10 Marketing Strategies Guaranteed to Grow ANY Business (PROVEN & PROFITABLE)

Summary

In this marketing guide, Adam offers a strategic framework to elevate business growth. He emphasizes starting with a clear offer, understanding the target market, setting goals, and leveraging content types like email and video for effective customer engagement. Adam's approach focuses on creating a marketing funnel that maps the customer journey, increasing retention, and ultimately boosting sales and revenue through a deep understanding of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Takeaways

• 📈 Start with a clear offer and align all marketing efforts with it to ensure consistency and focus.
• 🤔 Prioritize understanding your target market deeply to create relevant and resonating marketing messages.
• 🎯 Set a 'north star' goal for marketing to guide your strategy and measure progress towards desired outcomes.
• 🧐 Identify and articulate the 'miracles' (aspirations) and 'miseries' (problems) of your target market to bridge the gap with your offer.
• 📝 Develop a content strategy that includes a mix of long and short form content tailored to your audience's preferences and platform dynamics.
• 📧 Embrace email marketing as a critical component of your marketing mix for its high ROI and widespread use.
• 🔍 Use a marketing funnel to map and optimize the customer journey from initial awareness to becoming a loyal customer.
• 💰 Calculate and understand the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to inform your marketing investments and customer retention strategies.
• 📹 Leverage video marketing, starting with simple stories and moving to more polished content, as it is highly engaging and versatile across platforms.
• 🔄 Continuously test, measure, and iterate your marketing strategies to find what works best for your audience and refine your approach accordingly.

Q & A

What is the main purpose of the marketing framework discussed in the script?

The main purpose of the marketing framework is to provide a strategic path for creating profitable marketing that converts, helps grow a business, and ensures actions are targeted and data-driven rather than based on random guessing.

Why is it suggested to start with the 'offer' when launching a new marketing campaign?

Starting with the 'offer' ensures that the marketing campaign is focused on a specific product or service that solves a problem or fulfills a need, which is essential for attracting and retaining customers.

What is the debate in the marketing community regarding the order of focusing on the offer versus the target market?

The debate is whether to create an offer first and then find customers or to identify a target market's needs and problems first and then create an offer to address them.

Why is understanding the target market's 'pains and problems' important for a new business?

Understanding the target market's 'pains and problems' is crucial for a new business because it allows for the positioning of the product or service as an effective solution, which can resonate with potential customers.

What is the significance of focusing on the top 20% of existing customers when identifying an offer for an existing business?

Focusing on the top 20% of existing customers helps identify common traits and needs among the most valuable customers, which can guide the business in refining or selecting offers that best serve this segment and maximize profitability.

Why is it recommended to have a 'north star' or guiding goal for marketing efforts?

A 'north star' or guiding goal provides a clear direction and purpose for marketing efforts, ensuring that activities are aligned and contribute towards achieving the overall business objectives.

What is the importance of the target market in marketing and how does it affect marketing strategies?

The target market is the central component of marketing strategies because it dictates the relevance and resonance of marketing messages. Understanding the target market ensures that marketing efforts are tailored to their needs, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

What are 'miracles and miseries' in the context of the target market and how do they influence marketing messages?

'Miracles and miseries' represent the aspirations and fears of the target market, respectively. They influence marketing messages by providing a framework for communicating how the offer can solve problems or help achieve dreams and goals.

Why is it not advisable to jump into a new marketing platform without first identifying the target market and their preferences?

Jumping into a new platform without understanding the target market can lead to ineffective marketing because the platform may not be where the target audience is active. It's important to match the platform with the demographic details of the target market to ensure marketing efforts reach the right people.

What is the role of email marketing in the overall marketing strategy discussed in the script?

Email marketing is a crucial part of the overall marketing strategy as it serves as a direct and personal communication channel with customers. It helps in nurturing relationships, delivering value, and driving conversions, with a high ROI.

What is a 'lead magnet' in the context of email marketing and why is it important?

A 'lead magnet' is an incentive, such as a freebie or valuable content, offered in exchange for a potential customer's email address. It is important because it helps in growing the email list, which is a key asset for nurturing leads and driving sales.

How does the concept of a 'marketing funnel' help in mapping out the customer journey?

A 'marketing funnel' visualizes the customer journey from initial awareness to becoming a loyal customer. It helps in understanding each stage of the customer's interaction with the business and allows for the optimization of messaging and offers to guide customers through the buying process.

What is 'Customer Lifetime Value' (CLV) and why is it important for businesses to calculate it?

CLV, or Customer Lifetime Value, represents the total worth of a customer to a business over their entire relationship. It is important because it provides insights into the long-term profitability of customer relationships and helps businesses make informed decisions about marketing and customer retention strategies.

Why is video content considered a powerful tool in marketing and how can it be leveraged effectively?

Video content is powerful because it can engage viewers with a combination of visuals, audio, and storytelling. It can be leveraged effectively by starting with simple stories or tips shared through platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and eventually moving to longer-form content on YouTube, ensuring authenticity and relevance to the audience.

