Entrepreneurial Marketing

1. Introduction : Hi my name is Jason Adason. I'm the founder of Perfect Pixel Marketing. I help startups and entrepreneurs with all their marketing needs. Whether it's helping them design a holistic marketing plan, we're doing something more focused like a website design project or a digital advertising campaign. I'm going to be teaching entrepreneurial marketing. It's a high level look at all the marketing tactics a startup or entrepreneur can do on their own to get their product or service out to market. This is not going to be good for people who are looking to hone in on one specific marketing tactic like SEO or website design, advertising, et cetera. [MUSIC] Again, this is a very broad overview of a budget, different marketing tactics that you can employ. This is also not going to be good for companies that have large budgets and the people that can actually do all these things. If you are involved with Jeff Bezos or Moscow or Hoover or anything like that. This is probably not the course for you. We're going to cover a lot of topics. We're going to go over website design, marketing strategy, lead generation strategy. What's there between inbound marketing, outbound marketing, analytics and tracking content and marketing over and over. This could be a lot of things to cover. You're going to get a plethora of different marketing tactics that you can use. Your assignment is actually going to be milestone based. As you'd go through the course, you're going to be implementing things in real time. You can actually post these things on skill share in other communities section. I can actually provide some feedback for it. I'm excited, as you can see to teach this course, and I hope you're excited to get stuff done. Let's get started. 2. Marketing Strategy: Hi. Welcome to the first class of entrepreneurial marketing. I am just an artist in case you have forgot, we're going to be talking about marketing strategy today. Very first things is things you should consider before you start your marketing plan and starting to implement marketing practices. We're also going to talk about the difference between business to business and business to consumer marketing. We're going to talk quickly about your target audience and buyer personas, also the difference between a user and a buyer, and lastly we're going to quickly go over primary conversion goals. These are all things that you should be considering prior to doing marketing. The very first thing that we're going to go over, and by the way, you can actually follow along with the slide decks that are provided and I have also created a fake company website at perfect pixel waffles.com. Once in a while we'll refer to it, you can just go there and check it out. Before you begin all your marketing tactics, the things that you need to consider is one, is your product or service, a physical or a digital product? If it's a physical product, people might actually want to get their hands on it, see how heavy it is, see what it feels like, things like that. Consider that when you start building out your sales funnel. If it's a digital product, same exact thing. People might want to go online and try the product offer free like a seven day or 30-day trial, or you might have a gaming app and you want to give people a chance to actually try it out like a freemium model. Again, you're going to have to build that and consider all of that stuff once you start marketing your product. Secondly, if this is going to be a business to business company, the marketing is a little different because usually the decision makers are thinking more logistically and operational. Whereas, a business to consumer product or a consumer company, the buying process is more of an emotional buying process. How is this going make my life better? Is it going to improve things? Things like that. We'll get into that a little bit more, but you still just want to mention it so you guys are aware. Lastly, it's price. Usually when an item or a service or whatever is expensive, and you know the higher the price goes up the more likely that the buying process is going to be longer and that you're going to need to nurture that customer or that perspective customer a little bit more. Again, you just need to consider all those things as it will change your sales funnel. By now, you probably already know who your target market is, you know who you want to sell your product to but to. To even go in deeper, one thing that you want to take a look at is buyer personas. There are a bunch of them but we're going to actually focus specifically on three. The three is your decision maker, your influencer, and your user. Your decision maker is pretty much the buyer. It's the person who says, we need this product or service let's go buy it. Then the influencer is the person who is actually going to do the research or is the person who actually knows all the technology. For instance, an example of influencer is maybe an IT guy who knows exactly the differences between MacBooks and Chromebooks. Then lastly you're going to have the actual user. This is the person who will be using the product and will benefit the most from it. Now, the thing is there's is saying all thumbs are fingers, but not all fingers are thumbs. Why? What I mean about that is sometimes those three buyer personas, the decision maker, the buyer/influential/user, that can all be one person. However, there are some times that the influencer and the buyer is going to be one person and the user is going to be separate. One of the examples for this especially for our business to consumer product example is the SAT markets. Say if you have Mary who's 16 years old and she needs SAT tutoring, she's going to be the user. However, the mom is going to be the decision maker and buyer. This is the person who's going to influence her as well. This is the person who is most likely going to go out research the different companies out there, and the different options such as tutoring or online learning, and then make the purchase and use the credit card. User again is Mary who's the six year old who's going to college, and then the decision maker/buyer is the mom who's going to do all the research and what not. These are things that you need to consider because you're going to want to target those people. You're going to want to target the buyers. One thing that you can do is create a buyer persona. This is pretty much a fake profile that you are creating that actually makes it seem like someone exists, not just a number, not just a person, this is an actual hypothetical person. You create this person because it's the five W's of your target market, the who, what, where, when and why. Things that you put in there is their name, their age, their occupation. How much money they make? How many children do they have? Are they married but specifically what are some of the challenges that they're facing, and how does your product or service is the solution to them? Lastly, obviously there are going to be objections or blockages. Why would they not purchase your product compared to others? Why they wouldn't make that big step? I've created two, you can see these in the slide deck that I've provided. The first one it's a business to business example, I've named Gaming George, he's a male, he's 40 years old. The biggest thing is the problem that he's facing is that he's created this mobile gaming app and people are downloading it, but no one is actually paying for it. It's a free download but they're not paying for the premium features of the game. My fake company can help Gaming George by using analytics and cohort analysis, to target specific users that we can then try to acquire more of said users through advertising or other methods. The next one is a business to consumer. It's a Waffle Wendy and this is specifically for that perfect pixel waffles.com example. Her challenges is that her children are tired of the same old breakfast foods. She needs something to switch it up and the kids they don't like frozen options like frozen waffles. What does she do? She buys the waffle maker 5,000 which provides her with new fresh foods and the kids love it, and plus it has different topping options etc, it's a perfect fit for her. Again, you can find these two buyer personas in the slide deck. Let's talk a little bit about this reason between business to business and business to consumer marketing. As mentioned before, with business to business, it's more of a logistical purchasing process. It's most likely going to have multiple people involved in that purchasing process, so again going back to the buyer and the influencer, and the user. The decision make process is usually longer especially if it's a high enterprise cost product, and there's going to be multiple targeting options. Again, you have to consider the buyer persona or the decision maker or the buyer profiles I mentioned before. You have to figure out who you should really target, is it going to be that user? Probably not, it's going to be that decision maker or the influencer. When it comes to business consumer as mentioned again before, that's more of an emotional process. Instead of trying to say, hey, this is going to cost you this, you are going to say $50 a week or etc, you want to do more of a hey, if you buy this or use this service, your life is going to improve this way. Now, with business to consumer, it's usually going to be only a one to two person decision making process. You just have to figure out who that person is and target that person. Now, obviously you can't really target children sometimes but you can target parents. That's why sometimes if you watch morning cartoon shows, they will show some ads that are specifically targeting parents instead of just toys for kids. That's something to think