Leverage Your Online Marketing with these Simple Steps

Arnie Sikkenga – you asked, I answered. This is one of my longer videos although I’ve laid out my recommended steps to help you promote your business and its services.If you’re a business leader this information will be relevant to you as well and will help ensure your success online. If you’d like to learn how to be found, make connections with your visitors, and create new opportunities online then check out this video.Thank you in advance!https://youtu.be/gXDPLPQ4NAE

Sample Targeted Lead Funnel™ Layout

Transcript

Hi, today we’re going to answer a question from one of our viewers, and that was Arnie. Arnie had asked:

“I have a five-year-old company and I want to start an aggressive advertising campaign. I have a website, a Facebook page, and just started putting out a weekly email. What else should I do?”

Well, today we’re going to talk about that.

Hi, I’m Jonathan with Valorous Circle, and today I want to address a specific question that I received from one of our viewers, Arnie. Arnie had posed the question that he wants to start doing an aggressive marketing campaign for his business that is five years’ old, already has a website, has an email campaign, and has a Facebook page set up. He’s looking for advice on what else he should be doing.

So, without knowing the specifics, I did a Google search and was able to find Arnie’s website and take a look at it, and today I’ll talk about some of the things that I think we should do. 

First, let me show you his question on Facebook. So you can see here, I posted a question on my Facebook group, Digital Marketing for Business Leaders, as to what questions people would like to ask about digital marketing and leadership for me to address in today’s video session. And you can see here, Arnie had a question. He has a five-year-old company and he wants to start an aggressive advertising campaign. I reached out and asked for just a little bit of clarification, and Arnie told me that his target audience is people that are 18 to 65, both men and women, and that the service that he’s providing is firearms training, both basic and advanced, as well as firearms sales and transfers. He’s got some different ideas for growth, but he’s trying to figure out how to get people to connect to his services, and I’m going to assume from that to get people more aware that he’s available for these services.

So I did a Google search and I found Arnie’s website, and I have a couple thoughts about that. First, Arnie, thanks for the question, I really do appreciate it. As I go through my questions, though, a couple of specific things that I first want to kind of walk off through a check mark. Whether you’re starting a brand new business or you’re focusing on how to market your existing business, there are a number of things that we need to take a look at. One is, do you have a website? We’ve got a check. Yes, Arnie has a website, he’s good to go. He’s got social media because he talks about being on Facebook, and he’s using email marketing. Those are all great starts, and if you’re not doing those, we need to talk about those. In this case, Arnie has got all of those under control. So, now I’m going to talk about some more specifics of what I would do based on my knowledge of Arnie’s business and where he’s at. 

Next steps, what would I do? Well, first and foremost, Arnie, I’d take a look at your website and make sure that you’ve got a very clear and concise message in the above the fold section on your website. That means when somebody pulls up your website on their laptop or their phone or their computer, before they have to scroll, is there a succinct, clear message that tells them what it is that you do? I’d need to chat with you to give you some specifics, but it could be as simple as firearms registration and training, or firearm training and registration, or transfers, but something that very clearly, preferably in six-to-eight words or less, tells that visitor what you do.

The next step before you scroll is you want a clear call to action. So you need to think about what it is that you’d like them to do on your website. And this doesn’t matter whether you’re Arnie or any other business. What do you want that visitor to do on your website? What’s the end goal? What would you want to encourage them to do? In most cases, that’s probably going to be either to buy something, to fill out a form, or maybe schedule a phone call. In this case, Arnie, I noticed on your site that you’ve got the ability for a number of classes that are coming up and questions. My guess is that I would probably encourage them to either fill out a form, so that you could follow up with them, or possibly schedule a call to discuss. One thing that I noticed you don’t have on your website is the ability to sign up directly for a class, and I’ll talk about that in just a moment.

So, the first two things I do, make sure you have a clear and concise message and a very clear call to action that are both in what we call the above the fold place on your website, meaning that people can see those on every device before they scroll. Why is this important? Well, when people find your website, they’re going to give you three-to-five seconds to determine whether they’re in the right spot or whether they should click the back button and go to the next response in Google, who is probably one of your competitors. If we don’t connect with them quickly and let them know what it is you do, they’re going to hit that back button. So that clear message is critical, as is the call to action button. Because many of the people that come to your website are looking for quick answers, and if you give them the ability to connect with you and encourage them to take that call to action, a good percentage of them will. So, that’s the first two things I do.

The next thing is I look through the website, and this is something that you need, whether or not you’ve got a brand new website or whether you’ve got an existing website. But I need to create some credibility for the services or the products that you’re selling. And so what I want to do is I want to have what I call a credibility section just below the fold, meaning that as I start scrolling, I should see some things like testimonials from past clients, possibly manufacturers that you work with that would create credibility, or certifications that you have that will help me understand, as an individual, why I should work with you. And again, this applies to Arnie or any other website that’s out there.