Outlines

00:00

📚 Introduction to Marketing Framework

Adam introduces a framework for effective marketing strategies, emphasizing the importance of a structured approach over random guessing. He proposes a playbook for generating new customers, leads, and sales, and stresses the value of a strategic path that has proven successful over the past decade. Adam also mentions his initial brainstorming process and the transition to a cleaner diagram for better understanding. The paragraph concludes with the idea that marketing is not a linear path but more of a dynamic journey involving continuous learning and adaptation.

05:01

🎯 Starting with the Right Offer

The paragraph discusses the critical first step in marketing: defining the offer. Adam addresses the debate between focusing on the offer or the target market first, suggesting that new businesses should prioritize understanding their target market's needs, while established businesses should identify and refine their most profitable offers. He emphasizes the importance of specificity, strategic selection, and alignment with the offer as the core of all marketing efforts, advocating for a clear focus on one offer at a time to avoid customer confusion.

10:03

🤝 Understanding Your Target Market

Adam highlights the significance of the target market in marketing strategies. He explains the importance of empathy and understanding the customer's perspective to create resonant marketing messages. The paragraph delves into the details of identifying an ideal customer avatar (ICA), including demographic, geographic, and psychographic details. Adam stresses the importance of knowing the customer's values, attitudes, and lifestyles to create relevant marketing campaigns that evoke a sense of being understood.

15:04

🔍 Identifying Miracles and Miseries

This paragraph introduces the concepts of 'miracles' and 'miseries' as key elements in understanding the target market's desires and fears. 'Miseries' represent the problems and frustrations the target market wants to avoid, while 'miracles' are their aspirations and goals. Adam explains that marketing should bridge the gap between these two states, helping customers move from their current situation to their desired one. He also touches on the importance of a balanced approach, using both pain points and aspirations in marketing messages.

20:06

📍 Choosing the Right Platforms

Adam discusses the importance of selecting the appropriate social media platforms for marketing efforts. He warns against the common mistake of diving into new platforms without first identifying the target market and understanding where they are active. The paragraph provides guidance on matching social media platforms with the demographic details of the target market, mentioning various platforms and their general demographic appeal. Adam advises focusing on one or two platforms where the target market is most active, rather than spreading efforts too thin.

25:08

📝 Establishing a Content Strategy

The paragraph focuses on developing a content strategy by choosing the right content type. Adam suggests starting with one form of long-form content, such as a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel, and supplementing it with short-form content across various platforms. He emphasizes the importance of email marketing as a mandatory strategy, with a lead magnet to entice customers to join the email list. The paragraph also touches on the frequency of email communication and the high ROI of email marketing.

🌐 Building a Marketing Funnel

Adam introduces the concept of a marketing funnel, which maps out the customer journey from initial awareness to becoming a loyal customer. He contrasts the structured approach of a funnel with the ineffective 'marketing plate' approach, where leads are not guided effectively. The paragraph explains the importance of reverse engineering the marketing process, starting from the end goal and working backward to identify potential leaks or gaps in the funnel. This process helps in optimizing each step of the customer journey to increase conversions and sales.

🤑 Calculating Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The paragraph discusses the importance of understanding the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which is the total value a customer brings to a business over their lifetime. Adam suggests looking at CLV in terms of profit rather than revenue and emphasizes that this value is often higher than initially thought. The paragraph encourages businesses to find ways to increase retention and the frequency of purchases, as well as to upsell, downsell, and cross-sell to further increase CLV.

📹 Harnessing the Power of Video Marketing

In the final paragraph, Adam champions video marketing as a powerful tool to enhance all marketing efforts. He acknowledges the intimidation factor for those new to video marketing and suggests starting with simple stories recorded on a phone. Adam then recommends exploring short-form vertical content like Instagram reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts to capitalize on organic reach. For those aiming to lead their industry, he encourages the creation of long-form video content on YouTube, reminding viewers that practice and experimentation are key to improvement.

Keywords

💡Marketing Framework

A marketing framework refers to a structured approach or system that guides the marketing process of a business. In the video, Adam emphasizes the importance of having a strategic path for marketing rather than randomly guessing or hoping for results. The framework is meant to ensure that marketing efforts are focused, measurable, and aligned with the business's goals.

💡Conversion

Conversion in marketing is the process of turning potential customers into actual customers. It is a key metric that measures the effectiveness of marketing strategies. Adam mentions that the framework aims to create marketing that converts, which means it should effectively persuade prospects to take a desired action, such as making a purchase.

💡Target Market

The target market is the specific group of potential customers that a business aims to reach with its products or services. In the script, Adam discusses the importance of understanding the target market's pains, problems, and desires to effectively position an offer as a solution. Understanding the target market is crucial for creating relevant and resonating marketing messages.

💡Offer

An offer in marketing is the product, service, or value proposition that a business presents to its target market. Adam stresses the importance of starting with the offer when launching a new campaign or business. The offer should be aligned with the needs of the target market and should be presented as a solution to their problems.

💡Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), also known as Lifetime Value (LTV) or Lifetime Customer Value (LCV), is a metric that represents the total worth of a customer to a business over the entire duration of their relationship. In the video, Adam explains that understanding CLV is crucial as it provides insight into how much a business can afford to invest in acquiring a new customer and what strategies can be used to increase the value of existing customers.

