Marketing For Business Growth

1. Intro: If you look around the world today, you will probably notice that there are both large and small companies that operate in nearly every single industry. As an example, you can probably think of a small family run restaurant that is operating nearby your house, and you'll probably also be able to think of a large chain restaurant or fast food chain that has a location nearby. They're both competing in the same industry for the same customers, and they can both find success, but the difference between the large company and the small company is their ability to successfully market for growth. In this course, I'm going to walk you through the strategies and the techniques that those large companies are using to grow their operations, scale their business, and generate more profits. Hello, everybody. My name is Zach Hartley, and I'm an entrepreneur and investor from Calgary Alberta, Canada. I am currently a owner and founder of two different businesses. The first one is a three D printing farm that is about to generate over $1,000,000 per year in annual revenue. And I also run a social media business that is primarily focused on my personal brand that is bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. In my past life, I was a CEO of a manufacturing company that brought in wine barrels from California, whiskey barrels from Jack Daniels, and then converted those barrels into home de core and furniture products and distributed them across Canada and the United States. I also turned those barrels into a rental business for parties, events, and weddings. And so I have been through this process multiple times. I have skilled several companies up over $1,000,000 in annual revenue. And in this course, I'm going to walk you through everything I know starting with the difference between marketing, branding, and sales. Then exploring the different marketing channels and techniques that we can use as business owners. We're going to talk about AB testing, which is one of the strongest tools at our disposal as marketers. And we are going to talk about the tools and strategies that I use to get the absolute most return on the resources that I'm dedicating to my marketing. And at the end, we are going to start talking about an e mail list and how to build it in a way that generates consistent sustainable profits for your business. In this course, you can expect to see the inside strategies that I personally use in my business to grow my revenue and grow and scale my business. I'm also going to give you real life examples of what other companies have done to grow from their starting point into billion dollar companies, and I'm going to give you actionable first steps to start your marketing campaign, as well as the tools and the metrics that you need in order to analyze the success. In this course, I have also put together a project for you, and it is a marketing questionnaire that is going to walk you through all the different aspects of a marketing campaign that you need to consider. And it's also going to ask you about the performance and the results of that campaign. And what I'm going to ask you to do at the end is to either take a screenshot or a scan of that questionnaire. Or what would be even better is if you can share some of the content or the marketing campaigns that you have generated based on this course with us. That way, we can follow you on socials, or we can follow you on the platform. We can support the campaign. We can learn from what you have done, and we can support your business. That is the goal here is to build a community of students that have gone through the course that are going through the course, and that will go through it in the future so that we all have a shared mindset, and we can support each other as a community. Now, if you get any value out of this course, please remember to leave a review. I sincerely appreciate it. And if you have feedback for how I can improve the course, please leave that. I read every single review. I read every single comment, and I am doing my best to improve this course over time based on the feedback that you have for me. I read everything, and I sincerely appreciate it. Now, if you want to learn more about my personal businesses and what I am doing outside of this course, you can follow me on all of my social media channels. I post primarily on YouTube and TikTok, but I also have Instagram X and LinkedIn, and I would love to connect with you there. Thank you so much for watching and joining this course. And without any further ado, let's get started. 2. Marketing branding and sales: Alright, everybody. Welcome to the first video. In this one, we're going to talk about the difference between marketing, sales and branding. Believe it or not. Those are three very different things. And so in this video, I want to just very clearly tell you about the difference between them and how they fit into our overall marketing strategy. Let's jump right in. Okay, so when I think about these three topics, I usually like to think about a lemonade stand. And when you're starting a lemonade stand, you need to come up with a company name and a company logo, and you need to think about what colors you're going to use and what people are going to visually perceive your company as. All of that is referred to as brand. Now, once you have all of that set up and you've got your lemonade stand ready to go, you need to find a way to acquire customers? You either need to run advertisements or you need to get a billboard? You need to get a sign on the side of the street, or you need to put a little poster up on the front of your table? Whatever it is, that is marketing. The act of setting up that engagement in order to bring in customers, that is called marketing. And then when your customer arrives at the station and they say, Hi, I'd like to buy a lemonade, and you say, Okay, would you like a small or a large? And would you like a pop to go with that? And would you like a cookie as well? That is called sales. And so when you're talking with the customer, and you're trying to upsell them, and you're trying to get more life and value out of that customer. That is sales. When you're trying to get that customer in the first place, that is marketing and what your company or what your customer sees when they talk to your company, that is branding. So those are three very, very different things, and it's important to get that distinction. Somebody put out a good tweet that has always kind of stuck with me, and they said that marketing gets attention branding keeps attention, and sales monetizes that attention. And I think it's very true. There are three different things, and it's important to just kind of differentiate them for us in this course, and what we're trying to do is we're going to focus on the marketing side of things. And when it comes to marketing, there are two ways to get attention and drive customers to your company. Number one is by creating organic content, and number two is by paid advertisements. Now, let's dive into this. Organic content is creating content that people naturally want to watch and integrating the product into what they're watching. The idea here is that people need entertainment in their life. And if you can provide some type of entertainment that also integrates your product into that entertainment, that can usually be a fantastic, fantastic way to advertise and send customers to your product. One great example of this is Red Bull. Red Bull releases a lot of videos. And these videos are a very, very extreme stunts. The guys skiing down a glacier, F one car versus drone. They're jumping over a ship. They're doing some wild stuff in Red Bull. And if you ever watch these videos, they never really talk about Red Bull the Drink. It's not about the health benefits or the energy that you get from drinking Red Bull. It's about these amazing stunts that people just want to organically watch. And then every now and then, they'll slip in a video of the person drinking Red Bull. That's That's the advertisement is that if you want to be like this star athlete, well, that star athlete drinks Red Bull, so you should drink Red Bull, too. That is the underlying message in all of these videos, but they're getting you to watch it and intake that message by giving you amazing content with some crazy stunts from all over the world and world class athletes. And so that is an amazing strategy by Red Bull. Another company that you're probably familiar with is Patagonia. What they do is instead of these crazy stunts all over the world, they tell stories. They tell story about the lands and the people and where their products come from and how they're made, and they talk about the history and the philosophy of what they are doing. And within that, they integrate their products, they integrate their brand. The people in those videos are in those photos are wearing patagonia clothing. And so by learning about this story, learning about these places and engaging in these stories and this content, you are getting a subliminal message to help out or to engage with or to be like these people, you may want to purchase some patagonia clothing. Now, on the other side of it, of paid marketing. You could argue that this is more salesy, because you're running ads to get your product or service in front of people. You are literally creating something, whether it's a video, a photo, a banner, a poster, a billboard, whatever it is, and you are paying somebody, whether it's Facebook, or the billboard supplier or whoever it is, you are paying them to put your advertisement in front of eyeballs, whether it's on the side of the road or it's on social media, or it's on a video or it's on a T shirt, whatever it might be. You are creating an advertisement, and you're paying to get eyeballs on that advertisement, and you're hoping that some of those eyeballs resonate with the advertisement that you've created, and they decide to go and buy that product. An example of this is Apple. Apple created a very, very iconic commercial. If you're a young person right now, you may not recognize this commercial. But back when the iPod came out, you needed these long, white, corded headphones in order to use it and to listen to it. And it was a very, very iconic image of a black silhouette White headphones, and then