about. Again, just to reiterate, a lot of differences between business to business and business to consumer, is that the message is going to be different, the marketing channels are going to be different, the audience targeting is going to be different, the lifetime value of a customer may likely be different as well as the cost of acquisition. Last but not least, we're going to cover conversion goals. A lot of times people they say well, we just want sales. Obviously you want sales but you need to consider, are you going to actually try to get a conversion goal before the actual sale like a lead or a download? Stuff like that. Some of the conversion goals out there, the primary conversion goals are obviously purchase and sale but there is leads and we're going to get into lead generation a little bit later. Then there's the non-monetary action such as an app download or a website visit. Not all the time it's going to be a hey, here's my credit card charge me. It's going to be a hey, get to the site and perform some action that will get you down to the sales funnel. Your assignment is going to be the following. Identify the following? Identify your buyer/decision maker and your user. Obviously the influencer is important and you can identify that as well, but the main point is that identify those two people, the buyer and the user if they're different. Secondly I want you to create your first buyer persona. If you want some more examples, just google buyer persona examples and you're going to see a slew of different options available. Lastly choose a primary conversion goal depending on your product and service. Especially everything that we talked about in regards to business to business and business to consumers. Try to pick that primary conversion goal because we're going to start building your marketing plan all around that. Thank you very much for watching the first class, now, we're going to move on to the very first thing that we'll implement which is website design. 3. Sales Funnels: Hi and welcome to the second class of entrepreneurial marketing. We're going to be going over sales funnels in this class. The things that we're going to talk about is exactly, what is a sales funnel exactly? Different types of sales funnels, and we're going to discuss designing and creating your sales funnel. A sales funnel is pretty much the customer journey. What does somebody do from point A to point B? From discovering your brand to making a sale or making a purchase, excuse me. It's also known as, your revenue funnel or your customer journey. But one thing to consider though, is that not all sales funnels are the same. That's actually what we're going to go over right now. In the slide deck that I provided for this course, you can see an example, e-commerce Sales Funnel. A common one is, a customer will see an advertisement, they'll click on it, they'll go to the homepage or a product page and then they will like it so they'll add it to cart. Then they'll go through the checkout process. Then once they finally hit Submit, a sale has been made. That's sales funnel. Regards to sales funnels, you need to remember and consider a few things. The first thing again is, is your product a business to business product or is it a business to consumer product? Secondly, is it a digital product, a physical product, or a service? If it's a digital product, you're probably going to send down a customer in some sort of sales funnel where they have to download everything. If it's a physical product, someone needs to have that product sent to them. Again, things to consider. Lastly, if it's a service, there might be quotes or lead generation involved. These are all things to consider as you're building out your sales funnel. Also is the price. If you have a very expensive product, there's probably going to be a much longer sales funnel, which means you are going to need to nurture this perspective customer. Lastly, is the lifetime value of a customer. The higher a customer is valued, there is a chance that your acquisition costs will also go up. Just consider those things when you start building your sales funnel. An example for this for business-to-business funnels is for a SaaS product, you might have someone who will need to be captured via leads or demos or free trials. If it's a physical product, you might have to send samples or somebody might need a quote, or they might actually see the product in action depending on the thing that you are actually selling. A business-to-business sales funnel example, which you can see in the slide decks is someone will see advertising, click on it, it goes to a landing page and then on that landing page there's a Contact Us form which a person fills out, and then they are entered into an automated e-mail campaign where then they are given the option of scheduling a time to see a demo or do talk to a representative about said product or service, and then that leads to a sale. In regards to business-to-consumer sales funnels, there's a few of them out there. If it's a digital or mobile product like a game, someone has to download it and then maybe make a purchase. Or it could be other way where it's a premium app where someone has to pay ahead of time, then download it. Again, consider all these things. For e-commerce, you can use lead generation to provide discounts, things like that or you can just go straight for a direct sales model where you get somebody into the website or the e-commerce store and convince them to purchase. Then lastly is the service model, which again, it's usually getting people to sign up or to send information about the service that they need and if they qualify like a quote process. Your assignment is to map out your first sales funnel. Just remember to consider all the things that we've discussed in this class, in the class before especially regarding your process, the people you're targeting, the price, things like that, and then feel free to post it online on Skillshare so I can see it. I'm happy to provide feedback to you. I hope this class actually helped you a lot with sales funnels. Now, let's move on to more exciting marketing tactics. 4. Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing: Hi, welcome to the third class of entrepreneurial marketing. We're going to be going over the difference between inbound marketing and outbound market. Let's just go right into it. Inbound marketing is driving traffic in. This is usually using free methods of getting people to your site and then you try to convert them. Under the inbound marketing umbrella is search engine optimization, content marketing, the use of white papers, and the use of social media. Obviously, there are some more, but those are the four main ones that I want to focus on. The advantages of inbound marketing is that it's free. All you really have to do is just put time and effort into it, and using best practices. Another great thing is that inbound traffic usually has intent. People are searching for information, and they're going to come to your site trying to get such information, and then you have a better chance of converting them. The disadvantages is that it takes a long time for SEO or inbound marketing to really start working. In some cases, it could take up to six months. Some people might get a little impatient, but trust me, it pays off dividends in the future. The other thing is that some services or products that, in your market might have high competition. You really need to create a lot of content and a lot of unique content to be able to compete against the other people that have been around for a long time. Then, obviously, this is very time intensive. You need to allocate a lot of your time to creating content, and posting content, and getting people to start following, or to get people to your site so you can compete. Some people don't have that unfortunately, but as I mentioned before, the amount of time we put into it now is actually going to pay off in the future. Outbound marketing is pretty much the opposite of inbound marketing. You're reaching out to people, you're trying to get people's attention instead of drawing them in. There's usually paid methods of doing this. It's advertisements, sponsorships, conferences, expos, things like that; you're spending money to get attention. The advantages though, just opposite of inbound, it's very instantaneous. Once you start spending money, once your ads are going, people will see your brand, and they usually will act immediately. I'm not saying that they're going to actually make sales immediately, but you can start getting results a lot faster. Another thing is that the audience targeting is really great. Platforms like Facebook or Google, it's very expansive, and the types of people that you can target according to their interests, behaviors, or whatnot, is really helpful in regards to who you really want to hone in on. Then last but not least, is that you can actually reach new people. With inbound marketing, you might have a lot of experts who are doing searches for things like that, but you might not be trying to reach those people. With advertising and outbound marketing, you can find a whole new group of people that didn't know about your brand or your company. Disadvantages, pretty obvious; it costs money. Some people don't have money. That's why I'm actually teaching this course. A lot of things that we're going to be going over are the free inbound marketing tactics. However, if you do have a few thousand dollars to do this, I do recommend giving a shot if your company is ready for that influx of new traffic. There are some other things that is very risky in regards to money, because you're buying ads doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to make sales. You got to do it right and you have to use best practices. Last but