💡Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel, also known as a sales funnel or customer journey, is a visual representation of the customer's path from initial awareness to making a purchase. Adam describes the marketing funnel as a tool for mapping out the customer journey and ensuring that each step is designed to guide the customer towards becoming a loyal buyer.

💡Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is an incentive offered by a business to capture contact information from potential customers. It is often an offer of value in exchange for an email address, which allows the business to nurture the lead. In the script, Adam mentions lead magnets as a critical component of email marketing strategies, helping to grow a business's email list.

💡Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategy that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a clearly defined audience. Adam discusses the importance of content marketing in the video, emphasizing the need to establish a content type that resonates with the target market and serves the offer, whether it's text, audio, or video.

💡Email Marketing

Email marketing is the use of email to promote products or services, build customer relationships, and build brand loyalty. Adam highlights email marketing as a mandatory strategy, stating that it is effective for nurturing leads, building relationships, and driving sales due to its high ROI and widespread use.

💡Video Marketing

Video marketing is the use of video content to promote or market a product or service. Adam positions video as a powerful tool for supercharging marketing efforts, explaining that video content can articulate the 'miracles and miseries' of the target market, resonate on various platforms, and be integrated into the marketing funnel to increase conversions.

💡Psychographic Details

Psychographic details refer to the psychological characteristics of consumers, such as their values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. In the video, Adam explains that understanding the psychographic details of the target market is essential for creating marketing messages that resonate on a deeper level, making the audience feel understood and addressed.

Highlights

Adam introduces a framework for creating effective marketing strategies that convert and are profitable.

The importance of having a strategic path in marketing rather than randomly guessing.

Marketing should be adaptable and evolve based on data, feedback, and analytics.

The debate on whether to focus on the offer first or the target market when starting a business.

For new businesses, understanding the target market's pains and problems is crucial.

Existing businesses should identify their best products or services with the highest potential for scalability.

The necessity of aligning all marketing efforts with a single offer to avoid confusion.

Setting clear goals for marketing campaigns to have a guiding direction.

The critical role of understanding the target market to create resonant marketing messages.

Demographic, geographic, and psychographic details are key to defining the ideal customer avatar.

The concept of 'miracles' and 'miseries' to identify and address the target market's desires and fears.

The importance of not being too broad when defining a target market to avoid irrelevant messaging.

Matching the right social media platforms with the target market's demographics for effective marketing.

The significance of establishing a content type that resonates with the target audience.

Email marketing as a mandatory strategy with high ROI and its importance in customer retention.

Creating a marketing funnel to map out the customer journey from陌生 to brand ambassador.

The concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and strategies to increase customer retention and value.

The power of video marketing to supercharge marketing efforts and its various forms like stories, short vertical content, and long-form videos.

Transcripts

- Hey there, my friend. Adam here.

And today I wanna walk you through 10 marketing tips

and tactics and strategies,

or rather give you a framework and a playbook

that you can use to create marketing that works,

that converts, that's profitable

and helps you grow your business

or any business you're working on.

What this is going to help you do is essentially any time

that you're sitting down and you're thinking of ways

to generate new customers or more leads or make more sales

or launch a new campaign,

it's gonna give you a framework and a roadmap that you can

follow from start all the way to finish to make sure

that you're doing the right things in the right place

for the right people,

rather than just randomly guessing and hoping

and praying that this might all just magically work,

which let's be honest,

isn't much better than gambling.

And that makes no sense at all,

especially when there is a far more proven

and strategic path that you can follow,

one that has been replicated thousands,

if not tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of times,

both for myself and for my clients over the past 10 years.

And one that I know that if you follow and you work through

what I'm about to share with you will have amazing

and positive effects on your business

and your marketing as well.

So with that said, let's dive right in.

Now what you're looking at right here is the original kind

of brainchild behind all of this, just a mess

of words and of thoughts and ideas all kind

of tossed down on the paper,

of course, in typical Adam fashion being slightly a bit

of a perfectionist, still working on it.

Anyway, I cleaned it up a little bit.

I made a better and cleaner diagram for you

and that's what I wanna walk you through here today.

Essentially starting in the middle

and then working our way out.

See, the problem is when most people think about marketing,

they think about business planning and strategy and things

like that, they view it as this linear path like,

I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna do that,

and then it's gonna be followed by this, when the reality is

it's often a lot more of this kind of roller coaster ride.

We're gonna try this, we're gonna get data and feedback,

we're gonna look at the analytics and the metrics.

We're gonna pivot and adjust accordingly.

Then we're gonna go in this direction,

then we're gonna move this.

Then we're gonna base those decisions off everything

we've just done and what worked and what didn't.

And it continually evolves and you need to be able

to evolve and adapt with it.

All that said, there is a set of steps

that you want to take.

You don't want to just go out there and start posting

on random social media accounts because

then nothing's going to work, you're gonna get frustrated,

you're gonna get burned out and then you might just give up

on the whole thing altogether.

And that's not good for you,

it's not good for the people that you hope to serve.

