Make Your Marketing As Personal As Possible
We all want to market our businesses and get more customers to know who we are and what we do. In my opinion one of the best ways to do that is to personalize your marketing as much as possible.
People like to be talked to like a person as opposed to being talked to like a mindless drone. When you are doing any kind of “mass messaging” your goal is to focus on finding ways to segment your list so the messages your target audience is seeing is personalized.
An example I like to use is when you are someone who hates vacuums but you are part of a “mass marketing list” and you keep seeing ads for vacuums you are going to be extremely upset about having this message being shoved down your throat.
This is why people hate marketing and anything that it stands for because they are so used to the “mass marketing” that is not personalized. If you want to get better results and have lower complaint rates then spend the time to organize and segment your lists!
Be personal and always remember you are talking to people no matter what medium you are using.
Push Yourself just a little more
As a leader of a team one thing that I know for sure is I want to set the example of working hard. In my opinion it is the leaders job to go out there in put in more effort than anyone else on his team to set the tone.
In order for us to get the results that we really want we have to push ourselves just a little bit more. It can be easy to just settle on what you have accomplished already or think that you can just coast by but then you wouldn’t be maximizing your potential or growing as a person and/or team.
A lesson I learned from one of the best leaders I have ever been around is if you don’t put in the work you can’t expect the results plain and simple. The guy I am referring to is someone who would get up earlier than everyone else and stay up later than everyone else to accomplish the goals that he had set for himself.
The thing I admired about that was he did not need to work this hard. He had already “made” it from a financial standpoint but his desire to build his team and to lead from the front was amazing.
It definitely made an impact on me and taught me very valuable lessons. I remember he pushed me so hard to be more and to be better because at that time I was content with just getting by and putting in minimal effort. Truthfully I had no self confidence or belief that I could do more.
I can tell you during that time frame that he pushed me (harder than I have ever been pushed) I had doubled my results and achieved things that I thought I could never achieve. It helped build my confidence and opened up my eyes to what was possible. I had never been around someone that driven.
In fact he was so driven I sometimes wondered if he had an “edge” of some sort but I later found out that he didn’t. He just loved the opportunity to wake up everyday and do something he was passionate about.
So the lesson that I try to apply every single day ( I am not perfect) is to push myself to do just a little bit more than what my comfort zone is because that is where the true growth happens.
Execution is the key to reaching your goals
Everything you want to accomplish all comes down to production and executing. If you sit around and think too much then you will not end up accomplishing all of the things you want to do.
The thing that holds many people back is thinking too much and not acting enough. Typically anytime I have procrastinated on doing something that I wanted to do it was because I had some sort of fear that held me back. I was afraid of something so I put it off and usually that fear had something to do with the fear of confrontation.
But back to execution the thing…it takes massive action in order to achieve anything of real substance. Something that I find when I take super high levels of action are I notice that I tend to get better and more efficient in whatever it is that I am trying to do.
If you look at anything you ever achieved in your life that was worthwhile I am pretty sure that it took a whole lot of effort to do it and you took massive action. Today I spoke with a few people about wanting to achieve certain goals and one of the objections were the level of discomfort it would take to achieve it.
The goal itself is a simple task but the discipline it takes is very high. The reason why it was uncomfortable was the level of activity that was going to be taken and the fear of what people would think when they saw how much activity would be taken is scary.
It can be scary to have the “mental jury” (as I like to call it) of all of the things that people might say when you post or share something. But this is where the opportunity lies because if you can push yourself past that level of discomfort and just go a little bit further than what everyone else is willing to do then you will be able to get the rewards that you want.
Being outside of the comfort zone is the number one reason why people don’t try in my opinion. They don’t like to feel “exposed” because we are wired to be afraid of what people think of us. We are wired to think it is the end of the world if some “internet troll” says something we don’t like or it hurts our feelings.
The thing about execution is you will have to accept that when you are an executor you will make a lot of people feel uncomfortable because it puts them on the spot. High levels of execution makes others look at themselves in the mirror and ask questions that maybe they do not want to answer.