not least, is distrust. There's been some recent issues with consumers not trusting advertising because of the use of data recently. So you might have people who are blocking ads or blocking pop-ups. It's a small group of people, but there is some distrust out there. What's a better strategy for you? Is it inbound or is it outbound? Inbound is great if you have no marketing budget and you have some time, you have compelling content, you have the ability to write all that stuff, and you're a little web savvy, and you have the time to be able to go out and do those things. If outbound is what you're thinking, I personally recommend having at least some minimum budget of 1,000. The more budget you have, the higher budget you have, the more testing you can do, and the more you can learn about your audience in your content. If you can spend up to 5,000 in one month, I definitely recommend it as long, again, as you have a product that is ready for that publicity. Also, outbound is great because you have immediate impact. Just like I mentioned, if you're looking to really charge your traffic and boost your sales, outbound marketing is definitely the way to go. However, you could do both. Inbound plus outbound actually works really well. If you integrate both of those strategies, you can really drive some impact for your company. One way you could do that is draw traffic in through content and then retarget that traffic with ads. That's actually a lower cost because retargeting, you usually have a much smaller audience base, so you don't have to spend a lot of money to reach those people. Your assignment is to actually pick a strategy. Which one is it going to work? I want you to go to your whiteboard, your chalkboard, or just a piece of paper, and write out some pros and cons for each strategy for your business, and pick a strategy that you're going to move forward with. Trust me, by taking a step back, and planning everything out, you're going to reduce risk, and you're going to give your company a better chance of being successful. I hope this was very informational, and I can't wait to go on to class 4. 5. Website and Landing Page Best Practices: Hi, welcome to class 4 of Entrepreneurial marketing. We're going to be going over website strategy. We're going to be discussing the role that your website will play, the role of a landing page and the differences between a website and a landing page, and lastly, your options on how to build one if you don't have one already. Your website is your hub. This is where people go to learn about your company and your products and services. One thing to consider, 88 percent of consumers actually do an online product search before they make a purchase. It's very important that you have a good representation of your company online through a website. Obviously, it connects your company to people. Website best practices, the very first thing is that you want your website to load fast. People are impatient. They want to see things immediately, especially on a mobile device. Make sure that when someone goes to your site or they're looking up your products and they go to a product page, things load quickly. Second, it has to be informational. You can't just have a few pictures and a few pieces of text. It needs to have all the information that people are thinking about and want to learn about. Lastly, it needs to be easy to navigate. You have to be able to get around. People should know where they need to click. It shouldn't be confusing and it shouldn't be distracting. A nice, clean, minimalist design that's fast loading, and a big thing is that it needs to be responsive, meaning mobile responsive. If somebody's on their phone, they should easily be able to find information, make purchases through things like that on their mobile phone. First thing to consider after all those four things is your website architecture. This is usually a homepage, your product pages and about a blogger news page, and then you have your legal and privacy pages. Those are usually the five common pages that you're going to see on a website. Now, the big difference between a website which has all those different pages and a landing page is that a landing page is designed specifically for a conversion. It usually doesn't have a navigation, doesn't have a footer. It is only about the service or the product that you're selling. It's a stand-alone page. It's focused only on one thing, and it's generally designed with advertising in mind as well. You don't see a lot of landing pages that is driving organic traffic. You're ready to build your website, now, how do you actually do that? Well, some people are savvy enough to do it on their own, but there are a large group of people who need to hire a website builder, and the advantages of doing so is that usually the outcome is going to be high-quality. The people that you're hiring are experts so they know what they're doing, and it's going to free up a lot of bandwidth so you can focus on other things. The disadvantages is that it is very expensive. The bigger the project, the bigger the service or the bigger the website, the higher the costs are going to go up. Don't try to cheap out on it. There are sometimes people might go and get overseas help. They might be pretty good, but you have to remember that you're going to get what you pay for. If you really want a high-quality website, I definitely recommend that you're going to end up spending, you're going to expect to pay a lot of money. The process can also be a little overwhelming if you are not familiar with websites, it might cause you a little anxiousness, and last but not least, you have a low less control. These people, they might work with you and try to help you with the design process, but, you're going to have these people building everything for you and you're going to lose some control with that. The other option is to build your own website if you're savvy enough. It's a great option for you. It's low cost. There's many templates and services out there that you can use and just fill in the gaps, and boom, you have a new website and you can actually control your own images. You can control what goes online and the content, things like that. Disadvantages. Obviously, it's time-intensive. Yes, there are templates and whatever, but still, if you have a really big website with a lot of content, it's going to take a lot time to populate that website, widths add content and to get things up and running. Websites are really easy to break as well. If you have no idea what you're doing, you're going to need to take some time and read about the best practices, and lastly, you could end up with a poor quality build. Again, if you don't know what you're doing, it might not be mobile responsive, and might not load fast. There's a lot of things that could go negatively unfortunately. If you do decide to build your own website, as I mentioned, there are a lot of great services out there right now, and you have a few options. One option is to self host. That is using a platform like WordPress or a builder like Dreamweaver, where you create your website and then you put it on your own servers. There's many website hosting companies out there that have a lot of the stuff pre-built and they can help you do that thing. Secondly, you can also use a hosted website designer like wix.com, Weebly or Shopify. These are people who will provide templates for you and they'll host, and they'll have domain registration, all in one package so you don't have to worry about finding another website host and deal with e-mail and all that stuff. I recommend both options to self-hosted and the build and host. I do recommend more the build and host technology and platform for people who are not very tech savvy because you're going to get reliability, and it's going to be a lot easier for you to build the site that you want to build. Your assignment is going to be, figure out what your website's role is going to be. Is it going to be a e-commerce site? Is it going to be a lead generation site? Is it going to be just informational? First, figure out what your website is going to do within your sales funnel. Secondly, draft out your site architecture. Again, your homepage, your product pages or service pages or your information pages, your abouts, your Contact Us, things like that. Because there's four to five different content types, doesn't mean that there's only going to be four to five pages. Write out what you think is going to be all the important pages and put it in a hierarchy, so it's going to be homepage will be by itself, but then about might have two to three pages underneath it like team and history, things like that. Lastly, if you're going to hire a website designer, go and do some research as to the firms that are locally near you and some remote ones and try to find a designer that's in your price range and that has good reviews and good portfolio. Make sure you see the work beforehand. If you decide to make your own website instead of doing research for freelancers, do research for different builders out there like wix.com or WordPress, Weebly, etc. I'm not going to name anymore because I'm not getting paid again, so focus on those things. If you guys have any questions, please follow up with me on Skillshare, but this one assignment here is really going to kick things off. 6. SEO 101: Hi and welcome back to Entrepreneurial Marketing. This is class five. We're looking at Search Engine Optimization. This is the first time we're actually now focusing more on marketing tactics than the strategy stuff that we were talking about before. What exactly is Search Engine Optimization? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search results. That's from MOZ, again l quoted them exactly. So how it works is Google, Bing, Yahoo whoever goes around the Internet and across all these different websites. The websites are then indexed into their database. Then what happens is this index is fed into an algorithm. When a search query is made, it then compares all the different indexes and sites out there. Then once the search has been made, the query has been made. Those results are sorted by the strength of the website and some of those SEO factors. I'm going to be reading this lesson. You can get this list in my slide deck is first is a Secured Accessible Website. Second is Page Speed, specifically for mobile as well. Faster, the better. Third is Mobile Responsiveness. Fourth is how all the domain is. It's a brand-new domain which is registered. Google's not going to break you well until you really start building up traffic and content, things like that. Five, Optimized Content, we'll get into that in second. Six, Technical SEO, we'll get into that. Seven User Experience. Eight, Incoming External links. Nine Social Signals. The last one is Real Business Information. Instead of going through all of those, I want to focus mainly on just three specific factors. The first one is keywords and search phrases or long-tail keywords. What you want to do is think about what your target market is going to be searching for and then use those keywords and put it into content. So specifically create content around those search phrases. Secondly, you want to use keywords in specific places on your webpage. So in your titles and your, excuse me, your URL slugs, things like that. Lastly, you want to use your keywords and meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are those little pieces of snippet of information and Search Engine results pages. You can do that by going into your header section and adding those. Also, there are some platforms out there like WordPress or Wix or Shopify or whoever that gives you the option to just go in there, fill out a field, it will automatically be updated for Google. The second tactic I want you to be aware of is site speed. So Google's been really focusing on faster, better mobile experiences and iPhones or Androids or whatever, off of the mobile cellular data, the speed is usually slower. So if you are building a website that's really big and it's really content heavy on your homepage and whatnot. It's going to take a while for that page to load on your mobile device. Google is aware that. They want to improve the user experience. So if you have a really slow site, they're actually going to give you a much lower ranking when someone does a Search Engine search. What you could do is try to make your site as flexible, as small as possible. Use these two tools, it's called GTMetrix m-e-t-r-i-x and Google Mobile/friendly test. Again, look these up. You could just quickly do a search form and you'll find it or refer to my slide deck. The third one, again is Mobile responsiveness. So whenever you build a site, even if you think that the majority of your target market is going to be using a desktop computer to look up information. You still want to make sure that your site can be easily viewed and navigated on a mobile phone. So here's some fun stats that you should know about. Fifty seven percent of organic search engine visits were made on mobile devices. Google is aware that. So make sure that your site is A fast, B it's mobile responsive, you can view it on a phone. Three, that you're using keywords and search phrases in your content. So when people are making those searches, they're going to find your articles. One thing you might hear is a term called black hat versus white hat SEO. These terms were created because back in the day, villains used to wear black hats and the good guy usually had lighter, brighter clothing on. So what happens is there are these tactics called black hat SEO that can give you really fast results. However, they're very risky. Some of them is like using unrelated keywords for content, doing content automation, shady link building. So having some links paid for on someone else's domain that goes to your site, as well as keyword stuffing. That's literally taking all the keywords that we discussed before and just throwing it into one page. If you get caught doing that stuff, Google will actually ban your site. You will not be able to be found via search engines. Generally, you want to stay away from Black Hat SEO practices. White Hat SEO practices are just the opposite. You're following Google guidelines, you're creating new content and you're creating unique content. So you're not duplicating just other people's stuff. Also you're getting links from these established domains. You're giving links out to establish domains. So that way it doesn't look all that shady. Your assignment is going to be the following. I want you to create a list of 5-10 specific keywords like long tail keywords meaning not just, you know, for example, for my fake waffle company, I'm not just going to try to do waffles. I'm going to do Belgian waffles or best toppings for waffles, stuff like that. I want you to build a list of 5-10 of those. Then I want you to go find the Google Keyword Planner. This is something that's done through AdWords. Don't worry, you're not actually buying ads, but you can use this Google AdWord planner to see how many times the specific keywords are searched for on a monthly basis and how big the competition is. If you wanted to, you can actually see how much the estimated cost per click is for each of those keywords. So find those things. You'll want to look for the high search volume, and low competition. Now then your third thing that I want you to do is optimize your website for those keywords in the ways that I just described. Okay. So make sure that you're using I'm entitled to make sure that you're using them and headings and things like that. Get those keywords in there and create content that have those keywords. Just make sure that you avoid keyword stuffing. You don't want to use, in my case, waffles. You don't want to use waffles and every single sentence and paragraph, just make sure it's used in the right places. If you have any questions, obviously follow up with me on skill share and ask me any questions, or even show me your list of keywords I'd love to see how you're thinking and how you're processing all this information. Thanks, I'm looking forward to continuing to teach you guys more about marketing. 7. Content Marketing Strategy: Hi and welcome to class 6 of entrepreneurial marketing were specifically now looking at content strategy and content marketing. So what exactly is content marketing? I'm going to quote someone else again, this is from the Content Marketing Institute, "Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience with the objective, driving, profitable customer action" sounds really nice. Here's my version, content you create to drive interests in sales for your company. That's exactly what content marketing is. It is a part of SEO and so content marketing is under that inbound marketing umbrella that we talked about a few classes before. It's a great way to build credibility actually can help your company become a thought leader in a specific topic. The great thing is evergreen content, content that won't expire because of trends or things like that will last a lifetime. So it's going to continue to pay off dividends in the future. So there's different types of content. There's blogs, infographics, podcasts, videos, white papers, e-books, and social media posts. So it's not just writing content, it's videos, it's other dynamic, fun things that people might use. The way that you build your content strategy is first, define your goal. What is the purpose of creating this content plan and the strategy? Are you trying to drive traffic or you're trying to increase sales? He tried to get leads? First, define what you want to do, and then you start writing your content after that. Now define your audience. So before, I believe this was our first class, we created our buyer persona. So go back to that buyer persona and look it over. So what are their challenges? What search terms, are they using? What content are they searching for? Where do they read the content? Are they going on Pinterest and doing searches? are they going on Google and doing searches, or they go on the YouTube? These are things that you want to establish ahead of time. So then you can create the content and post it in those places so it can be found. So what type of content is going to drive the most impact? That has to do with your industry. For instance, if you're in the food or culinary industry, you're going to want to post recipes, videos, how to articles, as well as social media. I know Instagram and Pinterest is great for food related posts. If you are in a business services, some of the best content types as case studies and testimonials, as well as a portfolio of some sort. You can use infographics, e-books, and blog posts as well. If you're in the travel industry, for instance, you might post reviews of places visited or a hotel's, things like that, as well as social media. Again, Instagram's great if you have this beautiful sunset on the beach and take a photo of that and post it. That is going to be viewed and people are going to love that content. So your assignment is to leverage, and use your goal and audience and content type to draft out 5-10 content ideas. You don't actually have to write everything out or create everything out. I just want you to list them out. Just some ideas that you have that you can post in the future that is relatable to your industry, products, services or company. Then I actually want you to write one thing or create one thing and post it online, whether it's on your homepage or your website, social media, something like that. So you're actually creating