It's not good for anyone.

So the very first thing that you need to do anytime your

launching a new campaign,

whether it's an existing business

or you're thinking of starting a new business,

is you need to start right in the center here

with the offer.

Now, I could make you struggle to understand my terrible

handwriting like was mocked up the time before,

but I've taken the efforts to go and let's see

if this works, I don't have perforated paper,

but that worked better than I thought, so here we are.

Step number one is the offer.

Now there's a bit of a debate in the marketing community

about when it comes to starting a business,

when it comes to growing an existing business,

do you focus on the offer first or the target market?

In other words,

do you want to make something and then find people

to sell it to or do you wanna find people that you can help

and then make something to solve their problems?

No one seems to agree on this, so we've got a solution.

If you have a brand new business,

you've never sold anything

to anyone, you just have this idea

in your mind, then typically you're better off thinking

about the people that you seek to serve.

Those are going to be people that you may have been one in

the past or that you resonate with or that you're currently

a member of the group, and the reason

is because the better that you're able to understand your

target markets and their pains and problems and fears

and frustrations and all the things we're gonna talk

about in just a minute,

the better you're going to be able to position your product

or your service or your offer as the solution

to their pains and problems.

On the flip side, if you already have an existing business,

you've been in business for any length of time than the odds

are good that you already have a number of different

products or services or things that you're selling.

So the key here is to be specific and strategic and

selective and make sure that you're choosing the right offer

with the best margins, that is the most fun

to deliver, that has the highest potential for scalability,

that's easy to sort of market and clearly describe.

So to recap all of that,

if you've got a new product or a new offer,

something you're thinking

of selling, do a little bit of market research,

find the ideal segment of people that you can best serve

and then make sure that there's a match there.

If you already have an existing business,

the odds are good that you've been selling something.

So find out what it is about that makes it unique,

and then find the best people that you can continue

to serve by 80 20ing your existing customers.

Essentially taking a look at the top 20% of your customers,

what are their commonalities, their traits?

What do they sort of have in common, where do they live?

All of the things that we're gonna talk

about in just a second when it comes to market.

All right, so that is our offer and that's gonna form

the core of everything that we do from this point on,

everything is going to be an alignment with this offer.

It's gonna be in service of this offer.

Marketing is done and one single offer at a time.

You may have a number of different things you can do

or want to do,

but that doesn't mean you wanna blast somebody

with all of your different offers cuz it's going to lead

to overwhelm and to confusion and to this sort of paralysis

by analysis, not knowing what to do or how to do it

and confused customers don't buy, so we start here.

Okay, so now that you've got the offer in mind,

the next thing that you need to do is move on

to this section here, goals.

Now here's the deal, when it comes to setting goals

for your marketing, I'm not a stickler for making sure

that you set exact specific measurable goals like we want

to increase our cost of acquisition or decrease our cost

of acquisition by 3% or increase our leads

by 22.8%, but I do need you to have a north star,

a guiding sort of area light to work towards to make sure

that you are going on the right path rather than taking all

of these completely irrelevant paths and ending up somewhere

completely different that's not going to benefit you

or your business or the people that you seek to serve.

Good example here is that most business owners,

most entrepreneurs, most marketers,

sadly, they do marketing for the sake of marketing,

they were told that, Hey, we need to do some marketing,

we need to make some stuff.

So they make some stuff and then they put it out there

and unsurprisingly it doesn't resonate because it's

just stuff, or they may have the wrong kind of goal,

which is creating stuff for the sake of getting likes

or comments or shares rather than building a community and

increasing engagement with the right kind of people that

will lead to leads that will lead to customers that will

lead to sales and revenue and actual business growth.

Now, fortunately, when it comes to setting goals,

the end goal is normally pretty simple.

I mean it's going to be an increase

in sales or an increase in revenue,

and then all you have to do is start to work your way

backwards to assign relevant metrics and KPIs

known as key performance indicators to make sure

that everything's in alignment.

For example, if you have a thousand dollars product to sell

and you know that you sell it by phone and you close one

in two sales, well now we figured out,

well, we're gonna need two sales calls to make one sale,

and then, okay,

well how many leads do we need to generate

in order to have those two sales calls?

And then how many clicks do we need to get those leads?

And you can start to work your way back and at least it

gives you sort of a right direction to move towards.

Okay, next up we are gonna draw the line,

and this one is all about target market, target market,

possibly the most important element in all of marketing.

In fact, the word marketing, right?

We've got market baked right into it.

That's how important this is, they are the core,

the central component of your entire campaign,

the entire structure,

everything you do is about your target market

and what's in service to them, you see,

the reality is that when it comes

to marketing, the customer doesn't buy

when they understand, they buy when they feel understood,

and that's all about empathy, it's about awareness,

it's about being able to put yourself in their shoes

to view things from their perspective.

See, the reason that a lot of marketing doesn't work,

doesn't connect with the target market is because it's not

relevant, it's not, it doesn't resonate with them.

They don't understand how this would apply

to them and so they just tune it out, good example here.

