Everybody is an expert at something, well, almost everybody. If you really take a minute and look at your life, you are probably really good at one thing or a string of a few things. This is how solid businesses are formed, when people turn a skill, talent, or passion into a profession. Every single day new businesses are formed over 1700 to be exact. That is a lot of people trying to turn their skill, talent, or passion into a profession, unfortunately, just over 1600 fail every day.
Generally speaking just because you are good at something does not mean that it can sustain or replace your income. Being good at something is not enough, most of the time the talent people have is not being “good” at business. Being “good” at business is the crux of it all, it is a learned skill, a skill that some people pick up faster than others but it is the learned skill of business mixed with the passion and skillset of something else that leads to the 100 or so continuing businesses every day. This basically comes down to marketing because that is the first step of getting customers. Marketing is hard. You need customers to run a business without them you just have an office, idea, and skillset. No customers, no electricity.
There is an old marketing/advertising adage that goes something like “I will always spend a dollar if it will make me 2 dollars.” Now that makes perfect sense for the most part (most people in marketing/advertising are actually looking for a better return than that but it works for this example) wouldn’t you spend $100 if you are guaranteed a return of $200 or how about $1000 to make $2000 or better yet $100,000 to make $200,000. Well, yes of course you would but I think we all know that for the average joe that it is simply not that simple. Marketing and advertising are very difficult. There are many factors that play into this: who are your customers, how much do I have to spend, what to I do when someone is interested, how do I add value, how much is a fair price to charge, is my add attractive, and some much more.
I am not going to get into how to create the perfect marketing or ad campaign in this blog post but I will touch on the basics. If you are reading this blog you have probably heard of a funnel, as it pertains to marketing. Picture a funnel and it is large at the top and very narrow at the bottom. This is what your marketing campaign should look like. For example lets spend $100 on facebook advertising, maybe we get about 10-30 people to click on the ad that we have populated. This is the top of the funnel, from here we send them to a specific landing page tailored to their niche or what we targeted them for, they spend some time on the landing page and perhaps fill out the form for their contact information, maybe they fill out the survey we have which gives us even more information. Now we are reaching the bottom of the funnel where we have good qualified leads. This is the ultimate goal.
But again, easier said than done. Here are the basic steps listed below in order:
- Find an advertising platform (Google, Facebook, Bing, other social media)
- Facebook is by far the cheapest and one of the most effective
- All of these platforms are complicated and change quite frequently
- I recommend taking a class or spending a few weeks learning if you are going to do this on your own
- Targeting
- Who are your customers?
- Ad platforms allow you to target exactly who you are looking for (Facebook is best for this)
- You can target 40-50 year old, stay at home moms, interested in yoga & tennis, that live in Wyoming (really is no limit)
- Be as specific as you need to be to make sure that you are wasting any marketing dollar
- Setup a landing page
- This is crucial to the success of your ad
- You can do this many ways, either on your own or by hiring a professional
- Allows analytics on your visitors
- Allows you to better optimize your ad
- Create free value add content
- Give some value away for free in exchange for contact information
- Video, PDF, brochure
- Make sure it has enough value in it that they want to learn even more
- Watch the leads come in
This is the crux of setting up a solid marketing/advertising funnel. It is easier said than done and the most successful ad campaigns are done by people that are considered experts in the field. With that said, if you have the intellect you can become relatively proficient after 20-40 hours of learning how the ad platforms work.
Long gone are the days of cold calling. People do not want to talk to you, they want to find something on their own and make a decision. If they see something on the side of their screen then it was their idea not yours. Remember nobody likes to be sold something but everybody likes to buy something.