something and posting it out there. You should definitely post it to the class, I'll love to see what you're doing. I will do my best to provide you some tips and some changes. I think that's going to help you out. I hope this was very informational. I can't wait to continue going through all the different marketing tactics you can use. 8. Lead Generation: Hi, and welcome to Class 7 of Entrepreneurial Marketing. We're going to be going over lead generation. The things that we're going to cover is pretty much as lead generation in general, the different types of leads out there and then lead generation funnel examples. So what exactly is a lead? A lead is pretty much someone who's showing intent for your products, and some shape or form. Obviously, lead generation is using marketing tactics to acquire said leads. You can do this in a variety of different ways. What's great about lead generation is that it's universal. You can use it for real estate, health care, wellness, business services, Auto. There's tons of reasons why you'd want to employ lead generation. Other than the fact that it's universal, it's also a quick conversion. Sometimes people are more likely to just give their e-mail address, instead of making a purchase or doing a really big conversion. So that's another reason why I recommend adopting it into your marketing strategy. A third reason is, there's a lot of a variety of different carrots, lead carrots. These are the things that you dangle in front of people for them to make some action. The reason why you'd want to start using lead generation within an e-commerce market is that, A, you're going to be able to directly send e-mails to your potential customers, or hopefully turn these people into repeat customers. Two, you can inform these people of new products and services that are coming out. Third, you can re-target people, and you could do some cart abandonment. Someone leaves a product in their cart, you can e-mail them an hour later saying, hey, you left a product in your cart, wants you to go back and finish order, or hey, is there something wrong, let us help you finish your order for you. There are a lot of platforms out there that will actually provide this as a automatic service. Platforms like Shopify, and Big commerce. Then last but not least is that, if you have these leads, you can get engagement and feedback from these customers. Somebody didn't check out, ask him, "Hey, we noticed that you didn't check out, is there something about the the checkout process that was confusing or anything that we can help you out with?" In regards to the incentives, the carrots, you could do pop-ups for discounts at checkout, you could do exclusive deals and say, hey, sign up for this now and we're going to let you know when there's these awesome flash sales. Also, you can do free shipping and you can do first-to-know thing. Hey, you will be the first one to know about this awesome thing that we're doing. So those are some of the incentives as a business to consumer company. If you are a business to business company, some of the lead gen, reasons why you'd want to do is you're going to get users into a sales funnel, especially of a very long expensive sales funnel. You can get people in there early and search and nurture, and that way. You could build credibility by sending industry thought leader articles, you could also send case studies and testimonials to show people, hey, you are actually really good at what you guys do. Then lastly, just like business-to-business, you could do that drive engagement and interests thing. You're going to want to engage with these people, and have them learn a little bit more about you and ask you any questions that they may have. The incentives of doing this, you can offer white papers or e-books, or you can provide free consultation. You can do industry updates, you can do free trials and you could do demos as well. Those last two, the free trials and demos are pretty big. A lot of people like to do that as a great way to capture people's information. So there's a few different types of leads. There are cold leads and there are warm leads. Cold leads our e-mail addresses or contact information that you've acquired, but these people have not given that to you, or at least they haven't given it to you knowingly. So they're unaware of your brand, they're unaware of your company, and they're not really expecting any calls or e-mails from you. Cold leads are also leads acquired from a service. So you possibly went to an online service, gave them money and they give you a list of e-mail addresses that fit a certain profile you are trying to target. Last, again, these are people who did not request information. So you acquired their info's somehow, maybe it was through an expo, or a conference, and the people who manage and run their coverage central list of e-mails. That's a cold lead. Your warm leads are what you want to focus more on. These are people who have shown interest in your company. They're people who know your brand. They might have made a demo requests, they've done a trial sign-up. They might be following you on social media. So these are people who know that they have requested information, and have provided you with their contact info. Next, there's lead quality. It's a little different from a cold lead in a warm lead. Because a warm lead might be somebody who has shown interest in your products and have provided you information, contact information so you can contact them. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a well, high-quality lead. For me personally, I would rather have one high-qualified lead, than 10 unqualified leads. The reason is that these, that one person is more likely going to convert to become a customer than those 10 others. I would rather put more of my focus into those type of people. High-quality, low quantity leads usually come from qualification forms, surveys and quizzes, demo requests, offers delivered via e-mail, social media follows, and log file. So people who signed up to get the feeds and whatnot. When I say surveys and quiz, I don't mean something that's on Buzzfeed, and so let's try to figure out what a vendor, superhero they might be. This is actually some quiz that's put on your own website, that you might offer to someone, hey, fill this out and we're going to send your personalized and customized tests that's going to help you with your blank situation. That's really great, because you get to understand what this person's going through, and how you can help them, and then you can actually deliver them customized content, specifically e-mail content that is about their needs. High quality, low quality leads come from those sources where you're buying lists from people. You're getting that expo slash conference lists of people. It's to refer a friend, or enter your e-mail promotion to possibly win $10,000. That thing provides lower-quality leads because people are just trying to get some monetary prize or promotion from it. Here's a little overlap, you can also get poor lead quality from social media posts and blog follows. Because if you have somebody who's just completely out of your market, but they really like something that you're doing and they like a post and they just blindly follow you, they're not going to be someone who's going to convert in the future. Sometimes you need to have a little due diligence in regards to who you are showing content to on social media. In my slide decks, I've provided two sales funnels that you guys can take look at one is a business-to-consumer one is business-to-business. I'm not going to try to verbally describe them, because we've already gone through sales funnels a lot. But usually the core belief in lead generation sales funnels is that you get people into the sales funnel, as a cold lead, and then they become a warm and hopefully qualified lead, and then after that posts lead generation, you then try to convert them into a user, or a customer. Excuse me. So your assignment, just as I just described it, is going to be three things. One, you're going to decide what your lead carrot is, what is going to be the thing that's going to sensitize people to become a lead. Two, what is your call-to-action? You know your company best, I can't tell you what to put in. But what is it going to be is, get started today, or fix your problem this how. Try to drive somebody, try to pick something that people are going to relate to, and that they know that they need. Then lastly, I want you to create that lead generation sales funnel. First start off with how someone's going to get into the sales funnel, then how are they going to become a lead, and then what are you going to do after they become elite? We're actually going to get into e-mail automation, and e-mail content and all that stuff soon. So you can actually map something out, then watch the next class, and then go back and finalize. If you have any questions, obviously go to skill share, and hit me up. I would also love to see what you guys are doing, so please post your projects and your assignments in the course page. I'm excited to keep going and to continue to move through the sales funnel, and to keep telling you guys more awesome marketing tactics. See you soon. 9. Email Strategy: Hi and welcome to class eight of entrepreneurial marketing. We are now going to be looking at e-mail and e-mail strategy. If you have been skipping around a little bit and you haven't watched class seven, class seven's all about lead generation. Try to get those e-mail addresses so you can start marketing to people. I recommend pausing, go to class seven, watch that, then come here because class seven is all about getting those e-mails. Class eight is all about what to do with those e-mails. Let's dive right in. The very first thing that I want you