How To Kick Off Your Digital Marketing Efforts In Just 5 Easy Steps…

If you’ve ever thought about bringing your business online, then you’re reading the right article. That’s because you’re about to discover my easy 5-step method for making the most of your online advertising and digital marketing efforts.

And the good news is that this method works even if you don’t have the budget for an expensive copywriter, don’t have hundreds of dollars a month to spend on new software, and even if you’re completely new to the whole “marketing thing.”

Read on…

Step 1: Determine Your Audience

Many people who are new to digital marketing don’t even realize that they need to do this step before ever spending a single dime on running ads or promoting their products and services. And that’s why a lot of people who dive into marketing their business online end up failing – they’re simply missing this crucial step. 

So the first thing you need to do is to decide on exactly who your audience is. I’ve talked to many entrepreneurs who, when asked about their dream client, tell me “anyone trying to do XYZ.” Their understanding of the market is that if they throw out a wide net, they’ll inevitably catch enough fish to feed the family. But they couldn’t be more wrong.

You see, when you go into the market, there’s actually nothing that could sabotage your business more than if you present yourself as a jack-of-all-trades! Your prospects will look your way and see some vague promise of an unclear result with no proof behind it to support what you’re trying to sell, and they’ll think to themselves that you must be an amateur. Here’s what to do instead.

Become ultra-specific about who your dream client is, and what the result is that you can bring into their life.

You’ll find that this process will go much more smoothly if you apply these tips and tricks:

• Create a complete demographic and psychographic profile of your dream client. That means figuring out everything from where they live and how much money they make to what things they do each morning and which annoyances they have to put up with throughout their day.
• Practice advanced empathy to allow yourself to really get inside of their mind and emotions and create content that appeals to them.
• Give this profile a name and act as though you were only ever marketing to this single person. You’ll be repulsive to anyone who doesn’t fit this profile, but you’ll be magnetic to the people who you actually want to work with.

Once you’ve built out this idea of your dream customer, then you can move onto the next step…

Step 2: Create A Mouth-Watering Free Offer

The next thing you need to do is come up with a free offer that your dream client will love and that they’re willing to trade their name and email for. (More on this in a second.) 

When I first started marketing my own business, I made a lot of mistakes. And now that I’ve helped others do it, I see a lot of people have a tendency to make the same mistakes. So let me share with you the top 3 mistakes and how you can avoid them:

• The first big mistake is coming in with a direct pitch. If you watch any old content about using Facebook ads, you probably think that selling your stuff is as simple as creating a lead-gen ad and picking up new clients. This is not the case.

The golden days of Facebook have long passed, and the market has grown wise to old-school digital advertising methods. They won’t just click on an ad and buy because you give them some kind of discount or even if you write the most persuasive copy the world has ever seen. People want relationships with the brands they’re buying from, so you need to start your marketing off on the right foot by allowing that relationship to build itself naturally.

• Mistake number two is offering a free “consultation” or “session.” I know this was probably your first thought when I said you should be offering something free. It’s not a bad idea, right? You get them on the phone, provide some value, and sell them – then a certain percentage would become your customers.

Unfortunately for you and me, the market has become wise to these tactics and now universally associates “free [whatever] call” with “sales call.” There is still a way to work around this, however. It just takes more steps. (Which I’ll explain thoroughly in the next sections.)

What you have to do instead of offering a free call is to offer what we call a “lead magnet.” A lead magnet is usually a short ebook that gives your prospects a piece of actionable and highly-valuable information that will help them achieve their desires. If you offer something like this instead, prospects are much more likely to take you up on what you have to offer because they get to avoid talking to someone they know has an ulterior motive and they get a big piece of value upfront.

• By far the biggest mistake I see new marketers make is offering what they think their prospects want. Let me explain…

When you create content, there are two ways to do it: you can create the content that you like to create and what you think is valuable, or you can do research to determine exactly what your market desires and make something based around that. To do this, listen to what your prospects are saying in Facebook groups, check on best-sellers in your niche, and scope out your competitors. Find out what your dream clients actually want and then you can create a lead magnet for them.

(Most times you’ll find yourself with multiple ideas for what you can offer. Don’t be afraid to test three or four to see what gets the best reactions before going all-in on just one thing!)

Step 3: Make Your Landing Page

At this step, you’re likely to notice that things get a little more techy and complex. So, what you need to do is follow a simple, proven formula for designing a high-converting landing page – instead of fumbling around trying to figure everything out on your own. 

I made a video about this step, which you can find by clicking here. I literally draw everything out and break down the core components of a conversion-focused landing page so that you can simply swipe my design and rid yourself of the headaches that come with first-time design.

I still remember when I sat down to make my very first landing page. I must have spent a week researching, creating pages, and scrapping everything because I wasn’t satisfied with my end results. I literally designed ten pages in a row and when I had the one I thought would be my winner, I realized that it wasn’t converting and I had to start all over again. The memories of that frustration still haunt my dreams… 

Don’t try to be a hero, just do exactly what I show you in this video and you’ll avoid the anger every first-timer goes through when they try to figure something out solo.