a funky color in the background, and Apple created this advertisement and then paid TVs to run the advertisement, to put this advertisement in front of our eyeballs so that hopefully, maybe we decide that we want an iPod as well. Another example of this, again, Apple, just because they did a good job. It was the old commercial between the Apple guy and the PC guy, and it just made him feel like a modern, cool hip guy, whereas he was kind of a old stiff person that was stuck in the past, you could say, and so again, piece of content that they created that they are paying to get in front of eyeballs. This isn't something that somebody is searching out and watching because they get enjoyment out of it. The person is actually trying to watch a football game that they're getting enjoyment out of it, and they're getting interrupted by a commercial like this because Apple is paying for it. That is what is happening here. Another example of this just recently was coin base. They ran a Super Bowl but these all have some nostalgia. She probably get some more updated or ones that don't reference all the past. But Coin base ran a Super Bowl commercial, where this QR code was bouncing around the corners, and then right before the commercial ended, it perfectly hit into the corner. This used to be a screen saver on a lot of computers and TVs that people would look at, and they turned it into a QR code so that people would scan it, wondering what it was, and they ended up going to the coin based website. This was run during a Super Bowl, and obviously, nobody is getting any enjoyment out of watching this. It's just sparking their curiosity, and it's hopefully ending them up on the coin based website on their mobile phone. And so this is another example. Paid marketing and paid advertisement. Now, you can go to the extreme one way or the other, like Red Bull and Patagonia or like Apple and coin base, where it's just a pure paid advertisement. There's not really a whole lot of entertainment there versus pure entertainment and not necessarily a paid advertisement. You almost don't even know it's an advertisement. So you've got those two ends of the spectrum, and then you have everything in the middle. This is not black or white. You can be anywhere along the line here. And in my opinion, one of the under utilized strategies here is to try and thread that needle where you put out a lot of organic content, and then the organic content that does well, you turn that into a paid advertisement. That is actually strategy one of this course. We're on Video one, and I'm giving you strategy. We're on video one right now, and I'm already giving you the first strategy. The first strategy here is try and make as much organic content about your business as you possibly can. What that's going to do is it's going to put out all these different pieces, and your customers and your audience and the people that follow you are naturally going to vote on which piece of content is the best by commenting or liking or sharing or saving or whatever it may be. And then the content that does well amongst the rest of it, that is the content that you should start using for paid advertisements to drive customers because you already have traction on it, you know it's engaging, you know people want to talk about it. And this is a strategy that is extremely, extremely underutilized. So I highly recommend If you are trying to work on the marketing for your business, focus on creating as much organic content as you can, and then the organic content that does very well, that is the money that is the advertising that you should put money behind. So, there we go, just to get started here, but in summary, number one, we are going to focus on marketing. We're not necessarily going to focus on sales or branding in this video. Marketing is about getting the right attention from the right people. So that's what we're going to focus on, and we're going to talk about both paid and organic strategies within this course. So I hope this video helped. I hope this first strategy helps, and we'll see you in the next video. 3. Goal of marketing: Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. Now that we understand the differences between marketing branding and sales, it is time to talk about our marketing specifically and what the actual goal of the marketing is. How do we know if we're achieving success and what are we actually striving for in this video, I'm going to break it all down. So the goal of marketing is actually very, very simple, and I've kind of distilled it into just three words, and it is to acquire profitable customers. By acquire, what I mean is get people to see your product that actually want to buy your product. By profitable, I mean, spend a reasonable amount on marketing so that there's still profit left over once those people have bought your product, and that way you're not losing money. When I refer to customers, what I'm talking about is your actual target market. If you are selling pistachio flavored ice cream, your customers are not people that are lactose free and can't eat dairy. You need to be very, very specific about who your customers are, and our goal of marketing is to get in front of those customers, make sure that what we are doing is profitable and make sure that those customers are buying our product. That's what we're looking for, and that's what we're trying to achieve with our marketing efforts. And when it comes to marketing and how we are measuring those efforts and the success of those efforts, there's a couple of things that we need to understand about our business. First one here is the cost of goods sold. What I am referring to here is the labor and material and overhead that goes into creating your product. We've talked about this in some of my other courses. But basically what I am referring to is if you sell a product for $100, how much does it cost you to make that product and how much is left over afterwards? What is left over afterwards is referred to as your gross profit. And what we're really trying to figure out is what is the average gross profit on your order or on your product or on your service? Because that number is super super crucial towards our marketing efforts. And the reason it's crucial is because that is what's going to determine your profitability. So, let's just give this an example. Let's say that you run a cake business. You make cakes for events and weddings and stuff like that. And you sell your cakes for $20, but your cost of goods sold is $12. That leaves you with a gross profit of $8 per cake. Now, if you run marketing and advertisements that cost you $3 to acquire a customer, That means that you have an $8 gross profit, cost you $3 in marketing, and that means that you have $5 leftover in profit at the end of this exercise after your advertising expense. But let's say that your marketing isn't as good, and you actually have to spend a lot more on marketing to acquire that same customer, and let's say that that dollar figure is actually $14. Well, unfortunately, you only have $8 in gross profit. You just spent $14 in marketing, and that means that you are losing $6 on every cake that you sell. That is the situation that we are trying to avoid. And when I talk about marketing, I am talking about trying to acquire profitable customers, and this is why. We do not want to be spending more on marketing than what we are earning in gross profit from each sale. That is an absolutely crucial crucial concept that we really need to understand right away. Let's put this into another example here. Let's say that you run an e commerce store, primarily a website, and you sell a variety of products. Well, what you need to do is then look at your averages. Look at your average checkout, your average order size, and let's just say that your average order was $100. Well, if your average cost of goods sold is $45, that means that your gross profit per order is $55, meaning you have $55 in profit after you cover the expense of the actual product that you were shipping out. Now, in this scenario, let's just say that it costs you $25 to acquire that customer using your marketing strategies and advertisements. Well, if it's $55 in gross profit, that would leave you with $30 in leftover profit per order. However, If it cost you $75 to acquire that customer, and you only have $55 in gross profit, that means that you would be losing on average $20 per order after your marketing expenses. Again, this is the situation that we are trying to avoid. And so overall, what we're trying to do is we are trying to find a marketing strategy that leaves us with as much profit as possible after we account for our marketing expense. And then once you find a marketing strategy that produces a good profit, the goal here is that all you should have to do is increase the marketing budget and fulfill those orders. And so if you can figure out that if you put up a billboard near your shop, it's going to drive traffic, then what you should do is get a few more billboards as long as it's profitable or if you're running online ads on Facebook and you're noticing that you've got $10 leftover on every $30 order, well, it's time to start scaling up that ad budget. The goal here is to figure out what marketing strategy is going to give you the most profit leftover after the cost of marketing, and then to scale that channel and grow that channel and try and bring in more revenue through that marketing channel. So that is the goal here. That is what we are trying to figure out. And in summary, we are trying to find profitable customers and marketing channels for our business. So that is the overarching goal, and that is what I'm going to try and help you achieve throughout this course. 