Introduction
Never let marketing become more important than the product itself. The best tool of marketing is the product itself. Marketing is just a kickstarter to build word of mouth for a great product.
Marketing is a game of perception, but the product is rooted in reality through which you are serving your customers.
If you have a great product and great marketing, you can accelerate the growth of your business.
If you have a great product and average marketing, you can still grow, very slowly, as your product will take time to create the perception.
If you have a bad product and great marketing, you can accelerate the death of your business.
Customers only form a temporary opinion of your product/service with marketing. They form a permanent opinion or perception only after using your product or service.
You can create the perception you want from marketing, but if your products don’t live up to it, customers will not keep that opinion for long enough.
Customer Persona
Want me to explain marketing in 2 words?
I would say: Customer Persona
Actually, I can confidently say that another name for marketing is customer persona.
Simply stated, in business, marketing comes with this question: How do we sell our product/service?
Instead of asking this, we can ask: How & Why would anyone buy from you?
And to answer this, we need to know: Who would buy from you?
Let me tell you something about you:
You are interested in marketing, or you are a marketing professional, or want to be one.
You are a digital user who might have landed on this page from a search engine or social media site.
You see, I know a part of Who you are, and How & Why are you reading my content (product/service) is automatically answered.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service fits him and sells itself. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. Peter Drucker is an influential Austrian-American author, mentor and consultant who is considered the father of modern business management
Customers like to feel that they are buying - not being sold.
The only way on earth to influence people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.
And the only way to do that is to know what they want.
So, to get an answer to all these questions, in the most appropriate way, we need to understand who our customers are, and we need to understand their problems and desires.
Your job as a marketer starts with figuring out who it is that you want to serve, and finding where are hanging out.
That WHO, will be your ideal customer, and just to be aware of your ideal customer, during all your marketing plans, you can create a fictional representation of him called as customer persona.
A customer persona is a fictional person who is identical to our buying customers. We can create this by:
- Taking data from our market research/existing customer profiles
- Adding the characteristics of a person we want to serve with our products and services.
This persona can change according to time and as the business moves further, because customer problems, needs, wants, and behaviors can change, and our customer persona will be updated accordingly.
Working on our customer personas frequently will enable us to know our customers better and more clearly. Every piece of your marketing will be speaking directly to that one person, your customer persona.
If you aren’t able to clearly define your customer persona, then clearly define who you want as a customer. What type of customers do you exactly want?
To make your customer persona, first, give your persona a name. After that, list down all the characteristics of your persona (your ideal customer).
The characteristics include:
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Problems
- False Beliefs
- Fears
- Needs & Hopes
- Solutions are they looking for
- Platforms they are going on online & offline
- Searches they are doing
- Solutions they have tried before
- Top websites they visit
- Social media influencers they follow
- Emails they might have subscribed to
- Their burning questions
- Conversation happening in their mind
- Kind of content or ads most appealing to them
- Intent
- Results or outcomes that they want in their words from a product or service you are offering.
No Brainer Offer (What Result Are You Promising?)
A business is not about products or services, it’s about How you can serve your customers and what results you can get for your customers.
Most likely, whatever you are selling, is being sold by many other people/businesses.
That’s why most products or services are actually commodities, and for commodities you have to tell a strong reason WHY should anyone buy from you.
Because for a commodity, it makes a negligible difference no matter whosoever we buy from.
You need a strong WHY because that’s how you will differentiate your product/service.
And that strong WHY is your Irresistible Offer.
The solution to sell a commodity is to turn it into an Irresistible Offer.
Your unique offer is a significant differentiator for your business.
An Offer is not just your core product or service. It is everything you are providing packed together into an offer, to help your customers achieve the results they are looking for.
So think about what additional you can provide your customers apart from your core product, that will get them their desired results in a better way.
When you add additional things to complement your product or service, that will help your customer get better results and more value, then 2 things happen:
- The perceived value of your offer is increased.
- You are now offering a unique thing, which differentiates your brand and sets you apart from the competition.
You don’t have to make your offer look like a better one than your competitors, instead, it should look like a completely different thing than other brands in the same market.
You have to create an offer which perfectly fits your customer persona.
That is because, if you try to make a better offer, it will look like you are bringing an improved version of the existing products into the market. It doesn’t set you apart from the competition and doesn’t create a new market for you - a market of your ideal customers.
If you make fresh, new offers, they will look exciting to your customers. An irresistible offer creates a different market of people similar to your customer persona, and you own that market!