The next thing I’d want to do is I’d want to create on this website a simple section to tell people how easy it is to work with me. In this case, I’d recommend coming up with three to four steps to let people know how simple it is, that they can either book a class or initiate the transfers that you’re talking about. Let’s say it’s a class, I’d want to say, step one, select the class you want. Two, register for the time and date that’s convenient for you. And three, show up at the class and learn firearm safety or protocols or whatever is appropriate. You should do that for your business, whether you’re Arnie or anybody else, again, showing your customer, or prospective customer, how easy it is for them to begin working with you. Three to four steps, that’s all it should be.

Let me take a look at my notes and see where we go next. 

So, the next thing that I would recommend is more generic for the website, and that’s, Arnie, that I believe you need to add a blog to the website and begin creating what we call remarkable content. This is the same type of content that you might be posting to Facebook or to LinkedIn or to other social media groups like Me To We, but this is content that your audience is going to be interested in. It can be explaining what you do, but we’ve found that for every four posts you do, only one of those, at most, should be a sales post. In other words, four posts about education and inspiring and entertaining, and then one post about your company and your services. You want to make sure that your content is things that your audience is interested in, and they’re likely not interested in your promotions until they learn about you. So you need to begin by creating content that’s of interest to them. 

In your case, Arnie, that could be different articles that in general talk about firearm safety, talk about firearms transfer, without specifically promoting your services. That way, when people are searching on Google, your website is more likely to be found and they’re more likely to begin building a relationship with your company and with you by engaging with you. 

Now, I recommend video content, just like the content I’m producing here, to be the type of content you put up because I find it most engaging, and candidly, as a busy business owner, I find it to be one of the easiest to create.

Next, I recommend that we need to start building an email list. Obviously, the more email addresses you can get of people that are interested in your product and services, the more people we can begin nurturing, so that when they’re ready to do business, we’re there for them in a top of mind. We want to make sure that we’re building that email list on your website and we do that by setting up different tools on your website and offering some sort of hook and incentive for people to give us their email address.

You’ve probably seen it before, where you go to a website and somebody offers you a free download of a guide of some sort in exchange for your email address. That’s what we want to do here, Arnie, and again, we want to do it on your website, regardless of what you’re selling. Arnie, in your case, I’d recommend creating maybe a free guide, Five Basics to Firearm Safety That Every Gun Owner Needs to Know. Something like that, that you could create a very simple PDF, make it available on the website, and then when they register to receive that, send it directly to their email. That way, you’re building your email list and you’re providing value to your subscribers. It’s a win-win. Then, we can take that email list and continue with the email marketing it sounds like you’re already doing, to share information about you, about your company, about your instructors and the services you offer to encourage them, when they’re ready for your services, to reach out and hire you.

Alright, the next bullet point I’ve got is to create what we call a “lead funnel.” Now, a lead funnel is just a specific page on your website that’s probably not on the menu that you’re going to use to promote certain things. In your case, Arnie, I would recommend that each class of yours has its own page dedicated to it. That way, you can start promoting that class on social media via your email marketing and other ways, and you can go ahead and send people directly to that class page. On that page, we would talk about why they want to sign up for it, the value they’re going to get, and the cost, and obviously give them the ability to sign up right then and there. 

In your case, Arnie, I would recommend you have at least a lead funnel for each and every class. The good news is, once you’ve created the first one, creating the second and the future ones is very easy, because we can just copy that and change the dates and possibly the basic information. But, that will give you the ability, one to show up better in searches for those classes, and two, to direct people specifically to that page when it comes to selling that service. 

If you’re not Arnie and you’re watching this, you can do the same for each major service that you offer as a company, or each of your major products. On these lead pages, what we want to do is we want to focus on creating a page that tells the visitor to the page why it is that they’ll gain value from buying either our product or our service. I’m going to do another video talking about what that lead funnel should look like. For today, I’ll place a link in the comments of this video with an example to one of those lead funnels that you can go ahead and copy if you’d like.

And the last recommendation for you, Arnie, I noticed on your website there isn’t the ability for me to register for a class online. I’d highly recommend that you add that functionality by creating an event registration directly on the website, or using a third-party service if that’s better, that allows people to go ahead and register for that class, give you their payment, get it on their schedule, and lets them make sure that when they’re ready to buy, you’re there to make that sale.

If you’ve got any specific questions, Arnie, on how to do that, I’d be happy to talk to you offline about specific recommendations. I may, in the future, create a video about that as well, but I do think that’s an important part.

So those are the steps I’d take just on the website itself to help make sure that you’re going to convert better. The good news is, laid out properly, that’s probably only a couple hours’ worth of thought and process to make that happen. And Arnie, I’d be more than happy to chat with you about that.

The next thing I’d do is start taking a look at your email marketing. It sounds like you’re already sending out email newsletters, and that’s fantastic. I would also set up what we call an email drip campaign, and I’d send out a couple of those. The first one is that when you get new subscribers to your email list, I would set up a drip campaign, and that simply means you have a series of pre-written emails that are going to be sent out to those new subscribers at defined intervals. So you may say that when somebody signs up for your email list, day one, they’re going to get email one, day three, they’re going to get email two, a week later, they get email three, and through those emails, you should be both promoting your services, your credibility, and again, helping educate, entertain, and inspire the people that are signing up for your email list. You have to give them a good reason to open that email and great content is definitely the way to do that.

