities in regards to how we can use pricing to strategically position our brand. Now, the first is penetration pricing. So this would mean pricing the service at 12 or 14 or $16, for example, to significantly undercut the rest of the market so that we can get as much market share as possible. And then once the other companies are out of business, we can ultimately raise our prices. The next option is premium pricing, which ultimately means that we give a certain level of the product away for free. Then we only charge for upgrades once the person has been integrated into the actual system, and they love using it on a daily basis. This works really well with software companies, to be honest, at least from my experience. Promotional pricing is a little bit different, whereas, it's a little bit lower in the beginning, and it's obviously a great deal for people to come through the door and actually spend money with you and sign up. Then as time goes on, you gradually start to up the pricing to get them to a point where they are paying a more premium price. Now, we could always price the software at $20 and ultimately still undercut our competition, but it just depends how aggressive you want to be with your pricing strategy. This was actually a technique used by John D. Rockefeller, which ultimately led to him setting up businesses that were selling the product of oil at cost. Then once all of the other businesses went out of business, he ultimately raised the prices gradually and he was the only person providing oil within that area. He ultimately raised the prices to whatever he wanted because he could profit as much as he liked. Seems as though there was no competition to compete with him. But the real question is, what do we do if, for example, your costs are more than what the larger companies are actually selling the service for. Well, this could actually be reality as larger companies have economies of scale, so their costs are generally a lot lower, generally speaking. But obviously, this doesn't apply to every single situation. So one way to strategically price your products and services in this situation could be bundle pricing. This basically means offering more value and then bundling everything together, so it's a little bit more difficult for the customer to associate and compare the different prices between you and your competition. So that you can ultimately sell the product or service for more and ultimately be more profitable. So, for example, for a software company, you could ultimately give the person not only the platform to actually post their content, but you could also create a suite of templates for them to use to actually create the social media content. You could also give them access to an online group which allows them to share experiences and tips and tricks and methods with other people in the same situation as them who are also looking to grow on social media. Now, there are other little tricks and tips in regards to pricing, such as psychological pricing, like, for example, instead of selling something for $10, sell it for $9.99. But then there's also something quite clever called anchor pricing, which is, to be honest, one of my personal favorite strategies. Now, anchor pricing is when you basically have three or two different options and you place the option that you actually want to sell next to an option which is significantly overpriced. For example, a luxury retail store could place a $1,000 pair of shoes next to another pair of shoes, which are significantly more expensive, let's say, 15,000 $20,000. Now, what that does is it makes that $1,000 pair of shoes look far more affordable and far better value. And the reason that this works is it's directly next to another asset or another pair of shoes, which is ultimately priced at least ten or 20 times higher. So how the software company could use this particular approach is they could have three different product offerings, and they could ultimately want the customer to buy the middle option. But in the more basic option, this is the premium pricing where they just basically get a really basic core number of services and offerings for free. Then the standard offer is the one that we actually want them to choose, and then the premium offer is a long list of things which, to be honest, they may not even need or want. And this is priced significantly higher than the middle package. By pricing things this way, it's going to make things extreme simple for the customer to make a decision, because in their mind, they're looking at the premium option, which doesn't really give them everything that they need, and then they're looking at the premium option, which gives them far more than they actually need, and it's actually priced far out of their budget. So the middle option is the only one left, and it gives them exactly what they want to achieve their goals and objectives. Now, another way we could approach pricing is to sell our membership annually. So, for example, if we are selling the monthly membership at $20 per month, could potentially sell the yearly membership at $200 per month. So it's actually incentivizing the customer or the person who wants to buy the product or service, invest more in the beginning so that they save over the long term. Now, remember, in regards to your pricing, there's no perfect answer here. There's ultimately the answers that are going to get you more sales and the ones that are going to get you less. Remember, it's not always best to be cheapest because as we've already discovered with the T shirt example earlier on in this lesson, the cheapest is often perceived as the worst in regards to quality. That's just a subconscious thing that happens when we are viewing two almost identical offerings at different price points. Now, hopefully, this gives you a couple of ideas in regards to how to price your products or services. But if not, feel free to reach out. I'm more than happy to help and be as supportive as possible. And if it becomes really challenging to sell any product or service that you're trying to offer the market, then try something like giving away a free gift. I recently bought something and I got a free mouse, which was really cool. I need to feed him every day, but he's cute, I suppose. Anyway, now you've got an idea in regards to how to price your products and services. Let's move on to the next lesson in the course because I'm super excited with the momentum that we are making. I'll see you soon. 15. Watch this before creating your marketing strategy: Okay, so you're finally ready to start developing your marketing strategy. Now, I know we've done some work before, but that's kind of just preparing us for creating our plan, which is going to help us get from where we are now to where we want to actually be. Now, remember that the four stages of the marketing funnel are going to come in super important as we work through the next few stages of the course and try to think of them as kind of an upside down pyramid. So ultimately, you can't get to the bottom, the point of the pyramid until you go through the top three levels first. So make sure you follow the steps that we're going to outline throughout the course and the following lessons to make it nice and easy for you. You'll see that the next four sections of the course are all based around the four steps of the marketing funnel. Now, by all means, you can watch every remaining lesson in this course. But for some people, that is not going to be the most effective way to approach things. Now, how I would actually suggest approaching the remainder of the course is to watch the first lesson of each section, so awareness, education, sales activation and retention. And then once you watch that lesson, you can start to pick and choose which tactics which are clearly listed underneath the initial lesson that you think are going to be best suited to your specific circumstances. Now, each tactic is rated in four key areas. The first rating is cost. The second is the energy it requires to actually set things up. The third is how much energy it takes to actually maintain that particular effort. And lastly, the fourth point is, how likely are you to get a return on your energy and money invested? Some of these efforts are better than others, and some are going to be better suited to your specific circumstances. And obviously, the ratings that I've given each of these tactics within the course are based on my personal experience. So this does not by any means say that I know everything and that I am the ultimate authority figure when it comes to marketing tactics, because that unfortunately is just not the case. But what I can say very confidently is I've been working with founders and entrepreneurs and small and medium sized businesses for the last ten years to implement tactics and strategies like the ones I'm about to go through with you, and I've seen the tactics and strategies that usually succeed and the ones that usually feel and to be honest, it's pretty clear which ones are better. So anyway, I'll let you get through the remaining lessons of the course. But if you need any additional support, feel free to reach out. I'm always here to help. See you soon. 16. Awareness - Finalising your awareness tactics: So as I mentioned before, a customer cannot buy what they do not know exists. So the purpose of the awareness stage is to do two core things. One, let people know what you do and two, make sure they know that you actually exist. I should probably switch those two around. Okay, let's do that again. The first thing is we need to make sure that the customer knows that we exist. And secondly, we need to make sure they know what we do and what we can offer them. So it's actually really that simple. Imagine a situation where you have the best hotel on the entire planet, but nobody knows where you are and that you even exist, so they can't book your hotel. That is essentially the struggle that most startups and medium sized businesses have. They don't have the exposure and the awareness that is required to actually drive sales and generate revenue. Now, as I've mentioned before, previously in the course, to get awareness, you can use lots of different tactics, and we're going to go through some in this very next section. But something to keep in mind is, again, through the examples that I've shared is that it all depends on what resources you have. If you have tons of money to spend on marketing, then the resources that you can allocate to marketing efforts is very different to someone who doesn't any money to invest in marketing, but they have tons of time. So I'm going to go through every tactic that you could potentially use to actually gain awareness for your company and brand, and some are going to be more suited towards free exposure, and some are going to be more suited to paid exposure. Now, the difference between the two is usually a case, not always, but usually the case. If you pay for something, you generally get the result a little bit quicker. Now, this is obviously down to your personal circumstance because sometimes, if you have a little bit of money to spend, it makes sense to actually invest in marketing to get the word out there, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it actually makes sense to not spend anything, be a little bit more patient and get to the exact same place in just a little bit more time. So when you're ready to actually start developing your marketing strategy, dive into the following lessons the course, and you're going to be taking through every tactic that you could potentially use to gain awareness for your brand. And as I promised before, every single tactic that we outline in this course is rated on the four key areas that are super important to any small or medium sized business investing in a marketing tactic to make sure that it's the best suit for them. Now, within your brand guidelines, you will have a separate slide for every stage of the marketing funnel. And within each of these slides, there are some questions that you can answer and fill in to ultimately help to populate your marketing strategy and make sure that you have a perfect plan to get you from where you are now to where you need to. Now, just to be completely clear, as I've mentioned before with the marble analogy, it is not logical to try and push lots of different marbles at the same time. What's actually far more effective, and I've said this many times before, and I'll say it many times again is to focus on one or maximum two or, you know, maybe three to really get momentum in those key areas. So yeah, if you can just focus on one and you have the discipline to do I would do that all day long. It's going to be super effective and you're going to feel far more calm and a peace and a lot less overwhelmed, which obviously we all know is not the best feeling in the world. Now, I would recommend that you complete the awareness slide in your brand guidelines before you move on to the education or consideration phase of the marketing strategy development. And speaking of consideration, I haven't had a coffee in around 15 minutes, and I feel like I need one. So I'm going to fix myself a new coffee, and I shall see you in the rest of the lessons. I'll see you soon. 17. Getting partnerships with influencers for free: What if I told you there's a way to get influences with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers to share your product or service on their social media feeds. Now, listen, when you reach out to an influencer, the majority of influencers are going to ask you for payment upfront, and that's just the sad reality of influencer marketing. And if you actually want to pay to get your product or service in front of the influencers audience, that's ultimately just the price of the game. But the reality is that most of the audience of that particular influencer, although they are going to be aware of your product or service, they're also going to be aware of the fact you have paid that influencer to promote your product or service, which can sometimes result in sales, but it isn't very authentic. And the reason I say this is I've did this exact same thing many times over the past decade, both with my own money and also with clients money. And where we have found some incredible success with it, we've also saw that there have been some difficulties in getting that authentic approach right, simply because if the influencer just posts one single post and it's just very much out of the blue and they've never actually used the product before, it just feels very ingenuine and that can actually not have a negative impact on the brand and the product, but it just doesn't get you the results that I think you are expecting. And most importantly, it's not going to be worth your money, which is one of the most important things, obviously. If you do have a marketing budget to work with, then you want to make sure you get every single penny of that marketing budget working super hard for you, which is really important. So I actually developed a strategy which I personally think is super helpful to getting influencers on board to work with you to grow your brand. Now, notice the language that I'm using when I said an influencer to help grow your brand, to partner with them, to work with them. It's a very different dynamic to basically just pay an influencer or just asking them to sponsor your product or service. The vast majority of influencers are going to want to be paid upfront. But if you try to get the best fit, for the influencer and also for yourselves, then that could lead to a harmonious relationship which benefits both parties. So let me share a quick story just to give you an insight in regards to how this worked for me personally and how I think it could work for you. Now, I set up a partnership program for an ecommerce company which I'm currently running at the moment, which basically guaranteed the influencer to a certain percentage of the seals from some of the products that be a help sell. So, for example, if their promo code is used, then they get a percentage of that particular seal. Now, there's a couple of things to keep in mind, and this isn't revolutionary. This isn't a brand new idea. But basically, you have to position the partnership program as being a partnership and actually jumping on a Zoom call and talking to the person and saying to them, Listen, what do you want to achieve? Like, for example, I was speaking to an influencer who really wanted to do speaking arrangements and wanted to really push herself to be, you know, this figure and this authority figure in the wellness and mental health space. And this is obviously very much linked to the brand that I was building with the ecommerce company. And in simple terms, there was a great fit there already, and she was a really grit person. She still is a really grit person. She wears the product all the time for free, without any messages from me. I just like all of her posts. And the fact of the matter is she's just a really high quality person with incredible integrity and just an incredible vision for her future. And you want to work with people like that. There are some people in the world that are going to ultimately want to be paid upfront for everything. They're not going to care about if you get any results. They don't want to have a long term relationship. They just want a short term casual thing. And that's not what you if you want to actually build sustainable growth and you want to actually grow your business and take things to the next level, we need to make sure that you have long term partnerships in place. They need to be actively invested in what you're building. They need to be part of your journey as a brand. And when you find the right fit, it makes things so much easier and pretty much effortless. If you put that work in upfront, you can connect with the right people, and listen, you're going to connect tons and tons and tons of people that it doesn't make sense for, and you just, you know, kind of go your separate whiz because, you know, things just don't align. But the people that you do find, it makes a lot more sense for. And, you know, I probably reached out to maybe 500 to 1,000 probably like 500 to 600 people, maybe, maybe not 1,000 over the last kind of, you know, few years for the company that I was building. And I only work with three long term partners now because those are the ones that truly believe in the product. They truly believe in the vision for the company. And that's why it's super important to have your brand strategy in place, the first course of our five step program, get your internal communication straight so you have a vision for the future that other people can get on board and get behind. This can really change the trajectory of your entire business because you're now not just a brand trying to sell products, you have a vision for the future. And that's very, very different. You have a purpose and a reason for existing, which is beyond comprehension, you know, one of the most interesting and one of the most powerful things when you're speaking to someone and saying, Listen, this is how we see the future. Do you want to join us? Do you want to get on the ship or not? And it's been one of the most effective and impactful things that I've did both for my own businesses and for clients. Now, if we think about how much to pay influencer, it is probably roughly going to be around 30% to make it worth their while. Now this obviously depends on how much your product is worth or how much you are selling your product for. But, for example, if you are selling a product for $50 and you are essentially offering, you know, $5 as commission for each sale, how motivated is the person going to be to actually get onto the partnership program and actually start making progress with you to help build your business? Because what they're thinking is, well, wait. I'm putting all the effort in to actually market your product for you, and you're taking $45, and I'm just taking five. Doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me. What's actually far more useful, I think, is to basically think of the general amount that you will spend on marketing and advertising if you actually have to pay for ads. So, you know, you'll generally spend 30-40% to actually acquire a customer using Facebook ads or Instagram ads, et cetera, depending on the ads, depending on the creative, depending on the product, depending on how desirable it is, et cetera, et cetera. But generally speaking, 30-40%, so it actually makes a whole lot of sense to offer the influencer around 30% to 40% for their sales that they generate. And the reason for that is you're going to pay that anyway, so you might as well pay for a guaranteed sale as opposed to a sale which has not materialized and has never guaranteed to materialize, if that makes sense. So, yeah, that's just my opinion on, you know, using percentages to ultimately get it to a point where it's worth the partner's while to actually invest in your company and start, you know, really advertising and generating awareness for you. But obviously, you just figure out whatever's best for your particular circumstances. Now, one thing that I cannot stress enough is that you should not fall into the trap of getting excited about a person having 500,000 followers, and then you just basically think, Oh, they've got 500,000 followers. If I just get 1% of that, then I can make X, and if I pay them this, then I can get this, it doesn't work like that. People who are scrolling through Instagram, for example, don't really want to leave Instagram, to be completely honest. And when they see someone that they follow for a certain reason, they're not there to be sold to. They are there to ultimately get a certain benefit from that particular person, whether it be value, whether it be just looking at them because they're attractive, whether it be fashion, whatever. So please be aware that you will get the impulse to maybe spend on getting the awareness, but try to take it slow and try to set up a partnership program to ultimately get people on board and get them invested in your vision for the future with your business. So in regards to costs, I've marked this as a ten because this is an excellent way to ultimately get an amazing amount of awareness with zero upfront investment from a monetary standpoint. Now, I've scored it in regards to energy to set up as a two because it does take an awful lot of energy to get set up and actually connect with the right influences who are going to benefit your brand. But after it is, you know, set up and you just have to maintain it, I've scored it a four because it doesn't actually take a whole lot of effort and energy to maintain it, you just have to obviously respond to emails, make sure the discount codes are working, et cetera, et cetera. Now, likely ROI, you are essentially investing zero monetary investment or, you know, very little in regards to actually getting things set up. So your ROI is, you know, exponentially. It could be huge. So I've scored this as an eight just to kind of keep things realistic. But, you know, if you set things up correctly, you could really get an incredible amount of return based on this particular effort and tactic. Anyway, I hope you find this tactic helpful. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. See you soon. 18. Blog writing and SEO: Now, blog writing isn't anything new, but there are some incredible benefits to being able to write content that is both helpful and useful to your target audience to drive traffic to your website. Now, most people think that the only reason to write a blog post is to get on the first page of Google. Writing blog posts and written content can be so rewarding. And the rewards are to basically get on the first page of Google. Now in this lesson, we're going to cover all of the benefits and the pros and the cons of actually writing blog post content and ultimately building your authority within a particular realm to attract your target audience to your website so they can potentially buy from you afterwards. So firstly, let's just dive into what blog writing actually is and why it's so important to do if you're going to choose it as a marketing so a blog post is essentially a written piece of content which can get across the information that the target audience or the person that's reading it needs to resolve a problem or an issue. Sometimes it isn't even resolving a problem or an issue. Maybe it's a story from a personal experience that someone had. A blog post can come in many shapes and forms, but ultimately its main objective is to bring the reader in so that you can ultimately sell them something a little bit later on once they trust you. Now, to actually understand the types of blog posts that you should be writing, you need to refer back to your customer persona or target audience slide in your brand guidelines, essentially understand what type of content you think that particular person would like to read and digest. And once you know that, you can then start to think about how you can connect that need to what you can actually offer. So, for example, if you are Lulu lemon and you're selling yoga pants, then you are going to be talking about everything to do with yoga, mental health, staying healthy. Well being. And then on top of that, you're going to probably want to speak about, you know, women's stuff, like, you know, how to find the best fit leggings for your particular body size and shape. So tons of different things. But the most important thing is to understand your target audience first, which is why we did the customer persona earlier in the course and then work backwards from that to create content that that particular person is going to find helpful and useful. Now, there are a few pros and cons to writing blog posts, and the pros are obviously, you can get on the first page at Google and get a ton of organic awareness and exposure. And another pro is it actually helps you to articulate your ideas better. So when you're writing a lot, it actually helps you to gather your thoughts and provide really helpful, supportive content and advice in a really structured way. So your actual writing skills will improve overall. I guess, on the other hand, if you actually really invest in becoming an authority figure and a trusted person within a particular realm of writing, you know, whether it be a topic on bakery or yoga or whatever, then you can use that for your personal brand even, and you can sell other products related to that particular category if you are an authority figure that people trust and see is credible. Now, like everything in life, there are always cons to any given situation. And one of the things that is a con about writing blog post is it's very time consuming. You know, you need to really put time and effort into making sure that the content is as helpful as possible because if you write really crappy content, and, you know, people are just coming to your web page for 2 seconds before clicking off because the content is terrible and it's not well written. Then Googlers going to see that as negative. They're going to basically say, Okay, this content is not good. It's definitely not useful to the person who's trying to reach a conclusion or read something of value. So we're not going to rank this blog post very highly. And that's ultimately how the Google algorithm works when it comes to SEO, you know, to really simplify things because there are other things in place. But the most important thing is, how much time does the person spend on your blog post? If you can write a really captivating blog post, which does take time and a lot of investment and obviously energy then Google will see that blog post is valuable. So the next time someone Googles for that particular situation or issue, they're going to provide that blog post as the solution because they want to offer the best possible answers to the questions that is asked within Google. Now, obviously, search engine optimization or SEO is the main benefit of writing blog posts, but you can also make sure that you can link out to relevant products and things that you can offer within the blog post. So, for example, if we are talking about the yoga pants example for Lulu lemon, again, then we would be talking about the types of yoga pants that fit different body types. So the customer is in a position where they're learning about what their body type is and which yoga pants are going to be best for their particular situation. Then within that blog post, you have little links to specific products that that person could potentially buy to resolve that problem. And that is how you drive sales. That is how you assess the problem you provide a solution to the problem, then you give them a link to buy something to actually get the problem solved. So you're basically giving them the painkiller to take their pain away. And this is a really useful, tactic that any basic blog writer will be doing, whether it be selling their own products or whether it be selling, you know, another person's products and basically getting paid an affiliate fee for sending the traffic in their direction. Now, because blog writing is ultimately free, you can just write it as long as you have a computer ultimately. I have scored it as a ten in regards to cost because it costs literally nothing in regards to setting things up, I have scored this as an eight because it does take a little bit of time to really get used to writing, get into the habit of it. And also just getting the first couple of blog posts in place is often a little bit of a climb. So yeah, I just wanted to make sure that was fully transparent so you know exactly what to expect. Now, the reality is that once you actually get the blog post set up and everything is in place, you don't really need to maintain it. You can update it every couple of years or every six months or whatever if you really want to. But ultimately, that blog post is going to continue to create traffic for your actual website over time without any additional effort, which is really, really great, actually. So for energy to maintain, I've scored it as a one. But then moving on to likely ROI. So how likely are you to get a return on your investment once you put in all the time and energy to actually create the blog post, I've scored it as a five. Now, this all depends on your ability to write effectively for SEO. Because when you're actually writing your content, you can't just write the way that you would want to write, although you can, but you're not going to get the same results. You need to write in regards to how Google wants you to write. So, for example, your title needs to be something that someone is searching for. So what is someone searching for online that you can answer related to your product or service? Then all of the sub titles within that article are going to be other questions which are similar to the main question or something, again, that is going to connect to something that someone is searching for. Because when you do that, you are going to be more likely to show up on the Google search results. Therefore, you're going to be more likely to get clicked. Therefore, you're going to get more awareness and exposure, and therefore, you're going to be able to drive more web traffic and sales through your website. Anyway, I know this is a lot to take in, and hopefully you're learning a lot, but I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 19. Podcasting as a marketing channel: Now we all know podcasting is as popular as ever. We're all listening to podcasts these days, but how can you use podcasting to grow your brand? Well, let's first discuss what podcasting is and how you could potentially use it to grow your business. Now, podcasting comes in all sorts of shapes and forms, right? You have podcast where it's just one person talking into a mic. You have podcast where it is two people having a conversation. You have podcasts where they tell stories, podcast where they teach you how to speak a different language. So the real question is, how can you use a podcast to grow your business? And then we'll get to pros and cons a little bit later on in the lesson. If you're smart, you will again refer back to your customer persona slide that we did earlier in the course so that you understand your target audience and so that you can actually make an educated decision based on what your target audience and what your customer persona is wanting to listen to. For example, if you're a company that sells sports tickets to sporting events, I don't know where that came from. That's just the first idea that popped into my head. Let's say we are developing a podcast for a company that sells sporting ticket events or sporting event tickets. That's better. If we're selling sporting event tickets or events tickets to sporting events, whichever, then we ultimately need to bring in a crowd that is interested in sports. How do we do that? We could create a news podcast, which is kind of on the pulse in regards to sporting news so that you listen to it every day to hear the latest gossip in regards to which Manchester United player has crashed his car into a tree and, you know, all that sort of stuff. That is how we need to be thinking about using podcasts effectively as a marketing tool. And as a marketing tactic because within that podcast, you want to build a community that is interested in sports, that is interested in potentially going to sporting events because they're interested in sports. And then you can basically advertise your particular business within the episodes. So within the episode, you can be like, Oh, by the way, here's a quick word from our sponsor. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, obviously, buy your tickets from events tickets for sports.com. And then you ultimately have a channel driving relevant traffic to your website to sell tickets. Now, this is the same approach for every single type of business, whether it be a personal brand, whether it be anything. You need to make sure that you understand your target audience first. That's the most important thing. And then once you have that in place, then you can focus on actually applying your marketing and promotional messages to the podcast once you have a built in community and audience. Now, let's look at some pros and cons of podcasting because everyone is doing it, but should everyone really be doing it? Well, I can't answer for everyone, but I'm pretty sure after you've finished this lesson, you'll be able to answer for yourself, which is the most important thing. Now, the pros of podcasting is it can literally be done anywhere. You could be in an airport, and all you need is a microphone and your laptop, and you can literally record an episode anywhere. Another pro of podcasting is if you use a platform like Anchor, for example, I think it's Spotify for podcasters now. I think they bought Anchor. And what you can do is simply just upload your episode on one single platform, and it distributed out to every single platform that is basically showing or publishing podcasts like Apple Music, Spotify, all that good stuff. So those are some of the pros, as well as some of the obvious ones, like, obviously growing up community and driving sales, et cetera, et cetera. But what are some of the cons of starting a podcast? Well, the reality is that not everyone is great at communicating with their voice, and it does take a little bit of time, I think, for people to really master the ability to drive a message on with their voice and actually record, like, a full valuable episode or something. I think it's something that is actually quite a talent, and it's something that I'm constantly trying to get better at. But I also think that the amount of effort that goes into podcasting is a lot considering the likely return on investment depending on the type of business that you're actually looking to launch or promote. So, for example, if you are, you know, looking to start a podcast and actually start to drive sales through the podcast, you're looking at maybe a year, two, three, maybe four or five years until you actually started to get a return on that investment. And most people, especially small and medium sized businesses, can't really wait that long. So a podcast in my eyes, although it's free, and, you know, it's kind of a bit of an ego massage, to be completely honest, people just like to show that they have a podcast sometimes, and it doesn't actually have any impact on the effectiveness of their business and driving revenue and sales or, you know, even brand building because not many people listen in the first kind of couple of episodes. I think that unless you're 100% committed to actually building the podcast and it's just something that you really enjoy doing, then you need to really decide if it's worth it for you because there are plenty of pros, but there are also plenty of cons as well, including the fact that obviously, you have to buy equipment if you don't have it already to really get a top quality podcast that is going to really drag the message home and keep people listening for a long period of time. So yeah, in a nutshell, it allows you to reach a global audience, and it's fairly easy to do and arrange and setup, and it doesn't take a whole lot of time to edit, depending on obviously how many mistakes you make throughout the recording process. Overall, it all depends on your personal circumstance and what you feel your personal talents are. If you're better at speaking than writing, then by all means, try podcasting and see what happens and give it six months and then, you know, kind of assess things from there. Now, in regards to cost again, I'd give us a ten because this is ultimately completely free unless you have to actually buy the equipment, which most people have a microphone or something that they can just record into. You can even use your iPhone or your Android if you're a little bit weird, if you really want to just kidding. In regards to setting up the actual podcast, I would see that as around a six because you're actually going to take quite a lot of time to actually arrange the structure of your episodes and, you know, learn what you want to talk about. And, you know, obviously, structure, you know, the episodes in regards to what value you want to provide. You need to brand things, you need to get things, you know, all in place. You need a soundproof of your room if you really want top quality audio. So in regards to setting up about a six, in regards to maintenance, I'd class it as a one. The reason being is you obviously have to keep it going for, you know, as long as you can until you start getting results, which is, you know, obviously a lot of time and a lot of effort. In regards to likely ROY, I've scored it as a three simply because I think that especially for start ups and medium sized businesses, it's a bit of a long game, and anyone who's actually started a podcast will tell you it's a long game. It's not just something that happens overnight. So looking at around kind of two to three years to even start to see any return on your investment is, you know, obviously something that does not appeal to everyone, so please be wary. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this lesson, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. See you soon. 20. Mastering public relations: So how can public relations help you to get more awareness for your brand, and how can you get started? Well, the secret to public relations is essentially to craft a compelling story. When someone publishes something, whether it's a magazine or a newspaper or even an online article, it has one single purpose in mind. Well, maybe two. The first is to grab someone's attention and get them to read and spend time actually consuming the content. And secondly, it's to actually get across the information in a way that is easy to digest and that is structured to ultimately be compelling and to get people to come back again and again. Now, in regards to crafting this compelling story, you've already arranged your target audience and customer persona slide within your brand guidelines, hopefully by now anyway. So you should have an idea as to what types of stories would appeal to that particular target audience or person. So once you actually understand what types of stories will appeal to that particular type of person, then you can start to reach out to certain publications and, you know, magazines, newspapers, you know, online websites that you can ask to publish the story or, you know, discuss some sort of agreement to actually get the story out there into the world. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that you need to try and make it as easy as possible for the person who's publishing, because they are already super busy. They've got a ton of things that they want to do, and you need to ultimately, not just in PR, but also in any aspect of business, you need to make sure that both sides are incentivized so you're not just thinking about yourself, you're thinking about what's in it for them. So, in essence, if you can craft a really compelling story, which they are interested in that can ultimately make their life easier because it's really simple for them to just publish and, you know, maybe refine a little bit, they are going to be more likely to actually publish the article or the story about you, and you're ultimately going to get what you want, and they ultimately get what they want. Now, one thing that a lot of people don't talk about when it comes to PR, especially those who haven't really had enough experience in regards to the realms of PR is PR is very much a relationships based game unless you're actually paying for the article, which is not really a great option, I think for startups and founders. The reality is that it is a relationships based practice. You need to build relationships with the people who are tasked with and responsible for publishing these types of stories. And if you can do that, then you can have this kind of really mutually beneficial relationship where you provide the stories every now and again that benefits you but also makes their life easier because they know that you're always going to provide quality stories to them that will actually intrigue their readers or viewers. Or, on the other hand, you can just do what El Must does and just send a car into space, which also works. Now, obviously, not everyone has the money or the mindset to launch a car into space. I think that in regards to getting attention, I think it was really effective because every single news outlet covered that particular moment in time. It was something that was extremely beneficial for both brands, both SpaceX and Tesla, the two brands that kind of came together to make it happen, obviously. And when you start thinking outside the box, it doesn't have to be expensive, but you need to do something to stand out, whether it be something personally or something for your actual brand. Something that's legal, but something that stands out. Another great example is Airbnb, who hosted a worldwide sleepover where basically they had tons of people from different ethnic backgrounds from different places to all sleep over in, you know, the same historical building, which was huge because it was interesting. It was new, it was fresh, and it was something that, you know, it was an interesting story to read. So in conclusion in regards to PR, make sure you do something within your brand if you really want to get the attention of publications, papers, news articles, all that stuff. You need to make sure that you are doing something that can capture P's attention. Make sure it's on brand, make sure that you're not doing anything illegal, okay? And also try to build relationships with the people who you're actually looking to have publish your story and get the word out there. Because the reason being is it's a long term game. You need to make sure that you are investing in those relationships blossoming to really get your message across and, you know, get you in front of as many people as possible. Now, in regards to scoring, I've scored this as a ten because it's essentially free. You just have to build relationships and reach out to people, although you can also appear to have, you know, publications and magazines and websites to actually publish your story, but that's a whole different situation. I've also set it as zero. For time and energy to set up because the amount of time it takes to actually reach out to people and manage those relationships and do things, it's a lot of time and energy, but ultimately, it can pay off in the long run. So immigrants to energy to maintain, I've scored this as a one because it does take quite a lot of time and energy to actually maintain all of those relationships and also to continuously be thinking of new stories and new angles and ways to get exposure. And immigrants to likely ROY, it's kind of out of your hands, so I've scored it as a two. It is very difficult to not only get a promised outcome in Ma grass to someone actually publishing something, but it's also extremely difficult to have any idea and any measurement as to how impactful it actually was. So for that reason, I've scored lightly A wiser, too, because it's very, very difficult to kind of judge on those two points that I've just mentioned. But anyway, public relations can be a great tool if you get it right, if you maybe have experience in that or maybe you've did a little bit of reading and you are interested in using it as one of your tactics, then feel free, but I just wanted to give you my honest opinion. But anyway, I will see you in the next lesson. 21. Using Giveaways to sell more products: Let's explore how giveaways can be effective to helping you drive awareness for your brand. Now, again, as I mentioned before in previous tactic lessons, it is important that you understand your target audience first and foremost. And again, for every single tactic that you're going to go through within this course, you need to make sure that you are referring back to your target audience slide that you've already completed earlier on in your brand guidelines. The reason being is that if you are giving something away that your target audience is not interested in, you're going to be getting awareness from people who don't really care about what you're trying to sell them afterwards. So the awareness is basically worth nothing. Now, using giveaways as a tool and tactic to actually get your brand in front of the right people can be super effective. It can be really, really useful. But there are a few things that you need to know that no will tell you when trying to persuade you to use giveaways as part of your marketing strategy, which surprised me when I first saw them, but now I see them all the time, and nothing surprises me. And the first thing that I need to say is that people love free stuff. So when I say that, I mean that in the most respectful way possible. So we did a social media campaign and a giveaway for a brand that ultimately got tons of engagement on their social media. They got tons of followers. They got tons of likes and comments, I think around 600 comments on that particular picture of their jewelry. And the reality is that none of those commenters or likes or followers resulted in any sales. And the reason for that is people are more than happy to like something, comment on something, follow someone for a little while. But are they going to actually pick up their wallet and pay for something. And that's a completely different story. You know, we're not looking to actually drive the sale now and then, but we do need to at least know that the person is willing to pick up their wallet and make a purchase. We're not just giving away stuff to get likes and comments. Although, obviously, it does help to get us in front of more people, we need to make sure we're getting in front of the right type of people. So, for example, if we're just doing giveaways all the time, we're going to attract a crowd that just loves giveaways. But if we do a giveaway every now and again, like maybe every six months or every year, then it's not only going to have more impact, but it's also going to attract someone who knows that we're a high end brand, we're a super like, you know, a brand that people can trust and that is credible. And that our product is valuable, but we're not going to be doing this every day. We're not going to be giving things away every day, because it also kind of incentivizes people to wait to try and win the actual product as opposed to actually buying it. So it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to do this too much. So please be aware do not over egg the pudding. So that is one of the cons of using giveaways too much. Do not do it too much. Just make sure you do it just enough to make sure that people know it's a giveaway and that you're not just cheap and discounting things all the time. Now, some of the pros of giveaways is you can get a ton of organic engagement. With that campaign, which I mentioned a little bit earlier on in the lesson, I think it was 670 comments. A couple of thousand likes, and the amount of followers that we got was maybe 300 or something. Now, that obviously didn't result in any sales there and then. It did give us a really great insight into the types of people that were actually interested in the type of thing that we were selling for that particular brand. So keeping that in mind that you can get a ton of awareness and organic traffic to your website through the giveaway is super important. But just make sure you don't expect, you know, five or 10% or 1% to even, you know, convert into sales because just is very unlikely to happen. People who invest in giveaways are usually just looking to get something for free because they don't actually want the product, but they'll take it for free if they happen to win. Now, some brands that have done giveaways super well in the past are brands such as Starbucks, Nike, and GoPro. In particular, Nike hosts little pop up events sometimes in shopping centers where if you score a goal, you basically get a pair of sneakers or something, which is super cool, and it's kind of a little bit interactive and engaging, which is really nice, as well. And also, GoPro host competition, I think, every year, where they basically launch a new camera and they give camera away for free to the person who can create the best video with the camera or with the previous camera. The giveaway also includes a cash prize and some other things as well to really make it worth the person's while. And what that does is it creates this organic buzz, which ultimately has people actually using the good poor product. So it's building, you know, more associations with the brand and what it can do. And it also does something really clever where it is motivating people to create really cool videos that they're trying really hard to create, which they're inevitably going to share on their social media. They're getting all of that awareness for free, as well to make sure that they actually get the maximum amount of exposure for the giveaway and the amount of money and, you know, resources and prizes that they're going to give away to the winner. Now, for a giveaway, you don't need to make things complex. You just need to make sure that the actual prize that you're looking to give away is something that your target audience will want. Now for a giveaway, you do not need to make things complex. It makes a lot more sense to just keep things simple and just make sure that you are giving away something your target audience will want. This is going to make sure that you attract the right type of person and also that you're actually going to get some traction on the actual giveaway. Now, giveaways are an incredible tool to get some organic engagement and attraction for your brand with very minimal upfront cost. So I'm going to score that as a six because you ultimately have to give away something enough to gain attraction. Obviously, the better the price that you give away, the better the attraction that you'll get, and the better the engagement. Now, in regards to setting it up, it doesn't really take a whole lot of effort. I'm going to score this as a three because although you obviously need some content to actually showcase the giveaway, you need to write some nice copy to actually showcase what the person needs to do to actually enter. You know, it's not that much effort, but it also isn't doing nothing either. You do need to kind of prepare things to really think about what you're going to offer people, which can take a little bit of time. Now, in regards to energy to maintain, this is a nine because you literally don't have to do anything. You just literally just post it, and then maybe you have to answer some comments and answer some questions. But other than that, it's pretty much self explanatory and it just kind of does its own thing. Now, in regards to likely R or Y, I've scored this as a seven, maybe eight because I think that pretty much every single giveaway that we've done that has actually ended up and resulted in the person getting something that they actually want or actually understanding the target audience and packaging something that they will desire. As long as you do that stage right, you can't really lose. You're going to get some sort of engagement, some sort of traction. You're going to get some buzz around that particular giveaway, which can only be a good thing. Now, obviously, I don't know what type of product you're selling or what service you're selling. So if you need any additional support, please let me know, and I'll be, you know, more than happy to help as much as possible. But obviously, you know, the giveaway approach can be really effective when it comes to selling products and services, but it just depends on how you use it and how well you understand your target audience. But anyway, I will see you in the next lesson. 22. Using word-of-mouth to your advantage: Now, we all know that word of mouth is one of the best and easiest ways to grow your business, but how can you use it effectively to grow your brand if you can't control what people are saying about you? Well, in order to use word of mouth as one of your main marketing tactics, you need to focus on delivering exceptional experiences for your customers. Now, this is not anything special. This is the baseline and something super standard. And what I mean by that is this is essentially going to have to be your standard in order to exceed your clients' expectations or customers' expectations and ultimately get them talking about you. Because if we think about, you know, who we talk to on a day to day basis, maybe it's a colleague, maybe it's family members, we only share things that are extraordinary, right? We don't really chat too much about things that are boring, right? At least we try not to anyway. So one of the things that you can do as a brand is you can make your customer feel extra special. Now, we'll cover a couple of ideas a little bit later in this lesson, but that is the overarching premise. Think about your experiences and what you talk about and why you share experiences with brands with others. And if we think about it, it's either because the experience has been exceptional, so you feel comfortable telling someone that you care about about a brand because you know that they're going to be taken care of, as well. Therefore, it's going to reflect you in a better way. And also the fact that you just want to be helpful and maybe connect someone with a brand or maybe there's some sort of affiliate or referral program for that particular brand where you can basically link up the customer with the brand and ultimately get some sort of affiliate fee once they actually purchase that particular product. Now, again, this doesn't need to be complicated. It's simply just a case of setting up some sort of referral system where you give someone an incentive to share your brand with others that they care about that have the exact same problem as them. The brand Uber actually had an incredible amount of success with this particular approach, as they basically gave new users that had never used the app before $20 or pounds or whatever worth of credit to use on the Uber app if they referred a friend. So basically people were just referring everyone that they knew to get on the Uber app. And what this did was this basically triggered this chain reaction where everyone within the geographical location at the time of my hometown, where it kind of happened, where I saw this, everyone within a short period of time had the app and were using it because it was more effective. It was a better quality product, so it exceeded all their expectations because they'd never used that sort of thing before. They never used an app like that before. And also, they had an incentive to share it with their friends. So for example, Uber may have lost $20 to acquire each customer, but they quickly made that back within one or two rides that quickly followed that particular user, booking and using the service afterwards. And again, this all comes down to the cost of acquiring a customer, which I mentioned before in a previous lesson. You're going to spend around 20% to 40% of the actual cost of your product on average. And obviously, this isn't the same for all different types of businesses and products, but you're going to spend 20-30% or maybe even 40% on getting the customer and acquiring them and getting them to actually purchase from and most of the time they actually won't purchase from you, they'll just maybe shop a little bit and then just leave so they don't actually even become a customer. But if you can get a qualified user for $20, and then everything after that is just profit, basically, that's a good deal. So Uber was super smart in regards to how the approach that. So if you are incentivizing the people to actually sign up to your particular program or product or service or whatever, then you can offer them a cut or a percentage of the person who they refer to the service in future to try and incentivize them to actually spread the word and to get the word out there and make it in their best interest to actually do so. Now, in regards to pros and cons, obviously, the pros are you get some really authentic and organic growth which you don't really have to pay much for. You just basically pay for a result, which is obviously great. In regards to cons, there is obviously the con if you don't really have the ability to control what people say. So you could potentially be incentivizing people to say something about your company, which they could get completely wrong, and that could potentially damage your company. So it's a very delicate balance of getting things right, and you ultimately need to arrange a solution which is as secure as possible, which also showcases your brand in the best possible light. Now, in regards to costs, setup, maintenance, and also ROI, I've scored this as a fourth of cost because it may take a little bit of revenue to set up, but not too much. In regards to setup, it could take a little bit of setup because obviously, you need to set up the referral program. You may even need to invest in actually bettering your product so that when people are referring it, it's actually worthwhile them referring it to others because they're going to actually stick around, and then it's going to be a snowballing effect. So making sure that you're investing in your actual product and service and making it the best it possibly can be is also super important. And then the maintenance side of things is ultimately going to be fairly low. So I would probably score that as seven. You're not going to be doing much. You simply just have to let the people who are actually spreading the word for you do their thing. And from my experience, the return on investment for this type of approach is quite high. I'd probably say it is a nine or maybe even a ten. I'd probably go with a nine just to be safe because when I'm telling you that I'm great at something or that I've got the best service in the world, it's not really that believable, right? We're going to be very dubious. But if someone else told you that I had the best service in the world, it's a little bit more believable. Isn't as direct, so you're more inclined to be open to that idea. So super useful tactic if you can get things right. Feel free to explore and obviously, reach out if you need any additional support, but I will see you in the next lesson. 23. Creating value focused courses: So creating valuable courses to market your business. Now, this is actually a tactic which not a lot of businesses use, and I'll explain why because creating courses, and I know a thing or two about creating courses, because you're watching my course right now, it takes a lot of time. It takes a hell of a lot of time to get a course that is effective and that actually teaches things in the right way. And it's also difficult to really craft a course which is going to be helpful for someone. Like, I'm lucky in the fact that I've had ten years of experience in actually coaching clients and people just like you to learn the things that I am teaching you. So I've done this exact same process hundreds or maybe even a 1,000 times over the past decade. So this is the main con of creating courses to market your business. Takes a ton of time, and there's no guarantee that it's going to work. So you could waste a hell of a lot of time and resources. But I think the pros outweigh the cons significantly, and I'll explain why. So first and foremost, creating a course helps you to understand the topic far better. So for example, when I'm teaching something to either a client on a Zoom call or, you know, you now when I'm, you know, creating this particular lesson, my brain is thinking about things in a way that I have to communicate it in a way which is so simple and easy to digest that someone else understands it. Now, in my mind, when I'm talking about branding and marketing and website development and brand management and then logo design and colors and typography, there's 1 million pieces of this jigsaw, which we could use. My job is to select the ones which are going to work best. And there's no right or wrong answer. That's kind of the beautiful thing about brand development, right? You can make the brand whatever you want it to be. And I know I'm digressing slightly, but I just wanted to get across that, if you have a really great understanding of the topic that is related to your product or service. I think course creation is one of the best marketing tactics that takes no additional time to maintain or very little unless you want to update it every six months or year, which we do. But it can really present you as an authority figure in the space, and it can also really get you connected to the right types of customers that actually want to buy your stuff. I've had a lot of experience with students who have taken my course and then they've bought my book, and then they've reached out and, you know, worked with me on other things, and I love that. I love the fact that obviously they're learning from me, and then, you know, a lot of students that actually end up working with me as part of my team, my content creation team, they all took my courses initially, and then they just love what I did, and then they obviously wanted to work with me afterwards. Now, once you actually figure out that you want to create a course and you know what the course is going to be about, again, refer back to your target audience sheet that we did a little bit earlier in the course. You need to figure out where you want to publish it. Now, you've got Eudomi, skill share, and teachable. And all of these platforms now there are other platforms out there, but those are kind of the main three now, skill sharing doy will actually promote your course for you. They'll actually market your course for you and they take a cup whenever anyone, you know, actually wants to view your course. So teachables little bit different in the sense that it is essentially a platform where you can upload all of your courses and then drive traffic yourself to actually sell those courses. So it's very, very different. Now, if you can create a course and you can actually create content, the course creation tactic is going to work best when it's married with another tactic that can drive awareness. So basically, how I would maybe suggest doing it is take one social media platform which you're really, really great at communicating with or even blog posts or whatever, and then use course creation as an extension of that. So you would drive traffic from that particular channel, whether it be social media or blog posts or whatever to your course, which will then ultimately build more trust, more credibility, more authority with the target audience that you're trying to connect with, which will then allow you to market your products and services in a way where they actually trust you and you're not just trying to sell them something. And within different platforms like to me and Skillshare, you can mention the products that you're selling. You know, in the first and last video, I believe, you can mention that you have a website or, you know, you sell this, or you sell that. So you can market things like your book, for example, or you can market things like, you know, your services or maybe you have a yoga course and you're selling yoga pants or whatever. This is all super useful because you're building trust, but you're also getting sales through that trust and authority. And the best thing is, once you've made the course, you don't really have to do anything else. As long as it's evergreen and you don't have to constantly change it because the thing that the course is about is constantly changing, then It's kind of a no brainer, right? If you have the time and the camera and the equipment to actually record the course and you have knowledge on the actual subject, it can be super, super useful for your business. Now, there are some brands that do use this particular approach really well, like Kickstarter, for example, who create a course based on how to really create the best Kickstarter, to get people on the platform to then sell their products on Kickstarter, which, you know, makes the Me go round of Kickstarter, go around a little bit faster, I suppose, because people are actually getting the best possible result on the platform through the course that they have created. So one time investment, and it's literally working hard for them every single day, preparing people to get the best result on their platform. Now, obviously, you need to have actual expertise and whatever you're talking about. You can't just, you know, just sit here and just talk absolute garbage for, you know, an hour and expect someone to listen to it. But in regards to costs, I would set this as an eight because as long as you have, you know, a camera, like a phone, for example, you can film a course in, you know, a pretty decent quality, to be quite honest. If you can get a really cheap microphone, then you can, you know, get pretty good audio quality. If you can make sure you have natural light, that is going to be super important to you getting, you know, like, a nice, well lit environment so that your video looks nice and presentable and you look good. So yeah, I'd probably score this as about an eight in regards to cost. It's not that expensive to create a course. And obviously, you can build on it and obviously buy more expensive cameras and lighting and stuff if you really want to and a little bit of a set like I've got going on here. I didn't start off with this set, you know, This has been something which I've kind of built up over time. In regards to the energy and the time it actually takes to set up the course, this should be a minus ten, because this takes so much time and energy. You have to come up with the concept, write the script. You have to record everything. You need to edit everything. You need it. Make sure everything's perfect, and you need to upload everything, and you need to refine anything that maybe Skillshare or Edom wants you to change. It's a huge process. It's like maybe like if you're going full steam ahead, maybe like two months per course. It's a lot. It's a lot of work. Depending on obviously how much energy you want to actually put into the course, obviously. In regards to maintenance, pretty much a nine. You don't really need to maintain it very much to be completely brutally honest once it is uploaded, you know, obviously, some students may have some questions. You may have some questions in regards to this course, which I answer pretty much every day. So yeah, just to be supportive and just to make sure that your students are getting the best possible experience, which is, you know, really, really key to the success of your course over the long term. And then, lastly, in regards to likely ROI in regards to your investment, I think that it is about a selling. I think that if you make a really high quality course and you can really drive value to people, I think it is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the best things you can do for your business, as long as it's relevant, as long as you're getting valuable information out to people. And as long as you're actually knowledgeable in the thing that you're actually teaching, and you have evidence to back that up. So anyway, I hope this lesson was valuable, and I cannot wait to see you in the next lesson. I'll see you soon. 24. Social media overview: Okay, so we all know how impactful social media can be for your business. Now, if I can give you one piece of advice in regards to how to grow on social media and how to use social media effectively to actually grow a brand, then it would come in two parts. And the first is if you can't do every platform that you want to do perfectly to the maximum, then just do one. And secondly, people do not go on social media to be sold to. They go on social media to relax and to be entertained. And if you can understand those two simple things, you will be successful on social media. Now, I know that we've covered a little bit about focus and focusing on one channel a little bit earlier on the course, but it's very, very important when it comes to social media, and here's why. So if you are trying to really squeeze the most juice out of any particular platform, it takes a lot of commitment. It takes a team, in fact. So unless you have a team of content creators that are creating top quality content that people are going to want to stick around for, then I suggest you either get a team in place, which we'll go through a little bit later on in the course on how you can do that, or you put a couple of platforms at the side and just focus on one single platform and really dominate it because what generally happens is you are competing with at any one time hundreds of thousands of other accounts on that platform, probably doing a similar thing to what you're doing, and they are all in. They're 100% invested. If you're even just 50% invested and you're doing two platforms as opposed to just one, that difference is going to be so obvious in regards to the result of the actual content, how engaging the content is, how consistently you're going to be posting, pretty much everything. Everything that you can possibly experience by visiting your profile as opposed to someone else's, you can see very quickly who puts in more effort into their content. If you're only putting 50% in because your other 50% of your energy is invested elsewhere, that's going to be super evident on both, so you're going to be losing on both. Instead of understanding that, focus is the most important thing in business, especially when you just start out. Putting 100% on one single platform where your target audience is spending the most time and where your competition does not have an established following. And that, my friend, is where you are going to win because you are going to ultimately have the best possible environment for growth, and you're also going to be active in a space where your target audience is spending their time and attention. And also remember that people are not on social media to be sold to. They're there to be entertained. So this doesn't mean that you can't sell to people, but you have to entertain them first, right? It's kind of like going off on a date, right? You can't just instantly ask the girl or guy to