It should make your customer feel that taking up this offer will not only get them their desired result but also increase their status.
If there is a slight thought of status decrease in their mind, that will be a resistance to sale.
Create an irresistible offer that addresses all the things that are holding them back.
Creating your offer right after your customer persona will also help you clarify your Marketing Objective. Then later you can update it as per your funnel and content.
This will also help you discover the stage at which your customer is on your value ladder.
The value ladder is how you will move your customers to your high-end products/services, provide more value, and retain that customer for a lifetime.
Understand the Funnel
A sales funnel is a marketing plan (kind of), which tells you how each step in your marketing process should be aligned, and how your potential customer will move over those steps to reach the goal of the marketing campaign.
The most important aspect of any funnel is to have only one single call to action at each step.
If on a webpage, there are so many links, buttons, and CTAs, they are going to confuse people.
And a confused mind always says ‘no.’
The result is very few people out of those who visit your website, actually move ahead to buy your offerings. Because when they get confused, they are not likely to move ahead.
When you understand the right funnel for your offer, and have a single CTA, then you can easily take your customer through that funnel, step by step to purchase.
This will not only create a better experience for the customers, but you will also be able to offer the right upsells/cross-sells, to increase AOV as well as LTV.
The first step to understand your funnel is to look at the funnels of your competitors and other businesses selling to your target audience.
To understand the funnel what you need to know is:
- What should be the traffic source of my landing pages
- How should I be driving quality traffic
- What should be the landing page structure
- What steps should be there in the funnel
- What kind of offers do I need to create (apart from the main offer that we created)
- What type of content should be used at each stage
Content for the funnel means what hooks should be there for traffic, what stories should be there for conversion on the landing page, and what elements should be there in an irresistible offer.
When you are creating your funnel, you need to look at these 4 major things about your funnel:
1. Traffic temperature and pre-frame strategy
Determine the traffic temperature of your customer persona. It is required to match your messaging to what’s happening in the customer’s mind.
Hot traffic: Aware about your product or solution Warm traffic: Aware about only the solution & problem, but not your product Cold traffic: Aware about only the problem, or maybe even unaware
This will help you to understand what type of hooks you need to create and how you need to bring people to your landing page.
What you show to your customers before they get to your landing page is really important. It is a pre-frame to your funnel, and it sets the standard and perception about you in their minds.
Depending on the traffic temperature your messaging hooks, and how you will bring traffic will change. Depending on the awareness of your traffic, you need to know whether to drive traffic through ads, blog posts, videos, or to use a bridge page, or squeeze page or not.
2. Type of Funnels:
Lead generation funnels:
These funnel types are used to generate leads, so that a customer enters your funnel and becomes a part of your owned traffic, instead of earned or paid traffic. These are usually made for cold traffic.
There are mostly 3 pages in these funnels:
Lead squeeze page One Time Offer page (used to identify the buyers) Thank you page
You will need to create a free offer on the Lead squeeze page in return for your customer’s email address.
You can create a lead magnet, or a survey in order to showcase customized information or products.
You can also create an online conference interviewing experts in your industry or even somebody your audience can relate to, in return for your customer’s email address.
These are some widely used ideas, but you can try other creative ideas that may hit you.
Low ticket funnels:
One of the key laws of persuasion is commitment and consistency.
Whenever customers purchase your product or even give their email address in return for something valuable, they make a commitment by saying the first yes.
Starting is difficult, and moving is easy.
With that first yes, they already started to move on with you to get their solutions.
Now, moving them ahead to your other products and services is easier.
And, that’s why Low ticket funnels are used.
There are mostly 3-4 pages in these funnels:
Sales page (Low ticket offer) Upsell pages Thank you page
That’s the strategy behind low-ticket funnels. You offer something at a low price and when they purchase, you upsell them with other products.
The psychology behind the upsell offer is:
The customer is in the buying mode and if they are offered something that better solves their problem, they will most likely purchase now.
The upsell offer is something that complements their first purchase, so if not now, they’ll need to buy the upsell product later.
High ticket funnels:
With this funnel, you offer your high-end products and services to provide more value and solve their problems at a higher level.
It can be used for new product launches and products with a high cost.
There are mostly 3-4 pages in these funnels:
Sales page Upsell pages Thank you page
3. Thank you page
This page is where you show them the next steps after their purchase or becoming a lead.
It also includes moving them to your next funnel.
4. Building a relationship
This is the stage after the end of your funnel.