4. Marketing channels: All right, everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, we're going to talk about all of the different marketing channels that you can use to drive traffic and attention to your business to hopefully convert into sales. So let's dive right in. The first thing that I want to review here is just a bunch of different options that you can use. Now, when I say marketing channels, basically what I'm referring to is a method or strategy for advertising your business. For instance, you can make videos or content for social media. You can run search ads on Google. You can pay for sponsored segments on podcasts. You can hire influencers to promote your product. You can pay for sponsorships within YouTube videos. You can go and sponsor trade shows or be a speaker at a trade show or get a booth at a trade show. You can run radio ads. You could put door hangers on houses. You could run display ads on alternative websites. You could build an e mail list. You can do a variety of different things to try and get attention for your business. These are all valid strategies that I guarantee you have worked for somebody at some point. Guarantee you, most of them would probably work for your business, but your goal as the entrepreneur and the founder is to try and figure out what channel is going to be most profitable for your business. That is the goal here. Now, by no means, is this a fully all inclusive list? There are lots of different ways and different strategies and different marketing channels. I've just put together a list here of some of the most popular and some of the common channels that I use and that I am familiar with. However, when it comes to choosing the channel that you want to use to market your business, you need to think about where your customers are making their purchase decision. Not necessarily where your customers are, but where and when they make the decision to purchase your product or solve that problem. And then what you need to do is you need to align your marketing with that consumer so that when they're ready to make that decision, or when they're thinking about solving that problem, your product or your service comes to mind or is available or pops up for them or hits them at the right time. Basically what you're trying to do is ask yourself, is your product or service an impulse purchase, or is it something that people seek out? Depending on what the answer is to that question, also probably going to dictate what channel you decide to market on. For instance, if you sell an e commerce store with a product that solves a very specific problem, then running Google ads are probably going to be a great option for you because when somebody types in how to solve X Ys E, you can pay to have your product pop up right there so that when they're searching for it and making that purchase decision, your product is front of mine. That can be a great option for you, but again, it depends on your business because there is no right answer to this, and it usually takes trial and error. There is nobody that can sit here and tell you that influencer marketing or radio ads is going to be the best option for your business. What you need to do is try and test radio ads using a bunch of different ads in a couple of different demographics or market places and see if it works for your business. Does it generate a profit? Does it actually work? That is the idea here. And what you need to think about is which opportunity or which marketing channel is best going to apply to my business and to my customers. Now, here are a couple of examples that you may want to think about. I have a friend that runs a home cleaning service. Let's just say that this was your home cleaning service. Your customers are likely looking for local companies on Google. If I'm looking for somebody to clean my home, I'm looking for a company that is going to be based in Calgary with people that work in Calgary. I don't want a company as I don't want to search companies from across the country or companies from another city. I want to focus on companies that are local to my area. And so, for me, I would focus on running Google service ads so that people can call you directly. And so if somebody types in home cleaning in Calgary, my advertisement can come up for anybody that types that in within a certain geographic area, and I can pay run an advertisement so that when they call me, I can answer the phone and try and book them into an appointment. The idea here is that you are trying to fit your marketing channel and your marketing dollars to the most likely place where your customer is going to find you when they want to make that purchase decision. The idea here is that you want to also ask people for reviews on your service so that you can increase your credibility, especially if you're going to be doing anything on Google. So that is one example. If you're a home cleaning service, you want to have some control about where those ads are running. And so Google could be a great option because you can limit it to a geographic area. The next one here is a T shirt business. L et's say that you want a clothing brand that specializes in T shirts. This will likely be an impulse purchase if they like the design of your shirt. There are not a whole lot of people that are doing a ton of research on a T shirt before they buy it and seeking it out and doing that. A lot of people when they buy clothing, they're looking around for cool fabric or designs or a fit that they really like, and if they find that fit, they will buy it. It is not something that they have to think a lot about, because it's in general, a fairly low ticket item. And so buying a T shirt is usually an impulse purchase. That kind of business and that kind of purchase. What you might want to do is focus on running social media ads. Because this way, you can run ads to people across the country, so your market is absolutely massive. You can get those designs in front of thousands and thousands of people, and you can try and target those advertisements to just your demographics. So if they're sports T shirts, you can focus on people that like sports things on social media. That way, you can kind of target it to that specific audience to get a higher return on your marketing dollars that you're spending. My advice in all of these different channels, though is that it is almost never going to work on your first attempt. So what I would recommend is create multiple different advertisement. So if it's a radio ad, create multiple different versions. If it's a social media ad, create multiple different advertisements with different kind of pitches or different kind of angles to the advertisement so that you can test different strategies and see what works based on real results and real engagement from customers. Now, the third example here is a tutoring business. Let's say that you run an after school tutoring business. Well, It's probably not the kids that are going to be signing themselves up and paying for the tutoring business. It's probably the parents that are going to be buying that. And so what you might want to think about is running a radio ad before and after school when the parents are driving or picking up or dropping off their kids. That way, they have their kids at the top of their mind. You know that they're going to be sitting in a car with school also going through their head. They might even be asking their kids how they did in school or what their report card looked like. And then you can run an ad that says, Hey, kids not doing so well in school, we can help them out for a quick little fee, and we can bring them up to speed on math or social or science or whatever it might be and so if I was running a tutoring business, I would run radio ads before and after school when I think parents are driving their kids. Another option for this is to be putting advertisements on bus stops or billboards around different schools that you want to target. So let's say that I run a tutoring business in the south end of Toronto. Well, in that scenario, I would want to run my advertisements on all of the bus benches near that school and any large billboards near that school, I would offer my tutoring services so that I know the students and the parents that are driving to and from that school will see my advertisements. That way, I'm spending money on my target market, that I know they're going to see it, and those are the people where hopefully school is at the top of their mind, and they're thinking about making a purchase decision like this. And so, again, what we're trying to do is we're trying to match the channel to the customer to figure out what channel is going to be the most profitable. And then once we find a profitable channel, all we need to do is just scale up the ad spend or kind of ramp things up. That is the overall goal. Now, that's it for this video. And the next one, we are going to start talking about how to actually measure the success and the performance of your different marketing channels. So let's jump right 5. ROAS: Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. In the last one, we talked about the different channels that you can use for marketing your business. Now what you need to do is you need to go out there. You need to think about what channel is going to give you the best results. You need to then go out and try and use that channel. You need to experiment a little bit, try a few different types of advertisements and see what works best for you. My recommendation would be to try a couple of different marketing channels and a couple of different advertisements and then analyze the data, get rid of what doesn't work, and focus on what does work. Now, in order to make those decisions and figure out what is working best, we're going to use something called Roaz. Roaz stands for a Return on Ad spend. That's what ROAS stands for Return on Ad spend. Now, to calculate your ROAs, you are going to take the revenue that is generated from your advertisements, and you are going to divide it by the cost of those advertisements. It's very, very simple. We are taking the ultimate revenue that is coming in from our advertisements, divided by the cost of those advertisements. Dally, we want as much revenue as possible for as little cost as possible. And so a higher ratio is better. For instance, if we bring in $100 in revenue with $10 in ads, our ROAs would be ten X. Ten times the cost of our ads in terms of revenue. That's what we're looking at there. And so a higher ratio is better. A ten is better than a one. If it was a one ratio, that would mean that you're bringing in $100 in revenue, and it's going to cost you $100 in advertisements. That would be a one to one ratio. What we are looking for is a higher ratio where we are spending as little as possible on our advertisements, and we are getting as much revenue as possible. Now, to give you another example, let's just say that you