7 Things Every Effective Marketing Strategies Lover Should Know

Hey there, today I wanna share with you seven #marketingadvice secrets/hacks/tricks, essentially things that nobody's really talking about. Not even me that often. And it's because they're a little more complicated and a little more nuanced than the quick hits that we often get when it comes to social media, things like post at this time, or adapt your content for this algorithm tweak or use this kind of font or this kind of color or all of those things. What I'd rather do is get to the core of why your marketing may not be working as well as you want.

And even if it is working okay, understanding the seven things 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. And not only that, probably the most important thing that I could ever give you is to show you how to think about your marketing, how to process different marketing strategies and basically the crazy stuff that goes on inside my head when I'm evaluating different marketing tactics. So my goal here today is as ambitious as it is, is to try to pack seven secrets into a very short article, so that you're gonna be able to read this. And you're going to be able to extract these little golden nuggets and apply them to your business, to your client's business, to whatever it is that you're doing. And it starts right now.

So the very first thing that we need to talk about is kind of what ends up happening when someone says, "Hey, my marketing is just not working. Like, it's just nothing is happening. No one's clicking. No one's watching my stuff. The algorithm isn't pushing it or promoting it to people. Nothing is working." It's something that I hear all the time. 90% of the time, it's because they're just not doing enough marketing. It's just a question of volume. It's a question of quantity, not so much quality. So let me explain. I don't think Maybe it's all of the courses and the programs that promise that you can become a millionaire in 30 days with no work or whatever it is. But for some reason, when people think about marketing, they think that all they need to do is make a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad or post one video on YouTube and they'll just blow up and become the next viral sensation and everything will just work out miraculously well, and, seriously.

I wish this was the case. That'd be amazing, but it's not, right. It's like marketing is just a business function. I'm gonna make this sound horribly boring, but it's like accounting or finance or legal aspects of a business or HR or sales or whatever it is. They're all just different business functions, which means that they require time. They require energy. They require money and investment in them in order to get them to work. Now, what ends up happening is most people will make one post on social media. It won't get the traction. And then they'll swear off that platform. So they'll hop over here, try out Twitter now and make a couple tweets. Nobody engages. So they say, "Well, Twitter doesn't work," and they'll make a YouTube video. And then that won't take off and they get frustrated and they get angry because it's just not working when the reality is, they probably just haven't done enough.

And that's why the first concept, the first sort of hacker secret is identifying the marketing sweet spot. So in the most rudimentary art drawing class ever, let me show you exactly what I mean by marketing sweet spot. And you can see where you fall and where the vast majority of businesses fall. And if you find yourself in this position, you know that the answer is to keep on pushing through. It's not to dial back. It's not to pivot. It's not to do anything like that. It's just to keep going forward.

So let me show you what that looks like. So I want you to imagine for a second, a bell curve, kind of like the traditional bell curve. And it's gonna have three different sections. Now over here on the left, this is what you're going to call the Minimum Effective Dose (MED). Essentially, what ends up happening here is until you're in this range, nothing you do matters. It's about sort of making that one post on social media that someone sees one time and then that's it. And then you wonder why it's not working. It's about spending $5 on Facebook ads or Instagram ads and not getting immediate sales and then sort of swearing off the entire online advertising system and that, but the reality is we just haven't hit the minimum effective dose. There's not enough momentum. There's not enough touch points. There's not enough exposures and reach and engagement with the audience that you're trying to reach. This is where 90% of businesses fall as they sit around here in this minimum effective dose kind of half committing to different strategies, and then wondering why nothing is working and the answer here, the solution is, again, you've got to push through, you've got to move up. And this is the sweet spot. This is where you're going to find sort of the saturation of your market. You're going to be hitting the number of touch points that are required. You're going to be making sure that the people that you want to reach are actually seeing your content. You're gonna make sure that you've essentially saturated everything that you can.