If you've ever seen a commercial or a YouTube or a

Facebook ad or any kind of ad or marketing material at all,

and you've thought

"This is really dumb, like seriously, this makes no sense,

I don't even know what they're trying to sell."

And if you do happen to figure out

what they're trying to sell, you think

"What a dumb product, who would ever buy that?"

and here's the thing, the product, the service,

whatever it is being sold might not be dumb and the ad might

actually be really good, but you are not the target market.

Now, sure, their targeting could be off.

I don't know why you're seeing the ad that's not meant

for you, sometimes these things happen,

but the point of the matter is

that as long as you're specific and relevant to the right

kind of people, you will get them to take action.

They will be inspired to want to get the solution

to the problem that they have provided,

that you've properly articulated this,

that you've said the right words in the right way

at the right time.

On the other hand, if you water down your message

by trying to appeal to everybody out there,

it becomes very bland and very boring and very generic

and then people just automatically tune it out

and you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Talking about the things or the ads,

the marketing that says we provide better service or faster

delivery or we're superior or whatever it is, first of all,

these are not specific terms, they're very ambiguous.

They could mean a lot of things to a lot of different

people, second of all, pretty much everybody can say them,

therefore everybody does say them,

therefore they mean nothing.

Anyway, I'm gonna dive into more of the specifics

on that in just a second, but first,

let's figure out your ideal target market,

your ideal customer avatar, also sometimes known as an ICA.

And to do that we break it down into three different

categories, the first of which is their demographic details.

These are the stereotypical things you think of

when you think of marketing and think of a target market,

so age, gender, income, occupation, titles,

all of the things that are just like the generic customer

avatar right there, then we have geographic details.

What city, state, province, country, principality,

municipality, neighborhood, where do they live basically.

This is incredibly important because there's going

to be cultural differences between not only different

countries but also different cities and sometimes even

different neighborhoods in different cities.

And then of course you have the mother

of all the psychographic details, what are their values,

their attitudes, their lifestyles, their beliefs,

what organizations are they a part of?

Religious affiliations, political leanings,

all of that stuff.

All of the things that are not polite

to talk about around the dinner table.

Those are the things that you want to know.

You want to get into their head and you want to know kind

of like what do they really think about these things

that we're not supposed to talk about.

Now, I'm not suggesting you make all of your ads

and all of your marketing directly call this stuff out,

but it still is important to keep in the back

of your mind when you're creating your marketing materials.

What are these people going to like?

What are they not going to like?

What are they going to find offensive and what is going

to be polarizing but in a good way that's gonna draw them in

and really reject and repel everybody else that you just

don't wanna deal with?

After target market, well, of course we have to drill down

into those psychographic details even more,

and to do that we're going to sort of break apart,

their miracles and miseries.

Now, miracles miseries are things that I've coined

that essentially make up the two different areas

of your target market.

They're miseries being their fears and problems and pains

and frustrations and nightmares and all the things they're

trying to get away from, and their miracles being all of

their wants and dreams and goals and desires and aspirations

and all the things that they're trying to move towards.

Every person, every target market,

every business has a way to appeal

to someone's miseries as well as to their miracles.

There's going to be different industries

that lean one way more than another.

There's going to be segments of the market

that lean more one way or another, in other words,

if you use messaging that help someone move away

from pain, sometimes that's stronger,

on the other hand, you have more aspirational language,

helping someone achieve something and different markets are

gonna benefit more from that.

A decent mix of both is usually the best path.

We don't want to constantly be negative and say,

This is a horrible thing and you need to get it fixed

and blah, blah, blah.

Otherwise you come to come off as a Debbie Downer.

On the other hand,

if all your promising is rainbows and sunshine

and unicorns and all the magical things in this world,

while they're not gonna have any reason to take action

if you don't sort of back that up with a little bit

of pain, in other words,

a solution without a problem is completely meaningless.

You need to put the solution in context to

an actual problem that they have.

Now, here's where things get good.

The miracles and miseries essentially form a gap

A gap between where they're at right now with all of the bad

stuff going on and where they want to be

with all of the good stuff that they'd like to have.

And it's your marketing's job to help them bridge that gap

away from miseries and towards miracles and the better

you're able to communicate that and show how

if you do these things, if you acquire this product,

if you use this service, if you take me up

on this offer, you're going to be able to have it.

Well, the better you're able to clearly communicate that,

the better all of your marketing and all of your sales are

going to be, all right, moving on.

Next up, we have present and active.

Now, this one is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

I've got a few different marketing pet peeves,

one of which is when I ask someone who their target market

is and they say everyone or everyone in the world or people

with money, and of course as we've already covered,

you can't be that broad,

otherwise you end up with completely boring

and bland and irrelevant messages.

The other pet peeve I have is

when people, business owners, entrepreneurs, marketers

occasionally hear about a new platform or a new

social media channel or a new marketing opportunity

and they dive right in without doing all of the things

that we've just covered,

all of the more important things that need to happen first,

identifying the model, figuring out the target market,

working out their miracles and miseries

and all of those details.

Instead, they just dive headfirst into this new platform

and make a bunch of stuff, nothing works,

and then they swear off the platform for good.

