Marketing Best Practices

mktpractice

Digital Advertising Fuels the Funnel

By on

Digital advertising is a great way to drive people into your marketing funnel. You may be concerned with the initial  up front costs, but I’ll explain why it will save you money in the long run.

digital advertising sales funnel

Test Your Funnel

You have no idea if you have the right deal set up unless people go through the funnel.  You’re testing the message, the offer, and the audience.

There’s something called “critical mass” which is essential when you are evaluating the effectiveness of a campaign.

Test the Audience

Using very targeted customer audiences on Facebook at $3-5/day will allow you to test how engaged your target market will be with your offer and landing page. You should let the ad run about 3-5 days to evaluate its effectiveness.

You can pull audiences from people who have already visited your website. Or you can start to test with demographics.

If you set up a fan page, and go into Insights, you will see the demographics of the people who like your page. This could be a good starting point.

You’ll need to ask yourself if they’re buyers or just people who “like” what you’re doing.

Then you can expand by using Look-alike audiences.

Test the Landing Page

There are programs out there called “heat maps” that will show you how people are interacting with your web page. This can be useful if people are expecting something to be a link and it’s not, or they’re not engaging with the Buy Now button. You may want to test adding in more buttons or moving the button around.

Then set up two landing pages to test the text. You may always be running some form of test to see what converts. This is called Split A/B testing.  What you should know is to only test one thing at a time. If you try to test more, then you won’t know what ended up converting better.

This is the scientific part of marketing which I always find fun.

Test the Offer

When you have the correct audience and the correct landing page, then you need to test the offer. You can use Google Analytics to help you with the flow.

If people are leaving your website or not picking up your upsell, it’s time to test if it’s resonating with your target audience. If not, maybe you need a different upsell.

Or perhaps people aren’t taking your second one but are taking your third. In which case, you may want to swap the second and third.

Why? Psychology. When people keep saying “Yes,” then they keep wanting to say “Yes.” Test it and see.

Organic Ranking Is Slow

It could be months before you have enough traffic, and by then, you won’t have been able to optimize your sales funnel.  Think of all the money you left on the table by not optimizing your funnel faster.

Advertising Increases Awareness

I’m sure you’ve heard that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Now you know that’s only true if they know you have the mousetrap.

You can get your product or service in front of more people who have pain but don’t know what to do.

Learn more about Facebook Ads in my Simply Effective Facebook Ads course on Udemy. Use this link and pick it up for $10.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

What Are Native Ads

By on

I found this interesting video on Bing native ads. It explains how they are placed within an article. There are additional types of native ads that I’ll discuss below.

Native ads can be used in newspaper or magazine type sites where you have a lot of article titles. You probably saw it on Yahoo where it says that it’s Sponsored Content. I’ve also seen it on my local news site.

Native ad in Yahoo Finance

How to Set Up A Native Ad

The best native ads don’t look like ads. They look like an interesting story that someone would want to click on.

The best places to start with native ads are revcontent and spoutable. You can get started for $100. Many of the other places have a $1000 minimum.

Outbrain (I’m not sure what their minimum is…they’re a highly recommended company from everyone I’ve talked to) has a great resource page. Read this article and see examples of the best native ads.

Managing Your Native Ad

When you start with $100 you need to “mine” for good widgets first and target only the good ones. There are a lot of bad sites out there that are nothing but ads and it’s hard to get noticed. You can do this easily by going to these sites and examine the code and find the widget or site id’s. You can also that in conjunction with a spy tool like adplexity.

Make sure you’re tracking conversions and how much money you make on the back end. If you’re not making money, change up your ad. Remember that people get ad blindness after seeing it a few times.

Just Released Entrepreneurship for Noobees

By on

My buddy Boomy Tokan and I released Entrepreneurship for Noobees. It’s the third in our series of business courses to help people wanting to get into online sales and marketing.

Starting up your own business can be challenging. You want to be sure it’s not a job that’s taking up more of your time than your old job did. And you want to be sure you’re treating it like a business instead of a hobby. That means you have plans and repeatable processes.

What’s It About

The course starts you off with identifying some important mindset issues. I put in a quiz to help you determine your risk tolerance. Some people are ready to jump in with both feet first. Others want to wade out.

Those who jump in should probably pause a bit to do some planning and research. You remember my cautionary tale about the bakery that closed after about nine months.

Those who wade in will need to identify when is the right time for them to commit to their new business. If they don’t, then it will always be just a hobby.

Why Should I Buy The Course

If you’re struggling, you may need to step back and build up a solid foundation. It helps to get your brain thinking about owning a business and not just a job or a hobby.

That and I have a special coupon link for you where it will only cost you $10. I know a lot of people compare it to the price of a cup of coffee, but I won’t. I’ll just say it’s only $10 with no risk. Plus, I really want your feedback. And I want to do a case study on you and how you turned your desire to be an entrepreneur into a successful business.

So click here to check out Entrepreneurship for Noobees for $10 during this introductory release.

3 Quick Facebook Page Management Tips

By on

I have three quick Facebook page management tips to share with you today. They should make it easier to get more page likes.

Invite People Who Like Your Posts

I had to have someone point this out to me.  You can click on the names of people who liked your boosted post.

Then you can click on the Invite button. A percentage will choose to like your page. It’s an easy way to increase the likes.