spend $50 on Facebook advertising, and you bring in $300 in revenue. That would give you a Raz or a return on ADSPen of six because we are taking 300 and we're dividing it by 50, and that gives us a value of six or a ratio of six or a Raz of six in this scenario. Now, let's give another example here. Let's say that on average, the product or service that you sell generates a 50% gross profit margin. That would mean that you need a ro az of two for your marketing to be profitable. Let's say that you have $100 in revenue that you bring in from your advertisements, because you have a 50% gross profit margin, that means that you generate $50 in gross profit. And if you have a $50 ad spend, that means that you would be break even, because your ad spend is half of what the sales or the revenue that you're bringing in are. So 100/50 gives you a row as of two, so your break even is two, any marketing channel or advertisements that you can get or that you can pay for that generate a row above two is going to generate profit for your business. And so the minimum RO az that you would be looking to continue with or to scale up when testing your different marketing channels would be a Raz of two if you have a 50% gross profit margin. Now, when it comes to comparing these different channels, like I said, I recommend you try out a couple of different marketing channels to see what works best. And what you are looking for is the RO az for each of those channels. If you notice that your ro az on Facebook advertisements is four, but on TikTok, it's seven, and on YouTube, it is six I would put most of my money into TikTok advertising, I would continue to put a little bit of money into YouTube advertising, and I would cut back my budget on Facebook or eliminate it entirely. The goal here is to figure out what marketing channel is going to give you the highest return for the money that you're spending on those advertisements. We are measuring that in terms of a metric called Roaz or return on ad spend. And then the idea here is that if the Roaz is above your break even, which is dependent on your gross profit, that means that those advertisements will be generating profit for your business, and you should be trying to scale up the budget that you're putting into those advertisements. So just to kind of summarize this strategy and break it down for you very simply, this is kind of like the strategy two of this course. Number one here, you need to test out multiple channels. Test out, Google, test out, social media, test out, billboards, test out, whatever channel it is that you think is going to resonate best with your customer at the time of their purchase. Next one here is you need to test each channel in multiple ways. If you run one Facebook advertisement, and it doesn't work for you, and you completely write off the entire marketing channel of Facebook ads. You are doing this wrong. I am telling you that it is going to take you multiple tries on almost all of these channels in order to figure out what type and strategy of advertisement works best. You're also going to need to do some research about how to best use these marketing channels for your advertisements. But in this example, we are focused on the high level, and we are focused on evaluating each of those channels to figure out what is going to work best for your business. Now, once you have started running those advertisements in those multiple different channels with multiple different advertisements, you then need to calculate your break even roaz, and you need to evaluate those different advertisements to figure out which one is going to give you the best roaz. And that way, you then need to focus your budget onto that specific marketing channel and those specific ads. The goal here is, let's say you test out three different marketing channels with five different advertisements in each. Hopefully, you will find one specific channel that does better than the other two on average. And hopefully, within that marketing channel, you have one or two ads that provide you a very high OS that you can number one, increase the budget for, and then number two, make additional advertisements that are a similar theme or a similar visual or a similar pitch just in a slightly different strategy so that, again, you can continue to test your different advertisements and improve them over time. We call this AB testing. It's basically just changing one variable in each advertisement to figure out what gives you the best performance. That's what we're trying to do here. And again, it is a cycle of continuous optimization where you are lowering or eliminating the budget for advertisements that are performing poorly, and you are increasing the budget for advertisements that are performing successfully. And we are measuring that success by calculating the ROAS and comparing it between different marketing channels and different advertisements. So in summary here, the goal is to find profitable customers by testing different marketing strategies and searching for the highest ROAS, exactly like what I just said, identified some of the marketing channels that you can use as a business. Your job is to think about which ones will be most appropriate for your business, and then go test those marketing channels, evaluate multiple different advertisements, consider which one is giving you the best rows, and then continuously optimize those advertisements to put more budget into the successful as reduce the budget in the unsuccessful ads. This is the overarching concept of marketing. This is how these billion dollar companies are built. This is how these consumer product companies are built is by creating different advertisements and figuring out what is the best way to actually sell this product or market this product in our scenario. So I hope this helps. I hope this was a good summary and we'll see you in the next. 6. AB Testing: Alright, everybody. In the last few videos, you've probably heard me talk about the term AB testing, as well as testing out these channels and running advertisements on these channels. So in this video, I just want to dive a little bit deeper into that concept and give some clarity here so that you know exactly what I'm talking about. So when it comes to testing a channel, what do I mean? Well, what I mean by testing one of those marketing channels? Remember that list I gave you of all of the different marketing channels you can try out. Radio ads, Google, social media, influencer, sponsorships, X YS Ed, right? When it comes to testing on a channel, what I'm referring to is trying to actually advertise your products or services on that channel. So go out and learn how to run a Facebook ad. Go out and learn how to convince an influencer to promote your product. Go out and purchase a radio ad and get it produced and see if it brings in traffic. The idea here is that you actually want to go out and you want to try and test that channel. So as an example, you create Facebook ads and target people in your target demographic. If you are running a cleaning service for the area of Ontario or the area of Vancouver, for instance, then you would basically run ads for all of the postal codes within the city of Vancouver. That's the idea here, and that's what I mean by testing out a channel. Now, how do you actually do this? Well, we're just going to use Facebook ads as an example because they're fairly popular. They're extremely extremely powerful, and it's probably something that nine to ten entrepreneurs should consider. So when you do this, number one, watch a few YouTube videos or take a course on how to run these Facebook ads and set them up. But the general premise and what most people are going to tell you is that you need to create a couple. In this case, I'm saying three, different types of advertisements with equal budgets. Meaning that if your budget is $50 per day on advertising, I want you to take that budget, divide it by three, create three different advertisements, geared towards your target demographic, and I want you to give them all a equal budget and then see which one gives you the best results, I want you to subtract money from the one that doesn't work and put it into the one that does. That's the idea. So you're going to run this campaign for seven days. You're going to see which type of content had the best results or ROAs, you're going to make three more pieces of content in the same style as the best piece of content. So the idea here is not that you're making three and eliminating two, and then you're done. What you're trying to do is figure O h, that type of advertisement worked better than these two. Or, oh, people liked this intro better than those two intros. And so what you're going to do is you're going to take that data, and you're going to make two or three more advertisements that have the same theme. Or whatever you think worked about that video compared to the other two, you're gonna put a different spin on it. You're gonna frame it in a different light. You're going to just put a small, different pitch. On that sales pitch or on that marketing or on that advertising piece. And the idea here is that you're trying to double down on what works and get rid of what doesn't. You are going to be constantly creating new advertisement, so if you look at any of these e commerce companies that have done very well over the last five years, they make an advertisement, they figure out what works, and then they make ten more advertisements that are all 90% identical just to basically refine it and close it out and get a few percentage points higher on that conversion rate and on that ro as and. So That is the strategy here. We're going to eliminate the bottom two performers. We're going to make three more advertisements. We're going to put more money into the advertisements that are working, and then we're going to test again for seven more days, and then we're going to optimize. That is the process here. If you notice, a lot of what I talk about is not necessarily a step by step process, but it's more often a cycle of testing analyzing, gathering data and improving in some way, and then testing again, and then gathering and analyzing data and improving and then testing again. That is what we are doing, both in product development and business development, as well as marketing. It is the exact