Well, unsurprisingly the reason this doesn't work

for most people most of the tim

e is because this may be the completely wrong platform

for you, for your business.

Your people might not even be there,

your marketing than what I call the marketing wasteland

an area that is completely devoid of potential prospects

and customers and leads for your business.

Much better alternative to identify your ideal target

market, figure out their demographic details like age,

gender, income, occupation,

and then match it up with what social media platforms

appeal to that demographic,.

Fortunately, this is not secret knowledge.

All you have to do is head over to Google

and type in social media demographics.

So get a long list of different resources and it'll start

linking up men between the ages of this and this are

on this platform and women between the ages of this

and this are on this platform and this platform appeals

to these kind of people, it changes all the time,

but there are a few pretty safe bets.

For example, if you're in the business

to business community, you're selling to other businesses,

LinkedIn is kind of a staple.

If you're serving a demographic that's 35 or 40 and older,

Facebook is still probably your best bet.

If on the other hand most of your customers

are 35, 30, 25 perhaps we're looking at Instagram,

TikTok being the new kid on block does skew younger,

but like all social media platforms,

all platforms in general,

it is aging up and doing so relatively quickly.

So you can find people there, twenties, thirties, forties,

fifties, and it's continuing age up.

Twitter still skews slightly younger and

a little more urban, Pinterest still primarily women.

YouTube does tend to be kind of neutral territory

for all people looking for all things.

There's a kicker that you need to make video content

of course, more on that in a minute.

And then of course there's others that are popular

in different countries, different Reddit forums,

different WhatsApp groups, Snapchat.

If your demographic is much younger, lots of options,

too many options, that's why people get confused.

See all these options,

they think they need to be on all of them.

The reality is you're much better off to choose the one or

maybe two different platforms where your ideal target market

is present and active and then go there

ignoring everything else.

So let's draw our line and move on.

So now that we've figured all that out,

the next thing that we need to do is we've gotta figure out

what kind of content are we going to make

and that leads us to content type.

Now what I'm gonna suggest here is that we need to establish

a content type that you're going to start with.

This may ultimately be or not be where you end up.

We're gonna talk about that more in a minute as well.

Lots of cliff hangers and open loops in this video.

So keep watching, the point is though,

is that there is a lot to unpack and where we're gonna start

is going to be different than where we end up

because I'm gonna give you a couple different options,

but some are significantly superior to others.

So here's what you've got, you've got text based content,

you've got audio content and you've got video content.

Arguably, you also have some kind of

visual graphical content like infographics

and visual diagrams and things like that,

but typically they're paired with one of the other kinds

of content, you also have different lengths

of content, short form and long form content.

My suggestion is that pretty much every business out there

needs one form of long form content and then you can do

whatever short form content you like to feed into it.

So long form content for text is obviously a blog.

Long form, content for audio is a podcast

and long form content for video would be YouTube.

Short form content though we're talking

about short tweets, we're talking about short captions

for Instagram, we're talking about Facebook posts,

we're talking about LinkedIn posts,

anything like that for text, audio is a little trickier.

We're still kind of looking

at mostly podcasts, possibly shorter ones.

We're taking clips and adding video elements to them.

And then short form video is kind of the rage right now.

Short form, vertical video.

We're looking at Instagram reels,

we're looking at YouTube shorts, we're looking at TikTok.

So if you don't mind writing,

you can start with text if you don't mind speaking,

you can do audio.

And if you don't mind doing video or getting

in front of a camera,

finding someone that's willing to get in front

of a camera video is by far the best one, but again,

we'll talk about that in a minute.

So we'll get our arrow there and then let's do our next one,

which is mandatory marketing, no exceptions,

every business needs to use this, it's email.

Yeah, I know.

Hoping for something a little sexier myself.

But the fact is that email works,

it works just as well now if not better than it ever has

before because everybody uses email, I use email,

you use email, your customers, use email, your doctor,

your accountant, your lawyer,

everybody that you know has an email address.

Not everybody has a social media account.

Not everybody accepts SMS or text message marketing or even

appreciates it, direct mail, still phenomenally effective,

but it's hard to find curated lists,

especially for cost effective prices and it's a slightly

more advanced and complicated marketing strategy that I

wouldn't suggest starting out with, but everybody has email.

A bit of a fun fact here,

but when I'm working with a brand new business,

I'm doing any kind of consulting

or teaching, one of the very first things I do,

if not the first thing I do is take a look

at their overall email marketing strategy strategy.

If they don't have a good one, we'll install one.

If they have one that's working, okay, we'll upgrade it.

And I kid you not, every single time we're able to make

substantial and significant increases in profitability,

in customer retention, in the number of sales made,

it's as close to a magic bullet as we have.

So where do you even get started, well,

the very first thing you need is some kind of a lead magnet,

also known as a bribe or a freebie or a content upgrade.

Essentially something that you can give away in exchange for

a customer's email address so that they're actually enticed

to join your list.

I have an example of this

that you can check out in the descriptions below

or by visiting adamErhart.com/cheatsheet.