As part of that, I would then define throughout your email campaigns certain specials and offers that you can offer to your subscribers that give them specials in promotions and VIP status that’s not available to the general public. That might be a discount for a class, it might be a private one-on-one session with you, or maybe even something for your classes where you set up your own Facebook group and then you invite people that are on your email list, once they’ve taken a class, to join that Facebook group, and give that to them as an exclusive benefit.

So now I’m going to move onto social media. We’ve talked about the website and the email. Once we get to social media, Arnie, I’m going to recommend because you know your audience, you know it’s basically 18 to 65 men and women, I’m going to recommend that you go and join other firearms-related groups, second amendment groups and things like that, that those target people that you want to meet with and that you want to sell to are already involved in. 

Now, in your case, I’m assuming, and I don’t know, that because your classes are in person, so they probably are pulling in people that are in your area, which I know is up in the Rothbury, Michigan area, and so I would try to focus on local groups as much as possible. But also, don’t hesitate to join some groups that might be statewide, regional, or national, and then start adding value to those groups by contributing, answering questions, posting good questions or even educational material that you have that’s of value to that group. What you can do over time is you can begin to build relationships not only with the group, but with those group administrators. And then when you’ve got classes and things like that coming up, those group administrators, once you’ve built that relationship, may be willing to help you by promoting your classes and your services inside the group. The real benefit to that is that by promoting it within a group of likeminded individuals, you’re now promoting your services to people that are already predisposed and needing what it is you sell. Arnie, this will work specifically for you, and if you’re not already, this could work for you as well. You just need to identify the groups that your audiences are already in. Where are they already at, and how can you get into those groups in order to gain credibility, and through that process, get a chance to market to them?

Here’s an example of how this could work. So, I have a side project called Creature Classifieds. It’s an online, animal classifieds database. We designed it, one, because I’m in the web business, but two, I’m a hobby farmer, and Facebook doesn’t allow you to sell livestock or animals through its marketplace section. That can be inconvenient because a lot of people that are hobby farmers and farmers, more legitimately than I am, want to buy and sell animals, and as a result, Facebook Marketplace doesn’t allow you to do that. So we created Creature Classifieds to fill that need, and I needed a way in order to start marketing Creature Classifieds, and what I started to do is I joined other groups of people like me, people that were interested in selling animals and livestock and buying animals and livestock, and I began adding to those groups, and over the period of a couple of months, I got to know a number of the site administrators, one of them in particular, very well, who ran four of the groups that I’m in. When I approached that administrator and said, hey, I’ve got a new project, and here’s how it would be valuable to the group, that administrator not only allowed me to promote that Creature Classifieds site within his group, but he also promoted it for me, and that sent us access, and got us in front of over 100,000 likeminded individuals that might be interested in our service.

You can do that same thing with your business, and I’ve got another video that I’ll link to that talks a little bit about what we did there to give you some more detail.

The last thing, Arnie, and I’ll end with this, is paid ads. I do think that’s probably the last thing you want to look at, but I’d encourage you to consider using Facebook ads, in particular, very defined to the demographic you want to reach, and the geography that you want to reach, to start promoting your classes. When you run that Facebook ad, you’ll talk about the classes that you’ve got, and then you’re going to send them back to that lead funnel page that I talked about earlier that’s specifically about that class. Set relatively low budgets. You may only want to spend five, ten, twenty dollars on a promotion for that, but when you do that on Facebook, targeting the people in your geographic area that have similar interests to what you do – and, by the way, on Facebook we can define audiences by selecting all of that criteria, you probably would find that there’s only a few thousand people that you can get in front of, maybe 10,000 or 20,000, depending on how big that geographic area is, but now when you spend that $20, your ad will only be shown to those people that are likely to want to sign up for your class. So I’d highly encourage that you do that and take a look at that. 

The last thing you could consider in advertising is what we call retargeting, and that means we can add, and you can add, a piece of code to your website, you may have heard it called a cookie or a pixel or something like that, that tracks people that come to your website. And then, you can follow them around the web and advertise to them, knowing that they’ve already been on your website, so they’re likely already interested in your services. You’ve probably had this happen to you if you’ve ever gone to Amazon and went and looked for a product, and then decided to maybe check the weather on the local news station on your computer, and all of the sudden, you saw ads showing up for what you just searched for on Amazon. That’s called retargeting. It’s something you can all do, and it can be very effective to target the people that have already been to your website, who are already likely interested in your product, and therefore, we’re not wasting those advertising dollars on people who have no interest in what it is you offer.

So, Arnie, I know I’ve given you a lot of things here to talk about. I’d be more than happy to have a personal discussion with you to go over these. If you’re not Arnie, I hope that this same process makes sense, how we begin with the website and we check that how and make sure that we’ve got the right components. We then move into our email marketing, our social marketing, and ultimately, possibly, paid ads.

I hope this has been helpful. I’ll be creating additional videos talking about some of these subsections, and I welcome your future questions so that I can create more videos like this talking specifically about how to promote your business.

Make it a great day.