marry you, right? You need to butt them up a little bit, right? You need to established a little bit of a connection, and that's usually done through, you know, casual chats and having a laugh and being entertained. And that is the first step to creating a connection with a potential customer. You need to entertain them or be valuable. You need to give them something that they want so that you can then give them something that they need. And that is a realization that I actually managed to figure out when working with a client a couple of years ago, where they basically were doing tons of content. They were doing tons of incredible stuff, but it was all about them. It was never about entertaining the audience. And as soon as we switch things around, as soon as we essentially started to think, Okay, how can we create content which is going to get people to watch? Because at the moment, no one's watching, so we're not winning anywhere with this content. It's useful, but we need to get their attention first so they'll listen so then we can actually be useful. Do you see what I mean? So we did that, and we switched things up a little bit, and it was a little bit risky and, you know, they didn't really kind of they weren't really bored into it at first. But as soon as they start seeing the numbers come up and they start seeing the numbers go up on their ecommerce website, that's when things very swiftly change direction. And this is the reality of social media. It's free to post, so you can post as much as you want, obviously, within reason. Don't post 50 videos a day, right? But you can post as much as you want, and those videos, as long as you do them correctly, will be out there entertaining people and driving home a message and getting people and reminding people of what you actually do and what you can offer them every single day, no matter what. And unless obviously you get banned and it gets shut down, but that's a whole different kettle of fish. Cancel culture, hash tag. So that's the thing with social media. You need to make sure that you are in it for the long term and that you are thinking of every single piece of content, not as a transaction of you saying, Okay, let's post this to get this. You post it out there in the ether to entertain people and to let people know what you do. Give people what they want. Look at your target audience sheet and think, what type of content would this person be looking at? And you can do your research and actually check this out if they're following certain profiles on Instagram or, you know, profiles on YouTube, for example, what do they subscribe to? What are they listening to? What are they commenting on? All these things are going to come in super, super helpful. So I think at this point, now we've kind of had an overview of how to use social media, and it's pretty much the same no matter what platform you're looking to use Immigrants to your marketing tactics. Let's dive into each platform and see which is going to be the best for you specifically in your situation, okay? I'll see you soon. 25. Youtube: So I think we all use YouTube in some way shape or form. But how can you use YouTube to get awareness for your brand or business? Well, the first step, as always, is to look at our customer persona sheets and look at the type of content that they're currently absorbing and digesting and then look at how we can create some content that is going to be entertaining for them, but that can also gather an audience and a following, which we can then sell to later on. Now there are tons of pros and also some cons to actually growing and managing a YouTube channel. Now, firstly, you can reach a ton of people organically using the YouTube algorithm, which will ultimately always make the best content rise to the top of the algorithm and get it in front of more people. Secondly, is as long as your particular content is engaging and it's actually useful to the person or maybe it's just entertaining, then YouTube is going to show to more people, but it's also going to be connected to Google. So, for example, if you are a yoga company and you are selling yoga mats and you made a video based on, you know, what is the best yoga mat and why, if someone Googles that and then is looking for an answer, they will ultimately be showcase your video, which tells them exactly which yoga mats to be used in exactly the certain situations that they need to be using. And also, it gives you an opportunity to sell your particular product in a place where you have a customer that's looking for that exact solution. And the last thing that I want to mention is it gives you very in depth analytics to allow you to make better content over time. Now, a couple of cons in Mo grass YouTube, there are 500 videos being uploaded to YouTube every hour worldwide. So you've got a little bit of competition, to say the least. And also the reality is, it takes a long time to actually shoot, edit, plan, package. Record, if I didn't already see record. And then post and, you know, do all the description and stuff on the thumbnail. It takes a lot of time to do all that. It is a big, big investment. It's almost like a full time job. And unless you have a team around you who can do all that for you, it's either going to cost you a ton of time or a ton of money. So you can either put in the time yourself and do it yourself or you can spend the money and get someone else to do it for you. The difficulties between the two are obviously spending a lot of time actually making the content. It needs to be worth your while. And then, secondly, spending the money to actually get, you know, someone else to do it for you. It's not going to pay off for a fairly long time. So if you're going to be paying someone 20, 30, $50 over the short or long term to create videos for you, you're going to have to spend a lot of money before you start seeing any potential return. Now, the brand Red Bull actually uses YouTube really well. They have one of the best strategies when it comes to, you know, advertising on YouTube, but in a way, that's entertaining, and that's actually brand building. That we can really take a lot of inspiration from. And they basically have four different types of content that they oppose. They have content based around extreme sport and Adventure, which is fairly self explanatory. They also have an original series, which is more for their loyal fan base. They also have documentaries, which kind of delves into the world of kind of, you know, sharing stories about athletes and explorers and unique events which kind of match with the Red Bull brand. Also have music and culture, obviously Red Bull has also ventured into music and the sort of cultural content that that includes. So that is also super important to building an audience that is interested in music and that sort of culture to connect them with the Red bull brand and give them a reason to actually remind them of the brand and what it actually stands for. And you can see through each of those categories, the content has nothing to do with the product, nothing at all. They're not trying to sell the product, they're trying to sell what the brand stands for. And that is ultimately the fine lining between what a lot of people think content marketing is when it comes to social media and what it actually is. You're creating content for the user. You're creating content for the viewer. You're not creating it to sell your brand. You're selling it in a way which is indirect. You are not telling your showing. You're showing that we are, in Red Bull's case, adventurous and a little bit risky and all that sort of stuff. What you don't want to do is say, Red Bull's awesome. It gives you wings, blah, blah, blah. That's sales activation. That isn't brand building. That's not what should be on social media. Take that into consideration, and what I want to do now is just give you a real crash course in how to use YouTube and get the best possible result in the fastest possible way. By using a step by step process to create better YouTube content that's going to get engagement, retention, and views. So the first step to creating your YouTube content is not shooting the video. It's the thumbnail. You need to think about the thumbnail first. And if you ask anybody in the world of YouTube who's had any amount of success, they'll all tell you the same thing. The thumbnail is the most important thing. And if you don't have the thumbnail, then you don't have the video. It's one of the things that a lot of people get wrong. They do things the other way, which is the logical way, but you actually have to do it backwards. So the next step after developing the thumbnail is to actually package the video. So we need to take the idea of what the videos about. And we've already got a couple of ideas in regards to the thumbnail for. Then we basically look at how can we package it to get a thumbnail and title, which is going to get someone to click and to get someone curious about what the content actually is and what happens? It should have curiosity sparked, but also unanswered questions. For example, you could be a mattress company or a bed company and you're trying to sell beds and mattresses. You don't know what type of content you want to make. So then some genius in the marketing department says, Okay, let's make content about how important it is to sleep 8 hours per night because our beds are the best and we want people to sleep 8 hours per night. And that is the worst idea I've ever heard for a video, the worst, but it can be switched and packaged differently to make it far more interesting. Put it this way. Which idea is going to make it more clickable? How important it is to sleep 8 hours per night? I'm almost falling asleep reading that title. Or, then there's a second title that we could use, which is, I slept 2 hours per day for four days, and this is what happened. And then the thumbnails may be something where the person looks really sleep deprived, and it makes it more clickable. It makes it more interesting because you want to see if I sleep 2 hours per night, what is going to happen to me? Am I even gonna be alive after that? You need to give people a reason to click because if you are giving people something that they think they know already, they're not going to click on it. They're not going to care. So you need to give them a reason to actually engage and click on the content. And then once you actually have them clicking on the content, you need to keep them engaged. So YouTube works on two single principles, pretty much, and I'm simplifying things, getting someone to click on the video. Number two, keeping someone engaged and retained until the end of the video. It's as simple as that. If you can create the entire video around achieving those two principles, it's all you need to do, and you will undoubtedly grow on YouTube, undoubtedly, I guarantee it, okay? Unless your content is really bad, but if you can get people to go to the end of the video, then your content can't be bad because why are they still watching, okay? So those are the two things that you need to be focusing on when you are basically developing your content for YouTube. Then the only thing you need to do is do the same thing consistently until you reach your objectives. That's it. Now, please make sure, and I need to warn you of this before you actually leave this lesson. Make sure that you're not clickbaiting the audience. The reason being is, remember the last time you were click Baited, you were promised something, and then that person or that video didn't deliver on that promise. Will you ever click on that video again? No, you won't cause you learn, right? We're humans. You know, we sometimes do stupid things, but we're not completely stupid, right? So we learn that this person or thing will not deliver on our expectations, so we don't want to invest in, you know, spending our time doing that. Overall, YouTube can be an incredible channel if you're willing to put in a time. And in MagarstCs you can literally start YouTube video with your iPhone, right? You do not need an expensive camera. Does it help? Sure. You know, do you need good quality audio? You can get a mic for $10 of Amazon and get pretty decent audio if it's, you know, close enough to your face. I would give cost an eight because you don't need tons of equipment. You can do things really authentically at a very, very low cost. However, in regards to setting things up, you can get a channel set up pretty easily. But actually getting the videos out, that's going to be the most important thing. So I'm going to call this a five for setup, simply because it is a fair amount of effort to get a YouTube channel set up to kind of figure out, you know, what type of content you want to be creating, the ideas for the content, how to actually shoot them, spending the time actually shoot them, et cetera, et cetera. And to maintain, I'm going to put this a zero because you literally need to be consistent as hell with this particular channel. Any channel, with any social media channel, consistency is going to be super, super important with YouTube, especially because if you post, like, every single three days or every week or every day, it's going to have an impact 100%. So hopefully this video was valuable because the ROI on, you know, YouTube can be great if you really put in the time and you are consistent. So hopefully this video was valuable in helping you understand the inner workings of YouTube a little bit better. Although this definitely isn't a full course on YouTube, I might develop one of those in future. YouTube can be a great platform if you are willing to put in the time and the energy. So consider it, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 26. Tik Tok: Okay, so how can you use Tik Tok to start growing awareness for your brand? Well, TikTok is actually one of the best platforms out there for organic reach, but it is getting more and more competitive every single day. So I guess the best time to start on TikTok was yesterday. But if that isn't available, then I guess we can just get started now. Now, there are a few pros and cons in Maganster TikTok that you should probably be aware of. So the first is, as I just mentioned, that TikTok is one of the platforms which is the easiest to get reach and awareness organically without having to pay for advertising. But obviously, that is going to change over time, and that will become less and less as the platform becomes more popular. Now, the great thing about TikTok is that the videos that are shown on TikTok are generally quite short and catchy, so they don't take as long to make as YouTube video, for example, obviously, depending on the complexity of the video. Now, one of the best things about TikTok is the chance to go viral. So one thing that we do need to remember in regards to going viral and getting lots of, you know, awareness on TikTok and other social media platforms is doesn't necessarily result in sales. So you could potentially do a piece of content that goes viral but for the wrong reason. So always keep in mind at all times that you are trying to build a brand and you're not just trying to go viral for the sake of it. So those are the positive points of using TikTok, but what are the cons? So the first thing is that you do need to be quite creative to actually create engaging content for the platform. And secondly, once a piece of content has been posted and it makes its rounds, it won't be seen again very much. Essentially, has a very short shelf life. Once you create a piece of content, it has its part, and then it kind of goes away forever, which is very different to the likes of YouTube, which can obviously resurface again and again. And thirdly, it is quite difficult to convert a Tik Tok follower into a paying customer who's going to enjoy your brand for the long term. Now, really great example of a brand that grew on TikTok quite well is ELF Cosmetics. Now they essentially had four different types of content that they were posting on a regular basis, which covered areas such as challenges and trends, user generated content, educational and fun content, and then collaborations. So as you can see, they were posting a range of different types of content, and they were giving their audience lots of different content to consume, which was connected to their brand in different ways. Now, in regards to cost, I would give this a nine because it literally doesn't take anything to shoot or basically make a TikTop account. In regards to actually setting things up, you can set up a TikTop account pretty easily. I literally takes about 30 minutes. But in regards to actually maintaining and managing the TikTok account, you're going to have to create a lot of content to get the awareness that you need to actually grow your business. So I'm going to rate that as a one or maybe even a zero. You know, it's going to take a lot of effort. It's going to take a lot of time and energy. And if you're fully invested in it, then, it could actually work. But I would suggest really thinking carefully about I TikTok is where your customers, your potential customers are spending their time. Obviously, refer back to your target audience slide, which we discussed a little bit earlier on in the course. And you'll be able to make a decision as to if TikTok is going to be a good return on your investment. Because if you get things right, then I would probably rate TikTok is around seven or eight. But if things are not done properly, and, you know, your target audience isn't there on TikTok spending time, then, you know, that's going to be a zero. It's not going to be good for your brand. It's not going to be good for sales, and you're going to be spending a lot of time investing in TikTok content. Which isn't going to be driving any sales, so your business could ultimately feel if you do invest a lot of time into Tik Tok, and it's not driving any sort of revenue whatsoever. Hope you found this lesson valuable, and if you think TikTok is the best option for your specific circumstances, that's great. If you need any additional support, please let me know I'm always here to help, and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson, Tika. 27. Instagram: So how can you grow an Instagram following that you can then use to actually sell your products and services in this day and age? Well, again, much like every single other tactic that we have explored in this particular course, you have to first start with your target audience and what they are interested in. You see this is why we spent so much time in the target audience section of this course to really understand who they are what makes them tick and what they are interested in. We need to understand where they're spending their time. So if your target audience is spending time on Instagram, here are some tips and some tricks to help you grow up following on Instagram, and then eventually build a following that is ready to buy whatever you're trying to sell them. Now, the first thing that you need to do is make sure that you are creating content that they are actually interested in. So again, this comes back to understanding your target audience and really creating content that is going to again, entertain them first and foremost, and then, secondly, provide some sort of value. Now, in regards to value, what people generally think value is when it comes to content is something that is informative, something that is going to educate someone. But that isn't always the case, and I had to learn this the hard way from, you know, a lot of experimentation. Some people just want to be entertained, and that's literally it. And you do not need to go into depth or teach something to someone, in order for them to feel like they have value from your content. You can just make them laugh. You can make them feel good. You can make them feel inspired. You can even make someone feel grateful for what they actually have. And that to the viewer is value, right? It just isn't the type of value that is kind of black and white. You know, it's value which makes you feel a certain way. So that it makes you feel like you want to watch that type of content again in future because you enjoyed the feeling that it provoked inside you. Now let's cover a few pros and cons in regards to Instagram just so we can understand exactly if Instagram is going to be the best option for you in your business. Now, first and foremost, Instagram is a very visual platform, which basically means that you can showcase your products and services in a really effective way, no matter what you're selling. Now, secondly, hash tags and location tags can help with discoverability. They aren't as effective as they used to be. Instagram also has some great features such as stories, reels and lives to allow you to actually connect with your audience in a meaningful way. Now, one thing to note is, especially when it comes to Instagram and pretty much any other platform out there when it comes to social media, when Instagram launches a new feature or something new on the platform, they generally want to get as many people using it as possible. So if you want to get a little boost in your awareness, then try using the new features that Instagram promotes because it's going to help you get more awareness because Instagram is going to be posting and ultimately promoting more content for that particular feature during that time period. During the testing time period when they're trying to figure out what features work and which features don't, Reels, for example, when Reels first came out, you know, reels were getting a stupid amount of traction for, you know, literally no effort whatsoever. So make sure that you jump on that opportunity if it ever arises in future. Now, in regards to the negatives of using Instagram, obviously, we all know that the amount of competition on Instagram is crazy. There are so many profiles out there, probably ten other profiles that are trying to do the exact same thing as you that are already millions of times bigger than what you are at the moment. So does that mean that we should be disheartened? No. Doesn't mean that we should be wary and take this into consideration when we're actually thinking about starting an Instagram account as part of our tactics for our marketing strategy, 100%. Now, Instagram is also extremely strict with consistent posting. So they actually recommend 2-3 posts per day. Now, this does not mean that you have to post two or three times per day. But that's just what has been seen to get the best results based on new profiles being made and trying to launch themselves and get a decent following afterwards. Now, one thing that Instagram does have is limitations to linking out to your website and other sales pages, for example. You can obviously use stories and you can have the link in your bio. But for example, if you're actually posting in Instagram, you can't actually in the link out to your website within the post itself, which is not a huge deal, but it is something to consider. Now, something else we need to think about when it comes to Instagram is the fact that whenever you post any form of content, it's only actually reaching around one to 2% of your overall following, which, you know, isn't great. And although that particular post could get more traction in future if it's, you know, actually liked by the algorithm, you know, one or 2% for each post that you actually put time and effort into can be a little bit disheartening. Instagram certainly comes up a little bit shorter when it comes to organic reach when you're thinking about Tik Tok and YouTube, because those two platforms are essentially the easiest to get organic reach on if you do the correct content. Now, in regards to costs, Instagram, obviously, costs pretty much nothing to post on, depending on obviously the type of content that you're creating, and if that costs money to actually create, so I'm going to give it a nine for costing in regards to energy to set up and energy to maintain I will give it a seven for energy to set up because it doesn't really take a whole lot of energy to actually set up an Instagram account. Maybe it takes a little bit of time to actually think about the niche that you want to create content within. In regards to maintenance, I'm going to rate it as a two. The reason being is it's going to take a lot of time and effort to actually create the content, answer comments, think of new interesting content, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in regards to the ROI, I'm going to give it a five or six. The reason being is Instagram is quite a mature platform. It's certainly not as mature as Facebook, which has had its day a long time ago. But it is one of the platforms that is still used quite regularly for communication. You know, it's essentially why people are starting to get their news now, which is really, really interesting, especially within the certain niches and the certain topics that they are particularly interested in. Now, one thing that a lot of people don't know about Instagram is the fact that you can reuse the same content again and again. And this is essentially all because of the algorithm and how it works. If you have 100 followers and only one person sees it, there's 99 people that aren't seeing your content. So this basically means that we should be creating a library of content, which can be posted over a time period of six months to a year, and within six months, you can maybe post the same piece of content two or maybe even three times. So what this simply means is instead of just thinking about creating a new piece of content every single day without fail, that's pretty much impossible, right, because we all have people to see and things to do and food to eat and sleep to do, right? I don't know why I said that. But anyway, in regards to creating content, think about it as creating a library instead of just looking at it as, you know, a fresh piece of content every single day until the end of time, post the same content. Just don't do it on a weekly basis, maybe, you know, spread it out between two months and post it once every two months, ultimately, because you're getting the message across the same message to a different target audience, a different person within your target audience. Who is ultimately completely unaware that that post was ever posted in the first place. So I really hope this lesson was valuable. If you think that Instagram is going to be a tactic that you want to use for your particular business and brand, then obviously, feel free to reach out if you need any additional support, and I'm more than happy to help, but I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 28. Facebook: So how do you use Facebook to boost awareness for your brand or business? Now, Facebook is by far the most mature social media platform out there. It's been around for a long, long, long time. Can you still use it in this day and age to actually grow awareness for your brand and business? Now, although the opportunities is certainly not as big as what they were, you can still get some form of organic following and reach if you approach things correctly. And one of the biggest positives of Facebook is it has one of the biggest user bases among every single social media platform out there, which is obviously super useful because you've got a bigger range of people that could potentially become aware of your brand on what you can offer, which is obviously super useful because you have a bigger range of people to ultimately become aware of what your brand does and what you can offer them. Now, one thing that is huge when it comes to being successful on Facebook from what I've read and what I've learned and what I've discussed with others who have grown a massive following on Facebook over the years is authenticity. So ultimately, you're looking to grow a community of people that are interested in a particular thing or a particular topic instead of just trying to promote your business, which kind of goes for all social media platforms, but especially Facebook. You also need to take into consideration the fact that Facebook is generally used by a demographic, which is a little bit older because they're used to using Facebook and they're used to kind of using the features and what Facebook can actually offer, as opposed to the younger generation who are ultimately now merging over to the likes of TikTok and Instagram, obviously, and YouTube. Again, this is why it's super important that we took the time to understand who our target audience is so you can make better decisions based on where they are spending their attention and time. So just to summarize, if you are looking to use Facebook, make sure you are looking to build a community of people around a particular topic or a particular interest, which is actually going to benefit the target audience that you're looking to connect with. Like every single platform, there are also negatives to using Facebook, as well. Like, for example, you can't really get organic reach on Facebook anymore because the actual platform is so saturated and there are so many posts getting posted every single second. And this actually encourages people to start looking at paid advertising in Facebook, which is obviously what Facebook wants because they need to sell advertisements, they need to sell attention that is being invested in the platform to brands that need that attention. Now, there are also some negatives in regards to privacy concerns. I'm not sure how much that kind of concerns you personally, but obviously, it isn't great that Facebook has had a couple of issues in the past in regards to privacy and data, which kind of matters, but also it depends on your personal stance on the situation. Now, something that will probably concern you is the fact that, well, pretty much with every social media platform, but this should be kept in mind when you actually own your audience in an email list, which will come to a little bit later on in the course, you have complete and total power over that audience. Now, when you have a social media following, you kind of own the audience, but it's rented. You don't actually own it because the social media platform owns those accounts, and they allow you to connect with those accounts through social media. Until you actually have someone on your email list, you are essentially just renting their attention. You don't actually own it because you cannot directly communicate with them. That is the key. And we saw this with people getting canceled on social media, for example. So imagine if you spent so much time and energy building a huge following on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram, and then you just do one single thing wrong and they completely wipe out your account and cancel and block you. That is not going to be a great day in the office. I can tell you that now. Now, I know that's a little bit off topic, but I just wanted to make sure you knew the difference between obviously having a social media following and just renting the attention as opposed to owning the email list and actually owning the attention. Now, in regards to the cost of setting up a Facebook community, it doesn't really cost much. I'm going to scall this as a nine because you can literally just do this for free, and it takes like 30 minutes. Now, in regards to energy to set up, it can take a little while to set up because you have to start creating posts, you have to start really engaging with the community and getting the momentum under you so that you can actually grow the audience and grow the following over time. So I'm going to score setup as a zero because it is going to take an awful lot of effort to really get the ball rolling. But once the balls rolling, it should start rolling downhill. And what I mean by that is not in a negative way, I mean that once you actually start growing a community, they will start reaching out to other people who are interested in the same topic, and the community and the following should start just growing itself, which I think is one of the most positive things about Facebook is the fact that there's obviously so many people on the platform. Obviously, not as many people use it anymore, at least, I don't, and I know that a lot of my friends don't. They generally choose Instagram or TikTok on YouTube. But one thing that is still super important about Facebook is the fact that you can easily just tag some of your friends to join a community if you really want to. Now, in regards to ROI, if you actually do things right, I'm probably going to score this about seven, but, you know, there is a lot of competition on Facebook. It is an older platform, which I don't personally feel has a lot of potential when it comes to most brands these days. But obviously, this is just my humble opinion. I would score it as 7-5 depending on how you execute the actual approach. I hope you found this lesson helpful, so please reach out if you need any additional support and I will see you in the next video. 29. Twitter / X: Now, I think we can all agree that Twitter or X is very different to a lot of other social media platforms out there, especially since Elon must walk through the door and caused all sorts of chaos. Now, one thing about Twitter is it is very much a conversation, and it's more for conversation than any other platform out there, to be completely brutally honest. Not as much posting content, but you're actually trying to ignite a conversation with the people who are following you. You are obviously still delivering value, but it in a way, is not as much visually focused, but it's more based on written content. But one thing that's really important in regards to Twitter, if you actually want to use it as part of your marketing tactics is you need to be very much on the pulse with everything that's going on. And that basically means that you need to understand how to communicate effectively with your brand's voice to properly represent your brand and what you do in a way that on professional, but also that is captivating enough to actually get people to follow you and take notice. Now, one of the greatest things about Twitter is that it is on the post, and it's really fast moving. So, for example, if you post something on Twitter, it will have its moment, and then ultimately, it'll just fall into the ether of the Twitter realm, I guess. Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to describe that. Yeah, basically, it's there and then it's gone. But one great thing about Twitter is the fact that you can use hashtags and trendings to actually get more awareness than you usually can from other platforms out there like Instagram and Tik Tok. Now obviously, Twitter is very much on the pulse, and you do need to keep up with trends and everything that is going on in the world to actually make sure that you are sharing content which is relevant to the current times and what is going on in society. So I guess that could also be used as a negative, right? Like, you do need to invest quite a lot of time just to make sure that you are aware of what's actually happening in the world just in case your brand posts something which is a little bit controversial and it doesn't really end well. Obviously, the fact that your content has quite a short lifespan is also a little bit of a negative because if you put a lot of time and energy into actually creating some content and it gets a ton of engagement, it doesn't necessarily mean that that content is going to be around for any longer in comparison to a YouTube video where if you create a great YouTube video, that's going to grow and grow over time, which is obviously going to be, far more profitable and far more useful over the long term. Obviously, I do know that you can post videos and images on Twitter. You do need to keep in mind that it isn't really a visually focused platform. It is very much text based. So please keep that in mind because if you feel like your strengths as a brand and your resources and your talents as a founder, aren't based around text and them or based around visuals. It may be something that helps you consider which platform you want to use in regards to your marketing tactics. So keep that in mind. Now, one thing that I did want to do is to share a couple of examples of brands out there that have used their brand voice in an effective way and ultimately create a ton of engagement. Now, the first is Oreo Super Bowl tweet. During the 2013 Super Bowl, there was a blackout in the stadium, and Oreo capitalized on the moment by tweeting Power Out, no problem. You can still dunk in the dark. The tweet went viral. I got a ton of attention, and whoever sent that tweet deserves a promotion. Next, we've got Wendy's roasts, which if you've never read Wendy's roasts, they're pretty funny. Basically, Wendy is known for its witty and humorous responses on Twitter. They engage with their followers by delivering clever comebacks and engaging in friendly banter. I think, basically Wendy's has hired a comedian or someone who's just extremely funny to just tweet people all I don't know, that sounds like the best job in the world. If you're into Twitter. If not, then obviously it's the worst. And on the other hand, we have Denny's weird tweets. Now, Denny's, the restaurant chain is famous for its quirky and sometimes bizarre tweets. Their unusual and often humorous posts have gathered a significant following and engagement from Twitter users who appreciate their unique brand voice and the unique perspective that they have on the world. So we all know that Twitter can be really impactful when it comes to obviously growing or following or, you know, getting any form of engagement, but you do need to approach it in a very specific way, and you do need to be on the post with things. Now, in regards to cost, I'm going to score this at ten because you literally can just set up an account in 2 seconds and just start tweeting from the second it's set up. And because it's so quick to set up, I'm going to score it as a nine for energy to set up because it literally takes no effort whatsoever. All you have to do is just add a profile picture, add a bio, and you're good to go. Now, for energy to maintain, I'm going to score it as a zero. And the reason I'm going to do that is because have to be on the post with everything all the time. For example, Oreo would have never got that viral post if you hadn't been watching the Super Bowl. If the person who had actually been in charge of the Oreo Twitter profile at that time was not watching the Super Bowl, which I know is a huge thing in America, so everyone watches it, that viral tweet would never have happened. So you need to be on the post at all times. And if you see an opportunity to actually post something which could potentially, spark some sort of interest or engagement, then you need to take advantage of it. And you also need kind of constantly be walking that fine line between trying to get engagement, but also not being polarizing enough to actually cause, a little bit of chaos. Now, in regards to the ROI, if you can really get things right with Twitter, I'm going to score it as an eight because if you can communicate really well and you can provide value, you can be on the post with things, or you're just naturally good at Twitter could be a really great platform for you and your brand. Just make sure that you get your brand voice right first. Just understand that it does take a little bit of time to get that right, and all the time, you will start to become fluent, almost. It is kind of like learning a language, right? You are trying to learn how to communicate in a certain way in a way that is not natural to your mother tongue. So please keep that in mind, and I hope you find this lesson helpful, and I look forward to seeing you in the next. 30. Linkedin: So how can you use LinkedIN to promote your brand and gain awareness through your business? Well, I suppose it all starts with, again, understanding your target audience. Are they actually spending time on the LinkedIn platform? And if so, why are they spending time on the LinkedIn platform? For example, if you're selling a service or some sort of product which can help someone find a job or further their career, then LinkedIn could be the best option for you. It could be a fantastic option. But if you're selling I don't know, yoga pants, it may not be the best option. Now, LinkedIn is a platform which has a reputation for being a little bit more professional. You know, that's what the original purpose of LinkedIn was to connect one professional with another professional and ultimately develop your network and further your career. And to be fair, LinkedIn has always been used to, you know, find new jobs and find new opportunities in that particular space, especially when you're talking about, you know, leveling up in your career and connecting with people who could potentially get you a new position, it is becoming a lot more personal now. People are sharing more family related content. People are posting, you know, more personal content, but it's all still with the main objective of being seen as this polished professional that can provide value to an organization or to the world. So I do think that you still need to be very conscious of the types of people that are using LinkedIn, but not only that, but also the types of people that are using it for the reason that they're using it for. Now, one of the great things about LinkedIn is the fact that people who use LinkedIn in general will probably have a lot more disposable income than someone who uses Instagram, for example. This is simply just because they're more career oriented, so it doesn't mean that they're rich by any stretch of the imagination, but it just means that they are probably a little bit more financially savvy and they generally have more money lying around. Now, another great thing about LinkedIn is the fact that it is very much focused on a type of person that is using the platform for a very specific thing. So for example, if someone goes to YouTube, they could be searching for anything, right? They could be searching for how to clip their toenails or how to find a job. With LinkedIn, you know that people are on the platform for a reason which is connected to in some way, shape, or form to their career and progressing in their career. Now, LinkedIn does offer paid advertising at this point, and you can advertise, you know, your posts and boost them, et cetera, like you can on pretty much every other platform, to be honest. Within LinkedIn, again, you do know the type of person that's going to be seeing that particular post. So it is going to be worth it if your product or service is very much geared towards that particular type of person, the mindset that they're in when they're actually, you know, dedicating time and effort to the LinkedIn platform. Now, a couple of negatives of using LinkedIn is one, people generally don't use it very often. People are on their every now and again to ultimately check up on things. It's not really a platform that you go onto for entertainment. Now, another thing which is a little bit of a negative in regards to LinkedIn is the fact that organic reach, again, because it's a very mature platform, there's tons of posts out there, it can be difficult to get organic reach. And then you do need to take into consideration the fact that LinkedIn is quite formal, you know? You cannot be too outlandish or, you know, too kind of outside the box. Otherwise, you are going to look like a little bit of an idiot, you know, in some cases, because you do need to kind of read the room. And with the Linked in community, people tend to put on their best face, right? And they tend to be this polished professional that is extremely well rounded and blady blady blah. So just keep that in mind, because you need to be mindful of why people use the platform and the same person that posted a certain way on Instagram or you know, Twitter or Facebook may not post in the same way on LinkedIn, because there are times and places to act a certain way, especially when it comes to social media. So in regards to cost, I'm going to score this as a ten because it literally takes 2 seconds just to make a LinkedIn profile, and it costs absolutely nothing. So in regards to setting up the actual profile, you literally just set up the profile, and it's done for you, so I'm going to score that at nine because maybe you need to take a headshot or add your education or, you know, do another few things to make your actual profile look credible and authentic. But in regards to maintain the actual profile, Amna scors are too because you actually have to add content. You have to be posting all the time to think about new content, which is going to engage with that particular target audience in regards to your product. Keep that in mind as well, because obviously, like most platforms, it is hard to get organic reach, but with LinkedIn specifically, much like Facebook and Instagram, they're more mature platforms, so it is a little bit harder. And lastly, ROI. So how likely are you to get a return on your invested energy and money? Now, to be honest, it all depends on the type of product or service that you're trying to sell. For example, if you're selling like a professional service, logo design or, you know, sales generation, then you can probably sell quite a lot of products on Linktn because people are looking for that sort of thing. However, if you have not got a product which is more catered towards a professional, then you're probably going to struggle, and there are going to be better platforms out there for you to advertise on and actually start posting on and building a following on. I hope you find this lesson helpful. Again, if you have any questions or you need any additional support, please feel free to reach out. I'm more than happy to answer any questions that you have, so I will see you in the next lesson. 31. Pinetrest: In this lesson, we're going to be talking about how Pinterest can boost awareness for a brand or business. So Pinterest is one of the most underutilized platforms, I think, in the social media realm, because it is very visual, and there are a lot of incredible, you know, creators on there that, you know, post some incredible content. I think one of the main benefits of using Pinterest is the fact that you can really get a great following and a lot of attention if you have a great sense of style, and if your business is very much focused around things like fashion, like design. So basically, things that just look really good. Interior design, um, beauty, makeup, those sorts of things work really well on Pinterest because you can actually see the result. You can actually see something really, really obviously, which I think personally is quite empowering, because most businesses, especially ecommerce businesses are very visual, right? They are very kind of easy to sell with the right image and with the right video. And one of the best things about Pinterest is the actual content has no lifespan. Or at least a very long lifespan. So, for example, if you post a really great picture of your dress, for example, and you tag it up properly so that people can actually find it. So when people are putting in the correct search terms for that particular dress that you're trying to sell, you can get in front of the right people that are looking for that particular style, then you can literally be getting targeted website traffic for your product, effortlessly forever, which is actually one of Pinterest's main selling points. It has an incredible search function and algorithm to give you the type of image that you want when you want it. Now, of course, like pretty much every other social media platform, there are some negatives to using Pinterest. For example, to get really high quality and visually appealing images, you do have to put a lot of time and effort to really get them looking great. And also, because it is a very visual platform, Pinterest does have a lot of competition in particular nations like makeup, fashion, interior design, those sorts of things. Now, the difference, as well, between Pinterest and other platforms is Pinterest is a lot less like a community building. It is much more of her, I like that image. Where can I buy that dress? I want that dress now. I go to the website, I buy the dress, I wear the dress, I look great, et cetera, et cetera. It's much less of a conversation, you know, like Twitter and Facebook, where they're more kind of community based and more conversation based. Pinterest is more, I want this, I want to get this. So please keep that in mind because this is going to be a really important aspect of the process of actually managing the account, and it has its pros, but it also has its cons. So in regards to cost, I'm going to score Pinterest as an eight. The reason I say that is I think that it may cost a little bit of money just to kind of set up the actual profile just to get the pictures right. Maybe you have to get some equipment to take the right types of pictures or maybe you can just use your phone. Obviously, it's completely up to you. To get Pinterest looking good, you do need a good camera. So that is the only thing that I would suggest. In regards to energy to setup, you do need a little bit of energy to get things up and running. But once things are actually posted and you actually have content to post, it doesn't really take a great deal of time and energy. So I'm going to score energy to set up as an eight. Now, in regards to maintenance, obviously, you don't need to really engage a lot with your target audience. You don't need to engage a lot with your following. People just follow you to get the pictures or the content that you're actually posting on Pinterest. And as well, if you're trying to just sell a product or, you know, something that someone can buy, like a necklace or, you know, something that really looks good, or maybe makeup, for example, or maybe a tutorial for makeup, you know, you only have to post that once, and as long as that person is searching for something that is similar to what you're actually selling, your image is going to pop up. At some point. The lifespan of the actual content makes me think that in regards to maintenance, you've probably got to look at a score of around seven. Now, in regards to likely ROI, so how much are a return on your time and money invested with Pinterest, I think that ROI is going to be quite high. It's gonna be around about a seven if you're in one of those niches where you can visually sell the thing that you're wanting to sell to someone. But if you are selling a service or something which is not really that visually appealing, then Pinterest maybe isn't going to be the best option for you, and you're going to be probably scoted around a three or four. So, again, I hope this lesson was helpful, and if you need any addition support, please feel free to reach out. I'm always here to help, but I will see you in the next lesson. 32. How to create better content (in half the time): How can you create better quality content in half the time? I know that this title sounds like clickbait, and it sounds unrealistic, but I assure you that the two methods that I'm going to run through with you and the two methods of thinking in regards to creating content that I'm going to share with you in this very video are going to help you achieve just that. Now, obviously, we need to create content if we are looking to actually promote our businesses on social media. It is an essential aspect of the social media development process. How can we create great content in a way that is consistent, but it also allows us to have a life outside of content creation. Now, the first method is actually quite clever, and it was first done, I think, by Gary Vinachuk, if you know who he is, he's a really famous entrepreneur from the US. And he basically set up this system where he would create really long form pieces of content, like, for example, in the modern day, you can see things like podcasts using this exact same approach where they have a long podcast which is like an hour long. And then what they basically do they cut up that podcast, and then ultimately they have little segments of that podcast shared as separate pieces of content. Now, what does that mean? It means that when you are creating content, think about creating the long form piece of content first and then snip it up into smaller bite sized chunks. And now instead of just having one piece of content, you've maybe got nine or ten pieces of content, which can last ten times as long. Now, this approach works best when you are merging two different platforms together or even just using YouTube. So, for example, you would post the long form piece of content on YouTube or, you know, another platform, which is video focused. And then you would take that long form piece of content, make shorter form pieces of content, and then post those short form pieces of content on the likes of YouTube short, which are, you know, up to 60 seconds long. And then you would post it on Instagram and also post it on TikTok. So you're hitting three different platforms whilst not investing any more time in the content development process. Now, again, I still stand by my stance of only focusing on one single platform. If you are passionate about basically hitting the three main platforms out there being YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, then that would be the most efficient way to manage the content creation process. Creating long form pieces of content and then splitting it up into short form and then ultimately sharing it and distributing it across all platforms evenly. Now, please keep in mind that if a piece of content works on Instagram, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to work on TikTok as well. So that is something that you do need to consider when you're looking at posting on three different platforms at the same time. Now, another way that people use that short form content is to actually point back to the long form content, because with short form content, there's only so much of a connection that you can have with the person who's actually speaking, right? But what that's doing is, for example, on YouTube, when people are watching your short form content and they're watching all of it, YouTube will think, Okay, this person likes watching this type of content. Maybe we should promote some of the longer form pieces of content that that short form content is similar to. That basically is going to get you more awareness for your profile on the likes of YouTube, for example, so that you can get your content in front of more people who it is essentially more relevant to. And well, when you're posting content and managing it and creating it and editing it, it's still a lot of work. So the second method that I wanted to share with you was ultimately building a team. Now, how do you actually build a content creation team? Now, what I found is the best way for me personally is to actually find someone who really great to take instruction. They don't have to be the best editor in the world. And then I basically spend my time creating the first type of video for that particular style or that particular purpose, and then I hire them to replicate that for the future. So, for example, with these course videos, I basically create the first video then I send it to my editor who basically replicates the exact same style with the edits, making it feel very natural, adding the same stock videos, adding different titles, making sure that the sounds, effects and everything is all consistent. Basically, I want to show him that this is the style that I want, and then I put rules in place to make sure that that person follows the exact same framework so that I get a consistent result across every single lesson within every single course. Basically what I found was really helpful when I was creating my SOPs for my content creation team, so basically standard operating procedures. I wanted to make sure that everything was very easy to break down. So I would have the first step, okay, edit the footage so that it feels natural and organic. Second, add stock videos that are like this, this, this, this, and this. So, for example, I would say, you know, I need stock videos that is bright and airy, so it's not like, dark and sinister. It needs to be positive. It needs to have people involved in the actual footage itself. So it needs to be, you know, focused around people because people like seeing people. And lastly, it needs to be relevant. So if I'm talking about logo design, don't be posting something about coffee, right? That's kind of a very simple thing that you and I would probably figure out and think is very logical. But the reality is that a lot of editors are just trying to finish the job as soon as possible. So making sure you have very structured rules in place is very important. I know it takes a lot more time to actually develop these operating procedures and really put things in place and really get the training laid out. But even if it takes you three times as much time or even ten times as much time, once you get that document perfect and you have that done and you have the style and the system in place, you always fall to the level of your systems. So as long as your system is high standard, and you can share that with someone, and as long as they watch the videos and learn and train themselves, you're always going to get a consistent result which saves you tons of time over the long term, which is the most important thing. And one more unique method, which I really wanted to share with you in this particular video is when you are posted on social media, you are basically trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work. Now, social media is a process of figuring out what is good and what is bad. When you are actually developing content, look out for the highlights and the moments where it's kind of like a eureka moment where you see, Okay, this type of content works and it gets the awareness and the virality that I want. Once you find that, take that, put it into your ammo, and ultimately start to look at developing more ideas around that particular win because you're ultimately exploring for opportunities to on social media. So look at those videos, take that video, and then ultimately look at unique ways to kind of spin mat and repackage it into a new video going forward. So look at the exact same structure, try to figure out why that particular video did so well, read the comments to see what people liked about the video, you know, look at why that video is so different to other videos or other pieces of content that you've created to get the virality that it did. You know, why did this video do so well, or why did this picture do so well? Take the time to understand and assess why your content is doing well and why it's failing. And if you do that, you're going to be able to get a far better understanding of what content is going to work better in future. Anyway, I really hope this video is helpful, and I hope you're enjoying the course so far. If you need any additional support, please let me know, but I will see you in the next lesson. 33. Why start ups should not use paid ads for awareness: So paid advertising for startups. Where do I start? Now, you may be tempted to invest in boosting a post or paying for advertising at this point in your brand's journey. I just wanted to share my personal opinion with you, and then you can do whatever you feel is right for your business. But this is just my decade of experience through working with thousands of founders, much like you, who have been in the exact same position. And the only reason I'm making this particular lesson in this course is because I've actually made the exact same mistakes that a lot of other founders make. So I just want to make sure that the lessons that I learned through, you know, wasting money and time, through experimenting with paid advertising is used positively to save someone else from losing their money in time. Now, listen, can paid advertising work? 100%. But is it likely to work for you right now, honestly, I don't know. But what I can tell you is that a lot of people and founders and entrepreneurs see videos on the likes of Instagram and TikTok and YouTube or whatever, of other entrepreneurs who have basically spent 10 million in a week on advertising. And obviously, they must be making a profit on that because otherwise, why would they spend 10 million per week? The difference between someone who's spending 10 million a week on advertising and someone who is just starting their branding journey is that they very obviously have product market fit, and they already have the confirmation that their product is wanted by a certain target audience. Unless you have that, unless you actually have people buying your product organically already, you shouldn't be paying for advertising. Because think about it this way. Imagine you have ten grand. You have $10,000 to sell your product or service. If you have all that stock, let's imagine you're ecommerce company. Imagine you have all that stock that you need to shift, and you've got $10,000 in marketing spent to sell it. If you spend all that $10,000, then you're left with absolutely no budget left to sell your products. So you're just left with all this stock, which makes zero sense. Now, I'm just using this ecommerce example because I know that holding stock is not the greatest situation to be in because I've been in it myself many years ago. So with paid advertising, what would you rather do? And what makes the most sense from a logical standpoint? So, firstly, you could spend the advertising and just try and figure it out and get product market fit while spending the $10,000, or you could post organically, find out what works, find out how to connect with your target again, make sure that you have that product market fit right, then once you have it right and you know what works and you've learnt it, then you can start investing your advertising and spend behind those particular efforts. It's a little bit like buying a car for a race. Are you going to take the car for a test drive first before you actually invest in buying the car? Or are you just going to buy the car and just try and race anyway? In business, one thing that I've learned is that you need to test and experiment as much as possible. And the more opportunities that you have to test and to get things right, and to minimize your losses, that is ultimately going to set you up for long term success because a lot of times in business, yes, you have to try and win, but you also need to defend, as well. You also need to defend yourself against losses and basically putting yourself in a situation where you could get to zero. If you get to zero, it's not going to be a good situation. Make sure that you look at advertising as something to amplify what you're already doing, as opposed to something that is going to save you and get you the awareness that is never really going to happen because you don't have the organic and authentic connection with the person that you're trying to sell to yet. Now, another thing which is far more effective when it comes to paying for advertising is to use a remarketing method, which is, ultimately, if you don't know what remarketing is, somebody goes to your website and they spend a certain amount of time on your webpage or on a product page. Now, what you basically do is you install a cookie on that particular page. Now, what that cookie does is, if someone spends a certain amount of time on that product page, when they go back to their social media profiles, and you've probably experienced this when you've been on a web page, for example, on a certain website, and then all of a sudden there are lots of adverts for that particular product from that particular brand over the next couple of days. That is essentially remarketing at its best. And the way that works is maybe you're looking at that product or service online, and then maybe you get distracted. Maybe just before you're about to purchase, you know, your wife or husband says, Oh, can you do the dishes or something? I don't know. This is one of the things that remarketing is great for because it reminds you of the thing that you wanted to buy to start with. And the way that remarketing is usually used, especially on social media, really effectively is, say, for example, if you are looking to buy, I don't know, a course for $500 online, and you're thinking about buying it, but you're not 100% sure. So you say, Okay, I'm going to sleep maybe I'll buy it in the future. I'll just leave it. It's still going to be at the same price. I'll just leave it. Now what they'll do is they'll create an offer to essentially remarket to the person who was originally looking to buy the product. So if that course was $500, for example, but they left the page, they'll then be flooded with advertisements over the next seven days to ultimately have that particular course for 50% off or 70% off, or even, you know, 80% of something crazy to basically get you press the buyer button and get that purchase. Now, the reason that remarketing is super effective and it's actually far more logical to use is because when you are using remarketing, you are not just advertising to a cold audience. You're advertising to someone who already has been on your website. They already know exactly what you offer, and they're actually probably interested in what you actually have to sell them. So it's actually a far smarter way to advertise, and it gets you a better return on your money invested because if you've only got a small marketing budget, you want to make sure you make every penny count. Anyway, I hope you found this video helpful. I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. See you soon. 34. Education & considerations: Okay, so by now, you should have your marketing tactics to gain awareness for your brand or business in place. And now it's time to move on to the next step of the marketing funnel where people are going to be ultimately deciding and becoming educated and considering your product or service as a potential solution to their problem or challenges. So what should we be focusing on when we're selecting the different tactics to help to educate and help to allow the people interested in our product or service to consider us as a potential option? Well, there are two things that the tactics within this particular section should be doing. They should be looking to build trust, and they should be looking to answer all of the questions that that potential customer has. So just like before, we're going to be deep diving into each of the tactics as we go through the course and make sure as well that you fill in this slide in your Bn guidelines to make sure that by the end of the course, you have all of your tactics well organized so you can refer back to them in the future. Now, one of the main differences between this stage of the marketing funnel and the awareness stage is that the awareness stage, generally, in regards to tactics, anyway, requires a lot more upfront effort and maintenance. Whereas, a lot of the tactics that we're going to cover in this section of the marketing funnel are essentially just done and then done really well, and then they just have to be left alone and maybe updated if you really need to in future. So make sure you dig into the marketing tactics that you feel are going to best suit your particular marketing funnel for your brand and business, and I will see you a little bit later on in the next lesson. See you soon. 35. Workshops & webinars: So we all know that webinars, workshops, and consultations can be a fantastic way to build trust with your target audience and potential customers. Now, whether these workshops or consultations are done physically or they're done virtually, it doesn't really matter because you can still provide the same level of value to your potential customers and give them the answers that they need, really fine tune your communications to highlight certain aspects of the conversation, to make sure that they feel encouraged and persuaded make the decision to buy from you. Now, building trust and answering your customers questions needs to be done with authority and authenticity. So by offering and inviting potential customers to attend a webinar or a workshop, for example, you are inviting them into a space where they can discuss or learn about a certain topic that you have expertise in. Now, obviously, this particular tactic works best for certain types of businesses. For example, if you're a service business, like, for example, my branding agency, I offer free consultations to discuss the client's problem with so we can actually discuss potential solutions, and then if they'll like what I have to say, then they'll hire me. However, if you have any e commerce brand, then sitting on a Zoom call and having a conversation with a sales representative may not be the best option. Obviously, in retail, it can sometimes be quite helpful to have somebody that actually has experience and knowledge in regards to the product. Discuss these things with. This is essentially a little bit like a consultation call, right? You are ultimately with that person in person discussing the different products and basically giving your experience and expertise to help them make the best decision. So it's essentially the exact same thing. Now, in regards to webinars and workshops, obviously, for an ecommerce company, this wouldn't make a whole lot of sense unless your product is extremely complicated. So, for example, if it's an extremely complex computer or something else that requires a lot of training to actually use. Now, the question that you should probably be asking yourself if your product is super difficult to use is it actually worth buying? Do you actually think that someone is going to buy something that is super difficult to use that actually requires a training or a workshop to actually purchase it and use it properly. So that's the first thing that you should probably be wondering, and you should maybe fix that before you even start thinking about conducting workshops and webinars. But, for example, if you're looking to sell maybe a course or a program, for example, maybe a health program, then that could be a really great opportunity to create some sort of webinar or workshop where you can ultimately create a really great presentation. Or sort of mini course and then basically host a online webinar or workshop to guide a certain number of people through that particular program, and then basically say, Listen, if you want to really get long lasting results in regards to your health or, you know, any aspect of what you're trying to sell basically, you know, I'd really recommend checking out this program, which, you know, for the people on this webinar for a short period of time, with the discount code, X, you can get 50% off or 60% off or whatever. You know, this approach has been tested, and it's been successful in a lot of situations. So in regards to using it, that is probably going to be the best way to approach things. But obviously, take into consideration the fact that your product or service is obviously going to be very unique in your particular field. Please take this as inspiration and then use it how you feel it will work best for your certain circumstances. Now, a couple of cons and negatives to think about when you're thinking about actually utilizing this particular tactic is that the reach is not going to be organic. You have to actively get people to that particular webinar or workshop or consultation. And sometimes people don't show up, so you could potentially have, you know, 100 people scheduled for a workshop. And then when you actually attend the workshop, only 20 show up. And that happens. That does happen sometimes. Putting things in place that can basically encourage people to show up. So, for example, giving away a free gift or, you know, doing something that is, you know, very desirable for that person, if they stick around till the end of the workshop or if they even attend the workshop, then that's also going to really help to get people to stick around and stay until the end. But another negative to, you know, ultimately consulting, you know, through consultations or workshops or webinars is that people are almost expecting to be sold to. And that can create a really awkward energy in the room, even the virtual room, if you don't know how to manage