Import Your Email List

Create a custom audience to target by uploading your email list.  First you need to go into the Business Manager and select Audiences.

Then select Custom Audience

Then you can import your file:

 

How to Spy on the Competition

If you need to blog more regularly, use Facebook.  In the Business Manager side of the Facebook page, under Insights, you can add in Pages to Watch. You do need 100 page likes before you can do this.  This is one time where you may want to pay to advertise your page until you achieve those 100 page likes. It’s an extremely powerful tool to spy on your competition.  It’s also great for finding ideas for your own posts.

Once you’re on this, you can see what your competitors best performing posts that week were. You can then create your own posts on similar topics.  Or curate their content with your own opinions about it.

You can track their posts to see if they have a content calendar. This can be useful if you’re new to the industry and learning trends.

Let me know if these quick Facebook page management tips have helped you!

Mastermind 1on1 Review

By on

My friend Richard Butler just released his new program Mastermind 1 on 1. I know Richard and got early access to review. I was so impressed and learned a ton. Usually I’m telling you that we already know stuff….we just need to be reminded of it. In this case, I learned a lot of new ways of thinking.

Richard interviews the experts and you get 9 hours of video success talks with some of the leading experts in the Internet marketing industry

Who Are the Experts

Here’s a rundown on the panel of experts:

    • Alex Jeffreys – from dead broke 10 years ago to owning one of the fastest growing companies in North America
    • Erik Stafford – the man who walked away from 3 successful businesses he built – he deleted customers, lists, products – why he did it and how it helped him
    • Reed Floren – never had a job in his life, but continues to earn day in day out from the internet. Find out his secrets
    • Felicia Slattery – from college professor to one of the sought after speakers and trainers in the business – find out why you have to know how to communicate even if you will never be on stage
    • Stuart Tan – one of Asia’s leading professional trainers, to date he has trained over 500,000 people. He talks about NLP and how to program yourself for success
    • Mark Lyford – from living it up in the Bahamas to spending a couple of years in jail, his story is of a survivor and go getter. Learn from him on what it takes to keep on going.

There are more experts as well. It’s time to grab this while it’s discounted, use code launchspecial to get an instant 25% off.

Why Is It So Great

It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes. Ultimately you’re going to make your own mistakes. But wouldn’t it be better to avoid the basic ones because you learned from people who already made them?

Then you can become an expert when you make your own mistakes and get interviewed or publish a book.

Richard has a great style for interviewing them. He knows when to let them talk and when to bring them back around. Not once did I feel bored. In fact, I got so caught up in watching them that I forgot to do some of my actual work. So make sure you pace yourself.

There’s a full 30 day money back guarantee so it’s risk free. Just make sure you start watching a video after you buy it.

I’m guilty of buying and not using the product myself. Don’t do that. Normally I’m the one telling you to buy the just in time products and not the just in case products.

This is a just in time.  We’re in the third month of the year. If you’ve been working steadily and not seeing any results, you may be getting disappointed. That’s when it’s essential to fill your mind with positive thoughts and increase your belief that you will achieve it.

These experts have all been where you are. The difference is they persisted despite mistakes and setbacks. So go buy it and give yourself the support you need to succeed.

Do They Really Want What You’re Selling?

By on

Before starting, you need to find out if there’s anyone out there that really wants to buy what you’re selling.

As I mentioned in a prior post, it’s important that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that people want to buy what you think you want to sell.

This video talks about how important it is to build up trust first. I like his point about thinking about what other people want rather than what you think you want to sell them.

At this point, some people bring up Steve Jobs. Yes, he was a brilliant marketer who could create want and need. But let’s think back to 1976 when the first Apple I was invented. There was a small market for home computers that Radio Shack (TRS-80) and Commodore (Pet) were moving into.

The Steves also lived in Silicon Valley where nerds were building their own computers. They were able to create one that was friendly looking and worked well. And thus, they sold into an existing market.

Brand Expansion

In the early 1980’s, Steve Jobs visited Xerox Park in Menlo Park and saw a computer with a guided user interface (GUI) and a mouse. He saw the need for a friendlier computer for the masses. Kids were using computers in schools. People were using computers in their offices. It was a natural progression to making a computer for the home.

Steve Jobs kept pushing the envelope, and people responded well to it. It wasn’t always that way.

Start Simply

When you’re starting out, look for something that people will buy. You’re better off selling them things similar to what they are already buying.

My favorite T Harv Eker example is that the best person to buy a hamburger is someone who has already bought one. They know they like them and will want another.

Competition is Your Friend

There are some markets that are really difficult to break into. I won’t pretend there aren’t. But that’s where differentiation is your friend.

USPS used to have the lock on delivering packages. Then along came FedEx and UPS. But it didn’t end there, did it? You’ve probably seen DHL. They specialize in businesses. FedEx differentiated themselves by being the first company that would promise and guarantee overnight delivery.

Think how many pizza parlors, coffee stores and hair salons are in your town. For each of them to survive, they’ve had to craft a way of being different. One pizza parlor caters to kids’ sports teams.  Another has a play structure for little kids.

What problem are you solving, and how do you do it differently than others?

Competitor to Collaborator

If you want even more money coming in, find someone you think is a competitor. Then find ways where you collaborate. I’ve seen plumbers do this. One specializes in repiping homes. Another specializes in repairing leaks. They refer clients to one another, and get to focus on what they do best.

Where can you do this in your business?