Dear business builder…
Let me ask you a direct question. Are you finding that your competitors are kicking your butt or your marketing is underperforming even though your products or services are way better? Well I’ve been there and I know how frustrating it can be.
Ok I have the answers… and the solutions are honestly not that hard to implement but before I give you the answers, I want to tell you a story first.
You see… In 2003 after struggling in business for over a decade and going bankrupt a few times I made a life-changing decision that put me on the path to more or less instant success and financial freedom.
After a made a few changes in my business within a few months I was finally financially free. Life was perfect! I could pick and choose where I wanted to live in the world and for a while I lived the life, sipping martinis on the beach in the Caribbean.
But I still had a lot to learn, and I kept on investing in my knowledge. This led me to the breakthrough of being able to start a meetup group with no budget and build it to the 2nd largest business meetup in the world now with over 28,000 members.
Since then it’s been my passion to connect people and to fix broken marketing.
In analyzing thousands of marketing campaigns I’ve identified 7 errors that is the root of almost all marketing problems for small to medium sized business ..
So are you ready for some truths? Here they are:
1: Weak Headlines.
The headline is the ad for the ad and responsible for up to 80 % of the result in your marketing. Basically, your headlines have to GRAB your audience by the eyeballs and force them to read the rest of your marketing piece.
Headlines are used everywhere. It can be in your ads, in social media posts and on your websites. It can be the headline for a lead magnet or the title of an article etc. etc.
The headline is so unbelievably important that it can literally mean the difference between runaway success and miserable failure.
One example that comes to mind is a headline in a lead magnet that I changed which instantly resulted in over 600% increase in leads.
So, my point here is that you need to put some serious effort into your headlines as they are one of the absolute most important parts of any marketing.
2: Weak or no lead-magnet
Here is a reality that most business owners don’t want to hear… people will never come back to your site… that is unless you do something actively to get them there.
Since almost no-one buys the first time they have an experience with someone you are basically losing massive amounts of your visitors. That is unless you capture the visitors contact details and get their permission to follow up so you can start to build trust and relationship.
The only way to do that is to offer them something of tremendous value for very little money or free. This is called a lead magnet.
After you have their contact details and permission to get in touch with them you can start the process of educating them why you are the best choice.
Most of the website I visit have either no lead magnet at all, or the idea for the lead magnet is weak, or the copy for the lead-magnet is very weak.
The lead-magnet is one of your most important marketing pieces and you need to put a lot of focus into it. Your lead-magnet itself needs to be great, but also your marketing of it. This means coming up with a great name for it and great sales-copy.
For example, simply saying “free coaching session” is not going to cut it today. It might have worked 10 years ago but today you must give much more value.
3: Weak Offer.
The offer is super important. Your offer is not only the offers that your customers pay for, but it’s also the initial offer for your lead-magnet.
It needs to be better than good… it needs to be irresistible. There is a science to creating irresistible offers which I could be talking about for days but for now, think about creating a unique offer, with a powerful guarantee and it needs to be worded in a way that stands out and connects with your audience in a way that creates trust.
Also adding powerful bonuses is one of the ways you can improve an offer and increase conversion.
4: Focusing On Traffic First Instead of Perfecting Your Messaging and Funnel.
One of the questions I get most often is… how do we get more traffic?
Well, that’s easy… you buy it. You simply cannot scale business predictably without either buying traffic or pay SEO experts to get you ranking in search engines.
Either way at some point you will have to pay for traffic to be able to scale. (and even if you do your own SEO you will have to put a lot of time into it which is not free)
Because paid traffic is the most scalable and predictable, you need to put your focus on your messaging and your funnel until it is profitable enough that you can afford paid traffic.
You may say that you have tried paid traffic and it didn’t work. Well, it didn’t work simply because either the messaging was not right, or your funnel was not created in a way that it yields enough profit.
Once your funnel works you can afford all kinds of traffic sources. So bottom line here is… focus on messaging and funnel FIRST… then you can focus on traffic.
5: Your funnel is not optimized.
Your funnel is basically the journey you are taking people on from the moment they have an experience with you.
So for example. After they see one of your ads and go to your website and opt-It what happens next? Do you send them emails, videos, txt, make a phone call etc. etc.
And it cannot just be one step… longer funnels are typically needed today to bond and create trust and make your prospects believe that you are the number 1 choice.
Funnel is becoming more and more important as the cost of marketing is going up with increasing competition.
Without looking at a funnel its hard for me to say exactly how to fix it because there are so many variables, but most of the time it’s simply weak messaging..
6: Wrong target market.
You could be focusing on the wrong target market. Nicheing down is very important but it’s not complicated to find out what your best target market is. There are 2 basic ways to find out and you should be doing both.
A) Talk to your market.
You need to talk to prospects and current customers to really understand them fully to find out how they think and feel and to understand who your perfect customer is.
Don’t do what a lot of company owners do which is ask friends and family about their opinion. You need DATA from the market… not opinions.
B) You simply test different markets and see which works best.
7: Graphic focused marketing
What I mean with this is that graphics is NOT going to do the trick when you are in the early stages of a business (that is unless you are selling something of a graphical nature (like design and fashion for example)
Most business owners seem to believe they need incredibly fancy graphics to win today, but graphics should support your message… not the other way around.
A story that perfectly illustrates this was one of my clients who had literally spent ALL his money on branding and graphics. His site and other marketing material looked AMAZING but he was getting ZERO leads and sales.
He was literally getting to the end of his rope and in dire straits. He couldn’t even afford my normal fees, but I believed in this guy and wanted to help so I worked out a special deal for him.
So what did we do? We simply focused on getting his messaging fixed. We created an irresistible lead magnet and a great offer. Within ONE month he had closed over £24,000 pounds of business and it turned everything around for him.
So dear business builder… are you seeing a theme in most of these core reasons your marketing is not working?
For small businesses it’s almost entirely about your messaging. The messaging is the reason I was able to build the biggest business meetup in Europe.
It was in the titles of the events and the email subject lines that got more people to pay attention. And it was in the descriptions of the events that got more people to book.
So here is the essence of what I want you to get today:
Fix your messaging and you will fix your marketing.
Fix your marketing and you will have most of the foundation for a successful business. Marketing is not everything, but without good marketing there is no chance of success.
Until next time – stay cool and may the high conversion be with you –
Patrick M. Powers