Now, the reality is this sweet spot is massively huge. Like when we're thinking about your business, your market or your industry, these are huge industries, billions and billions of dollars. So unless your business is doing a billion dollars a year or more, there's more that you can do. It's crazy when I hear about someone that thinks that, "Well, look, I'm already posting once a day on Instagram," or, "I'm already making one YouTube video a week," or, "I've got a podcast. For an example let's take health and fitness industry. This is massive multi-billion dollar industry and your business is doing a million a year. You haven't even scratched the surface for what you're capable of doing and for the amount of people that you could reach. So you could go from one post a day to five posts a day, one video a week to one video a day on YouTube. There's so much that you can do. Now, of course, at some point, you're going to reach this third area, which is diminishing returns. There's gonna be some point where eventually more money, more effort, more time isn't gonna pay off, but I can't even begin to tell you of all of the businesses I've worked with over the last 13 years, the tiniest fraction falls in here. And typically it's when they're spending like a million dollars a month on ads and they simply can't get in front of more people with their ads.

So they're doing blogging, they're doing podcasting, they're doing SEO. They're running Google ads and Facebook ads and Instagram ads and all that. The biggest example here is if you're running some kind of search-based pay-per-click advertising, like a Google search ad. At the end of the day, you can't make people search for more stuff. So you can max out. But again, you can make that broader. You can go for discovery ad platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where you can put things in front of people that may potentially be interested. There's a lot of ways. This is where we're going for, this sweet spot here. Like everybody is down here in this sort of minimum effective dose. They haven't even scratched the surface for what's possible. And then they're wondering why their marketing is not working. The best piece of advice of everything that I could give you here is, really, you just have to do more. Now, of course, you need to be strategic. You need to think through it. That's what the rest of this is going to be about, but more is your answer.

So on that note, how much more? Now, depending on your business or market or your industry, depending on if you're selling something for low-dollar value or high-dollar value, it's kind of universally agreed that for somebody to make a purchase decision, for someone to take action and actually buy from you, they need around seven touch points, which means seven engagements, seven interactions with your brand. You can't simply put something in front of them one time, expect them to buy and then call it a day. You're gonna have to do this multiple times, seven. If it's significantly cheaper, like you're selling a pack of gum for 99 cents or something, you probably don't need seven touch points. One should be sufficient, but that rule of seven is important because it forces you to not give up too early. It's just like when you're looking at these statistics around sales and you realize that most conversions, most closes for sales happen after like five rejections or five follow ups, five emails, five extra calls. It's rarely, pretty much never, the first time. Same thing goes with marketing. A bit of a side note here, but marketing is kind of selling one to many, sales is one to one, marketing, one to many. So we use the same concepts, the same strategies, all of that with sales.

But I like to think of marketing as a little more exciting and a little more challenging even because instead of trying to convince one person at a time and overcome their objections and their fears and their concerns, we have to do this on mass and we have to do it without really getting much feedback from our market. Now, how do we do this? Well, we do this by showing up the products in front of our ideal target market where they're present and active, which means that we need to be selective about what social media platforms we're going to, about what kind of content we're creating, about where we're putting that. And we need to make sure that it's in alignment, not only with you and your content style and what you like doing, hate doing, but also where your people are. In fact, that's the most important element. There's no point on being on Twitter or Pinterest or Instagram or YouTube if your people aren't there. So we got to find out where they're present and active online, and then you've got to make it your mission to follow up and to make sure that you're consistently showing up in front of them with value, with content, and with offers.

Now the next point is more of a psychological phenomenon, more of a mental hack that you can use. It's called the mere exposure effect. It is a psychological phenomenon that says we, as people, as humans, we associate frequency with trust. So the more often that we show up in front of people, the more often that they see us, the more they know us, the more they like us and the more that they trust us. So now when we see things again and again and again, we naturally start to like things more because we're familiar with them. They're less scary and, therefore, we're more likely to trust them. This is why following up is so important. This is why making sure that you've got a solid email marketing strategy in place. It's crucial. I could suggest here is, the first one is to make sure that you get out of that minimum effective dose zone and into the sweet spot, by doing more. The second probably most valuable piece of advice I could give you is to make sure that you're doing some kind of email marketing and you're doing it more than you think.