This is my version of a freebie, of an opt-in guide

to get onto the list, alternatively,

you can offer your more supportive,

more loyal customers and people that are interested

in your business,

a way to join your newsletter directly kind of bypassing the

freebie, which does tend to attract a more loyal subscriber,

but your conversion rates are going to be lower

cuz you're not necessarily offering something

of immediate value in return.

For an example of this,

you can visit adamErhart.com/newsletter,

from there, you need to decide on your email frequency,

how often you're going to be emailing your list,

whether it's once a week or three times a week.

Some people email daily, I've done it in the past.

I've kind of found a sweet spot

around three to four times a week.

Once a week is like your bare minimum.

Once every two weeks is unacceptable, once a month,

and I don't even know why you have an email list.

I mean seriously, let's just run the math for a second.

If an email open rate is say 30% for your list

and you're emailing once a month, well,

it could be months before anybody sees you.

And then when they finally do get your email,

they've forgotten who you are,

so they're likely to A unsubscribe or B,

worse mark it is spam and just delete the whole thing.

Also, depending on which statistic or study you read,

marketing via email has been reported to provide somewhere

between a 3800% and 4400% ROI or return on investment.

I don't know if my numbers are right around there,

but they wouldn't be too far off, it's that good.

Long story, short email gotta do it.

Okay, moving on to the next one.

Essentially, once you've got some of these pieces

in place, it's time to start putting things together

and that comes in the form of a marketing funnel,

also known as a sales funnel,

also known as a customer journey or just a funnel.

Aptly named because it kind of looks like a funnel

with a whole bunch of people coming in at the top

and then kind of getting sorted out

as they go through the bottom

with fewer customers coming out the bottom.

And this is a reminder that most won't.

I first heard this from Frank Kern who said, most won't.

In other words, most people won't click,

most people won't subscribe, most people won't buy.

And you need to factor that into your marketing

and plan accordingly.

This is totally okay because most won't

but enough will provided you do things, right.

Now, what a marketing funnel is really about

is mapping out the customer journey,

Taking someone who has no idea who you are and walking them

through all of the steps in order to become a lifelong

and loyal customer, a brand ambassador,

someone that loves you, loves what you do,

wants to tell everyone about just how great you are,

and you are pretty great.

Now, the opposite of having a marketing funnel

is just having nothing.

I don't know what the opposite of a funnel would be.

Like a like a plate.

You just pour stuff on it splashes everywhere.

Sadly, most people have marketing plates, in other words,

they just take all of the traffic and all of the leads and

they just dump 'em somewhere typically on their homepage,

meaning that someone shows up at your website's homepage,

they have no idea what they're doing,

they don't know where to go.

They might click the contact button,

but there's a weird form and they don't know if they want to

do that yet cuz they just met you and it's kind of pushy.

Let's slow down here.

So they kind of skirt around a little bit

and then they bounce,

which is marketer term for leave and never come back.

Again depending on what statistic you use.

The vast majority of visitors to a website that click

the back button never return, somewhere around the range

of 98 to 99%.

"Where are they going?" You might ask.

And let me tell you,

they're going to your competitors that actually have a

funnel, something that says, "Hey, you're new here.

Let's start here, let me give you this thing.

Let me nurture you and provide you some value.

Let me follow up, see if you have any questions,

and let me continue offering you the next step

in the process in order to becoming a customer."

Now, the best advice that I can offer in a short period

of time when it comes to mapping your marketing funnel

is to start at the end like we did with your goals

and then reverse engineer the process,

so in other words, for someone to make a sale,

well, what needs to happen before that?

Maybe it's visit a sales page, okay,

well, what needs to happen before they visit a sales page?

It's like, okay, well they need to click a link.

Okay, well, what needs to happen for them to click a link?

Are they getting it through content or through email?

And then if they got on your email,

how are they getting on your email?

And essentially you can just work your way backwards

through the process, and then once it's all mapped out,

that's where things get really exciting.

Yeah, kind of nerdy about this stuff

because once it's mapped out,

now you can start looking for gaps,

for leaks in your funnel.

You can start finding areas where you're losing people

through some random mistake or messaging

that just doesn't quite line up, for example,

if everybody's clicking over to your sales page

but nobody's opting in or nobody's buying,

well, now we know we have a conversion issue

on the sales page, on the other hand,

if people are joining your email list but

then never opening any of your emails,

well, now we know we have an issue with congruence

between what was promised and what's being delivered,

or perhaps we're just collecting bad emails.

Or if we map it all the way out and we get to the sales call

and we realize that we're only closing one in four or one

in five when we should be closing one in three

or one in two, well now we know we can start looking

at that and we can look at all of the steps up to it.

And was there a congruence issue,

again, were there pricing expectations?

Were there other objections and sales issues

that we could have overcome in our marketing prior?

What's really cool about this is that we make a small tweak

over here and we increase conversions by 2%

and we increase that one by 3% and that one by 1%, well,

it's not like we're adding these things up

just one after another, they compound.

So an increase by 3% here could lead to 10

or 20 or 30 more sales,

which could then lead to thousands or tens of thousands

or even millions more dollars in revenue at the end.