it right. So make sure that if you are using this approach, make sure that you understand how to sort of manage that energy and make people feel comfortable. They shouldn't ever feel like they're being sold to. They should always feel like they are essentially in a really comfortable place so that if they want to make a decision based on what's best for them, then they are going to be offered that solution, and they're not going to feel any pressure to secure that solution. In a way which feels awkward to them. Another thing which is really important to point out is that creating webinars and workshops can be really time consuming. It's ultimately like creating a course which has to be delivered in real time, so it can be a little bit unnerving if you're the presenter. But another thing which is obviously really important is technical issues. So, for example, we've all been on a Zoom call or Google meet or something where, you know, maybe the mic isn't working or something doesn't work. So make sure that you really stress test every single aspect of a meeting or a webinar or a workshop to make sure that you don't have any technical difficulties and that everything works perfectly. HubSpot and Salesforce are really great at using this particular approach to market their brand. Now, they basically use the webinar and workshop system to basically bring people into their ecosystem so that they can learn more about Salesforce and HubSpot. And then once they have those particular solutions matched to those challenges that they're currently facing as a person, as a customer, then it's pretty much a simple process of just thinking, Okay, this is a solution to my problem. I have a problem. It makes me feel pain on a regular basis. I'm going to take them up on that solution if it makes sense from a financial standpoint. So in conclusion, webinars, workshops, and consultations can be a fantastic option when it comes to marketing your brand. But one thing that you need to take into consideration is the fact that it is quite time consuming. The percentage of people that actually show up to the webinar workshop may not be what you expect, so don't get disheartened. And you also need to be able to present in a really effective way to get your message across. But if that feels like that's something that you can deliver on, then these are the scores that I personally gave this approach. In regards to cost, I would say that it's going to be about an eight. It doesn't really cost a great deal to do a webinar workshop or consultation. It can be done fairly easily through Zoom, which is free, or you can do it via some other platform which can host workshops to a broader audience, which shouldn't cost very much as well. So I would actually score this as an eight in regards to cost. Now, in regards to setup and maintenance, it can be quite time consuming. You obviously have to make sure that everything is set up correctly, so you have to actually set up the funnel to get people to actually book the consultations. You also need to make sure that you actually get people to sign up to the webinar or the workshop, which can be quite time consuming. And then once you actually present the workshop or do the consultation, that actually takes up quite a lot of your time, as well. So you're spending a lot of your personal time actually presenting and trying to sell the product or service. So in regards to energy to set up and maintain, I'm going to score them both at, too, because it is going to take a lot of time and effort. However, when it gets to ROI, when you're connected to a person and you've ultimately been able to be in a real life, real time situation with someone and discuss their problems with them, what challenges they're facing, so how you can help them personally with your particular solutions and systems, then ultimately you should have a pretty good chance of converting them into a customer. So I would probably score the likely ROI, so return on investment of around eight. So if you think that webinars, workshops or consultations is going to be great for your particular business, then feel free to experiment with it. Obviously, make sure that you remember that for ecommerce companies, it doesn't really work as well, so please keep that in mind. But if you're selling a service or something that really requires a lot of kind of discussion and a little bit of training, then it could be the perfect option for you. Anyway, I hope you find this lesson helpful. I look forward to seeing you in the next. 36. Social proof: So how can social proof help to encourage customers to buy from you? So first of all, let's confirm what social proof actually is. Now, social proof can come in many shapes and forms such as testimonials, reviews, you know, places that you've been published, maybe, you know, a magazine writ a story about you, five star reviews on trust pilot, you know, Google reviews. Basically, anywhere where a customer can leave some feedback or some insight in regards to their experience with you personally. Now, something to keep in mind is not all social proof is the same. Now, what I mean by that is, if you look at two different reviews, one of them is on the actual company's website, and one of them is on Trust Pilot or Google, which one of them do you think is more authentic or actually worth more in building trust? Well, we're probably going to see that the one on the third party website is more trustworthy because the people who are actually managing the website could have just put inauthentic reviews on their webpage. This is something to keep in mind because if you have millions of reviews on your actual webpage, yes, it's going to help. Having authentic reviews on the likes of Google and on the likes of Trust Pilot is also going to you don't need as many as long as they are all positive, obviously. Now, there are a few things that you should be thinking about when you're looking to gather social proof for your brand or business. Now, the first thing is to actually gather reviews. Now, I know this sounds stupid, but do not wait for people to give you a review and instead, make sure that you're reaching out and putting in the time of effort to actually build that social credibility because people are not thinking about giving you a review as a priority. Have millions of things to do in their life. So they need to be reminded to give you a review if they think it's actually worthwhile leaving their feedback. Now, you could pest to someone for 20 years and they just would never give you a review because it's just not in their nature. But some people just need a little bit of a nudge. So make sure that you send maybe one or two emails or one or two messages just to say, Listen, I would love to hear your feedback in regards to the product. Let me know if you have any issues or any concerns, but I would love you to leave a review on our profile if you really have the time. Now, once you have these reviews, something that we actually cover in the digital presence course within the five step program, is that the reviews need to be in a prominent place. You need to showcase the reviews after you've emotionally connected with the target audience, after you've actually explained exactly what you can offer, and the reviews should come after that as a trust builder. This is essentially because the person who's actually looking to buy from you is essentially just looking for a little bit of reassurance that what they're about to invest their money and time into is not going to waste their resources. Now, what I usually do is whenever I have a Zoom call with a client is kind of the end of our process when we're working together, is, I'll just ask them, how is it working with us? How did you find the process of, you know, building your brand with us or, you know, building your website? And what generally happens is they'll just, you know, go off on a rant of how great it wants to work with us, what they like, what they didn't like. But it's my responsibility to ask that question and actually probe the client to get that response, so I can then use that recording to ultimately promote my services on my website later. So what are the main benefits of using social proof? Well, you obviously have the trust building aspect, which is going to be huge because if a customer doesn't trust you, they're not going to buy from you. Next is the conversion aspect. So if someone actually trusts you, then they're more likely to buy from you, which is obviously going to significantly increase your conversion rate. And lastly, it actually encourages customer engagement. So for example, I had a client around three years ago who actually gave me some really great feedback in regards to the naming presentation that we were offering our clients throughout the name development process. And this single piece of feedback actually inspired me to redesign our entire naming presentation and process to make it better for future customers. So by getting this feedback, it's not only going to encourage customers to actually give you their honest opinions, but it's also going to help you improve your business and product going forward. Now, obviously, there are some cons or negatives to asking for reviews or social proof. And this could come in the form of negative reviews, which, you know, sometimes happens. Maybe your customer isn't happy and they just don't want to reach out. They just want to cause a little bit of chaos and see the world burn, so to speak. Another is authenticity concerns. So, you know, for example, you could have tons of reviews on your ecommerce website, but they could all just be seen as being manipulated by the actual owner of the website. That could be you, which obviously isn't great, and it doesn't really inspire a lot of trust. And lastly, actually monitoring and managing the reviews. So, for example, if you're getting negative reviews on Google, then you have to actually reply to the negative reviews or even the positive reviews, to be honest, to ultimately answer why that experience was so negative, and maybe someone's just be super awkward and just trying to basically damage your company, you need to handle that and manage it in a really effective way. Now, brands like Amazon and Airbnb use reviews to really boost conversion rates. And ultimately, you are not going to buy a product that has zero reviews over a product which is pretty much identical but has 150 reviews. It just doesn't make any sense. Social proof is a huge factor when we are looking to buy things, when we're looking to ultimately invest our hard earned money into a purchase. And after assessing social proof, I've scored a ten in regards to cost to setup because it doesn't really take a whole lot of money to get on a Zoom call with someone and talk to them and get a review from them. And also, as well, most of the reviews should come from your actual product just being great. So you don't actually have to invest any money in it whatsoever. So in regards to cost, I would score at ten. In regards to setting things up, I would score it at seven. And the reason being is it doesn't take a whole lot of time or effort to set things up to actually get things to a point where you can ask people for reviews. It's just either a simple email or maybe you have to, you know, jump on a quick call with them, which isn't, you know, a huge bother. But the energy to maintain is scored at four. And the reason for that is we need to stay on top of our reviews. We need to make sure we're answering them. If someone leads a negative review, we need to ask them what was wrong and how we can help them in future and basically how we can improve the product. That is something that you do need to consider when you're looking at the types of social proof that you ought to be gathering. But in regards to ROI or return on investment, social proof is by far, one of the best things that you can do for your business. I personally have really invested in getting video reviews of clients, and I manage them on a regular basis to update my website. It helps every single time I add a new testimonial or I update them, or I just do something a little bit different to make them a little bit better. It always helps to boost conversion and get me ultimately far more clients through the door. Anyway, I hope this lesson helped you to understand social proof a little bit better. But if you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out. I'm always here to support you, but I will see you in the next lesson. 37. Effective email marketinga: So how effective is email marketing in the modern day? Well, as it happens, very. And this is because when you look at social media platforms, there's this big romance with having a huge following, but that is only because the following is evident and obvious to the people who are actually viewing your profile. But the reality is, even if you have the biggest social media following, it doesn't mean that those people are willing to buy from you, and it also doesn't mean that you actually own your audience. This is because you could have a YouTube channel, for example, and that could get shut down through the powers of YouTube. Within seconds. However, your email list is completely different. Your email list, you actually own it and nobody can ever take it away from you. But how do you actually get started with email marketing? Well, the first step to successfully achieving objectives in email marketing is to actually build your email list. This can be done through gaining awareness through any of your tactics that we've already discussed in the awareness stage, and then ultimately asking them to subscribe to your email list and maybe give them a free gift or a free PDF or something that they found valuable to incentivize the action. And the next step once you actually start growing your email list is to segment your email list. For example, let's imagine your IC. And you are wanting to build an email list of two different types of audiences. The first are interested in sofas and living rooms, and the second are interested in kitchens. The smart thing to do would be to create some sort of asset or some sort of PDF or tool that would be desirable for those two different types of people. Because ultimately, if you're looking to furnish your kitchen, you're looking at very different pieces of furniture and solutions as opposed to someone who is looking to furnish their living room. And by having those two different types of people within the same email list, but segmented to basically make sure that you have one person that's interested in kitchen separate to the other person that's looking to furnish their living, you can communicate more effectively with the two people in a war which is more relevant to what they are looking to achieve. Now, once you have your email list and it's segmented, the next step is to start delivering quality content. Now, in regards to quality, what I simply mean is valuable content, valuable content that the person can actually use to make their life easier or essentially help them find a solution to a challenge they're currently facing. Obviously, the content that you'll be creating will be relevant to the product or the service that you're selling. So just keep in mind that the more valuable your content is, the more likely your target audience are to trust you. Now, once you've built your email list, once you've segmented them and once you've driven home some quality content, next step is to adjust. Now, this is the same with any tactic when it comes to marketing. You need to measure and adjust as you go. This is the only way to get improvement and to actually understand what's happening and why some things are succeeding and why some other efforts are failing. Ultimately, you want to learn as much as possible to make sure that you understand how to email your target audience better to get them to do what you want them to do. Now, there are a few pros and cons when it comes to email marketing. The first being that you can be super personal with your emails. Email platforms such as Milchm for example, make it super easy to say Dia Scott or Dia John or Dia Sarah or Dia Susan or whatever their name is to basically make it feel a little bit more personal to them. And the next positive of email marketing, if you segmented your audience correctly, is that you can be super targeted with your messaging. Again, going back to the ICA example, if someone's interested in a kitchen, then you know that they're interested in that particular solution. So you can be super helpful and you can be super direct with your communications. And lastly, another great positive when it comes to email marketing is automation. So you essentially can automate absolutely everything and just have emails come and go as you please without even having to lift a finger once you've set everything up. So those are the pros of email marketing, but what are the negatives? What are the potential issues that may pop up? Well, the first con is that a lot of emails from businesses that come to a personal email address end up going into spam. That means they never end up getting red, and they're essentially just ignored and never seen ever. And then the second con is, if it does actually enter your inbox, then it very rarely gets any time unless you are extremely good at building relationships with your customers, which is obviously recommended. Your email is most likely going to get about no 0.2 seconds of their attention before they delete it or archive it. But if you are great at communicating through then the quality of your content is essentially the only other con. It does take a little bit of time to actually create that content to actually send it out and to be well thought through. Brands like Airbnb, Starbucks, and Amazon have all mastered email marketing, and they know the power of it because they know that they actually own their audience. But the secret to email marketing is to nurture the relationship and to ultimately answer all of the questions that your customers may have in an indirect way to essentially make them feel at ease when they are thinking about buying from you. One thing that I will say is never ever, ever spam a customer, it will lead to potential legal issues and also just a very, very unhappy customer overall. Now, in regards to scoring email marketing, after assessing it, I would give it a ten Immigra to cost because it literally costs nothing unless you sign up to something like Mil chim, which cost around 20 to $30 a month. In regards to setup, I give it a seven because it does take a little bit of time to set up, but not too much, right an email can only take so long. In regards to maintaining email marketing, I would give it around a six, simply because it does take a little bit of time to maintain it. But ultimately, once you have your template in place, all you have to do is change some words and some images. And lastly, in regards to return on investment, I will give it a nine, simply because own your audience. You can have a direct correspondence with the person, and as long as you play your cards, you can really nurture potential customers into paying customers fairly easily and quickly. Anyway, I hope this lesson has helped you understand Email marketing just a little bit better, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. 38. Utilising FAQ sections: So how important are FAQ sections? Well, they are probably a lot more important than you think. Well, maybe you're asking, why is that? Well, let me tell you, FAQ sections can reduce the amount of client inquiries that you have or customer inquiries, so it makes your job a lot easier and saves you a ton of time. It makes your website far more trustworthy. And thirdly, it helps with conversion rate. So how can just an FAQ section, just a couple of little questions on a page make this much impact? Well, let me explain something to you. So when you are on a web page and you obviously have experience being on webpages and buying things online, have you ever been in a situation where you've been almost ready to buy something, but you just haven't had the answer to a question, and then you've ended up not buying it because you didn't know this important piece of information? Well, I've certainly had experience. And I know lots of other clients who have not understood the importance of having a quality FAQ section and a well thought through FAQ section on their website, especially their homepage and their product pages, and as soon as they have started to understand the importance of having a well thought through and carefully thought out FAQ section, they have been amazed by the results, and putting an FAQ section in place is not difficult. It can be done by anyone. And in fact, the FAQ section for your business should be done by you. It should be done by the person who knows the business best. And I'm going to explain in a couple of steps how you can do it. So the first step, as I'm sure you're probably aware already, is to note down the most common questions that are often asked for your business. But if you've never been asked a question about your business, that's fine, as well. Simply just think about what you think the most common questions might be in regards to your business, product or service. Next, once you have all the questions listed out, you don't need to answer them just yet, put the questions in importance order. So what I mean by that is, if I'm a customer, which of these questions am I most concerned about? So let me give you an example. My branding agency, Clementine House, when I offer a naming service to a client, they often ask Scott, what if you send the brand names over to me, and I don't like any of them? So if you go to my homepage on my website, this is the first question on our FAQ section. And the reason I put it there is because when you answer the most important question first, it puts the client at ease. Okay, so we know that we need the questions, and then we also need the questions to be organized and prioritized in a nice way. The next step is to answer them in a clear and concise way. So what we basically need to be thinking about when answering these questions clearly is, if I was the customer, what would I need to be told to be reassured? And obviously, this needs to be true. You can't just, you know, make things up and just, you know, pretend that everything is done a certain way and then do it the complete opposite way when it actually comes to the experience. You need to make sure that you're aligned with your FAQ section, but you need to put your customers and clients mind at ease. This is how they're going to have all of their concerns answered in a nice systemized and organized way. Then they're going to be shopping with you and more likely to convert into a paying customer far more easily and effectively. So now you know how to arrange an FAQ section properly and strategically. What are the pros and cons of an FAQ section? Well, as I said before, an FAQ section can save a ton of time and help build an awful lot of trust with your visitors on your website. But also, as well, it's kind of the standard in regards to customer service because imagine you had a retail store when you were selling jewelry, for example, you wouldn't just not have anyone there to answer questions that your customers. Would you? No, you would have someone there to actually talk to the customer and to answer all the most common questions that the customer has so that they can make the best purchasing decision based on their personal needs. Obviously, those are the positives, but what are the negatives of having an FAQ section? Well, the first thing is you may have to update your FAQ section quite a lot in the beginning. Obviously, if you've never had questions asked about your business before, and this could be completely new, and the questions that you have initially may not be the ones that are actually helpful to customers. So it may take a little time to figure out. Also, if you don't answer the questions in the right order, then that could also hinder your ability to build trust with the customer. Now, pretty much every single brand that knows what they're doing like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, every single brand out there basically that is making good money understands the power of having questions answered in a short and concise way that is easy to get to and easy to digest for the customer. And for that reason, I have scored FEQ sections after assessing them as a ten in regards to cost because they literally cost absolutely nothing to set I've also scored them seven in regards to setup because it takes a little bit of time to get things right. But once they have actually been arranged, they don't take a whole lot of time to maintain. So I'm going to score a nine for maintenance, and then I'm also going to score it at ten for return on investment because I know for a fact, through assessing hot Jar data, which is ultimately a system and a software where you can actually track what behavior is happening on your website, that every single customer that ends up buying, well, pretty much 90% of customers that end up buying my services or my products, end up looking at the FAQ section before making a purchase. So I know it works. I know it's really important, so I really advise you to do the same and really think about adding some commonly asked questions to your website just to make your conversion a little bit better. Anyway, I hope this lesson was helpful, and I cannot wait to see you in the next lesson. See you soon. 39. Portfolio & case studies: How important is it for service businesses to actually showcase their projects and case studies? Well, ultimately, it can be the difference between a customer not trusting you and trusting you or client for that matter. And that is because your case studies and your portfolio showcase many things about who you are, what you know, and what you can do for your client. For example, within my branding agency, people always get in touch with me and say, Oh, I really love that brand name, or I really love what you did with that branding project. And this is ultimately the reason why they've got in touch with me and why they want to work with me because they understand that I can achieve a certain goal and have maybe a certain style to how I work, and they want to achieve the exact same feel. So it's really important for you to take some time, especially if you're a service business, to take the work that you've done for previous clients or previous customers and showcase how that particular situation worked for them so that other people who are interested in that same solution can see how it's worked for others so that they can see how it's going to work for them. Now, a really well thought out case studies or portfolio page on your website, for example, is going to be really important in showcasing to your potential clients or customers that you know what you're doing, and also that you can give them the result and help them meet the objectives that they are looking to achieve. Now, there are a few things that you do need to keep in mind when you're actually creating your case studies and projects. And these are simply just to allow you to showcase your best work in the right way. And as I just mentioned, showcasing your best work is the first step. You need to make sure that the first projects that you show in Mgards to your portfolio page or your case studies page is the work that you want to get more of because if I'm seeing the top row of work and it all is focused around tech companies, for example, and I have a tech company, I'm going to be more likely to hire you based on that particular row because I've seen that you can achieve the aesthetic and the result that I over time, time and time again. And now, once I actually click into one of those case studies to learn a little bit more, I want to hear a story. I want to hear what challenges the clients had, how you approach those challenges, and then what the end result was after you actually solved all of those challenges. And I want to see this visually. I want to see this from a visual standpoint to show the process of where you were, what you went through, and where you are now when the project is finished. This is going to showcase a level of expertise and a level of awareness that you understand not only how to get the end results, but you understand how to get their time time again because anybody can get lucky. If you, you know, throw 1 million spears into the sea, you're going to eventually catch a fish, right? If you understand how to wait and how to go through the process and wait for the perfect moment to spear the water, then you're going to catch more fish over time. And this ultimately is the worst analogy I've ever heard in my entire life, but I do want to just drive at home that it is still very relevant. With your process. You need to be able to showcase that you understand the journey and how to get there, not just how to get there, because that's going to give your client more reassurance. It's going to make them feel more at ease to be guided by you and ultimately to, you know, be supported by you through that process, because ultimately, it's going to showcase you as an authority. It's going to showcase the work that you've done. And it is also going to help reduce the friction that a customer is going to feel when they are thinking about hiring you. And not only that, but they're also going to see what's more desirable because we are willing to pay more for a result that is more in line with what we want to achieve. And let's say, for example, we're looking to have a kitchen built within our home, okay? And we've got two teams that are looking to pitch us for the business. One team has the exact aesthetic that we want. They've done multiple kitchens like it in the past, and they ultimately can show us tons of examples and case studies of customers that have wanted the exact same thing as us, and they have done it perfectly. Now, on the other hand, we have the other team who are cheaper, actually significantly cheaper, but they have no evidence of the exact kitchen that we want, and they have no evidence of any work that they've done in the past. Now, tell me which one out of those two teams are you going to choose? Now, let's face it, if it was just a small purchase, then we wouldn't really care that much. It's not really that important. But if it's a big purchase like a kitchen, which is going to be, you know, kind of $10,000 rough at minimum, you are going to have to take time to make that decision. And, you know, I think anyone would rather spend $10,000 on a kitchen that they really love as opposed to $6,000 on a kitchen that may not be ideal for them because a kitchen's going to last a long time. It's going to be part of your family every single day and what you're doing within your house. So it makes sense to make that extra investment, and having more credibility and more case studies and more projects to show is going to help the customer to make that decision easier. Now, there are obviously a few negative points to having case studies and portfolio pages on your website. First is confidentiality. You know, some clients may not want you to post pictures of their homes or maybe pictures of them or videos of them or, you know, even, you know, examples of their projects to show kind of the source behind how their brand was made. In my case, for example, I've definitely had a couple of brands that have mentioned that this shouldn't be done. And obviously, we've had to discuss that before actually working through the project. Another thing is it's super time intensive, like, to actually create a case study takes so much time. It takes so much time. Actually spending the time on developing the page and making the template for the page is kind of the most important thing. But afterwards, to actually populate it, it takes a little bit of time. So that is something that you need to keep in mind as well. Now, companies like Pentagram, who are a design agency are really great at showcasing their work in a really meaningful way. So I would suggest learning as much as possible in regards to how other companies showcase their work in case studies in your particular niche, people who do the same thing as you and companies that do the same thing as you, and then take inspiration from that and basically build your own system, build your own portfolio in case studies page, if you're a service provider or you're offering some sort of business solution. Because if you're selling any commerce product it's not going to be as relevant. Now, in regards to scoring case studies and portfolios for your business and marketing tactics, I would score a ten Imogra to cost because it costs absolutely nothing to set up, and it's absolutely free to do. Now, it does cost emigra to time. So I would score it maybe around five emigra to setup because you need to create a template so that when you're creating portfolio pieces or case studies on your website, you don't have to recreate the page over and over again. You can simply just edit the text and edit the images. In regards to maintenance, I would probably score it as a four, simply because you do need to maintain things over time and maybe change some things or update some things and obviously add new projects as time goes on. Now, in regards to ROI, I would think that case studies and portfolios, at least in my experience, by working with clients and also obviously managing my own businesses, case studies and portfolio pages are one of the most impactful decision making tools when it comes to building a website. So that's why it's scored at ten. It is going to be extremely important to a client actually wanting to work with you. They want to see work that you've done in the past. They want to have the reassurance that you can deliver on your promises, and this ultimately is going to be key to you growing your business. So I hope this lesson was valuable. Thank you so much for your time, and I will see you in the next one. 40. Leveraging product comparisons: So how can comparing your offerings with the same offerings from your competition actually help customers feel more at ease buying from you? Well, product comparisons actually offer a lot of insight for a customer, not to mention showing a great deal of confidence in what you have to offer as a brand, but there are some steps that you do need to take to create an effective price comparison or product comparison table to showcase on your website and within your branded materials. And the first step is to identify key features. Simply means you need to list out the features that are the most important for your target audience and why they are trying to buy your product or service. And the next step is to assess your competition. So for this step, you need to check out how your pricing and your offer compares to the competitors offers and pricing to make sure that you have the best offer overall for your target audience. And lastly, for the third step, you need to make sure you show each piece of information clearly. So this basically means creating some sort of chart or some sort of display or some sort of graphic that showcases how your product offering compares to your competition to make you the most desirable option. Now, what kind of positive impact can having a product comparison table have on your website as a brand or a business? Well, the first thing is transparency. It just shows that you have confidence in your product, and you are more than happy to compare what you have to offer with your competitors office. This leads on to the second pro of building trust. So if the customer can have all the information that they need to make an educated decision right in front of them, then it makes it easier for them to choose you. Now, although there are some pros, there are also some cons to creating product comparison tables. Now the first is the fact that it takes a lot of time to maintain for example, your competition may change their offering after they see your pricing comparison table, and they may actually change their offering to be better or they may actually see your table and create something of their own to actually show that yours is untrue. Not to mention the fact that if you are simply saying that you are better than your competition, you could open yourself up to legal trouble, but this is very uncommon and unlikely. Now, one last con is the fact that if your offering is super complex and there's lots of different moving parts, then it might not be simple enough to actually put into a table, and it may need further context. Now, this type of approach often works for tech companies and other types of companies that offer a digital service or software. And ultimately, you can make your particular product look better than your competitions in a product comparison table if you really know what you're doing, but it can be a little bit unethical sometimes. Nevertheless, we've actually assessed product comparison tables as a tactic. And ultimately, it's absolutely free to do it just takes a little bit of time. So from a cost standpoint, we would score it at ten. However, in regards to energy to actually set up the product comparison table, we'd score it at two, simply because it takes a lot of time to research and then pull together. However, in regards to energy to maintain, this product comparison table will last the test of time. So we'll score it in eight because it's not going to take a huge lot of energy to maintain. And in regards to ROI, we would score it in eight simply because it is going to help the customer to make far more educated decisions, far easier, and ultimately, it's going to help you to increase your conversion rate, which is always a good thing. Anyway, as you can see, comparing your product or service with others in the market, can be extremely useful. So please feel free to experiment. And obviously, if you have any further questions, please let me know. But thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 41. Tips to increase desirability: How can you increase desirability for your brand or product? Well, in this lesson, we're going to be covering a couple of approaches and things that you can think about to help customers see your product or service and brand as more desirable. Now, desirability is one of the keys to actually getting customers to want what you can sell them. And, you know, sometimes we want things that we don't even need. You know? How many times have we bought something that we've never necessarily essentially needed, but we just felt this feeling inside that we need to exchange that for our hard earned money just because we have a desire for it. Now, one of the ways that you can really increase the amount of desirability around your br is to focus on design. So, for example, we've all been on the Apple website and seen how sleek and beautiful it is. And this all comes down to incredible product photography, beautiful website design, and ultimately the brand actually standing for something that we can connect with emotionally. Now, when all of these things work together, it creates this aura of confidence that we want to be a part of. We want to invest in the products that Apple creates, and we want to ultimately have a part of that br our life. Now, if you're an Android user, I do apologize, but I just really love the Apple brand, and I really feel like it is a great example of how branding can really get desirability right within a customer base to profit as much as possible. And whether you're an Android user or an Apple user, I think that's something that we can all learn from. Now, kind of touching on the emotional connection aspect which I just mentioned, the next way that we can increase desirability is using persuasive messaging. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you completed the first course of our five step brand building program, then you'll have already created your internal messaging for your brand. Ultimately, this is a reason for existing beyond financial gain. So having a brand purpose, having a brand vision statement, having brand values, and ultimately giving customers something to connect with. And when effective copyrighting and internal branding comes together effectively, you can really create some magic, and the amount of desirability that your customers WiFiel actually thinking about buying your product is going to be astronomical. Now, another way that you can increase desirability is to ultimately enhance the user experience or provide more value. Now, everybody wants to buy a product which is innovative and which also makes our life easier or better. I mean, that's literally how the human race became so dominant because we could actually develop tools to make our life easier, such as the bicycle, phones, and lots of other lovely stuff. Now, in regards to pros and cons of actually increasing desirability for your brand one of the biggest is customer attention. So we can actually attract more customers because more of them actually desire what we have to sell them. And then on top of that, another thing is customer retention. So once they actually buy from us, they will want to buy more of what we have to offer, so we can extend our product range and make more profit as we've already acquired the customer, and they already trust us. And lastly, because we're more desirable, we have a competitive edge. And whenever we offer something to the market, and there were competitors out there who were just less desirable because maybe they haven't worked on their internal branding and they just maybe aren't as cool or aren't as stylish, for example, and they haven't worked on their design, customers are always going to be willing to pay a little bit more to choose the brand that they see as being the best option for them personally. Now, obviously, one of the cons is subjectivity. You know, we can't please everyone, and we shouldn't try to please everyone. As I mentioned earlier on in the course, we should always be looking to appeal to a very narrow segment of the target audience. And another con which we do need to think about is design cost, for example, you know, if we've built a product and the product is finished in our eyes, and then we ultimately are told that it isn't desirable do we really start from scratch and redesign it all again? That is something that obviously you have to take as a decision and decide if it's worth it or not. And another thing is high expectations. For example, if I took these Apple headphones and when I look at them, I think they look beautiful. But when I actually wear them, they don't actually work, that is going to be a huge problem. You know, I won't see them in the same light. And although I see them as being, you know, a little piece of art that I love using and wearing every single day, if they don't fulfill the purpose to the expectations that I had then, well, I really like them anymore. Now, companies like Nike, Apple, and Tesla really get the aspect of design and really setting the bar high in regards to, you know, making sure that their products and their brands are seen as desirable. And they do this in lots of different ways. Like, for example, Nike will have lots of athletes wearing their products to basically make sure that you see that product on someone who you actually desire to be like, which is actually a very common method, and that's been used since, you know, Michael Jordan was first sponsored by Nike, a long, long time ago. But even just from a standard standpoint, you want to make sure that your products and brand are seen as desirable at all times. And that just means that you need to put a little bit of time and effort into how your brand is presented. So in regards to actually scoring this particular approach and tactic for your marketing, we've scored it a three in regards to cost. This is because if you need to change the design of your product, for example, or you need to invest in a new website, can cost quite a bit to get it right, especially product photography, for example, which is super high quality. You really need to make sure that you invest in quality product photography and getting all aspects of your branding and presentation right to make sure that your customers see your product or brand as desirable. Now, this can obviously take a lot of time and effort to set up. So I've scored three in regards to energy to set up because getting everything right, if you have no experience in actually making a brand desirable, if you don't, then obviously, work with a professional and they'll be able to help you. I'm even more than happy to support you if you really want me to, so just reach out but this is super important to getting everything right and putting in that energy and that effort in the early days to actually get things all perfect will pay off massively in the long run. Now, in regards to energy to maintain, we've actually scored this as a seven. The reason being is, I think that once you have all of your communications right and everything looks good and everything looks desirable, and you have your product in design writing as well, it's going to be really easy just to kind of let that go on autopilot, and maybe you need tweak a few things, change a few details over time, but ultimately, it's just going to be able to take care of itself. And in regards to likely ROI, so return on investment, we would score it as an eight. The reason being is if your brand is more desirable, you're going to get more sales. It's as simple as that. And, you know, if these headphones, for example, were ugly as hell, I probably wouldn't buy them. I mean, even they were the best headphones in the world. From a sound standpoint, I wouldn't buy them because they'd make me look like an idiot on the street when I'm actually wearing them. So you need to think about everything and to basically see if this particular approach is worthwhile for you. But honestly, I feel like with any business that I've started or worked with, you know, from the past decade, working with startups and medium sized businesses, much like yours if you're actually starting a business, making sure that my product, service, and brand are communicated effectively, a way to actually appeal to the benefits and the features that the target audience needs. So they really desire what I have to sell them. It's really important. So take some time to try and work that out. Let me know if you have any questions, and I will see you in the next lesson. 42. Harnessing the power of Google reviews: How powerful are Google reviews? Well, if you've ever seen a Google Review, you can see that they are extremely authentic. So ultimately, they can be very powerful when trying to persuade a customer to buy from you. Now, before you actually start collecting Google reviews, you need to submit your business on Google. And you can do this really easily by simply going to Google and typing Google business profile and setting up your business on there. They'll ask you a couple of questions, ask you to upload some images and some other information in regards to your business, and then they'll send you out a letter where you can basically just type in the code which you receive in the post just to submit your business and make sure it's all authentic, and then you will be officially listed on Google for people to find. Now, once you're actually listed on Google, you then have to try and encourage positive reviews. So you can even reach out to family or friends and pass customers, obviously, can leave positive reviews and who can actually start the ball rolling in regards to listing and building your credibility on Google. Now, obviously, when you start getting reviews, you need to respond to them. So the next step is to actually make sure that you put some sort of system in place. Maybe you check once a week on a Friday or something before the weekend. Ultimately, make sure that you respond to every single review that is left your business profile on Google. And then, obviously, as well, if you ever get any negative reviews, you need to make sure that all of them are attended to and responded to properly and professionally. The reason being is, if you get a negative review on Google and you ultimately don't respond to it, then it kind of just makes you look like you don't really care. However, if you say, you know, something along the lines of, you know, I'm really sorry to hear that you had a bad experience, I'm going to give you our direct email to get everything sort of for you. Obviously, we really care about making sure that you are super happy with, you know, everything that we do for you. So just please contact us here and we'll make sure that everything is rectified. Now, in that type of situation, when you get a negative review, it is sometimes the case that once you actually rectify the situation and talk to the person, you can actually provide a solution and end up getting a positive review as a result. So they actually edit the review and make sure that they actually change it given the fact that you've put in the extra effort to rectify the situation. Now, obviously, there are some incredible pros to building up your reviews on Google. Like, for example, customer trust. People are going to trust you because they know that the reviews are authentic or at least they should be. The second thing is increased visibility in SEO. So for example, when people are Googling your business, if they're putting your brand name correctly, are going to be met with your Google reviews and also your website because they want to link those both together. And also, as well, just from a credibility standpoint, just to see that the business actually exists. And if you have a picture of maybe an office or your building, for example, then you can really drive home the fact that you do exist and you are going to be taking care of your customers. Now, in regards to the cons and the negative aspect of basically having Google My Business profile and having Google reviews, you could run into a situation where your potential competition may leave some negative reviews. Now this is very uncommon, and I don't think this would ever happen, but it is the case that sometimes people use unethical tactics to basically damage your business, which isn't great, but it very rarely happens. So if I was you, I wouldn't really worry about it. Now, another thing is the fact of having negative feedback. You know, if you get negative feedback from a customer who maybe give you the chance to actually rectify the situation and solve things, then that could also damage your business a little bit. But again, that would only happen if the actual experience that was given wasn't a great one. So you just have to make sure that you take care of all your customers, and then everything should be fine. Now, lastly, it can be quite time intensive to check reviews and obviously manage them and respond to them all the time. It shouldn't take too much time, but I just want to get that across because it is very important. Now, the final con is the fact it could be quite time intensive. So for example, if you are constantly checking reviews and making sure that you respond to negative and positive reviews, et cetera, et cetera, can take quite a lot of time. However, in regards to local businesses, restaurants and businesses that you actually have to find on Google Maps, this is an absolute must. And even for companies that are online, having a Google My Business profile just gives you a certain level of credibility and authority, which really helps you to drive more business through your website, too. Now, in regards to costs, I've actually set this up as a ten because it is absolutely free to do. You don't have to pay anything to get on Google My Business. In regards to setup, it does take a little bit of time to set up, so I'm going to score it as a seven because you do need to invest a little bit of time to really get the profile set up, get the ball rolling, upload everything. But then once it's actually maintaining it doesn't take a lot of time. I'm going to score that as an eight, simply because you're going to be checking the reviews every week, maybe on a Friday, for example, just to make sure you answer any reviews back. And then in regards to ROI, you know, if we have the authority and credibility and, you know, tons of Google reviews, it is going to be super valuable to getting people on our website that actually trust us before they've even landed on our homepage. As long as our homepage does its job, they're going to trust us, and they're going to be shopping with peace of mind because they know they're going to be taken care of. Now, obviously, there are going to be tons of customers searching for you on Google. So maybe you need to consider this as part of your marketing funnel, but I hope you found this lesson valuable, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. See you soon. 43. Sales & Conversion: So if you haven't already guessed by now, every single marketing effort that we are investing in is trying to lead to a sale. Now, the reality is that a lot of founders and entrepreneurs just post a couple of times on social media and don't know why people are not going to their website to convert. And the reason being is they just haven't did it enough times, and they don't structured strategy that we've been covering in this course to actually guide customers through their marketing funnel to eventually buying from them. Now, hopefully, you can see now how having a structured and well thought out marketing funnel is so much better than just setting up a Daf website and then posting a couple of pictures on Instagram. And that's why by following this course and actually thinking about the structure of your marketing funnel and how you can actually guide customers and nurture them through that process, you're going to put yourself ahead of 99.9% of other small and medium sized businesses out there. Now, the marketing efforts and tactics that we're just about to go through are all focused around sales activation and getting the sale. That's all it's focused on. We've done all the hard work. We've got the awareness. We've educated our customers, and now we need to sell to them. Now, one thing that I do want to say, and please keep this in mind, these methods and tactics are extremely powerful. So please use them with care and please use them ethically. And also, make sure you use them in moderation. Make sure you use them properly, because if you just start throwing tons of discounts at customers, then ultimately, you're just going to be seen as a desperate brand, and there's not going to be much desire to actually buy from you, apart from just getting a great deal at a cheap price. So try and think about this stage of the marketing funnel as you've been dating someone for a little while you're just waiting for the right moment to ask them to be your boyfriend or girlfriend. You've built up enough trust and you know that you're the right fit for each other, but you're just looking for the perfect opportunity. So at this stage, it's really important just to keep the ship steady and to slowly move towards commitment. It's always good to show that you're attentive and caring and you mean well, don't go whipping out a wedding ring because that's going to spoil everything. So just like before, make sure you choose 1-3 of the tactics that we're about to go through. And obviously, you can experiment and swap and change them if you really want to. But once you decide on the tactics which are best for your personal situation, Make sure you're filling your brand guidelines. As I've mentioned before, you should be working through that as you progress through the course. And by the end of the course, you're going to have a fully fleshed out marketing plan that is going to be effective and that you, most importantly, are going to be confident in. Anyway, I cannot wait to start the section, so I will see you in the next lesson. 44. Psychological tricks to convert customers into buying: So if you're a founder or entrepreneur and you're wanting to get more seals for your business, there are some psychological tricks and triggers that you can use to convert website traffic into seals. And these tactics do not even apply just to websites. They apply to retail and in person conversions as well. But first, we need to ask the question of why using psychological tricks and hacks actually matters when it comes to convert potential customers into paying customers. Well, the reason is that as we are making purchasing decisions, our brains are ultimately trying to weigh up which option is best for us. And by doing that, we are ultimately trying to find the best option that suits our personal needs and requirements. Now, the reality is that most brands and their offerings are pretty even. So, for example, the headphones that I have here, which I've mentioned a few times in this course already, do pretty much the exact same thing as every other headphone out there. But the difference is the Apple brand is more desirable, and they use certain tricks and triggers and hacks to make me think that it's worth it paying an extra 200 to $300 for these headphones, as opposed to every other headphone on the market, which is considerably less. So let's break down some of the most common psychological tricks that you can use for your business so that you can move forward and get more sales in future. So the first psychological trick that a lot of brands use is scarcity. For example, the next time you go into a premium bakery and there's lots of lovely cakes out and you can see everything that you can potentially buy, do you know why they don't show all of their products immediately, and there's only one of each cake out there for you to see? The reason they do that is to make you think subconsciously that that is the last cake available. Therefore, they have the element of scarcity working in their favor to persuade you to buy the cake that you want. Now, obviously, you could just buy that cake anywhere, but it is best to have as much advantage as possible when you are in the stage of converting customers into paying customers, because ultimately, the more sales you get, the better. Now, the scarcity tactic also works online. For example, if you've ever been on a website and it says there are only two of this particular item left in stock, even though they could have plenty of that product available, still use that at their advantage because it entices you to actually press the button to buy the product just in case it sells out. Now, one thing to keep in mind is when we are actually being affected by these psychological triggers, and I'm going to go through a few more in this particular lesson, we are being manipulated subconsciously. It isn't something that we are logically thinking. It's something that we feel inside, we feel like we're going to miss out. Therefore, we want to purchase the product because we want it anyway, but we're just enticed to make that leap a little bit more. Now the next psychological trigger is reciprocity. Now, if you don't know what that is, it's essentially when you give someone something and they naturally feel inclined to give something back in return. Now, this type of technique is used very commonly in restaurants, for example, when a waitress or a waiter serves the bill at the end of a meal, they'll leave some chocolates or some mince or some little present to essentially make you feel good after eating your dinner or lunch. Now, what this does and this has actually been proven by studies, is it increases the likelihood that you will leave a better tip for the waiter or waitress. And this type of technique can be used anywhere. If we feel like someone has given us something, then we feel inclined to give something back in return. And lastly, we have four more. So the fear of missing out is ultimately something along the lines of maybe putting a launch with a timer. So, for example, you have 12 hours to actually secure this offer before it's gone forever. That would be the fear of missing out in play and what this does, and it's kind of similar to scarcity, but scarcity is more kind of the limited stock and the lack of units as opposed to actually the fear of missing out, but they are kind of intertwined and they are quite similar. Now, each of these approaches can be extremely useful in just nudging the customer in the right direction and getting them to ultimately buy your product or service. Now, they could have bought it anyway, but just having that extra little push is sometimes all you need to get more sales through the door. Now, obviously, there are pros and cons to using psychological tricks when you are ultimately trying to increase your conversion rate. And one of those is increased conversion rate. You can get more sales through using things like scarcity and four MO to encourage customers to buy from you. And that obviously gives you a competitive edge, which is another pro. You can have the ability to actually motivate people to buy from you as opposed to buying from your competition. However, on the other hand, you do have some cons of using psychological tricks and triggers because if someone actually understands what you're doing, then it could potentially be seen as unethical. For example, when I see a sales page which has a timer, which automatically changes every single time I revisit the page. So, for example, I'll refresh the page, and the time will go back to the exact time it started with the previous time just because there's no actual offer there. It's never, ever going to run out. It's just there to try and trick me. And that does leave a slightly bitter taste in my mouth because I don't want to buy from a company that's been unethical. So basically, if you are going to do any sort of promotion or any sort of, you know, offer like this, you need to make sure that you actually arrange the offer as you present it. You can't do anything unethical or anything unlawful for that matter. Now, another con is overuse. So if you again, just, like, do the same thing over and over again, your customers or potential customers, if they don't buy from you, is ultimately going to become numb to it. They're going to see it as just being, you know, another offer by X or, you know, they're doing it again. You know, I know that this exact same thing is going to happen in a month's time. So why would I buy now I can just buy next month, or maybe I just won't buy at all because you are cheapening the brand by constantly giving discounts or constantly saying there's only one piece left. Doesn't really have the same impact when you do it all the time. Now let's look at some real life examples of other brands that actually use these little psychological tricks to their own advantage. Amazon, for example, sometimes shows that there are a limited number of pieces or units available to entice you to buy. They also use social proof, which we discussed a little bit early on in the course to showcase reviews to give you more peace of mind when buying. Booking.com also uses this approach. They say that there's only one room left within this hotel. And although it's pretty much said that every single time I've tried to book a hotel room on booking.com, it gets me every single time, and it just helps me to make the order and Presto, I've got a better sleep in. Now, tons of websites out there use the reciprocity approach to essentially get you to buy their products or even just leave your email. They'll offer you a free PDF or they'll give you something for free, just to make you feel good about the actual brand or what you're trying to offer. And then you're kind of like, Okay, you can take my email because you've been nice and you've obviously given me that valuable PDF. So it's always a player, no matter what type of business you're doing, whether it's services, whether it's a product, you're always getting hit with these psychological tricks and triggers. So watch out for them and also make sure you use them in your own business. So in regards to assessing psychological triggers and tricks, we've marked this as a ten in regards to cost because it doesn't cost anything to ultimately set these things up. They're just psychological triggers and just clever ways of marketing. In regards to energy to set up, we've marked it as a nine because it doesn't actually take that long to do and to actually set it up, it's all pretty standard. So as soon as you actually understand the concepts, which you should buy now, and obviously, there are plenty more psychological triggers out there and tricks that you can use. But these are kind of the main three that are used most commonly in business, can actually get them set up pretty easily. It's just a case of applying them to your website or wherever you're actually selling your product or service. And then in regards to maintenance, you don't actually have to do anything afterwards. It's literally just a case of set up and go. So in regards to maintenance, I would actually score it as an eight. And then in regards to the ROY, to be honest, as well, that is pretty much a ten. You are always going to get a decent result, especially considering the fact that you don't have to invest any money. You don't have to invest much time or maintenance to actually get these things up and running. And they are super powerful. So anyway, I hope you can find ways to implement psychological tricks and triggers into your marketing tactics. But anyway, I hope you find this lesson valuable, and I will see you in the next one. 45. Building a list of customers ready-to-buy: Okay, so building an email list of people and customers ready to buy your product or service. So how can you actually build this list of people who are already pre qualified and actually want to buy the thing that you are launching very soon? Well, let's explore a tactic that I have personally seen work extremely well for both myself and also for clients that I've worked with over the past decade. Now, ideally, before you actually launch your product or service, you should have some form audience or following to begin with. But if you don't, do not worry, you may just have to invest a little bit in regards to paid advertising if you actually need to start driving traffic to your landing page because otherwise, you're not going to have any way to actually get your audience to the landing page in the first place. So you basically have two options. You have to generate awareness somehow. So you either take the time, first and foremost to actually build an audience before you actually launch your product or if you don't have the time to do that, and probably it's going to take around, you know, four to six months to actually get a good standing of customers to actually get ready to buy your product. Now, if you don't have that time, then you can always do paid advertising, which just accelerated the process. It doesn't have as much trust involved. It is essentially more of a transaction because they don't know who you are. They haven't spent much time with you, but you essentially are sending them to the landing page that we'll talk about a little bit later via paid advertising. Now, on average, I've seen clients pay anything from $0.15 to $5, depending on obviously the types of products that they're selling. Person signing up to that pre qualified list. Obviously, it depends on how great your offer is, how great your product is, and how desirable it is based on obviously what industry you're in and what your customer actually needs your product for. Now, obviously, if you're going to be driving traffic somewhere, you need somewhere for it to land. So that ultimately means a landing page. Now, within your landing page, you essentially need to have a sign up box which starts to obviously gather the emails and ultimately puts them into a funnel to allow you to actually send out automated emails leading up to the launch of the product. Now, one little trick that I did learn from working with the clients around three years ago, is to actually get the person, the customer to donate or pay $1 or one pound or just a really small amount to actually invest in and secure their product at a really great reduced price. The reason that this works is that you are actually getting some form of commitment, even though it's just a small one from the customer to state that they actually really want the product or service. And I remember reading a study a little while ago that if you get even a small payment from a customer, it significantly increases the amount of likelihood that they are actually going to buy the product when it actually launches as opposed to someone who hasn't paid any even though it's just $1 or one pound or, you know, whatever it is, wherever you are in the world, it makes all the difference when it comes to getting that bigger commitment later on. Now, obviously, as you're leading up to the launch, you need to start posting things relevant to the actual launch itself to whet the appetite of the people who have actually invested in, you know, pre ordering your particular product or service. And also making sure that you gain interest from others that are also going to be interested in what you're launching. Now, another great way to actually get more exposure when you're launching and when you're building your email list is to actually collaborate with people. So, for example, you could work with an influencer or one of the partners from your partnership program, which we've mentioned earlier on in the course in the awareness stage to ultimately get more sign ups, and for every sign up that goes through a specific landing page dedicated to that influencer, they could get a certain amount of the sales that are generated from that particular landing page. So let's say, for example, we had an influencer that we were working with and they were part of our partner program, would give them a dedicated landing page, which is separate to the common one, which was just on our website. And if they send people to that landing page and they get a sign up on that landing page, we could pay them a small commission. Obviously, this isn't the most optimal way to do it, but this is what we could do. But what we actually prefer to do is once they actually sign up, if they buy anything, so if that particular person without those details, buy anything, then we will give them a fraction of that commission afterwards. Let's actually look at the pros and cons of this particular approach. So, first and foremost, you're going to get a much better conversion rate. You are ultimately getting a pre selected list of people, and you're hyping up, you're creating buzz, you're ultimately using scarcity, which we've mentioned a little bit earlier on in the course, basically get as many people as possible ready to buy your product or service. And you could say something like, if you are one of the first 500 people to sign then you get the product at this when everyone else is going to be paying this, which is significantly more. It also gives you the ability to really get targeted with your marketing. So, for example, if someone signed up to this particular email list, you know, for a fact they're interested in what you have to sell. So it's kind of like impossible for you to get your communications wrong. And lastly, as well, one other pro, and it depends on if you are looking to launch your product on maybe Kickstarter or Indigogo or another crowdfunding platform. Most of the products and most of The projects that do really, really well, and I've actually been part of a team which has ultimately worked with tons of projects on Kickstarter and had some really great success. We've also had some successes with our businesses, as well, which I won't talk too much about, but we always look to create an email list of people who have already looked to buy our product or service and are willing to pay upfront for a discounted price. So if they are the first 100 of early birds who ultimately secure the service or product, then they can ultimately get it at a much better price than someone who secures it the next day. So simply by signing up to the email list, you ultimately get a flock of people ready to buy your product, which is obviously what every client and customer wants. So obviously, if you have an email list of people ready to buy your product or service, you can really get that initial gush of wind behind you, and the sales will surely come. Now, obviously, there are some cons to this particular approach as well. For example, when you are getting them to commit to, you paying $1 or a pound, for example, if they're not 100% committed to buying, then they probably won't sign up. So you might get less initial sign ups at first. What you shouldn't do is you shouldn't focus on getting more sign ups, but you should look at getting more qualified sign ups. I think that's the most important thing. And ultimately, I would rather have a list of 100 people that have paid $1 for a product, as opposed to 1,000 people that just haven't paid anything because that's going to actually get you a far better conversion rate overall. And I would argue that, you know, maybe 70% of those people who've actually paid something will convert, whereas out of those 1,000, you'd be lucky if maybe, I don't know, 3% converted. Now, brands like Tesla and Apple, for example, always use email sign ups and ultimately create a lot of buzz around their product launches just to get people through the door. And obviously, when you've seen Apple launches, you always see tons of people outside the front of Apple stores around the world, ready to spend stupid amount of money on a product that they don't even need because their previous iPhone works just fine. And Tesla also used this approach when they launched a new car, for example, and they actually used a referral system, I think, where you could only refer another friend who was also interested in Tesla. So basically, they're just grouping people who are interested in cars that use sustainable energy to basically market themselves, which is really, really clever. Now, in regards to cost, I've scored this as a nine simply because it doesn't take a huge amount of money to actually get this type of thing set up, and it's actually really useful. In regards to setting things up, I've actually scored this as a three. It doesn't cost a lot of money, but it can cost a little bit of time just to basically get the landing page set up to actually start to, you know, create the content to actually drive people to that landing page. The cost may be a little bit higher if you actually need to pay for advertising. So obviously, that is something that you need to consider. Now, once everything is set up, and you have your automated emails ready to be sent to your email list as you launch, maintenance isn't really an issue. So I'm going to score this as a nine because you don't really need to do anything, and it's pretty self reliant once you actually have everything in place. Now, in regards to ROI, this is going to be super important to getting the best momentum behind you as a brand as you start to drive sales through your website or even in store. If you look at two stores who are selling the exact same thing, and one is absolutely packed with customers wanting to buy your product, and the other is completely empty or maybe it has one, you know, poor little grandma trying to buy a cream cake or something. I don't know. This is going to be astronomical to actually getting the sales that you need. So I'm going to score nine in regards to ROI because I think this is really important to gather momentum and get you off on the right foot. Now, I hope you found everything in this lesson valuable. Please reach out if you have any questions. I'm always here to help and support, as always, but I will see you in the next lesson. 