So for some weird reason, there's this rule, this gospel in the marketing world, that you should send one marketing email a week at most, maybe one a month, 'cause you don't wanna bother people. Garbage. It's absolute garbage. There's plenty of businesses and industries where you could send one email every three days, you could send one email a day. People don't get angry, they don't unsubscribe. You've just got to know who your market is. At the very least, however, I'd say that you should be shooting for three emails a week, kind of at minimum. Otherwise, again, you're not going to have the chance to establish yourself and to take advantage of all of those touch points and the mere exposure effect.

And that leads me perfectly to the next kind of secret, which is that you really go deep rather than broad. Whenever I ask somebody, "Who's your target market?" And they say, "Everyone," or "People with money," and that's amazing. But there's like approx. eight billion people on the planet. And I promise you, you don't want all of them. Even if they all wanted to do business with you, some of them are just terrible for your business. So why don't we rein that in a little bit. And even if we were to say separate men and women, we're down to like four billion or then we separate to this country. Now we're down to like a hundred million and then maybe this area, now we're down to 30 million. I mean, still, we have to carve that down to a significantly lower number, someone that you're going to be able to connect with on a deeper level. So the easiest way to do this is to take a look at yourself and your business.

Now I appreciate you are not your customer. You know things that they don't know, you have experiences that they don't have. However, most people, when it comes to business, they're solving a problem that they had at some point. They're solving something that they know about, that they care about, that they want to share and help other people. So you probably understand a little bit about your situation and what they're going through, and, therefore, you're more likely to attract people similar to you. You know the words that they use, you grew up in the similar time, you have the same references, all of that stuff. But the point is you want to go deep here and you want to make better connections with fewer people than these superficial surface level connections with a ton of people. The big reason here is because when you go broad, when you go after everybody, you're forced to naturally water down your message. And it has to, because if you are being specific about someone's unique pains and problems, well, it wouldn't be appealing or interesting to else. So, therefore, you have to make it broad. And when you're broad, you're boring and everybody just ignores you. And you sound like 99% of the other businesses and marketers out there saying the same things, like we offer higher quality and we offer better service and all of that stuff that everybody's heard a million times before and they're completely blind and deaf to.

So the best way to solve this is to move on to our next point here, which is that you need an Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA). I recommend you to have this exact fictional representation of your ideal customer. It's helpful at times, what I think is more important is that you get really clear around the commonalities, the common characteristics that your top customers/clients/audiences have in common. And we typically divide this into three different categories.

The first of which being demographic. So what's their age, their gender, their income, their occupation, their title, all of those stereotypical marketing things that we associate. Number two, what are their geographic details? What city, state, province, country, where do they live? Number three, they're psychographic details. This is all of the head stuff. And this is where the bulk of your ICA should really be formed. So what are their values, their attitudes, their interests, their beliefs, their organizations, their lifestyles etc. After all, we often want to group people into these broad buckets, like men or women or this age or that age. But the reality is depending on what product or service you sell, you may have a wide range of that. And it may be more problem based. On the other hand, you may also have multiple different ICAs. I'm all right if you've got like, look, we work well with women who are 20 to 25 and we also work well with men who are 40 to 45, but those two different ICAs are gonna have different pains, problems, fears and frustrations. So you can serve them both, but you need to serve them both with different messages. You simply can't appeal to them by using the same generic, broad, bland terminology 'cause you're just gonna turn the other one off by talking about things that are completely irrelevant to them. So you have an ICA, but make sure that it's specific and you can have multiple. And on that note, the way to dive into that is with the psychographic details of their values, interests and beliefs.