same process just applied in a slightly different way. So, a couple of things you need to know about testing and about these early stages of trying to get this marketing off the ground. Number one, you're never going to have amazing profitable ads in the beginning. I'm going to be honest with you. I've done this probably six or seven times for myself, and I've helped probably ten or 11 people do it on their own. And most of the time, your advertisements are not going to be profitable on attempt number one. What I mean by that is your ro az is not going to be good enough to break even on attempt number one. But what you'll find is that on attempt number two attempt number three, iteration number four of your advertisements, you'll start to see that Ro az climb as you dial in your demographic and who you're marketing to and your advertisements get better and better over time. And so what you have to realize is that before you write off any of these marketing channels, you just have to understand that it's going to take time, it's going to take effort, and it's going to take that constant cycle of figuring out what works and then retesting, iterating, making multiple advertisements and trying to improve over time. Like I said, it is going to take time and money to figure out which ads do best. And most of these online, especially social media platforms. They will get better with time because they will figure out Who is actually buying your product and engaging with your advertisements, then it will send more advertisements to that type of people. That's why social media advertisement is so powerful because you can use all of the AI and technology and algorithms that Facebook and Instagram and TikTok actually have on their back end. You can use it to your advantage to optimize your advertisements, whereas you can't do that with, let's say, a radio ad or a billboard ad. And so just more things that you need to consider as the entrepreneur here. But I also want to say that you do not need to be profitable with advertising on day one, but you are looking for improvements over time. This is going to take time. Your roaz may not be good enough in Week one, but what you want to see is an improvement in Week two, and in three, and in four. If you see your Raz going down or you don't see any improvements, what you need to do is you need to pivot. You need to change your strategy. You need to come up with new advertisements. You need to test a new marketing channel. You need to restrategize how you are deploying your resources, your time, your energy, and your money, because what you are doing isn't working. You need to find that balance though between being patient with your advertising and also being ruthless and cutting the ones that aren't working. It's a fine line. It's going to depend on your business. You need to follow your gut a little bit, because when it comes to this, it is more of an art than a science. I'm going to be totally honest with you. To help you with it, though, and to get around that, one strategy that marketers use day in and day out, it is the bread and butter of the industry. It is the holy grail of marketing. And I can tell you that 99% of marketing agencies will use this strategy. It is AB testing. What I mean by AB testing is it is the idea of testing two or more different adsets and only changing one thing. So when I say an adset, I'm talking about the text and the graphics that the customer actually sees. If you look at this AB test here, you will notice that the only things that are really changing are the photo and the text. And so the idea here is that you're only changing a small part of that advertisement to try and figure out which advertisement works better. One that works better is the one that you are going to put more money into, and you're going to create more advertisements like that one. You're going to put small variations on it. You might just change out the photo next time. You might just change out one of the words. You might just change out some of the texts, but you are going to run three more ads that are just like that one, but slightly tweaked to figure out again which one works better. That is what we call AB testing, and that continuous cycle of AB testing to slowly increase your row as is what makes a profitable company. For instance, what I mean by this is, let's say that you run three different tests, and you notice that one of the m has an increase of 5%, or your ro as goes 2-2 0.5 with one of the advertisements, but the other ones are all around two or 1.5. Well, that's a really, really nice upgrade to 2.5. Now, what you should do is you should create three or four more advertisements that are just like that and test them all, because if all of a sudden, you can get up to a ro az of three, well, all of a sudden, that's a massive difference compared to where you were at originally down at two. And if you can slowly make those improvements with every AB test that you do, that is how you can get a Raz that's in the 45678 range, and that is where the real profit is made. So the idea here is that we are using AB testing to try and improve that Raz over time by tweaking our different advertisements and testing which ones work best. When people say that you need to optimize your advertisements, you need to optimize your budget, you need to optimize your marketing or this campaign, basically what they are saying is they are saying, look at the data for us as an entrepreneur, selling product online and running advertisements. Usually, our most important piece of data is going to be the Raz. So it means looking at the Raz and putting money into the Raz that is most profitable and taking money out of the advertisements with a ROAS that is least profitable. That is as simple as it gets, that is what optimization means, and that's what we're trying to do continuously. Now, when you take that to the second level here, what you're really looking for is the data behind why one advertisement has a higher ro as than the other? Is it the hook? Is it the visuals? Is it the text? Is it the imagery? Is it the video? Is it the story behind it? Is it something that you are doing that is working better than the other one? And how can you do more of it? Or how can you repeat that and try and improve it again in the next test? That's the idea behind optimization. And that's what we are trying to do once those advertisements start running? So, advertising, your ads and marketing are something that needs to be consistently tweaked and adjusted and trialed. I've said this several times. This is a cycle. This is not a step one, two, three, four, five, you're done. This is a continuous cycle that loops back and back over itself, and you need to constantly improve over time. It is a process of constantly trying to find better performing advertisements and increase the number of profitable customers that you serve. Again, back to the core of this course. We're trying to find profitable customers. It doesn't make sense to increase the budget on an advertisement where the ROAS does not generate you a profit at the end of the day. And so we're trying to find profitable customers. We're trying to spend as little on advertising for the largest amount of revenue that we can bring in, and we're trying to figure out what channel gives us that result. That is the overarching goal, and that is why we do AB testing is to improve that RAS and make more money. That's the goal here. That's how AB testing works. And I hope this offered some clarification, some help along the way. 7. CAC and LTV: Oh. Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. You have now heard me talk about ROAS quite a lot, and I've talked about it as if it's the most important metric. And in most businesses, it is, but there are some other businesses where the other metrics are going to become just as important. And those two metrics are customer acquisition costs and lifetime value. So in this video, we're going to dive into exactly what those two are and how important they are to your business. Let's go. Okay, now, just as a disclaimer here, a couple of things you need to know, Lifetime value and customer acquisition costs are going to be super super important to companies that are selling and offering software or subscription based services or products. If that is not your business model, this will matter slightly less to you, but it is still a very, very important topic that it is well worth it to understand as a business owner and as an entrepreneur, so it's well worth your time, and I highly recommend staying tuned here. Now, when it comes to customer acquisition cost, what I'm referring to here is how much does it cost you to acquire a new customer. For instance, if you spend $500 on Facebook ads to bring in ten new customers, that means that your customer acquisition cost is $50. Basically, your ad spent divided by the number of new customers. The lifetime value is a different metric. The idea here is that the lifetime value refers to how much that new customer is worth to you over their lifetime. So, for instance, the average customer for Netflix is going to spend $1,772 over the lifetime of their subscription on Netflix. That is just the average overtime that somebody spends on their subscription for Netflix before they cancel it. That is the lifetime value of one customer for Netflix. Now, in order to calculate this, it's going to be dependent on your business. But let's say you offer a monthly subscription business. What you want to do is figure out how long the average customer is subscribe to your business, and then multiply it by the cost of that monthly subscription. That is going to give you the total lifetime value per customer, and that's what we're trying to find out. Just as an example, I made up some numbers here because it's just really simple to understand. But let's say that Netflix spends $1,000,000 to acquire 10,000 new customers. That means that their customer acquisition costs would be $100. It'd be 1000000/10000 equals 100. Now, let's say that the average customer stays for 50 months at a cost of $15 per month, that would give the company a lifetime value per customer of $750. This is just a made up example with fake numbers just to further cement the idea of how these metrics work. Now, What we do with these two metrics is we turn them into a