46. Creating an irresistible offer: So what is an irresistible offer? Well, having an irresistible offer is the secret source to ultimately making customers feel stupid, saying no. It should make it so simple and easy for the customer to say yes that they always end up converting into paying customers in the end over the long run. Now, this is actually from Alex Homose' book, The Million dollar Offer, which is an incredible read. You should definitely pick it up if you're looking to start a business if you already have a business, or basically if you're just a human breathing oxygen, and you want to ultimately learn how to sell something to someone. There are some really important steps to actually helping you to create an offer which is irresistible to your target audience. And ultimately, that all starts with actually defining your market's desire. So you really need to understand your target audience fully. And obviously, we've already discussed this, and hopefully you fill that section in within your brand guidelines, I hope. So if you've already done that, then simply just look at it and figure out what it is that this actual person that you're trying to appeal to desires most when it comes to your product or service. For example, if it is someone who's looking to buy yoga pants, are they looking for but to look great? Are they looking for their legs to look great? Are they looking for something that's more comfortable or more sexy? Like, what are they looking for? What is the purpose for that particular person in regards to buying that particular product? Now, once you have that, you want to basically make sure that you provide enough value to make it stupid for the person who's wanting to buy that particular product or service to say no. You want to focus and talk about all of the things that they are going to benefit from actually using the product in the future, and that the amount that they're paying for the product or service isn't just for the product or service itself, it's for the long term benefits of what they're going to gain when they actually use the product or service over the long term. Now, one thing that you can use to really increase the value proposition of what you're offering is to include bonuses and guarantees. So for example, if you're selling yoga pants, again, I just keep using yoga pants for some reason because it's just easier to understand for everybody. Then you could potentially have a three year warranty. You know, the quality of this product is so good that will No, let's just not do three year warranty. Let's do a lifetime warranty. So if you buy these yoga pants, we will either replace them or repair them if any of the stitching comes away or if anything is done at all to make them less desirable. You will ultimately get a free pair as a replacement, or you will get them repaired. How about that? When you talk like that to a customer, one, it feels like you have a lot of confidence in the product, which you should do if you're having a lifetime guarantee with the product. But, secondly, they're not just buying a pair of yoga pants, which is going to break in, you know, one or two years, if you've got a lifetime guarantee, you're buying a pair of yoga pants for life. Obviously, if the business goes out of business, then you won't have anyone to actually repel the yoga pants. But what they're basically saying is you get this product for life and we'll take care of it with you. That's a really strong message. I'm not saying you should do that. What I'm saying is, it gets the message across, if that makes sense. Now in regards to bonuses, you could add things on. So, for example, if you sell yoga pants, again, I keep using yoga pants. I do not know why I've never even done yoga. You could potentially offer something like a membership to a local gym, for example, so you could partner with the gym in that sense, or you could do something such as a free getaway. So maybe you are, you know, entering into a raffle or a competition to win a retreat somewhere, which could be really cool. Obviously, you can get super creative, but as you're actually offering these things to customers, make sure you're testing your offer because that's going to be super important to actually figuring out what works and what doesn't work. For example, if you're AB testing the yoga pants with either a free getaway for a competition and also for a free month in a local gym, and this one significantly outperforms this one kind of know which one you need to go with next time. So make sure that you test and make sure that you learn as you're developing different offers to see what works and what doesn't work. I also listen to your customers and see what they're talking about, because ultimately, you could have a conversation with a customer who says, I really love these yoga pants, but I don't know where the best places to do yoga where I'm from. If you literally create a list of all of the yoga businesses in their local area, and then you essentially say, Oh, these are a list of the top yoga studios in your particular area. We actually have partnerships with them. We can actually refer you to them and actually get you a discount on your first three months. You could even get a commission from that place to refer them to that place, and that place gets a new student. You get a little bit of commission. You sell the yoga pants. They think you're great. Everyone's a winner. Now, one thing that works really well when crafting amazing offers is ultimately scarcity and urgency. Now, we've already discussed this in the psychological tricks section of this course, but it is a very important tactic to use if you're looking to drive sales, but you have to do it ethically. For example, do not see or it's urgent that you get these yoga pants now because next week, they're going to be double the price, and then next week, they come to the website and they are the exact same price. You know, the next time you see that something is going to be urgent, it's not really going to carry that much weight. Now, some of the pros of having an irresistible offer is you get more customers, you get a high conversion rate, and you manage to grow faster. However, obviously, all pros have cons. So if you are looking to develop a really irresistible offer, you may get people that think it's too good to be true. You may get expectations from people that are just, you know, extraordinary, and you just can't meet them. You just cannot meet the client's expectation because you've offered too much, so you need to be really careful. And also, if you've got lots of customers, you need to manage them all, which is in some businesses, really easy, but in some businesses, it's not so easy. Now, Amazon Prime is a prime example, pardon the pun. I made that joke up on the spot. Thank you very much. I'm here all week. It's a great example of an offer which is pretty much irresistible because you're going to pay $4, maybe even $7 or even more sometimes for delivery for a product from Amazon. So for them to basically give you free delivery for all prime products, plus streaming. Plus a ton of other good stuff. It kind of makes sense. Like, you feel stupid not getting it. And the only reason I don't have it is because where I live, they don't have Amazon, and where I live, I also can't get Amazon Prime. Otherwise I'd have it. So it's kind of that thing of you see the author, and you're like, Yeah, I kind of need that because I'm going to spend pretty much that in postage and packaging every month anyway. So I might as well get all this free stuff anyway. So this makes a lot of sense to me. And then there's other companies like Groupon, for example, which is a company, which I think is based in the UK, but I think they do other stuff worldwide as well, just in different names and under different companies. But they basically sell experiences that are worth like $200 on the company's website or the hotel's website or whatever for like a spa day. But they sell them for $50, which is like, 25% of the price, which is crazy. But because it's group on you feel like it's legit and it is legit. You will get the service that you have bought, but it just makes it kind of brainless to actually purchase, you know? You're getting a $200 thing for $50, and you know it's $200. It just doesn't make any sense, right? So this is what it means to have an irresistible offer. And if you don't have an irresistible offer, then you'll know about it because clients won't buy from you. So in McGrat Irresistible offers, I would give it a cost rating of ten because you don't really need to do anything. You just literally need to give the offer, and that's it, and craft the offer. So it does take a little bit of time to set up, obviously. So I'll give it a four because you need to think about what you can offer, you know, what you can't offer to make sure you don't set expectations that are unrealistic. And in regards to maintenance, you need to test your offer. You need to make sure that you are going through different types of offers over time to see what works best. So I'll give it a six it just going to take a little bit of time. Overall, from an RI standpoint, if you can actually make an offer, which is almost too good to believe, you're going to be in the realms of a ten in regards to ARI, you're going to get some AOI, which is just incredible from a business standpoint, and you'll know when you have your offer right because it'll be irresistible for people to say no, and you'll see the sales flying in. So anyway, I hope you find this lesson valuable. I sure enjoyed recording this video for you because it's one of my favorite aspects of branding and marketing, really getting the offer and the market fit right. So anyway, thank you so much for your time, and I'll see you in the next video. 47. Creating a persuasive sales page: Now creating a persuasive sales page with persuasive copy for your brand can be game changing for any business. Now, there are tons of examples of incredible sales pages out there, and I'm going to actually arrange some videos, I think in the near future to follow this particular video just to give some examples of some incredible sales pages that I personally find really inspiring. Now, ultimately, a sales page is the bridge between your potential customers and your company. You basically need to persuade them to buy the thing that you're offering them, you know, your product, your service, whatever you have to offer them to provide a solution to their problem. Now, there are a few key things that you should do when you are looking to develop a persuasive sales page. And a sales page can be done very quickly and very easily, but you need to know what you're doing. So in this lesson, I want to cover some of the main things that I see that really help a sales page to be effective to actually persuade a customer to buy something. And then I would like to just go over some pros and cons just to give you a little bit of an insight in McGarv you know, what I generally see in regards to what happens when a sales page goes wrong. Now, the first thing that's super important is knowing your audience. I've already mentioned this 1 million times before, but I'll see it one more time. You have to use your target audience slide, which is earlier on in your brand guidelines. You need to use that, and you need to fill that out because if you're doing all of these tactics without actually understanding your customer, you're going to be potentially speaking to no one, and that's not a good thing. Now, the next step once you actually understand who your target audience is, is to write compelling headlines. So in regards to compelling headlines, we always read the headline first before we even consider reading the text below it. So the headlines are super important. Now, headline should be short, snappy and should capture our attention. It should focus on a benefit or something that makes us seem like we would be stupid if we did not read on. And the picture, besides, it should also complement the actual headline. So, for example, if we go on Tesla's website and it has a picture of a car that's going super fast, you probably have a headline on there talking about speed. So they both have to kind of be married and sort of dance with each other. Now, once you have all of your headlines in place, obviously, the rest of the text should flow after that, and it should be in relation to the actual headline. But then you need to make sure that your value proposition is super clear. So make sure that you're talking about the benefits, the features, and make sure that you tell them why they should choose you over your competition. Another tip is to make sure that you have super engaging copy. The text on your sales page is your salesperson, okay? So you want to make sure they are as articulate as possible, that they know the product upside down and sideways, and you are also showcasing your product or service in the best light. So make sure you double check the copy or even hire someone who's a great copywriter to help you. Now, obviously, I've already discussed visuals and media, so make sure that every single image and every single video on your website is great and it looks and feels credible and it's on brand. But then once we have those key things in place, now we can move on to the interesting stuff. So if you remember a little bit earlier in the course, if you actually watch that lesson, social proof is one of the most important aspects to any website, especially a sales page, because we want to actually showcase that the thing that we're selling works or can solve a problem. And the best way to do that is to actually have some sort of social proof to show that it's done the same thing and it's actually helped people with this particular problem, and it's solved it multiple times before, and everyone is happy with it. So once you have your social proof, the next thing that you need to add is a call to action. So every sales page should have at least one call to action. And in fact, you shouldn't have any more than two call to actions. And the only two call to actions that you should have on a persuasive sales page is to buy or to contact us to learn more. Those are literally the only two things that you should have on there, nothing else. Now, it goes without saying that every single sales page should be responsive because most of the customers who actually shop online these days will not use a desktop. They'll use a mobile phone. So we need to make sure that your website looks just as good on desktop as it does on mobile, which is pretty self explanatory anyway, and it's pretty basic, but I just thought I'd mention it. And lastly, scarcity, urgency, and guarantee. So adding these three to your persuasive sales page is going to put the client or customer at rest, and they're going to ultimately feel like the can order with complete peace of mind, that they don't have to worry about you scamming them or running away with their money and never giving them what they expect. You can really drive a lot into your conversion rate and really improve it by simply just adding things like bonuses, guarantees to put, you know, your client's mind at ease and also, obviously, you know, building trust with things like lifetime warranties and, you know, stuff like that. Now obviously, there are a lot of pros and cons to actually following that structure and making sure that each of those elements are in your persuasive sales page. Now, one is obviously the conversion rate. It's going to be significantly better. You're also going to be able to build trust more, and you are also going to be able to grow your company a lot faster. However, there are some cons as well. Like, for example, if you try and overdo it with scarcity or, you know, psychological tricks, then you could be seen as a little bit more scammy and spammy, which obviously isn't nice. And it's also a massive investment to obviously create a sales page which is really effective. You know, you can do it well. But, you know, to get a really great sales page, you really need to invest the time and energy into it. Now, the likes of Apple and Shopify have incredible sales pages. Apple's product pages are literally amazing. Like they're literally probably the best out there on the market at the moment. And also Shopify with their home page, it just gets all the information across in a nice, easy to digest way, and it really helps you to sign up and start your free trial, which is obviously exactly what Shopify wants. Now, in regards to cost, I would say that doing the persuasive sales page, it depends on your experience. So if you've got no experience whatsoever, on any of those things that I've just mentioned, it's probably going to be quite costly. I would say, you know, it probably would cost anywhere between, you know, a couple of hundred dollars to maybe, you know, like, a couple of thousand. You know, I personally sold websites for like five K with a really strong landing page, which, you know, obviously comes with a guarantee of getting conversions and getting a result. But that would ultimately be around anywhere 2-9 in regards to cost. It depends on how much experience you have in regards to landing pages. In regards to time to set up, it does take a little bit of time. It depends if you do it yourself or if you get someone else to do it. But I probably say about four or five. It does take a lot of time, but once you have it set the maintenance isn't that hard. You would probably say it's about a seven in regards to scoring, simply because you can do some testing and adjust things using the hot jar software to see what's doing well and what's not doing well. But overall, in regards to ROI, it has to be a ten, has to be a ten. You get so much benefit from a well designed landing page which is going to sell for you. It's like having an employee as a salesperson. That knows exactly how to talk to customers every single time and converts, like, you know, two or three customers out of ten people that come onto the website, which is, you know, obviously fantastic. So it depends on your product. It depends on your market. It depends on obviously what you're offering, how much you're selling it for, et cetera, et cetera. A well designed, persuasive landing page or sales page is always going to serve you well, trust me. So anyway, I just wanted to say, I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for dedicating so much time to this course, and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 48. Promotions & free shipping: How can we use promotions and free shipping for our brand? Now, Immigrat to promotions, obviously, promotions can be super useful to getting sales through the door. Now, there's a couple of ways that you can actually use promotions in a way which is more effective as opposed to just using discounts all the time. Obviously, we don't want people to think that our brand isn't desirable. So in this lesson, I'm going to go through some different promotion strategies that you can use for your brand, and we can also go through some options Immigran to shipping to allow you to get the best possible result for your business. First, before you actually start offering discounts and promotions, you need to understand your margin. So make sure that the numbers that you have in place for your cost of goods to sell and also how much profit you actually need to actually run and operate your business, which is generally gross profit around 60% to 70%. If you can work on 60 to 70%, 80 if possible, then that would be ideal. Now, in regards to promotions, you can segment your offers and promotions to certain types of customers. So, for example, if you are selling new homes, for example, within a new community, you can offer new buyers so people who have never bought a home before, and this is their first time, a completely different offer to landlords who are looking to basically invest in the properties to rent out to, you know, tenants later on. Now, in regards to promotions, you can also bundle things. So, for example, if you buy two of these items, you can get this one free, or if you, you know, buy this item today, then you get, you know, a free membership pass to XYZ. You need to basically give the customer as much leverage as possible to get them through the door and to actually get them to buy something from you because if a customer comes to your website, they don't end up buying the product or service that they need and they actually want for whatever reason, then you've lost a potential customer, and it's never good to let a customer out the door without buying from you. You should always try your best to at least offer something else, bundle something, you know, offer something on top of that thing, which doesn't cost you a whole lot of money, but it seems to the customer like they're getting a great deal. Now, this kind of leads into cross selling and upselling. So ultimately, what that means is, if you basically sell something on your website, before they're taken to the checkout, you can potentially send them to another page where they're sort something that is similar to the thing that they originally bought, which is obviously, you know, not entirely ethical. It kind of is, but it also isn't because obviously, you've already got one sale. You're basically upselling them to something else. So say, for example, you get a new car and then they'll upsell you to Oh, so you want the rims, right, like the rims on the wheels, right, and the leather interior, you want those as well, right? So they're upselling you. The thing is, as well, with most upsells, if you just upsell it a little bit. So, for example, as a proportion, if the cars $20,000, and then the upsell is like $500, you're kind of looking at them both, and you're like, It's kind of worth it, right? I've already spent $20,000. I might as well get the leather interior and the rims for an extra 500, even though this is actually super profitable, right? This is something that a lot of companies use, and I think that, for startups, especially if you're looking to get the maximum amount of profit out of each and every customer, it's, you know, extremely important to do these types of techniques. Now, another type of promotion which usually works quite well is loyalty programs. So ultimately, if you are, you know, looking to retain a customer over the long term, which is where most of the profit and most of the business should be or coming from, then ultimately you should be looking to create some sort of loyalty program so that if a customer works with you again and again and again, then you ultimately end up providing a discount to that customer to thank them for coming back to you. Now with shipping, you can use something like a minimal order threshold, which basically means that if you order over $50, for example, then you basically get free shipping, which, to be honest people will rather pay for and get an extra product as opposed to pay $11 for shipping, for example. Or you could go like Amazon Prime if someone's going to be ordering stuff from you over and over again, such as a subscription model where basically you get free shipping through subscribing to a membership. Now, obviously, promotions and free shipping can be super, super effective. It costs absolutely nothing to do, so that's a ten. In regards to energy to sell up, it doesn't take a whole lot of setup, so I'll score that as like an eight. And in regards to energy to maintain, that has to be a ten because you don't have to do anything. And in regards to return and investment, that has to be a ten, as well, because promotions and discounts in regards to free shipping always works. So anyway, I hope you find this lesson valuable, and I will see you in the next one. 49. Improving conversion rate (PIPE FRAMEWORK): Now improving your conversion rate is literally the goal of pretty much every single online business with a website. But the reality is that 99% of websites out there are getting conversions, and they have no idea why. And most importantly, they have no idea how to improve it. Now, if you have a website for your business, this particular lesson is going to be a game changer for you. And the first step is to install a little software called Hotjar to your website. Now, don't worry, it's absolutely free. But what Hot Jot does is it simply gives you a screenshot and also an insight in regards to what your customers and visitors are doing on your website. It actually shows you recordings of where their mouse is moving, where they're clicking, what they're clicking most, what they're not clicking. So it gives you an idea as to what can be improved on your website to increase your conversion rate. The simplest way possible. Now, I'm not going to waste any of your time in this course showing you how to install Hart Job, because there are millions of YouTube videos out there for free to show you how to do it. But once you have it installed, give it around a month to actually gather some data so you can actually start to learn from what you see on your website. And what I usually do is at the end of each month, I basically take some time to watch the recordings and basically spot any opportunities to improve my website and the user experience. For example, on my branding agency's website, I've had plenty of times where a certain button hasn't been working, for example, and I've never known about it, and I only spotted it from checking my hot jar data a month later. I was actually seeing clients go to the page and want to book a call with me, but the button wasn't linking up to where I needed it to go. And if I didn't see that within the hot jar data, I could literally have lost out of thousands and thousands of pounds worth of business. Now, that's a really simple example, but there are more subtle examples, too. Like, for example, when I was working with a client and we were reviewing their hot jar data over a period of six months, is the customer was interested in buying their product. But they were just not willing to invest the time in answering the 30 questions quiz that was required before they actually purchased the product. So this company's conversion rate was 0.7 or something around that number. Once we shortened the quiz and made it far simpler for the customer to purchase a product, the conversion rate went to 4.3%. And this method of continuously improving your marketing funnel is what I like to call the pipe method. So it ultimately resembles a pipe with water running through from the top to the bottom. The water coming through the top is the customers that are aware of what you do and what you sell. And the water that comes out at the bottom is essentially customers that have bought from you and who actually have became paying customers. But it's a pipe in between that we really need to care about because we could have all the water in the world coming through a pipe. But if there's tons of holes and there's tons of things wrong with the user experience on the website, for example, or any aspect of the customer journey, it doesn't just have to be digital, then you're not going to be getting the amount of customers that you should be if your pipe was fully patched and ready to go. And you can think of your pipe in two separate parts. The first is education and consideration, and the second is conversion. So, for example, a customer could come through the pipe and become aware of you, and then they come to your website, and there's no reviews. There's no examples of your work. There's no testimonials. That is a huge hole in your pipe where most of the water is going to come out. You know, is it possible that a little droplet actually makes it out to the other side? 100%, you could actually get a customer, even if you have zero reviews and zero projects and zero case studies. But the reality is that 99% of the customers that come to your website are not going to buy from you. So maybe you invest some time in getting some testimonials and video reviews, and you add them to your website. Perfect. Now, that hole in the pipe is patched up, and the water can travel further down the pipe until it gets to conversion. And maybe there's some other holes in the consideration phase that you need to patch up. But that was the most important one. That was the priority, the biggest one that was causing the biggest issues. Now we get to conversion, and maybe they want to buy your product. They want to buy your service. And the same thing happens to you that happened to me. The button doesn't work. And we didn't know about it because, you know, sometimes when you're building a website, stuff like this happens. You now have a massive hole in that pipe where all of the water is escaping. And once you patch that up, yeah, some water is going to still escape because some customers are just not ready to buy. But what I'm trying to say is, if you strategically look to improve using Hotjar within your website so you can actually see where your customers are coming from, what they're doing on your website, what their behavior is, and how you can convert more into paying customers, then the reality is that you can get far more water coming out the other end of that pipe. Now I would seriously suggest that every single person who wants to start a business and actually grow a business, take this approach when it comes to consistently improving their marketing, their website, and every aspect and every touch point of their customers journey. And if we assess this approach in regards to cost, I would give it a ten because it ultimately costs nothing. Hot jar is absolutely free unless you get one of their premium options, which, to be honest, you don't really need for at least the first year. In regards to energy to setup, Hotjar literally takes about 10 minutes to put onto your website. It's literally just copy and pasting a piece of code into the header code of your website, and that probably takes, you know, probably 7 minutes altogether at most. So I would score it at nine. Now, energy to maintain is scored at six. And the only reason I scored it as a six is because it does take a little bit of time every month to check the data and to ultimately note down the different areas of your website and the overall experience that your customers are experiencing to improve it and to make it better. But in regards to ROI, it has to be a. And I'm not saying that because this is my model and my framework, but I'm saying it because for the last decade, I've actually seen this work time and time again. I've used it throughout all of my businesses, and it is ultimately one of the things that I learned, which has, you know, ultimately, you know, made me a great deal more money than I deserve, I think, and also helped me to understand marketing to a certain degree that I think, you know, most people just will never understand it. And the best thing is, you don't need to be a genius to understand marketing. You after installing Hotjar and reviewing a couple of months worth of data, going to be in the same boat. You're going to understand the process and the value of really applying this approach. Anyway, I hope you found this lesson helpful. I hope you find my method and model helpful, so I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 50. Customer retention: Okay, so now you have your awareness, consideration, and sales activation tactics in place. So the last step of your marketing funnel is customer retention. So these are ultimately customers who have bought from you, and now you are trying to promote brand loyalty. Now, you've worked so hard over the entire process to win this customer, to have them consider you as a potential option, and then to eventually exchange their hard earned cash for something that you can offer them. Now, a customer that has bought from you is worth a lot more than you can ever imagine. The reason being is that customer has trusted. That customer actually has put their hand in their pocket and given you their cash. They see you as valuable. They see the thing that you can actually offer them as valuable. They think the thing that you can sell them can make their life better in any way, no matter what type of service or product you're trying to sell. And the best thing is, if you can retain your customers, this is how your brand starts to grow exponentially because let's put it really, really simply. Customers cost a lot to acquire. If you are constantly having to spend money to acquire customers, it's not going to be the most profitable approach. Let's pretend for a moment that we're a software company, and we sell our software at $20 per month. Now, let's pretend that it costs us $10 to get a new customer in regards to advertising, okay? So just to summarize, we pay $10 to advertise and we get one customer in return that pays us $20. That's basically double the money, right? Okay, great. In this situation, it's not too bad. We're getting double our money back in the first transaction. However, with a lot of businesses, this is never the case. Most businesses will actually make a loss on their first sale in order to get their first customer. For example, PayPal, who I'm sure you've heard of, a finance company that offers payment systems and lots of other good stuff. PayPal, we're actually paying customers $10 just to sign up. Then they were paying an extra $10 for each person that they referred. PayPal was paying $10 per customer, plus $10 for each customer that that person referred before anyone even used the platform. So you can imagine how much money PayPal had to pay out in order to get that much reach and to pay all of those people who were being referred to the platform. However, the secret was that PayPal was just playing the long game, and they knew that paying $10 to bring a new customer onto the platform was going to pay off over the long run as long as they kept that customer loyal. For example, after just two transactions, they have pretty much made that $10 back. But what I'm trying to get across is initially, they didn't have that $10 come back to them. They had to pay that to get the customer on board, and they kept that customer on board because they had a great product and a great solution to a challenging problem. Now, getting new customers isn't cheap. And that's why keeping your customer base happy and keeping your customers loyal is going to be far more profitable than having to get new customers all the time. Now, within this section of the course, we're going to be going through some tactics which can help to keep your customers happy and keep your customer base loyal over the long term. And just like before, make sure you fill in your customer retention slide in your brand guidelines so that by the end of this course, you have a fully fledhed out marketing plan which you can be confident in. And once you have your customer retention tactics in place, you'll then be able to set your 12 months schedule for your marketing plan, which I'm super excited to do with you. And that will ultimately finalize your marketing strategy. So let's get through this section of the course, and I will see you in the next lesson. 