When it comes to creating your ideal customer avatar, when it comes to thinking about your audience, your customers, the real results that you're going to get from your marketing come down to identifying their miracles and miseries. I believe customers don't buy when they understand, they buy when they feel understood. The way to make them feel understood is with this. So their miracles that's over here, that's all the things that they want, their needs, their desires, their dreams, all of the things that they wish would happen, the desired end state of where they're trying to get. And then of course, over here, you've got their miseries. These are their fears, their problems, their pains, their frustrations, all of the things that they're trying to get away from, at least in regards to your business and to your offer. You need to identify what these are and ideally drill down into which the most important and the most painful ones are. And then what the most desirable end states are, because then you're going to be able to position your business as the bridge that takes them from miracle, oh, here we go.

This is your business right there. Your business's job, your offer, your product, your service, whatever it is that you sell, it's only mission is to move them away from their current state that they're in right now, that they don't want to be in, whatever that pain is, and towards the desired end state. And the better that you're able to communicate that, which is essentially the job of marketing, it's to communicate the value of what you have to them in regards to your offer, your product, your service. The better you're able to do that, the more likely you are to get somebody to take action and to actually buy from you and move them here. And this is where the conversions happen. It's right here. It's moving them away from miseries and towards miracles.

And on that note, let's hit the next point here, which is a very cliched thing to say, but I wanna break it down a little bit more. There's this super cliched saying in marketing that says you want to sell the benefits, not the features or sell the sizzle, not the steak. Your audience don't care about features, they care about how those features are going to positively impact them. So yes, we can make a cursory mention of the features. We got to highlight them. We'll talk about them. And we'll talk about kind of the flip side of that in just a second, but the real value is in the benefit. Now, one of my favorite examples and it kind of stems from like, "Hey, sell me this pen." Well, it comes down to, this pen doesn't actually have a pen cap, but we're gonna use that analogy anyway. It's sort of like, well, why does the pen have a pen cap or fictional pen cap? And the reason that this pen has a pen cap and the benefits it provides, that's what we have to highlight. So the feature is a pen cap. The benefits is, well, it prevents you from getting ink all over yourself. And then of course we could elaborate on that. We could explain it a little further and so on. The reason that benefits work significantly better than features, is because benefits are emotionally driven, and emotion is far more powerful driver than logic and emotion is the money maker. When we're able to properly communicate that's when conversions happen.

When you're first creating your marketing, whether it's through an ad or a landing page or a social media post or an email, we always have to highlight the benefits. And then of course, we have to talk about the features. But if for some reason, people don't convert, we flip it. And then the next time, we lead with features and we back up the benefits. And the reason that we do this is because we know that emotion is a significantly more powerful driver than logic, but logic still has a part. Not to mention, it's not that some people are, or it's not just that some people are more emotional than logical. We all know those people that fall on one end of the spectrum or another, but it's also that we, as people, we have days where we're more emotional or more logical. And within those days, we have hours where we're more emotional and more logical and there's situations and circumstances that you can't always control for, which is why we really want to cover our bases.

We want lead with emotion, 'cause it's the most powerful driver, but we want to back it up with logic. The next time somebody interacts with us, if we tried emotion and it didn't work, we have to lead with logic and we'll back it up with emotion, and we'll kind of go back and forth. We'll sprinkle in social proof, other forms of testimonials, guarantees and risk reversals. We'll use all of the tools in our toolbox as marketers to get somebody to take action, knowing full well that we don't have control over where they're at right now in their current situation.

This actually leads us full circle back to that beginning statement of minimum effective dose of you're simply probably not doing enough if you're not getting the results that you want. I mean, you can see here, when we look over the rule of seven and the mere exposure effect, we need to go deep. We need to have ICAs, talk about their miracles and miseries. We need to highlight benefits. And if that doesn't work, we go for the logical element. And then we go back to benefits. All of this is going to take time, energy, and investment in your marketing, which is why if you're at this stage right now where it's just not delivering the results that you want, you need to do more.

All the best and Thank you for reading.

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