ratio. We turn them into a ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition. The idea here is that we want the lifetime value of that customer and the money that they are going to give us to be significantly higher than the cost of acquiring that customer. Think about this for a second. If your lifetime value was only $100 from that customer, but they end up spending $200 to acquire that customer through advertisements, well, you're losing $100 per customer, and it takes you a while to even receive that $100 in the first place. And so it is not a very good scenario. What you're looking for is a scenario where the lifetime value per customer is significantly higher than the cost to acquire that customer. In our example that I just went through with the made up numbers, it is $750 because that is how much the value is per customer, and the cost to acquire that customer was $100, so the ratio is 7.5. As a business owner, you want this ratio to be as high as possible, because it means that for every customer that you acquire, you are going to be generating more profit from that customer. It also means that you have more room to spend more money on marketing in the event that you had to, which is really, really nice because it kind of insulates you from additional competition entering into the market and maybe undercutting or competing with you. And so, in general, you want a higher ratio of your lifetime value to customer acquisition cost. This is super super important, especially if you're in a subscription business or a software business or anything similar to that. This ratio is used to compare companies for investment and understand the unit economics. If I am an investor, and I have two companies that are trying to raise money and they operate in a similar industry or they have a similar business model, I am more than likely going to invest into the company that has a higher ratio because for every customer that they acquire, that company is going to generate more profit over the lifetime of that customer. So It makes your company more valuable. It makes it easier to generate profit, and it is a very, very important metric, especially when it comes to these software and subscription companies. And in general, even if you're not a software and subscription company, you want to be thinking about these things. If a customer is only worth 10,000 to you and it costs you $20,000 to acquire that customer at a trade show, that's probably not worth it. So you want to think about these metrics as you're going out and you're running your marketing campaigns or you're building your business. So in summary here, what you want to do is focus on your cost to acquire a new customer, and you want to test different ways to increase that lifetime value. Want to acquire new customers for as low as possible, and you want to make as much money per customer as possible. This ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost takes both of those factors, puts it into a number that an investor, a banker, or an entrepreneur can use to compare between companies and use as a metric to gauge the performance and health of that company. That is why this metric is so important, and that's why I'm sharing it with you today. We'll see you in the next. 8. Content marketing: Everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, we're going to start talking about content marketing. This is the idea of creating content that people actually just want to organically and naturally watch and then incorporating your product or service into that content so that it doesn't feel like an obvious advertisement. The goal of content marketing is not to create something that you know you're going to put money into to get eyeballs on, but it's to create something that people want to organically watch all the way till the end so that the social media platforms that you put this content on want to push it organically. The idea here is to create content so good that the platforms want to push it out to people because those platforms will be able to run ads at the start and end of that video. And when they push that video to all of the people on that platform, your product is nicely incorporated into that content in a way that makes people say, Hey, maybe I want to buy that. Maybe I want to be like that person. Maybe that can solve my problem. The idea here is that you are going to use the organic algorithm that these platforms have to push your product, because people want to watch that video, because it's entertaining, educational, whatever it might be and. So that is the general premise behind content marketing. Now, what type of content should you make? That is the question that I know you're probably thinking and that everybody kind of asks. And so the answer to that question is very simple. You should make content that your target customer already wants to watch. For example, Red Bull makes crazy stunt and adventure videos because the people that they want to sell to watch those type of videos. They're guys that like extreme sports. They are guys that like going fast. They are people that like doing crazy stunts or motor biking down the side of a mountain or helle skiing or whatever it might be. They are selling to people that like those things, and so they make content about those things. And then inside of that content, people are drinking Red Bull so that the guys watching that video go, Hey, I want to be like that guy, maybe I should drink Red Bull as well. That is literally as simple as it gets and what it comes down to. Another example of this is GoPro. GoPro does a really good job, where they actually give rewards for people that generate content using their cameras, and then they turn that footage into content marketing. And so all the people that might buy a GoPro are seeing what other people have made with GoPros, and the footage looks absolutely amazing, which makes them want to watch it, and then realize, Hey, maybe I want to make a video like this because this is so darn cool. I guess I need a GoPro. That's the idea there. So GoPro makes content on their own videos to make other people want to make content on their cameras. It's like the coolest thing ever, and it's a really, really cool content marketing strategy. Another example of this, and I think I talked about this at the beginning was Patagonia They make content about adventure culture and the planet, because that is what their target market is interested in. Their target market is interested in learning about remote places in the world or distant cultures that they've never heard of before, or what is happening with our planet. They're interested in those kind of things. And so Patagonia tells stories and gives education about those topics that they know their customers are going to want to watch. And then inside of that content, most of the people are probably wearing Patagonia clothing. So that's the idea here. When it comes to coming up with those original ideas for what kind of content you should actually make. I do have a couple of ideas for you. Number one, you should just tell your story to Chat GPT, say, Here's my business. Here's what I'm trying to do. I want to come up with some organic contact ideas that I can naturally incorporate my product into. What suggestions do you have? Give me ten different content ideas. I promise you, it will spit out at least one or two good ideas. Some of them might be a little bit off, but you can refine the search a little bit, give it more information, and I promise you it's going to be one of the most valuable resources that you can find when it comes to content. Next thing you should do here is not copy somebody, but find a company or a person in a different industry or in a different niche that has found success and take what they're doing and put your own spin on it. Do not copy them, but try and figure out what worked for them and then try and make that work for you. That's the idea here, because if somebody has already had success, using a strategy, that means that the strategy works. You just now need to take it and adapt it and apply it to what you are doing. Another idea here, try and jump on any viral trends. If you're scroll through social media, you notice a video, sound bite that keeps popping up or a meme that keeps popping up, try and apply that to what you're doing, try to make it relevant, try to make it funny, and try and stay on top of these viral trends, because it can give you a huge, huge boost in organic traffic, if you can time it appropriately and make something that is sensitive. Do not make something that is so far out or so risque or so out to lunch or racist or anything like that, make sure that what you are jumping on this viral trend is appropriate for the Niche and the product or service that you're selling. Then at the end, you need to own your spin on a popular topic. So let's say that there is something that is trending in the world, not necessarily a viral trend, but somebody really likes a certain topic, or somebody is really supportive of this one person, or somebody really likes X Y Z. Come out with a controversial topic and support it. Come out with your spin and your opinion on something and find a way to integrate your product into that. Let's just say you have a drink, and you like the sugar free version. What you could say is, I absolutely hate coca cool, but I love the sugar free version of it, and here's X Y Z. I'm not saying that that's a great example by any means. I'm just coming up with it off the top of my head. But basically, take something that people like or take something that is a popular opinion and put your own spin on it or offer your opinion in a differing viewpoint. That's the idea here because as much as people don't like it, small controversies build tremendous engagement. You do not want to come out with a big controversy. You do not want to come out with something that causes people to get emotional or causes people to get angry or turned off by you, but having an opinion about something that goes against the norm is something that drives massive massive engagement. So that's what I'm trying to say here is find something that isn't necessarily controversial, but goes against the norm and then integrate your product or service into. Now, in summary here, what I would recommend is focus on content that