51. Expanding your product range: Now expanding your product range is one of the best ways to increase the lifetime value of your customers. Now what I mean by lifetime value is if a customer buys one item from you, then they have essentially bought that item. So unless that item is something that needs to be replaced or it needs to be bought again and again on a monthly basis, for example, then they're not really going to have anything else to buy from you, if that makes sense. And obviously this depends on the type of business that you're actually providing. So for example, with my branding agency, I sell brand names, and then the next step in the service is brand logos, and then the next step in the service is marketing strategy. Then the next step in the service is website design. And then after that, we have brand management. Now, brand management is a continuous effort to grow the brand. So that is a repetitive service which can be done again and again and again, forever for the lifetime of the business. So for you, personally, in your brand, you need to find the system that can allow you ultimately build and expand your product range to offer more to customers to get them to buy more from you. Now, as I said before early on in the course, in the beginning, single product focus is super important. You need to make sure that you are really becoming the person or the company to go to for that particular product. But once you have a reputation for that particular product or service, next step is to start to expand your product range if you really want to, if this is a tactic that appeals to you so that you can start to offer more value to that particular customer just in a different way. So how do you start developing new products for your customer base? It all starts with market research. The first thing that you can do is check out what other competitors sell that are selling the same thing as you. So, for example, you are a fitness apparel company, and you sell things like shorts and vests to work out in, right? You could also sell things like water bolls. You could sell things like grip bands for when you're lifting weights. You could sell things like gloves when you're lifting weights. You could sell things like muscle recovery guns. Now, the reality is that the opportunities are endless and limitless. You can literally sell anything that you want as long as it's relevant to the thing that you were originally known for. So another way that you may be able to spot new opportunities for new products is by listening to your customers. For example, we have tons of clients that want to work with us but just cannot afford to have us design their brand for them and their brand identity. So we try and help them and answer some questions for them, but they really struggle to get their color palette right. So for that purpose, I actually developed a software on our website, which can help you to get your color palette within seconds. And now that we've invested all this time and energy into actually developing the software and the platform, now we can just charge a very small fee the person to get the perfect color palette in no time at all. So listening to customer feedback and listening to their problems is one of the most influential and important ways to see new opportunities when it comes to product extension. So listening to customer feedback and seeing the problems that they're facing is one of the best ways to spot new opportunities when it comes to product line extension. Now, in regards to the pros and cons of extending your product range, there are the obvious pros of ultimately being able to be more profitable, having more customer loyalty, and also just being able to offer more to a new potential customer so you have more channels for new customers to adopt to. So what positives can come from extending your product? Well, the first thing is profitability. You know, you've already got your customer, and then they can buy more from you, and you don't really have to spend any additional money to get them to buy that additional product. Secondly, it gives more customers different ways to actually buy from you. So, for example, if you only had one product, then ultimately the customer is going to only have one way to actually become a customer. Whereas if you have two or three products, then these other two products may actually attract new customers into your ecosystem. Now, obviously there are positives, but there are some negatives as well. Like, for example, if you start adding lots of different products to your product range, then your customer could end up confused. It's also going to be a lot more to manage for you instead of just doing one type of product or service. Ultimately, the more products that you try to sell within your brand, the more complicated the puzzle becomes. Now let's look at some examples of how product line extension can work in a successful way. Apple is actually a great example of this. They started off with computers for the home, and now they sell headphones, the iPhone, the iPad. IPod. Is the iPod still around? The I watch. So they literally have so many different products now that are all kind of born from the same brand and the same imagination and the same philosophy. And that is something that's super powerful. And obviously, Apple are, you know, a little bit further ahead than most people, but it just puts into context that all of their products are still very much aligned to the bigger vision of the company. They're all coming from the same place. And you can feel that. Nike is another example. I'm not sure if you knew, but Nike started back in the 1960s only selling running shoes. That's all they did. Bill Bowman, one of the guys who started the company with Phil Knight, made the first pair of Nikes with a waffle iron, a waffle iron. But over time, they kind of merged away from shoes, and now they sell all types of apparel and, you know, they sell lots of different stuff. Now, after assessing the product line extension approach in regards to customer retention, I scored it a two in regards to cost. The reason being is product line extension is not cheap. You need to develop a new product. You need to arrange that product, market it, communicate it effectively, sell it, which can be very expensive. Now, in regards to energy to setup, we're going to score it as a three. And that is simply because it will take a lot of time and effort. It is going to take a lot of energy. Think of a new product to get it to market, to do it properly, instead of just rushing it and just putting it out there into the ether just in case people need it. Now, energy to maintain isn't so bad. We're going to score it as a seven because once you've did all that hard work and you've kind of pushed the ball up the hill, you kind of just have to make sure it doesn't kill anyone on the way down. You just kind of need to make sure that it just stays as it is, and you just need to refine things over time using the pipe model that I've just mentioned in the last lesson. But in regards to likely return on investment, I'm going to score this as a ten. The reason being is, I think that having additional products, once you've actually been established important, please pay attention once you've been established within one particular product or category, once you start extending from that, that can be very, very effective to increasing profitability and giving you more opportunities as a brand and business. So anyway, I'm sure you're fully aware that extending your product range is always going to be a good idea, but make sure the timing is right. Don't rush it. Do not start off a business, and obviously, you can do whatever you want. It's your business. You are the captain of the ship. I'm just the parrot on the shoulder trying to guide you in the right direction. I have saw so many founders try to jump too far too fast, and I honestly, cannot think of any time where it's ended well. That's just the truth. So hopefully, you take my advice. But if not, that obsole' fine, as well, and I wish you all the success. But I hope you enjoyed this lesson, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. 52. Asking for feedback and refining your product: Customer feedback and continuous improvement is one of the best ways to retain and actually win the loyalty of your customer base. Now, this approach only works with certain types of businesses. So for example, if you're offering some sort of service or some sort of, you know, software, for example, you know, much like Netflix, for example, where it is literally, you know, a recurring payment every single month. This approach is going to work really well for you if you have a business like that. Don't, then do not worry. It's always going to be good to still get feedback and still to constantly improve your service and what you offer. And, you know, it's still going to be effective to a point. But all I'm saying is this particular approach does work well or better for membership and subscription businesses where people are paying for something on a monthly or, you know, biannually basis. Now, basically, this approach is all about engagement. And basically, what it means is when you have users using your platform or product or whatever, you can ask them for their feedback. Then actively refine and improve the platform. Now, let's use this example for a second. Imagine you're renting a house, okay? So you're paying for a product or a service, which is the house. Over time, the house doesn't just stay the same. Oh, no. The house gets better. It gets more refined. It gets more beautiful furniture. It gets easier to live there. It becomes smarter. How long do you think you'd live there? You'd probably stay there forever, right? I mean, I would probably stay there forever. That would be the smart thing to do, right? Just to stay there for your entire life and just have this house get better over time. Well, that's exactly what this approach is suggesting. If you have some sort of software or some sort of, you know, digital loafer, which you can ultimately refine and perfect over time and make even better and add more value, then ultimately you can have this exact same situation, bringing customers to the house, and then ultimately, giving them more and more and more and more for the same payment. Because it doesn't cost you anymore. You're just developing new stuff. And what happens is, you start to have this customer loyalty of people that stick around because they know that you're going to constantly improve things, that you're going to be refining things over and over and over again, which, you know, I'm not sure about you, but I certainly would stick around and have stuck around when investing in certain subscription businesses which have been adding value to my life, but then they just keep getting better and better. Now, the pros to this is obviously the customer loyalty and obviously the fact that you are going to be getting a residual income every single month. And, you know, that is obviously just going to grow and get bigger and better as more people start to sign up. But in regards to cons, it does take a lot of time to continuously refiner product and make it better and better and better. And you do obviously risk the fact that you could actually make it worse and people might not like something, but that's something that you just have to assess and, you know, take on the chin. Now, in regards to assessing this and scoring it, we're going to score the cost at ten. The reason being is, it is not going to cost a whole lot of money to actually ask for feedback and then actually refine your product afterwards, unless you're obviously outsourcing the work, which is obviously a different story. Now in regards to energy to set up, we're going to score that as a six because it is quite a lot of work to be asking for reviews and asking for feedback all the time and obviously engaging with customers. Now in regards to energy to maintain you've actually got that feedback and you get into a routine, it's not actually going to be that bad, so we're going to score that as an eight. And in regards to the ROI, I'm going to score that as an eight, as well, because ultimately, if you are getting the feedback from the customer base and then actually refining your product to make it better for them, it can only be positive. Anyway, I really hope you enjoyed this lesson. I'm super excited to continue in the next one. So let's see each other there. See you soon. 53. Loyalty programs and using a subscription model: So loyalty programs and memberships are one of the best ways to keep your customers engaged and buying from you. So the question is, how can you in your business, create some sort of loyalty program or subscription model where your customers have to keep coming back to you to get the solution that they need. Now, there are tons of different types of loyalty programs and subscription models out there. But in this lesson, I want to go through a few of the most common so that you can get a few ideas in regards to how you can implement this tactic in your business. So the first is VIP clubs. Now, I'm not sure about where you live, but I know that in the UK, they have the sort of cards that you go to supermarkets with where you basically give the card when you pay for your groceries, and you accrue points, right, which you can then spend on things like holidays, or just groceries, whatever you want. Basically, what the membership model does is it's essentially giving you a reason to come back to that particular store because it starts to gamify the process collecting these points. So you can see that you have a certain amount of points on the board. And then if you just get an extra 2000 points, then you can afford that TV that you've always wanted. Or if you, you know, get an extra 500 points, you can, you know, get a week's worth of groceries for free. So it actually incentivizes the customer to shop at that same store over and over again. Now, obviously, this might not work for slightly more expensive goods, but you can use the exact same model in pretty much any type of business. Like, for example, within my branding agency, I literally offer loyalty discounts to customers and clients that work with us over and over again. I'll give them, you know, free things, which is actually the next lesson in this course, you know, free gifts and surprises. I'll give them, you know, discounts on some of the you know, the services that we offer, I'll give them a free service just to show them what we can do in this particular area, like maybe a 1 hour strategic website meeting, for example, which, you know, would normally cost anywhere up to, you know, $700 to $500 roughly. Now, this is when you really need to start thinking about how you can make it more convenient and better for the customer, because there are other types of memberships. There's not just the points based system approach, but there's also the tier based system approach, which basically means that when you buy, you know, a certain level of product, you become, I don't know, maybe a VIP where you get a different level of pricing to everyone else because you've already shown your loyalty beforehand, rewards in future to unlock so that they can actually benefit from, you know, being a loyal customer. And it's all about incentivizing customers to buy more from you. If you can incentivize them in some sort of way by either making it more convenient or giving them access to exclusive products which are not available to anybody else. And if you can just make them feel good about the fact that they are spending with then, guess what? They're going to spend more money with you. Now let's look at a few of the pros and cons to really drive this particular tactic home. Now, the first pro is customer attention. You're going to be able to keep customers around for longer, which ultimately means more profitability. You're going to be able to get more out of each and every customer, increasing the lifetime value of every customer that buys from you. And lastly, you're going to increase sales. So not only are you going to be more profitable, but you're also going to be getting more sales through the door, as well. Now, obviously, all pros come with cons. One of the things that is probably going to be the biggest negative in regards to this approach is customer expectation, because if you, for example, have a customer who is at a high tier level in regards to your membership program, for example, then basically, if they maybe refer someone else to your program or service, and they aren't obviously tiered yet because they haven't bought from you, it could put you in a sticky situation where they're expecting the price that their friend pays but they obviously are on the program. So it could create a little bit of friction. Now, another thing which could be a little bit of an issue is cost. I'm not sure how much it costs to actually have a points based system. I'm not a supermarket, so I don't know. I know that it's free for me to, you know, my most loyal clients discounts and, you know, better pricing, but this is ultimately just a case of really understanding what it's worth to you. Now, some of the best brands really inspiring loyalty are obviously, you know, the likes of Amazon with Amazon Prime. You know, that particular service is a lot of great value and I think once people actually buy that service, they just leave it like forever because why would you change it? It's such a good product. Another one is Netflix. So in regards to Netflix, I genuinely think that I've been using my brother's Netflix for five years or something. Like, literally, I've never paid for Netflix. And I feel pretty bad. He doesn't even have that much money, but I've just been using his account for. I guess that's what it is in any family anyway. But anyway, I digress. Netflix is a great model. I think that it is a really great example of providing an incredible amount of value and basically having an incredible ability to charge so little for so much. And obviously, you know, this goes within any aspect of business. If you provide value, people will pay for it. It's as simple as that, making sure that you actually provide enough value for people to actually be willing to pay over and over again. And keep coming back, that's the most important thing, because if you don't provide the value, no one's going to come. So it doesn't matter how good your loyalty program is. If you can't provide the value that actually keeps them coming back, then it's never going to work. Now, in regards to assessing this particular tactic, in regards to costs, I genuinely think it's not really going to cost very much, so I'm going to score that this as a ten. Now in regards to setting things up and all the energy and time, I think that if you really wanted to set, like, a real solid program up, it's probably going to take a little bit of time. So I'm going to score this as a five in regards to energy to maintain, to be honest, apart from maybe using the data effectively, not going to take a whole lot of time at all, so I'm going to score it at nine. Then in regards to like the ROI, listen, we all know that, you know, if there's a coffee shop that offers us a free coffee every time we buy five coffees, we're going to buy those five coffees, right? It goes without saying. So this is always going to be an effective way to approach getting, you know, customers back again and again and again. And that is why I'm going to score this as a ten in regards to likely ROI. Now, it's actually pretty easy. You don't have to overcomplicate it when building your subscription model. Just keep it super simple and down to earth. But I really hope that you've enjoyed this lesson. I certainly enjoyed presenting it and obviously, you know, meeting you again. So I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. See you soon. 54. Gifts & surprises: So gifts and surprises, this is probably one of my favorite tactics to get customer loyalty, and it kind of ties into the reciprocity effect, which I mentioned earlier on in the psychological tricks lesson of this course. But ultimately, when you give free surprises and gifts to a client or customer, it always has a positive effect. Now, we all know this. It's not rocket science, but it really helps to set the tone for future business. Like, for example, have you ever bought anything online and then it came with maybe a couple of samples of some other things that that particular company sells, just to try and get you to buy more, or have you ever just been gifted something? For example, if you walk into a store and they maybe hand you a coffee or a drink or if you go into the high class stores, you know, maybe a glass of champagne. These little things make all the difference, and it doesn't need to cost a lot. I know that with some clients, I'll just randomly, if they've spent, you know, quite a lot of money and obviously, you know, we feel like we've got a good chemistry together, I'll just give them, like, an hour of my time and just say, Listen, book this time whenever you want, you know, that's worth $500. And I could sell that particular hour for $500. I wanted to give it to them because my time, although I could sell that particular hour for that amount, if I wanted to, I wanted to give back, and it doesn't cost me anything. And that is going to keep that person loyal to me for a very, very long time. And I've still got clients that have literally, you know, continued to work with me for years and years and years and years simply because they kept getting tret right. They get treat in a way which is respectful, which is in their best self interests, and, you know, I always put them first. So basically the littlest things can make the biggest difference. So, you know, a little thank you, Emil. Just say, listen, I really appreciate you as a customer. No hidden agenda. I just really appreciate you as a customer. Little acts of kindness. So, for example, we are building a website sometimes. We will just have somebody or pay somebody to write a few blog posts for the website so that the website isn't just going up without any blog post whatsoever. So it looks and feels credible. Clients really appreciate that. Basically, with customer expectation, we have what they expect. Everything above is an opportunity. And when you are creating those opportunities, if you just even go 1 bar up, that client is going to remember that, and they're going to think, Oh, this person knows what they're doing. And it's just going to leave an effect on them that keeps them coming back again and again and again, which is one of the most important things when it comes to marketing. You want to keep your customers as loyal as possible. Now, you know, there's tons of companies out there that have done this really well, like Zapos, for example, a shoe company in the US, they sometimes just upgrade their customers to faster shipping just for fun, which, you know, is pretty nice, right? You just get your shoes like seven days faster or five days faster, whatever. Because you're a valued customer. That's pretty cool. And then there's beauty companies like Birchbox, for example, that provides the product that you've bought, but then also provide tons of samples of other stuff that they sell as well. Now, obviously this is a marketing strategy to basically get you to buy more stuff, but it's a nice one because they're not really expecting you to buy anything, although they are, but they're not asking you. They're saying, Listen, we sell this other stuff as well. You can buy it if you want. We sell it. If you want it, you can buy it. Which is a much nicer way to ask. Now, in regards to cost, we've assessed this as an eight, just because I think that, you know, it can cost a little bit to give things away and obviously, you know, your time, for example. But ultimately, it's not going to cost you a great deal. I don't think that you need to give away the entire world, just give away something little and just make sure it's nice and relevant. Now, in regards to energy to set up, I would give this an eight. It doesn't take a whole lot of energy to give something away for free, right? Unless you are literally giving away the world, which is not advisable. But, you know, just make sure that whatever you're giving away is valuable to that particular person. Again, you need to really understand who you're actually giving it away to and what they actually value first and foremost. Now, in regards to energy to maintain, I'm on to score, this is an aid, as well, because you don't really need to do anything afterwards. You know, maybe you just have to send an email back saying, No, no problem. My pleasure. You know, if you need any help in the future, please let me know. You know, it's a little bit of extra effort, right? And maybe you need to, you know, keep some stock of some gifts or something. Not a big deal. Not a big deal at all. But the likely return on investment is huge. And this is something I've personally seen with my own personal brand and also with all the companies that I've worked with over the past decade, where if you go that extra mile and just add that little bit of extra pizars to your customer experience, it goes a long old way. Now, I really hope you've enjoyed this lesson, and we're nearing the end of the course, but I am super grateful for you spending all this time with me, and I cannot wait to see you in the last lesson of the course. I'll see you there. 55. Project Time: So if you are watching this video, then you have just made it through the marketing strategy course within the Brand Builder Pro program. And you should be super, super proud of yourself, and I'll tell you why. Because 99.9% of people will never invest in themselves and try and learn the actual strategic steps to build in a marketing strategy. They'll try and shortcut it. They'll try and cut corners. But the differences between you and them is you actually understand what's happening, whereas they still have no idea. Now, you actually know every single step of the marketing funnel you understand the tactics to actually build awareness for your brand. You know how to help customers consider and educate them in regards to your brand so they can actually buy from you. You now have tactics to actually sell your product or service to your customers. And then you also understand how to keep them as valued customers over the long term so you can profit as effectively as possible. Now, this is essentially a marketing strategy. You've been filling out your brand guidelines throughout this course, then you'll essentially have your marketing plan in place. Now, if you haven't been filling in your marketing plan, then please do not worry. The purpose of having this plan and actually taking the time to arrange it and really think about it carefully is it's going to ultimately define how you invest your time, energy, and money over the next 12 months when trying to market your brand or business. And for each stage within the marketing funnel, you need to make sure that you've selected tactics that you think make the most sense for your target audience and your specific business. So, for example, for awareness, take some time to assess all of the tactics that you could choose and then choose the one, two, or at most three that make the most sense to you personally. And in that section, make sure that you actually point out and be super clear with what you're going to do, how much you're going to do it, and when you're going to do it by. For example, if you've chosen YouTube, then you could say something like, I'm going to post four high quality videos every single month. Next, in the box below, Make sure that you state exactly how you're going to track to make sure that that particular effort or input is being successfully completed. Now, that's just for the awareness stage, but once you have each of those points filled out on all the slides for awareness, consideration, sales activation and retention, the next step is to develop your 12 month marketing plan. Now, the only reason for this marketing plan to exist is to keep you prioritized and organized in regards to your efforts. For example, should always prioritize and start with building your assets first, which includes things like your website and social media profiles. So it takes some time to really prioritize and think about what's the most important things for you personally to get done and then write those out within each strip of the 12 month plan so you can stay organized and focused on what you need to get done and when. Now, I want exercise that I love doing, and you can do it either on computer or you can write it out on paper. It's completely up to you. I actually prefer paper because I like writing things out and kind of jiggling things around. Write down every single thing that you need to do everything in regards to your business, everything out on paper or on a computer, whatever. And then take some time start to put them in three separate boxes. The first is high priority. So if I do these things, it's going to make my life and everything else far easier. The next is next to do. So once I've done the high priority things, these things are the next important, they should follow. And then the last box is to do later. So things that I'd like to get done, to be honest, if they don't get done, it's not going to be the end of the world. And once you start to prioritize them into these different boxes, you then have a little bit of structure that you can play with. Then you're not trying to organize the full list, but you're basically trying to sort out smaller boxes with less options. This makes things far more manageable, and it's really helped me personally. So I would really advise that you at least explore that approach to do the same thing. So once you have everything prioritized, one thing I do need you to keep in mind is that once you have all of your assets in place and you have everything set, you should be dedicating 95% of your efforts to awareness. If you watch the pipe video earlier on in the course, which if you haven't watched it, please check it out because it's really going to help you to understand the method and the technique that I've been using with, you know, thousands of clients over the past decade to help increase their conversion rate on their website. You can really help yourself by getting all of your assets organized. Ing all your ducks in a row and then pumping all of your energy into getting water in that pipe because then you're going to be able to test things. You're going to be able to change things. You're going to be able to improve things. You're going to be able to get sales. You're going to be able to actually get people involved, intrigued and interested in your business. And this could mean you literally spend all your time or 95% of your time, should I say, within one month or two months or three months or even six months only generating content if that's your marketing tactic. And what this is going to do is this is going to help you to get super great at doing that one specific thing. And your processes and your systems within that particular area will become more refined, more systemized, and ultimately more efficient. Now, this may seem crazy, but this is ultimately the focus that you need to really get the ball rolling and get momentum behind you. Now, if you haven't got your brand and your business and your website set up yet, then feel free to check out the other courses in the brand Building Pro program, which are ultimately going to help you to get your strategic branding in place. Brand identity and your visual expression in place, and then your actual website with your digital presence. Now, I know that this course is your marketing, but this is usually the fourth step of actually building a brand or business. Now, if you've already completed these three courses, that's incredible. And you're going to be, so far ahead of so many entrepreneurs and so many founders at this point. But if you haven't, then feel free to check them because there's lots of useful guidance in there, and we actually show you how to build your internal branding strategy, your actual visual expression, so your branding looks great and feels great and looks trustworthy, incredible. Then we actually go through showing you how to build your website from scratch, no matter if you have any experience in coding, design, we guide you through every single step of the process, and it's super easy to do. Now, once you've got your marketing strategy in place, the next step for your brand is brand management. And this is ultimately where you're going to learn how to actually grow your brand and actually not just market your brand, but actually manage how people perceive your brand in the long term. And this is where you're really going to learn how to grow your brand and actually develop a brand over the long term, how to take market share from your competition, how to grow a team for your brand, and how to build an iconic brand that people actually emotionally care about. So as I always suggest with every student, please share your work with me so I can actually give you feedback, and I can actually, you know, give you constructive criticism and also just tell you how great you are when I reviewed your work. One of the most amazing things about being a teacher and an educator and actually sharing my expertise with, you know, people who are wanting to get better at marketing and branding is seeing how much people learn when we invest so much time, and I'm sit in this chair talking for hours on end to this camera that feels like my best friend right now because I literally spend more time with this camera than pretty much anyone else. But lastly, I really want to just say that I really appreciate the fact that you spent so much time and trusted me to help guide you through this process. So thank you so much. I really appreciate you. I appreciate the time that you put in to your learning and your knowledge building, and I really look forward to seeing you soon.