Now the person is in your email list and you have the opportunity to nurture them to your next funnel.
Create Landing Pages with Stories that Build Trust
If you have a product or service that people want, the single biggest factor that keeps them from buying is a lack of trust.
People actually want someone they can trust.
The problem that most people make on their sales page is that they try to sell their offers, ideas, or products.
Your goal is not to try to sell anything to anyone. That doesn’t build trust.
When you do that, people don’t see it as their own decision and it doesn’t create an emotion that causes them to take action.
Instead, your goal is to guide them to their own decision. (whether it is to buy or not)
And, you do that with a story.
Stories break their existing false beliefs about you, your product, or about themselves, or any external factors. And it rebuilds new empowering beliefs for them to take action.
The purpose of a story is to create an emotion that causes them to take action.
To create that emotion, the story takes them on a journey where they break existing false beliefs and discover the idea (new beliefs) to get them to their desired results.
People like to be consulted about their ideas, and opinions, and they ask for suggestions (not orders).
They want to have ownership of the idea based on your suggestions.
And, they will only get convinced for a particular action, if they have come up with that idea of action.
What happens with a story is, by telling a story, you will indirectly be giving them suggestions and letting them reach the conclusion or idea themselves.
You plant the idea in their minds with a story, and when they reach that idea, they will have made a buying decision.
Now, that idea is their own, that decision is their own, and you don’t have to sell anything.
They have decided to buy!
Now, they are emotionally attached to the idea, and that becomes a strong reason to buy.
And…People don’t buy without a strong Why.
When dealing with people, we must remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.
So, to give them a strong reason to act, we take them on an emotional experience that gives the aha moment or the idea to sell themselves on your product or service.
Logic doesn’t sell. Emotions sell.
People buy based on emotion and they justify based on logic.
Now, let’s see how to create effective stories:
Before we dive deep into the structure of a story, let’s look at some parameters to keep in mind while creating our stories.
- Oversimplify your words like you are telling to a 3rd-grade kid
- Use examples and phrases that customers already know
- Make them feel the emotions of the character
Every good story starts with a captivating character who is pursuing some compelling desire and who faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
How the character overcomes those obstacles and achieves the desire and how the character transforms through the journey, is what completes a story.
Based on these fundamentals, the structure of your story should look like:
- Introduce the character with their desires, and problems.
- Tell about their struggles to overcome it.
- Their feelings when they were not able to fulfill the desire.
- How and what new opportunity did they find?
- What did they actually do to overcome the problem and fulfill the desire?
- What did they feel after the achievement and transformation?
The whole purpose of a sales page is to get the customer to believe in just one thing.
That one thing is that their desired result is only attainable through your offer.
All other distractions, buttons, and links should be removed, and the focus should be only on that one belief and that one CTA.
All their false beliefs and objections due to which they are not able to believe in your offer, should be answered by the stories you tell.
How to actually write the stories?
The most important thing in every funnel is the headline.
It is because a better headline gets more people to stop and read your story.
The headline has only one purpose, which is to hook the right people and stop what they are doing, pre-frame them and arouse curiosity, and get them to the next step of your story.
Based on the story framework, you can create various types of stories:
- Share your own story about the WHY and HOW you built this product, to break the false belief of other products they are currently using.
- Share a story about the HOW they can benefit from your product to break the false beliefs regarding them using your product.
- Share a story to break the false belief of their own abilities to get benefit from the product.
- Share a story to break the false belief of external things outside their control that can stop them to get benefit from the product.
Urgency and Scarcity
Urgency and scarcity are powerful psychological triggers in marketing that drive consumer behavior by creating a sense of need and prompting quick action.
When customers feel that time is running out to make a purchase, they are more likely to take immediate action. Limited-time offers, flash sales, or countdown timers on a website are common tactics that create urgency.
Scarcity leverages the fear of missing out (FOMO). When a product or offer is limited in quantity, it becomes more desirable because people value rare or exclusive items.
Create Hooks to Drive the Right Traffic
The hook is the thing that grabs someone’s attention so you can tell them a story.
There are 3 types of traffic:
- Paid traffic (Social Media & Search Engine Ads)
- Earned traffic (Social Media Followers & Organic Search Results)
- Owned traffic (Email List, Private Community or Groups)
Paid traffic is costly, and you have to spend money to get people to your website.
Earned traffic is not controlled by you but by social media & search engine companies and is very slow and inconsistent to build up.