your customers will enjoy watching. Try to stay positive. Try to focus on exactly who your targeted customer is and what type of video they would get enjoyment from watching and then integrate your product or service into that video as naturally as possible. Red Bull is As far as I'm concerned, the Golden Star and the best example of this, just go check out some of the YouTube videos. They do an amazing job. I highly recommend it. They do an excellent, excellent, amazing job of content marketing. So that's where I'm going to leave us here. If you have any questions about it, leave a comment down below, and I'll try and get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you so much, and I'll see you in the next 9. Tools I use: Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, we're going to talk about my favorite tools and softwares that I use to improve the marketing and my business. Let's jump right in. Okay, so the first software that I want to tell you about is called repurpose dot O. The website is also repurpose dot O, and I will link all of these resources and softwares again in the resource tab of this course. Now the reason that I like this software is because out of everything that I use, this one probably saves me the most time. What it allows me to do is it allows me to film one video and distribute it to multiple social media accounts on different platforms. How I use it is I create one video on TikTok, and when that video gets posted, the software will download that video, remove the watermarks, and then post that video to YouTube or Instagram or Facebook. That way, I don't have to sit there and re upload the same video four times on different platforms. And so I absolutely love this service. I think I pay about $30 per month for it, and it is an amazing $30 worth of value that I get every single month. So I highly recommend it. The next one that I want to tell you about is called Stan. It's actually called the Stan Store or however you want to say it. But basically what it is is when you click on 70s Instagram profile, you see that link in their bio, Scram will only allow you to use one or two links. But Stan allows you to use multiple links. And so this is what my store looks like. As you can see, I have lots of different links here, and each one of these is an affiliate link or a link to my other social media channels or a link to some of my other courses. And so all of these different links here will provide an income for me, and I'm also able to offer a resource that when somebody downloads, they automatically sign up for my e mail list. And so Stan is a great resource because it allows you to manage that Lincoln bio on all your different social media platforms. It also allows you to build an e mail list that you can then broadcast to your audience. And so Stan is a great resource for managing both of those for me. The next one I want to talk about is CP Cut. CAP cut is a super super easy to use and easy to understand video editing software. It is available both on your mobile phone as well as your desktop, so it can be used in both situations. And if you're new to video editing or you don't know how to do it, download CAP cut, and it will make your life so much easier than trying to learn a complicated software from scratch. Next one here is Canva. If you have to do anything with regards to logo design, graphic design, or something for your website, I highly recommend Canva, because, again, super super simple and easy to use software that will allow you to do anything you need in the world of graphic design in a very, very quick and easy way. Huge advantage here. Next one is BuzzSumo. I use Buz Sumo a lot to research different trends and try to identify potential influencers or people that might be able to talk about or review my products. It does a great job at analyzing the trends and the data on social media. And the last one that I want to talk about is impact.com. Like I mentioned, a lot of the links on my stand store are affiliate links, which means when somebody clicks on those links and they make a purchase or they interact with that service in some way, I get paid a commission on it. A lot of those commissions are set up through impact.com. And so if you have a product that you want to set up an affiliate program for where somebody else can promote it and get a small portion of that sale, then impact.com is a website that can help you set that up very easily. Now, in summary, the goal here is to try and find tools that help you make your marketing resources more effective and efficient. Lot of these resources are designed to save you time or make you faster. And when it comes to social media and creating this content, the more content that you can make the better. And so the less time that you have to spend editing it and uploading it, the more content you'll be to make, the more successful your business will be. So these are the tools that I use. I hope this helped, and again, I will link all of them in the resource tab of this course. 10. E mail list: Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. In the last one, you probably heard me talk about my e mail list, and I showed you what resource or software I use to manage that e mail list. Well, in this video, I want to dive a little bit deeper into that topic because my personal belief is that e mail lists are one of the most undervalued resources that you can have as a business. So I want to just kind of explain that and explain how you might be to take advantage of this. So Number one, an e mail list is something that everybody needs to be building because, like I said, it is extremely valuable, and I believe it is extremely underutilized and underrated as a form of marketing when it is done right. The advantage of having an e mail list is that you own the customers. You own their contact information, you can reach out to them, and you can send notifications to them. If you are selling on a platform like Etsy or like Amazon, or you're supplying somebody else, and you're selling in a store, You do not own that customer. You cannot contact that customer. You don't have a lot of ways to reach out to that customer unless you have an e mail list. And so I highly recommend building an e mail list. It is extremely valuable, and it will help you retain relationships with your customers. So, how you build an e mail list. Well, let's be honest here. P don't want a bunch of spam e mails clocking up their inbox. So number one here, do not send spam e mails. And in order to get their e mail address, you're going to need to give them something in return. A lot of the time, companies will give a 10% discount code. If somebody gives their e mail through their website, if somebody signs up for my e mail list through the Lincoln bio, they get a free resource that compares different high interest savings accounts. You really kind of need to give something small to that customer in order to get their e mail, and you should also be asking for at the checkout or when they make a purchase. Anytime somebody buys from you, that means they like you, they want to do business with you, and they want to hear from you, so get their e mail and automatically or manually add it to that e mail list. Now, the key to building an e mail list and actually engaging with that e mail list is providing people with real value in the e mail so that people will want to share it or take action on it. Goal here, is not to provide somebody an e mail just to stay up to date with them and to tell them how you're doing. The goal of the e mail is to provide value. You want to provide as much value as you possibly can so that that person is motivated to that open those e mails every time they go out. What the goal here is to provide two or three e mails worth of value and then hit them with that sale or that promotion or what you actually want them to do. The goal is to provide much, much more value than what you ask for in return. If somebody feels like they are getting significant amounts of value from you, that is how you build a relationship. That is how you get people to like your brand. That is how you get people to continuously come back and buy your product. And so the goal of the e mail list is to provide value, either through education or entertainment. And then every once in a while That's when you hit them with the e mail that says, Hey, we're running a promotion. Hey, we're having a sale. Hey, we're doing an event. Hey, we just launched a new product, whatever it might be. That's the idea here. Other ways that you can get people to sign up for your e mail list is to run a contest or a raffle and require an e mail sign up. You could give away a product, you could run a collaboration with somebody, you could put together an event. You could do whatever you want. The goal here is to get your target customer signed up on your e mail list so that you can continuously provide value, build a relationship and then hit them with that sale or that bonus or that event, whatever it might be. Now, where do you actually build this e mail list? What platform or software do you use? Well, like I showed you before, I use a platform called SAM, and I'm going to walk you through what that actually looks like on my computer here. But other service providers for e mail lists are mail chim, constant contact, active campaign, convert kit, and get response. I would say that mail chimp is probably the biggest in the industry right now, but there are lots of different service providers and options for where you store that e mail list, and the prices do very fairly significantly. Now, when it comes to e mails that you are actually going to send out to the people that have signed up for this list, again, I can't say this enough. Focus on providing them value. Don't ask for anything in the beginning. The whole goal of this e mail list is to provide value. Most of the time that is done through knowledge, instructions, or information, news updates or recent trends so that that person is up to date. Or then finally, once you have provided value, that's when you offer the sales discounts or opportunities. Do not start with a sale in your first e mail because nine times out of ten is just going to devalue and de appreciate your brand, especially if somebody has just purchased something. Last thing somebody wants to do is buy