You will know when you are executing at an high level when you start to get people questioning and even making fun of what you do. That is when you know that your actions are getting to the levels you need them to be in order to succeed.
Execution is scary because what if we were to outgrow our friends? What if we make someone else look bad because our stuff is better? What if we become great just because we take more action and not necessarily on how talented we are? What if we prove our inner critic wrong?
Those are all questions we must answer but I think it is better to lay it all out on the line and no matter what we do, be able to tell ourselves that we gave it our best shot instead of wondering…what if I tried harder and actually executed?
Motivation in your Marketing
When you are creating your marketing you want to make sure you are creating marketing pieces that motivate the person to take action.
The offer and emotion has to be strong enough that it will drive the person to action.
One thing that I learned from marketing guru Dan Kennedy is you have to pretend that your potential person is a sloth laying on the couch and your job is to do whatever it takes to get them so excited that it is worth it to get up and take action.
This is why the words, images, and offers must be STRONG because this is no easy task so take the time to think out everything you have create so it is powerful enough to drive action!
Every great leader had a wonderful, skilled, and trained team behind them, no one does it on their own
Don’t forget the fundamentals of sales and marketing
When you are on the internet and learning all of these new tactics it can be easy to get sidetracked or forget that who you are talking to are people.
Getting seduced purely by numbers is common but it can be a mistake if you only look at numbers and you don’t take into account that there is a psychology side as well.
If you only look at numbers and don’t also combine it with psychology then you are going to forget one of the most important parts which is the messaging.
If you are only asking how to get more website visits or eyeballs and not asking how do I craft a relative and compelling message that will spark an emotion or action in my audience then it does not matter if a billion people see your message.
Your messaging will not do very well as far as getting the responses that you want. Do not skip making a compelling message!
Focus on your messaging and how it can touch your audience in a unique and powerful way and then keep refining it until you finally get your exact messaging down!
Writing a good message is not something you want to get lazy with. Look at the time spent as an investment in your business future.
Spend the time now testing and fine tuning because in the long term it will be worth it and you will be glad that you did.
Always remember that we are in the people business and people like to do business with people who care about their well being and can also relate to.
How much is each source of website traffic worth to your business?
All website traffic is not created equal. If you look into your stats you will see that some web traffic converts better than others and some web traffic is of higher revenue than others.
Your job is to figure out what is more valuable to you in your business and then optimize all of your traffic acquisition activities to align with your business goals.
The other beauty of measuring your traffic source value is if you are able to figure out how much each visitor is worth to you then that gives you direction on what your paid advertising strategy can be.
For an easy example, if your average Facebook visitor is worth $1 to you then your job is to acquire that visitor for less than a dollar.
The more you understand the values of your traffic sources the more wasted marketing activities you can cut out and the better you can allocate your efforts towards building your business!
Why Testing Your Campaigns are so Important
If you are running marketing campaigns then you are going to want to test against your beliefs on what you think will work versus what will actually work.
I have been guilty of assuming a certain marketing campaign will work because in theory it sounds like a great idea but then I tested it in the real world and realized that it was actually the thing I thought wouldn’t work worked.
It happens all of the time because it is easy to think what would work to market us (the business owner or marketer) is how our target market wants to be communicated with.
Be very careful of this because if you make this crucial mistake you will lose time and money. Marketing is all about communicating to your target audience not making yourself feel good.
The point of testing everything is to be able to spot certain trends and to be able to optimize what you are doing so you can have a winning campaign.
Some things that you think don’t matter… matter and by making just very simple adjustments you will be shocked how much that can impact your results.
I am telling you don’t underestimate tracking everything. Yes there is a time to use your gut feeling on marketing but you should still track and double check to make sure that your theories are working.
The biggest benefit of tracking everything is you can grow your business once you find the winner and by doing that it will put you in the drivers seat of your business’s growth.