guys to do is segment your e-mails. I'm going to quote HubSpot here, and you guys can actually follow along. I have my slide decks on Skillshare. Please, follow along with me. Segmented campaigns perform better than non-segmented campaigns, obviously. But here's the big difference. Segmented campaigns with segmented e-mails, opens are 14 percent higher, unique opens are 10 percent higher, and clicks are 100 percent higher. That means you will get twice the amount of clicks if you segment your leads. That means you're going to get a lot more traffic from e-mail and your e-mail's going to be a lot more productive than it would be if you didn't segment them. In regards to segmenting your leads, universally there's about four or five different ways you can segment them. One is by activity, two by date so when they signed up, three is interest. Then lastly is location four. Location is important because if you for say, want to have your e-mails delivered at two o'clock across the whole country, that's not going to work because of the designed time zones. But if you segment people by time zone, you can then send out your e-mail campaigns so they are opened at specific times and so everyone gets it at the time that you wanted. That's just something to keep in mind. Now specifically if you're a business to consumer or e-commerce company, you can segment your leads in other different ways. You could do it by never purchased, one-time purchasers, recent purchasers or multiple purchasers or have never purchased. If you are a business to business company, you can segment by how they or how you acquired their lead. Did they download a white paper or an e-book, are they a blog follower? Have they taken a survey or a quiz in some way? Because of their answers, they are segmented into specific groups. You can also do multiple sales funnels in that way. If someone's a highly qualified lead, maybe they'll get an email that says, hey, why don't you talk to us and scheduled call immediately? But if it is a low qualified lead, you can send them some more information, so they can determine if your products and services are a right fit. One thing I want to talk about a little bit is about opting in. Double opt-ins is when you give the lead the ability to say, yes, I want to receive marketing and promotional materials from you. The reason why this is important is that a lot of times people don't understand what they're signing up for. If they don't understand what they're signing up for, they're going to start getting some e-mails that just come out of the blue and they're going to think it's spam. One of the best practices is to give somebody the option to do this double opt-in. They receive an e-mail that says, "hey, if you're interested, please click this and we're going to start sending you some more information." The positives of doing this is that it helps prevent spam labels and improves your lead quality. Because if people don't remember signing up for something and they see it they are going to be like, now I no longer want to get that. Then lastly, it reduces the unengaged e-mail quantities. There's a lot of platforms out there that will charge by contact. If you have 10,000 contacts, then you go over a certain amount, your costs are actually going to increase. If you're able to keep those numbers down, it's better for your overall budget. Should you or should you not? I would recommend enabling opt-ins if a user was added to your list without prior consent. Again, maybe it was an expo or a conference, you received a list of e-mails. Or a user performs a non-lead gen action, like they downloaded an e-book because they want to read said e-book obviously. Or they made a purchase on your website and didn't click a button that says, hey, I want to receive promotional e-mails. I don't think you need to use an opt-in if the user knowingly has signed up for a newsletter. They literally had a box that said sign up for a newsletter. Or the user opted in some way online. A lot of e-commerce platforms will have the ability to, once you put in your email address, there's a little checkbox that says yes, I want to receive promotional e-mails. Please keep that in mind. It's more for your safety so your e-mail account doesn't get labeled or flagged as somebody that's pretty spammy. You don't want to get in trouble doing that. We've covered some of the basics as to what you should do with those emails. Now, what marketing practices and e-mail strategies should you do? Very first thing, submit your content ideas. If you're a business to business company, you can send case studies and testimonials. You can send industry news. You can send original content. You can also send product and company updates. You can also use e-mails as a way to deliver content or deliver previews. If you put something on your website like a new blog post, you could put an excerpt in your email and then send it to people so they will click on it and go to your website. For business to consumer, obviously you can send discounts and exclusive deals. Again, in class seven, we talked about carrots. That's another thing that you actually want to deliver upon. You could do customer stories and engagement. Show people via e-mail what's going on on Instagram. That can actually encourage somebody to go to your profile and start following you on Facebook or Instagram or who knows where. Then last but not least, you can do milestone content. Milestone content is non-salesy content where you literally just say, hey, happy birthday and you don't even have to send a 10 percent discount or anything. Or it could be, hey, you've been using this platform for one-year. Congratulations, we appreciate your business. Little things like that, people will appreciate you. Another great useful tool is e-mail automation. It's wonderful because you can use it to send informational series. You could do it for re-targeting. You could do it for automatic response, and you can do it for milestone-based content. That way you're not going through your list and doing things manually. It's doing all that heavy lifting for you. It is a very strong and common practice. On my slide decks, I've put a few examples of e-mail automation campaigns that I've received. The very first one that comes up is from Google Ads. This is something that Google's been doing a lot. They want people to get success from their advertising platform. Because if someone does poorly, they're not going to go back to it. They're going to either find another platform or just stop spending altogether. They've been sending me a series of e-mails about what's best practice. One thing to look at here is that it started on a Wednesday and begins in a two-day intervals. The second email is delivered on a Friday, but then it skips Sunday, so it should have gone on. What they've realized is that I'm not in front of my computer during the weekends. So they're going to send it to me only during the weekdays. I have a better chance of actually opening and clicking on the e-mail if I'm in front of my computer. Then again, it restarts on that Monday and it goes back to two-day intervals as I originally said. Then all the emails have been delivered around the same time. It's always around 3:30. They know or at least they expect me to receive that e-mail, see it, and open it during that time. That first example was more business to business. Here's more of a business to consumer. There's this great company that's out in New England near me called Castaway Clothing. They offer men's preppy style and women's preppy style clothing. Pretty much anything that's on the Vineyard or Nantucket, they sell it. I get their promotional e-mails. There's a few key takeaways that I wanted to show you. First things first, they re-sent me an e-mail twice and I looked at it and I was trying to figure out what happened here, and I know exactly what they did. I never opened up the e-mail, so they assume that I never saw it. The next day they sent me the same exact e-mail. Now this could be user error on their part, but my understanding and my expectations is that they have some segmentation tool that if somebody doesn't open or click on an e-mail, they get put back into a resend campaign. This is very common practice and I encourage people to do it, as long as you don't do it too much and you start to overwhelm people. Secondly, you can see that they sent out a Groundhog Day e-mail. It was during the weekend. But what they thought was, you know what? We're going to send something out that's a little fun, It's a little timely and it's going to maybe encourage people to go to the store and buy at a time that they normally wouldn't. It's a fun little e-mail idea that they had. Then lastly, when it comes to automation, I mentioned the anniversary type of content that you can send out. Buffer, which is a social media platform sent me one that was milestone based. It was just saying, hey, thanks for using Buffer for I think it was two years now. It's not salesy, it's just appreciative and it's very funny. What you can't see in the slide is that, that is an animated gift of two of their staff members being excited and happy that I've been a customer of theirs for two years. Your assignment is going to be creating three different email segments. First, try to figure out where and how you can segment people. But then what you think is really going to drive some opens and clicks when you segment them. Two, I want you to draft out your e-mail strategy. What are you going to do with these e-mails? What content you're going to show them? is it salesy? Is it going to push content, etc. You give it a shot. Three, plan and draft out one e-mail automation campaign. It doesn't have to be that long. Ideally it would be at least 4-6 steps, but I'm really going to let you determine the length, how