something at full price and then realize they got an e mail for a sale for a 20% discount. That feels absolutely terrible. And so do not send out sales and discounts and opportunities in the beginning, focus on providing value to your customers in the beginning and building that relationship. Now, when it comes to the structure and how often you are sending out these e mails, it really depends on your topic and the industry that you're in. Some topics and some industries have enough news and enough things happening, that you could send out a new e mail every single day. Other industries and other topics do not have enough things happening in them. So, let's say that you had a candle business. Well, there's probably not enough content happening in the candle industry to send out a daily newsletter. But let's say that you were in the finance industry somehow or the food industry. Something along those lines, well, you could probably come up with new content every single day two or three times over because there's just so much happening in those industries. And so when it comes to frequency of your e mails going out? What you need to do is adapt that to your audience and to your customer, Maybe run some surveys, ask a few of your customers, and see what kind of frequency resonates best with them, or the other option here is just test it out. Run 100 people, where you send them an e mail every two or three days, and then send another people an e mail only once a week and try and figure out what the open rates are on those e mails. Are you wearing people out with three e mails a week, or is one e mail a week not enough, and they want more engagement and more content from you? You can test that out and figure it out, but it will take you a little bit of time. Now, when it comes to my e mail structure, here is what I like to do. Now, you know that I have a three D printing business. I also have a media business. It's primarily focused on education around personal finance and investing, but here is what the e mail flow looks like, and so when somebody downloads my resource, they get a spreadsheet that compares all the different high interest savings accounts in Canada. When they download that spreadsheet, they automatically sign up for this e mail chain. And how I have it set up here is that 2 hours After they download that spreadsheet, they get an e mail that tells them about tax in those accounts. It gives them all the information they need to know about how they are going to get taxed if they put any money into those accounts. The next e mail is about rate hopping and how you can take advantage of different accounts to get sign up bonuses. The third e mail here three days later is how I increase my credit score by 125 points in one year. And so the first three e mails that are coming 2 hours, one day, and three days after somebody signs up are all completely about value, providing information and knowledge to the person. And then I start to ask for somebody to sign up or check out my course or watch my YouTube video, and I sprinkle those in throughout the rest of the m. And so I have this set up with delays so that every two or three days, somebody will receive an e mail for me, or if I want to, I can click on broadcast here, and I can send out an e mail to my entire audience, and it makes things just really, really simple and really, really easy, where I can automate the entire flow of e mails so that somebody will get e mails every couple of days as soon as they sign up. Or I can send out one off e mails to the entire group for a big announcement or news or sales or whatever it might be. So that is how I personally manage my e mail list. So in summary here, my opinion is that e mail lists are extremely valuable and profitable when done right. They're an excellent way to engage with your audience. They're an excellent way to spread the word about things that are happening within your company, and they're an excellent way to build a relationship with your customers by providing them value. That is the goal here. Advice is to start early and build trust with early users. Make sure that the people that are signing up for this are your actual customers, and then ask them for feedback about how you can improve. That is going to help you build trust that's going to help you get a better idea for how you can build relationships with future customers. And lastly, like I said before, ask your readers what they want to see more of. Maybe on your third or fourth e mail, you put a little survey at the bottom that says, Do you want more information about X, Y, or Z? And people can kind of choose and give you feedback about what you're writing. So that's what I would recommend. That's how I would handle it. That's what my e mail list looks like, and I hope this helps. I highly recommend it. Don't pass this opportunity. It's something that's not going to pay off much for you in the beginning. But over the course of one, two, three years, as that number grows, of people on your e mail list, it is going to become exponentially more valuable. I guarantee it. We'll see you in the next video. 11. Conclusion : Alright, everybody. Welcome to the conclusion of this course. You've made it to the end, and all I want to do now is just give you a quick recap of some of the most important topics that we covered. Number one, you are going to need to test multiple different channels, and your job is to measure the row as of each channel in each advertisement and slowly optimize your ads and your budget until you get the best results. You also need to calculate your lifetime value of each customer and your cost to acquire each customer so that you can make better decisions around your marketing. My advice is always to run multiple AB tests so that you can figure out which factor of your advertising is the most important, and you can adjust it to improve your results. I also believe that you need to put time and effort into making your resources go as far as possible when it comes to your marketing. So please remember to review some of the tools that I recommended along the way, and as always start building your e mail list as soon as possible. Your earliest customers are probably going to be your most dedicated customers and possibly your most valuable customers. So the earlier that you can start building an e mail list, the better off you are going to be. Now, if you got any value out of this course, or you think there's something I could have done better in this course, please consider leaving a review. I read every single comment. I try to respond to every comment as well, and I take to heart every single review that you leave me, and I use that feedback to try and make this course better by adding content or adjusting what I'm saying so that it's more cohesive and easier to understand. So please consider leaving a review. I sincerely appreciate it, and it really does go a long way. I've also built a class project for this course that is a series of questions to help guide you through that first marketing campaign. If you don't want to share your answers to those questions, please consider leaving a link as a submission. To your website or your social media resources, or your blog or whatever you might have, we would love to see your content and support it by liking, commenting, sharing, or even buying your product. I'm trying to build a community of students that have gone through the course, are going through the course, and we'll go through it in the future. I want everybody to be able to help each other and hopefully even learn from each other and basically see how we are marketing our own businesses so that we can get ideas and inspiration. In my next course, in case you are interested, I'm going to be talking about building a strategic advantage. It is going to be super important once your advertising is starting to work, how you make decisions about reaching your end goals and the strategy that you implement to beat out your competition. We're going to talk about what is a strategic advantage and how you build a business strategy to accentuate and build a strategic advantage that makes it very difficult for your competitors to compete with you. We're also going to talk about protecting that strategic advantage and how you build a framework for your difficult decisions. And lastly, we're going to finish off by talking about alliances and partnerships that you can use to further separate your business from the competition. Now, if you're interested in learning about my personal businesses and what I do with my money, I post all of that content primarily on YouTube and TikTok, but I'm also active on Instagram, Twitter, X, and LinkedIn. You can also follow me on Skillshare to see my content and my updates to these courses. Now, if you are somebody that thinks your business is going really well, you found good product market fit. You've got some campaigns that are starting to work. I am interested in investing. If you need help scaling up and getting some money to run your ads, and you have positive returns on your advertisements, and things are going well for your business, but you just need a little bit more money to set flame to that fire, then I am your guy. You can send me an e mail, and I am looking to actively invest in small companies to help them grow and scale. I will write a check in order to buy some equity in your company, and I'll give you as much advice, mentorship help as I possibly can to see your business through to a success. If you're interested in something like that, please send me an e mail to info at zach harley.com, and I would love to hear from you. Now, in summary, the last thing and the last message that I want to leave you with is test multiple marketing channels to figure out which one works best for your business, and then focus on scaling that channel up. The goal here is to figure out what is going to be the most effective use of your marketing dollars and then to put as much of your marketing dollars as your business can handle into that channel. That's the goal here, because if you can put $1 in and get $3 out, that's how you grow a business. So I hope this helps. I hope I gave you some strategies and some insights here, and I hope to see you in the next course. Thank you so much for watching. Best of luck with your business, and I'll talk to you.