Speaking of revenue,

next step here after our funnel is CLV,

which stands for Customer Lifetime Value,

sometimes referred to as LTV for Lifetime Value

or LCV for Lifetime Customer Value, whatever it is,

it's pretty much all the same thing,

which what is the value of a customer

to your business over their lifetime period?

Now, some people look at this

in revenue, some people look at it in profit.

I typically like to look at it in profit,

but it depends on the formula that we're looking at.

The point is, if you've never done this before,

this is an incredibly powerful exercise to run through to

figure out just how valuable someone is to your business.

And I'm willing to bet regardless

of what business or market or industry you're in,

it's significantly higher than you thought,

which means that you now have permission to do significantly

more marketing and invest in significantly more content

because you know just how profitable and how valuable

new customers and new clients and new sales are

for your business, so that's step one,

figure out what is your CLV, after that,

you need to find ways to encourage and increase retention.

The number of clients and customers that you're going

to keep, the length of time that you're going to keep them,

and then finding other ways to increase that Customer

Lifetime Value, either by selling them more things,

by selling them more things more often,

by increasing the price,

by providing upsells and down sales and cross sales,

essentially other ways and other opportunities

to solve problems that they have.

And that's an important point to make here.

What we're doing with our marketing and with our offers

is we're solving problems that they have

and when we solve a big enough problem,

we're rewarded in direct proportion to the value

of the problem we solve.

This is why some people make a whole lot of money.

It's because they solve big problems and some people

struggle to make any money at all because they're

just not solving enough problems for enough people,

or they're not solving big enough problems

for enough people, okay, so that is CLV,

and what you may notice is that is kind of the final ring

of our concentric expanding circles, right,

moving all the way out, but we still have one left.

And the reason that I almost didn't want to give

it a ring of its own,

but rather have it sort of circle the whole thing

is because especially today, especially now in moving

into the future, it's so important that it almost needs

to overlap and encompass everything else that we're doing.

This is going to support all of the marketing of your offer.

It's going to help move you to towards your goals faster

than you ever thought.

It's appealing to every target market.

More people consume this kind of content than anything else.

Basically checks the box for being able

to clearly articulate miracles and miseries,

it works with almost every single platform,

which means we can put it in front of people

and where they're present and active online,

it's the best content type, we can embed it in email,

it works as part of the funnel, so on and so forth.

Probably no surprise here that the final piece

of the puzzle is video.

Essentially, the big question

that you want to ask yourself here is how

can you supercharge everything you're doing

with a video marketing strategy?

Now, clearly for long form video.

Youtube is the best place to do it, that said,

I appreciate that if you've never done video marketing

before, if you are just getting started,

you're not comfortable in front of a camera.

That's a pretty big ask.

So we can put that on the back burner for now,

and there are a lot smaller and somewhat still very

effective steps that you can take leading up to this

inevitable conclusion.

Number one, start with stories.

Grab your phone, look into it, hit record.

Go live for like 15 or 30 seconds and share some kind of

valuable tip or insight or story or something

that's going on, very low barrier, no editing required.

Raw and authentic will beat overly produced

and polished every single day of the week.

If you feel like taking it up a step further,

do more of them once, twice, three,

four times even a day isn't a bad strategy.

You can do them on Instagram, you can do them on Facebook,

you can do them on a number of different platforms as well,

depending on subscriber counts

and what rules are coming and going.

But stories are a great way to sort of dip your toes

into the water and get started.

Next If you're willing to take it that next step further,

and you want to capitalize on all of the available organic

reach right now, short form vertical content

is still going to be your best bet.

These are things like Instagram reels

and TikTok and YouTube shorts.

The length of these varies,

different platforms tend to have preferences

for different length videos,

but typically we're looking at 15 to 30 seconds,

30 to 60 seconds, somewhere around that range.

So what's something that you can talk about

for 30 to 60 seconds?

I'm willing to bet that if you've been

in business for any length of time or you have any sort

of passion or interest in what you're doing,

there's a lot of stuff that you could share

that other people would be interested in hearing about,

of course, if you really want to dominate your space,

become the leader in your industry,

then YouTube is clearly going to be the winner here for

longform video content, so don't be afraid to test it out.

Upload a few bad videos at first, I mean,

the beauty of just getting started is nobody's really

around to watch your stuff,

so you get a chance to sort of practice and experiment

a little bit without all the judgment of the internet.

Looking back on my first videos,

they were awkward and incredibly sweaty,

and I was super nervous and I didn't know

how to use a camera, so it's kind of blurry,

and I didn't know how to use a microphone,

so it only came outta one side, yeah, it was, it was rough.

But the point is that practice

does make progress and you've gotta start

somewhere in order to get better, all that said,

there are still seven more tactics and strategies

and tricks and hacks that I didn't have a chance

to get to in this video.

So that's why I've linked up a video right here with seven

of the most proven and effective marketing strategies

for you to take a look at right now.

So make sure to hop in there

and I'll see you in the next video.

Understanding the seven things

that I'm gonna be walking you through here today,

will allow you to immediately upgrade all of it,

get better results, more clicks, more traffic,

more sales from everything you do.