Step 4: Write Out Your Email Sequences

By the time you’ve made it this far, you’ve been able to connect your landing page to a follow-up email sequence. Most people would just leave the default “Thanks for subscribing to my list!” and move on without a second thought. This is the worse move you could possibly make…

Rather than simply viewing your new lead as another name on your list, you have to nurture them and create that new relationship, then move them on to the next sale so that you can maximize the lifetime value of each new lead you acquire. I like to do this through a series of 8 emails, which I’ll explain one-by-one.

• Email 1: Here’s What This Says About You
• 
  
• This is the first email your prospect will ever receive from you, and coincidentally it has been shown in every industry that this first email has the highest open and click-through rates. Let’s take advantage of that by setting our new contact up with some positive labels that we can call back on later (driven, motivated, willing to do whatever it takes) and driving them back to another resource like a landing page or the blog section of your website.
• 
  
• Email 2: Lead Magnet Delivery
• 
  
• Five or ten minutes later, they’ll receive the free thing that they asked for. Your job here is just to sell them on the idea of this thing to get them to actually download it and thank them for joining your list.
• 
  
• Email 3: Re: Lead Magnet Delivery
• 
  
• This email is a signature of every Bonaventure MS campaign. I noticed that only about 50% of the people who asked for the lead magnet actually opened the email and downloaded it. After checking with some other guys in the industry, this seemed to be the norm. Rather than letting it go on as an accepted fact, I thought to myself that I could give those slackers another opportunity to take me up on the product they had asked me for less than 24 hours ago. By sending out this second email to anyone who didn’t download the PDF from the first one, we’ve been able to provide value to an extra 25% new prospects who join our list.
• 
  
• Email 4: What To Expect
• 
  
• Now we move into what’s known as an SOS, or Soap Opera Sequence. Coined by Andre Chaperon, the best email copywriter ever to live, these five emails are designed to create and solidify your relationship with new prospects, keep them hooked on your sequence, and drive them back to a new offer. This first email is just a simple one that lets the reader know what kind of value you’ll be providing while also teasing the story to come.
• 
  
• Email 5: My Backstory
• 
  
• At this point in the sequence, your job is to create a strong sense of affinity between yourself and your prospect. Start your story off by talking about the moment of highest tension on your journey to achieving the goal you’re promising that you can help them with. Show them how bad things were at one point and when you hit the lowest low, let them know that you’ll tell them how you got out of it in the next email.
• 
  
• P.S. Include a post-script that directs them to the next free offer that you have for them so that they can get even more value from you. Follow that up with a new paid offer to get some sales.
• 
  
• Email 6: My Epiphany
• 
  
• Once you’ve gotten into the relatable failures, it’s time to demonstrate your expertise. Here, tell the story of what you discovered and how it changed your life forever while directing readers back to that same offer from your last email.
• 
  
• Email 7: Hidden Benefits
• 
  
• You know that your new offer has the potential to really help your reader out, but they haven’t taken you up on it yet. Talk some more about the benefits they’ll be getting from this great free thing you put together for them.
• 
  
• Email 8: Last Call
• 
  
• This gets a little bit tricky to do properly, but with most email autoresponders you can change the links in your emails dynamically to create real scarcity. Let your prospect know that they have 24 hours left to take you up on your offer, then it goes away forever. This is where 80% of your clicks and sales will come from, so take the time to learn how to do this right.

Step 5: Keep The Relationship Alive!

I would be letting you down if I didn’t include this final powerful step. It’s something most people, even marketers, do completely wrong – so they miss out on literally tens-of-thousands of dollars in revenue every single year!

The most effective email newsletter strategy, bar none, is the daily email. By sending out daily emails to your list, you get to practice your copywriting, reveal more of your personality and your character which solidifies your relationship with your readers, and promote your content and your offers with the most engaged people on your list. But you’re probably thinking that this will push your readers away… After all, you’d hate it if you heard from some marketer every single day in your inbox, wouldn’t you?

That’s the most common objection I run into whenever I talk about this idea, so rather than going into the whole psychology and philosophy behind it, I’ll just point you to this article where you can see that even when I send emails out every single day, I’m still able to get open-rates above 30%. That means that one in every three people loves to see me in their inbox every day! Curious about how you can make this happen in your own business? Let me teach you a simple three-step formula that I use to never bore my audience or drive them to unsubscribe:

• First, always start your email with value. I find that the easiest way to do this is to begin with a story from your life, something in pop-culture, or a historical event. Our brains are wired for story, so this makes the perfect intro to any email.
• 
  
• Second, tie the value back into the reason they’re on your list. The reason you’re telling your reader the story isn’t just to tell the story, but because there’s a lesson for them to learn from it. Tell them what that lesson is and help them understand how it can aid them in solving their problems or achieving their desires.
• 
  
• Finally, include a CTA. Always have a link that your reader can click on to learn more about whatever you mentioned in the body of the email; that way anyone who’s interested has the opportunity to further engage with your content or buy your products.

And there you have it – a simple 5-step method for bringing in new leads, nurturing them, and turning them into clients. Now that you know the basics of digital marketing, there’s just one thing left for you to do: take action.

So get to it, and soon, you too will have a complete online strategy in place!