much, and what you're sending out. If you have any questions, hit me up on Skillshare. Please post your assignments online as well. I want to see them and I can provide feedback as well. As you can see, I'm excited. I love teaching this stuff, and I'm looking forward to going through the last few classes with you. 10. Social Media: Hi, welcome to class nine of Entrepreneurial Marketing. We are going to be focusing more on social media on this one. Very first thing I want to do is just go over some of the different social media platforms out there, the really big names. There are dozens of them out there, but I really only want to focus on the real big ones. We'll talk about some of the demographics and key takeaways. I'm not really going to dive super deep into each one because this will be an hour-long video. However, you can, as always, go find my slide deck on Skillshare and go over this class or follow along with the deck so you can see all of the data right there. First things first, we're going to talk about how to leverage social media and the four topics we're going to talk about is, just what I've said, know your market, second is focusing on relevant networks, third test and optimize, and fourth is engage. First things first with Facebook. Facebook obviously is the largest social media platform out there globally, there is 2.2 billion global users, which is nuts. Here's the key takeaway on this whole thing though and especially for the US, even though it has the largest user base out there, the age differences are not really all that different between 13 to 17,18 to 29, there's a drop-of after 29 year-olds, but it's only a little bit, there's only like a 12 percent user base difference. Where I'm going with this is that you will be able to target a lot of people if you have to focus of people on a specific age range, which makes Facebook a very attractive platform for advertising and for user engagement, stuff like pages and groups and things like that. Don't forget, they also have the marketplace, they have the Facebook Messenger, lots of different options for a company to use Facebook. Secondly is Instagram, which is actually owned by Facebook. This has a much younger audience, there's a huge age gap. After the 29 year old, it drops down significantly. Those who are not familiar with Instagram, it's very image and video focused, which makes it a great option for travel and food blogs and companies, things like that. A key takeaway is that because it is a very young platform and it does skew toward females more than males, that makes it a great option for clothing companies and other similar female centric brands and companies. Your next social media platform is Twitter, it has 66 million people. The key takeaway with this is that even though there is a much smaller user-base compared to Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. This user base is very, very committed and very, very active. These people like to use it on a daily basis. This microblogging platform could be great if you're trying to find people who are in a niche audience, people who like to stay active and engage with other users. LinkedIn is similar to Facebook, but it's less about leisure and more about career. People are on there to read industry news, they're on there to network with like-minded professionals, or people might be using it to find a job or to advance their career. There is a dramatic drop-off in age after 49 years-old, but you have to consider that a lot of people are in there because they are using it for professional services. Anyone over 50 is most likely not on there because they might be retired or they just don't need to network with people all that much. There's also something that's substantial is that 50 percent of the adults on LinkedIn have a college education. You can really target people by their education levels if that's what you're trying to find. Your other big social media platform out there as Pinterest. This is your do it yourself, learn how to do it social media platform. A huge take-away is that new users are 50 percent male. I think a lot of people, they see Pinterest and think, oh, this is a female thing. That's true. It started off where a lot of females were the ones who were using the platform for their own projects, ideas, do it yourselves, etc, but now it's split. All new users are 50 percent and it's very popular with millennials. If you're aiming for that kind of market, the millennial market, and especially males and it's that do it yourself business that you're running or you can take advantage of that kind of interest, then I would definitely look into Pinterest. YouTube is a video centric platform, as you're probably aware. It's also huge. There's 1 billion monthly users. A cool thing and one of the key takeaways is just like Facebook, is that all the age groups are pretty similar when it comes to size and how many people are using it. If you have a lot of video content or you have content that would be great as a video, it could be recipes, do it yourself, things like that, I highly recommend uploading all that stuff to YouTube and creating a channel. I think it will be a very attractive channel for that type of business. Now we've talked about all the different social media platforms out there. Now I want to focus more on how some of those networks would be relevant to your business. For example, you're not going to post food pictures on LinkedIn, you're not going to post or yourself tips on Twitter, you're not going to post company updates on Instagram, and you're not going to post job postings on Facebook. Facebook itself is designed to help friends or family stay together and the different post that you can use are text, images, video, live videos and stories. There's also groups, company pages, events, marketplace, as I mentioned before, and other built-in features like the messenger. Facebook can be used for a lot of different things. Some companies like to have their own Facebook page which people can follow and they get updates, but it's also really great for advertising. We're not really talking about advertising in this course because it's a paid feature and we're trying to focus more on low budget stuff, but that is something to keep in mind in the future. Next again, Instagram, as I mentioned, Instagram is a very visual, heavy platform. You can do photos, videos, stories again, and live videos. This is connected to the Facebook ad platform. You can advertise in both social media networks under one advertising platform. Again, I recommend this for visual stimulating post and anything that is text heavy, I don't recommend Instagram for it. The next social media network I want to talk about is Twitter. As mentioned before, it's a microblogging platform. People go on there to just write small little posts. You get 280 text characters to write your post, but you can also add images and video and links as well. One fun thing that people are starting to do, that companies are starting to do is use it as a customer service platform. If I'm using my waterfall company as an example, someone might have a piece of their filmmaker that breaks and they can go onto Twitter and message me or put me, tag me in the message and say, hey, this is the issue and I could follow up with them directly. It actually is good because you aren't out in public, because then it shows that my company, perfect pixel waffle, is very engaging and very helpful with our customers. The next social media network is LinkedIn. First started off as a resume and job search site, but now it's expanded into something much bigger. It's more of a professional slash career network, when you can't create post text image video as well. You can actually start writing articles and have them posted there. You can have your own little blog, I guess you could say on LinkedIn. Other features, company pages, and groups. It's great for like-minded individuals who want to speak like for instance, I'm a marketer obviously. If I want to speak to other marketers about trends, things like that, I can create or join a group and have a forum or people I can talk to all under one network. Another great thing about LinkedIn, is that it has a strong job title targeting for advertising. Again, we're not going to go really into it, but it's something that I wanted to bring up in case you guys were thinking about moving into a more paid format. Another social media platform I want to again talk about is Pinterest. This was designed to inspire and learn new things such as do-it-yourself projects or product research pins. Now here's the different thing. Pins are visual bookmarks. There are things that if you actually had a cardboard behind you or I had one behind me, I'll put up little ideas on that board. That's what Pinterest is actually designed to do and it's great for those crass cooking, do-it-yourself and how to sort of posting articles. Highly recommended for food, highly recommended for crafts. Again, anything where or if instructional, people want to learn how to use a product a specific way like, call it like an immersion blender or SUV for instance. You can put recipes of how to on that. Next and last is YouTube, again, has one of the largest user bases. It's specifically designed to publish long-form video, long-form videos that are generally created by the users or networks or businesses. You can use it for entertainment and use it for instruction. You can use it for live video. It is used by a variety of different users. You have corporations, you have government agencies, you have artists. A lot of people are leveraging it to get their information out there. We've gone over all what I believe are the big important social media networks out there. Now it's time to start posting, but you don't just start posting random stuff