7 Effective Marketing Strategies for 2024 (TIPS, TRICKS & TACTICS)
– Hey there, my friend, Adam here. Today, I wanna share with
you seven marketing secrets or marketing hacks or marketing 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 and tools and resources and all of that.
So my goal here today is
as ambitious as it is, is to try to pack seven
secrets and seven hacks into a very short period of time, so that you're gonna
be able to watch 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's just not working.
Like, it's just nothing's happening. No one's clicking. No one's watching my stuff. The algorithm isn't pushing
it or promoting it to people. Nothing's working." It's something that I hear all the time. I see it in the comments
below very common. 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 know who's to blame for this one. Maybe it's the get-rich-quick things.
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 lemme 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. Of course, that'll be the, there we go. We'll get some ink flowing here. So this is our bell curve,
our ugly, ugly 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. So the MED, the minimum effective dose. 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. And we're gonna talk about
that one in just a second, but 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's working and the answer here,
the solution is, again, you've got to push through,
you've got to move up here. 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. Again, we'll talk about
that in just a second.
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 huge, massive, massively huge. Like when we're thinking
about your business, your market or your industry, these are huge, 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. I'm pretty much maxed out. There's nothing else I can do." And they're sitting at around,
say a million bucks a year, and they're in, let's
use health and fitness. So if you're in, let's say the health and fitness industry, this massive multi-billion dollar industry and your business is
doing a million a year, two million a year, a hundred
grand a year, whatever it is, 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. You could make one video on YouTube a week to one video on YouTube a day. You could do two videos a day. You could start other channels. You could have other podcasts. 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, biminishing returns. There we go, D for diminishing,
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 10 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 PPC, 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. So the reality is, let's find a bright,
happy, colorful marker. 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? And that leads me to the
marketing rule of seven.
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.
Now, if it's expensive,
it's gonna be seven to 14. 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. So rule of seven, that's important. Now, how do we do this? Well, we do this by showing up 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 TikTok or Instagram or YouTube if
your people aren't there.
So you've gotta 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. So that's the marketing rule of seven. Now the next point is more of
a psychological phenomenon, more of a mental hack that you can use. I've talked about this a
ton on this channel here, but it's called the mere exposure effect and what the mere exposure effect is, 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. This kind of stems back to caveman days, where if we saw something enough times and it didn't try to kill us or eat us, we assumed it was safe. Well, all of that programming, all of that evolution is
carried forward to today. 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. So this is why the marketing
rule of seven is so important. This is why following up is so important. This is why making sure that you've got a solid
email marketing strategy in place is paramount. It's crucial. Probably the second most important
thing I could offer here, 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. There's some businesses and companies that I've consulted for and done work with and own and have stake in that do two emails a day and it works. 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 marketing rule of seven and the mere exposure effect. And that leads me perfectly
to the next kind of secret, which is that you really wanna
go deep rather than broad.
So let me tell you what is
probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to marketing. And that's whenever I ask somebody, "Well, who's your target market?" And they say, "Everyone," or "People with money,"
and that's amazing. That'd be great, but there's like 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, terrible fits 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, well, now, 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're gonna
wanna 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. It's another kind of same reason that if you are a personal
brand or a coach or consultant or someone like that, you
tend to attract people, give or take 10 years around your age. So if you're 30, you'll
attract like 20 to 40. If you're 40, you'll attract
30 to 50, whatever it is. There's like this 20-year sliding scale, 10 years on each side that tends to work, that can balloon out a
little bit here and there.
But on average, you'll
find most of your people fall in that range. Again, it's just because
you relate to them better. 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 wanna 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. It becomes more vanilla,
it becomes more bland. And it has to, because
if you are being specific about someone's unique
pains and unique problems, well, it wouldn't be
appealing or interesting to, like, everybody 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 ICA. ICA is marketing talk for
ideal customer avatar. I'm not completely strict on this exact fictional representation of your ideal customer. And you've got to give them
a name and a hair color, and they've got to wear this kind of shoes and listen to this kind of music. I don't think that's necessary. 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, your top clients, your top
audience members 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 political affiliations,
their lifestyles, things that make them them. 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, ideal customer avatars. That's cool too. 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 and problems and fears and frustrations. We'll talk about that in just a second. 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 and attitudes
and interests and beliefs. And I call that their
miracles and miseries.
So let me find my pen, and
let's talk about that now. All right, so when it comes to creating your ideal customer avatar, when it comes to thinking
about your audience, your clients, your customers,
the money is, the value, the real results that you're going to get from your marketing come down to identifying their
miracles and miseries. Now there's this great
expression that I love that says 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.
Memo to self: I gotta buy
some smaller tip markers, but that's it. 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. The problem is, is that like most cliches, there's that element of truth to it that's absolutely the fact here, is like when it comes to marketing and to representing what
it is that you're selling and what you're trying to promote, it's not about the features, it's about what those
features are going to deliver through the benefits.
That's what they're after. They 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 gotta 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 wanna 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. A bit of a side note, do you know why pen caps have
like those tiny little holes? I dunno if you've got a pen
around, you can find one, but like they've got those
little holes on the pen lid, it's actually so if you swallow it, you don't choke to death. Random, hey. Anyway, the reason that benefits work significantly better than features, is because benefits
are emotionally driven, and emotion is far more
powerful driver than logic. It doesn't mean we can't have logic. It doesn't mean we shouldn't use logic. We absolutely should, but
emotion is the money maker. That's what compels
somebody to take action. When they feel it, like,
deep down in their core, this is going to make my life better. This is going to help me
achieve the goals that I want. This is going to increase my status. This is going to make me
healthier or happier or wealthier or any of those intrinsic
drivers that we have as humans, when we're able to
properly communicate that, that's when conversions happen.
That's when sales happen. Now here's the kicker. When you're first creating your marketing, whether it's through an ad or a sales page or a social media post or an
email or anything like that, we always wanna highlight the benefits. And then of course, we're
gonna 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 wanna, of course, 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'll 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. We'll sprinkle in other
forms of testimonials, we'll sprinkle in 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. And it's funny, I didn't
actually plan this, but this actually kind
of 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. It's gonna take energy, and it's gonna take
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.
Now of course, I'm not
gonna leave you hanging with just that, which is why I'm gonna
link up a video right here that's gonna show you a
digital marketing strategy that's going to help. So make sure to check it out now, and we'll see you in the next video. Now the worst offense here is
not having a marketing funnel or more accurately not thinking
about your marketing funnel and instead, just hoping and wishing..