Owned traffic on the other hand are the people who have opted in to hear from you. You can reach this traffic and get them to your website at almost zero cost.
So, the goal is to get the paid traffic and earned traffic to be converted to Owned traffic.
This doesn’t mean that Ads, Social Media, & SEO are not useful. It means that when you build your own traffic source, you not only have a 3rd traffic source in addition to the conventional traffic, but the quality of that traffic would be much better as people have opted in and shown interest in your brand already. Not to mention, you also have better control over this traffic.
Paid traffic
Paid traffic is simply running paid ads on social and search networks like Google & Facebook.
You create ads and set a budget, to bid for placements in your target audience feed.
There are 2 major audience types that you can create for paid ads:
Prospecting audiences: People who don’t know you or your brand
- People who are interested in a thought leader, brand, or celebrity in your niche
- Interests, age, career, and anything else of your customer persona
- People similar to your existing customers
Retargeting audiences: People who know you or your brand
- People who have Engaged with your content, but not visited the website
- People who have Landed on your website, but not converted
- Owned: People who are purchasers or leads
For all the audiences your objective is to move the people up the next step on your funnel.
People who didn’t purchase or become a lead from your prospecting audience, will now enter the retargeting audience, and they will move from engaged to landed, and then owned, and further to other products and services.
You can play with targeting on ad platforms only to a certain extent, as your core group of audiences don’t change often.
It is the ad creatives (hooks) that you can play with more often, and analyze which creatives are performing better as per your metrics, and create more of such creatives.
If you create just 1-2 creatives, it may last for a while and grab only those people who find that hook (message) relevant to them.
And you’ll be losing the people who don’t relate with that particular creative, resulting in poor campaign performance.
So, you have to be prolific at creating ads. The more creatives you can test, the more people you can bring in your funnels.
Earned traffic
Earned traffic is commonly known as organic traffic.
It is the traffic that you don’t pay for, and is coming from people who are following you on social media and coming from your search engine rankings.
There are 2 major types of traffic sources here: (along with what you need to focus on to build these traffic sources)
Social Media Platforms:
Understand that the platform wants its users to spend more time on the platform Find, connect, and engage with people in your niche Produce and post valuable content for your audience Treat your profile/page as an entry gate to your funnels
Social media isn’t about selling. It is about making friends.
Stop trying to sell your products, and start serving, interacting, educating, entertaining, inspiring, and having fun with your friends, and followers on social media.
It is a by-product of these things, that people who follow you will come into your funnels and become your lifetime customers.
Consistency is the key. Keep providing value, and do not sell anything.
Search Engine Platforms:
- Understand that the platform wants a better search experience for its users
- Find bloggers who are linking to top-ranked websites for your keywords
- Produce keyword-optimized, nicely-structured, valuable content on your website
- Connect with bloggers for linking back your content
Google wants to show its visitors the best web page for every search.
Based on this objective, it ranks the pages. It doesn’t matter if you are selling a better product or you have a cool landing page. If that page doesn’t fit the searcher’s query and intent, it will not rank at the top.
Your job here is to understand the users through your target keywords, and then create such a content piece that perfectly answers their search query with the best experience possible.
This process itself will get you more bloggers to link you (because your content is valuable to their audience), and your search ranking will go up.
Next, when you focus on creating such a content piece, it will build trust with people who will read it, and that trust will eventually lead to a transaction.
Means, if they trust you (through your content), they’ll soon become your customers.
Owned traffic
There is only and only 1 single goal of driving traffic from paid and earned sources.
And the goal is to convert it into owned traffic. (Whether people become your lead or customer)
Traffic that you own are the people who have given their contact to you, and you can reach out to them without any barrier of algorithm (search or social) or without any cost (paid ads).
You have a better control over this traffic, and most importantly these people trust you more than your social media followers or website visitors.
Owned traffic can be your Email List, a Private Community, SMS List, or anything where you have any contact with those people, so you can reach them out anytime.
Measure & Optimize
Don’t complicate this part of marketing too much, as done by marketing agencies.
First, let us understand what’s the purpose of measuring and optimizing our campaigns.
We need to measure, so we can know what to optimize.
And we need to optimize, so we can improve our KPIs, which are the only results that affect our business performance.
The only set of things we need to measure are the metrics at each step of our funnel.
It doesn’t matter whether we measure that on Google Analytics, on our website platform, or any other tool, until and unless the measured results are correct.
Whichever step in our funnel has a poor performance, we just need to fix that part.
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