out there. I want you to think about it. I want you to think like a scientist. That's what marketing is all about, is experimentation. We're going to do some testing. We're going to treat posts like an experiment. If you have my slide deck in front of you, I've posted a social media plan example. We're specifically going to focus on Instagram. What we're going to do is in my plan or my example, I've created a timeline of two weeks. What I'm going to do is I'm going to create four different types of content each week. Two, it's going to be this again, this is about my fake waffle company or waffle maker company. I'm going to post two waffle recipes. I'm going to do one pole Q&A. Saying like, hey, what is your favorite topping? Stuff like that, and trying to encourage engagement. The last one is a lifestyle. Maybe a picture of my kids eating a waffle or maybe someone else's kids eating a waffle, a customer provided image or post. The metrics that I'm going to watch are comments and shares. I wan to see how much engagement we're getting. The way that we're going to optimize it. Now we've created the plan. Now this is how we're going to optimize it. First we're going to establish a primary metric. What is the shares, clicks, etc. Next is, we want to answer some of the following questions. How did each post compare in performance? Did similar posts perform the same? Again, remember we posted two recipes. I want to see if each recipe had the same performance or not. Lastly, was there anything unique? Was there anything unique about one of those posts that I haven't done before that might make it better or worse? Now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to create a new hypothesis to test against the best-performing posts. Here's the optimization example again, check out the slide deck if you guys have it. Say one recipe post had 20 percent more engagement than the others. My hypothesis is that Brinner recipes, which is breakfast for dinner, will have more engagement. Here's my new content plan. I'm going to do two awful recipes, but now this time I'm going to do one specific breakfast, one specific dinner/Brinner. Then I'm going to do one pole and question and answer. I'm going to do one lifestyle. Then the parameters is that, I'm going to publish the post all on the same schedule as before, and then try to eliminate any randomization or any way that I can say, I'm not a 100 percent sure that the data I'm seeing in is not being affected by other issues. Run your tests again, absorb the information, and then continue to optimize. Learn what you're doing, and make your social media practices better from it. Let's go over social media best practices, and specifically engagement. First things first, you have to like to be liked and you have to follow to be followed. You know the term birds of a feather flock together. That's actually what I want you to think about when you start following and liking and adds, engaging with other people online, you want to do this with people who are in similar businesses or similar industries, similar likes, things like that. It doesn't have to be an exact match because obviously you don't want just another person doing exactly what you're doing. But you want to engage with people who are interested in the same things. Make sure you follow and like people who are similar to your business, try to find influences in your industry. For me as a waffle filmmaker seller, I'm going to try to focus on maybe Food Network people. Or celebrity chefs or local chefs to try to say, hey, check out what people are doing with our equipment in the recipes that we're posting, and then respond to followers in comments. You know how the Internet is. People are trolls. They're going to go up there. They're going to say negative comments just to be negative. Respond to that. But don't be defensive, don't be mean back to them. Be productive about it, show that you care about a, your own brand. But b, that you want to actually listen to other people's comments and respond positively. Your content defines your audience. You want to post things on your account that will encourage the right type of users. Don't post things that are just merely entertainment that people will go, they'll laugh, and then move on. You want to create content and post content. That's a, going to attract people who are going to convert, but b, people who are actually going to share, they got to comment they're going to like, you really want to encourage action. Just like lead generation from a few classes ago, before, I said, one qualified leaders is better than 10 unqualified leads. Well, a 100 qualified followers is a lot better than a 1,000 unqualified followers. Just keep that in mind when you're creating a content and what people are going to want to engage with, and what content is actually going to drive actions. Another thing that you want to do, especially on your business account. Under perfect pixel waffles, I'm going to want to focus more on waffles content. Images of different recipes of people enjoying waffles people using our products, things like that. I am not going to post images of me at a party with all my friends or anything that's unrelated. You want to keep those things separate. That is because people are going to your social media profile to learn about your brand, not about yourself. I highly encourage you to create a side one. Now you can encourage people to, you can actually have your personal on the side and your business and then actually leverage both of them, promote your personal brand and then promote your business account between the two of them. Just try to make sure that anything personal does stay on that end unless it has anything to do with your company. As also, I shouldn't have to say this. But your personal life out there, try to keep it in check because whatever you do will reflect to the accompany obviously. Your assignment is to take all the information that you have gathered today, which is a lot, and to find your social media goal, what are you going to do on social media? Are you trying to encourage people to engage with you? Are you trying to get people to your site? Pick a specific goal first. Then I want you to pick a primary social media account. Now, your startup or wherever you're trying to build right now, might be able to fit all four or six or who knows, even 10 social media accounts. But doing too much on what it would be too hard to track. I want you to focus just on one primary one first, and then you can expand it on your own. Your third assignment is to create a quick rough draft of a one month content plan with two tests. You pretty much going to do two test, two weeks, plan those things out and that way you know, what you need to have published on specific days. We're almost at the end. This is exciting stuff. We only have one more thing to go over, which is analytics and tracking. If you have any questions, hit me up on skill share and please post some of your first post on skill shares so we could check it out. We can see what you're doing. I'm excited. Let's continue getting things done. 11. Conclusion: Hi and welcome back to entrepreneurial marketing. This is the summary classes only go to just be a few moments. I want you guys to take away three major themes from everything that we discussed. Obviously there's been 10 classes, we're not going to go through every single one because this class itself will be about 20 minutes. But I really want you to take away three main things. First thing is your target market. We kept going over it, over and over about how important it is for you to A, establish who your user personas are. But B, you know who you're actually supposed to target, is it the decision-makers, is the user, is it the influencer, etc. When you start building out your marketing plan, just keep those people inline, because these people who you're going to be targeting. These are the people that you're going to be creating a content around your social media strategy around. It all just rotates and gravitates around them. That's the very first thing. Makes sure that you get your target audience and your personas and everything nice and concrete. Secondly, I want you guys to again remember your sales funnel. Your sales funnel needs to be simple and easy for your potential customers to go through. Try to reduce as many steps as possible. If you're doing a lead generation sales funnel, makes sure that you're not using a lead generation form that has 15 fields in it. Try to reduce it as much as possible, and then if you need additional information from people in the future, then follow up with them via email or other ways so you can gather more information. Just get those people into the sales funnel first. Last but not least, it's all about the content. Once you are building your website out, once you're doing your social media, you're doing all those things, make sure that again you're targeting the right people with the content. But you are actually smart about what you are posting, what you're writing about. How is everything structured? Make sure that it's not just 15 words and just a bunch of pictures. Make sure that there's a lot of content without pictures, and that's going to help you with your SEO. It's going to help you with your lead generation. It's just going to really pull everything together. I know there was a lot to really go over, we covered ten topics. But if you have any questions, please reach out to me on Skillshare, as well as you can go to perfectpixelwaffles.com. That's a fake website slash company that's created, that you can use that website as a guide, just to go back and see what best practices are. I had a blast teaching this. I really hope you guys learned a lot from it, and I really hope you're going to get some stuff done. Good luck.