Business Secrets Podcast Episode 16: Marketing Your Business Online

This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes

Hello you guys, and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat. Thank you so much for joining me here today. Today I want to talk to you about how you can market your business online.

This podcast is dedicated to helping you grow and scale your business. Obviously I’m going to talk about marketing your business online. Now in a coming episode I’m going to talk about how you can use organic traffic to market your business online. So one of the big things I’m a huge proponent of is SEO. But this episode is not dedicated to SEO. This episode is dedicated to actually marketing your business online, and finding the different ways you can do just that.

Now I’m going to give you an overview in this episode, and I’m going to talk kind of about the macro. Then in later episodes, we’re going to dive into the micro. So there’s a lot to cover in something like marketing your business online. But you guys all know that this is one of the most important topics today. Because if you are not online, and if you are not marketing online – you are pretty much dead. Because everyone is online. Now I know that brick and mortar sales are still huge, they’re still massive. But online sales are beginning to quite eclipse brick and mortar sales, and sooner or later it’s going to be all about online sales. That’s why it’s so important to be able to market your business online.

I remember hearing something not too long ago actually, and it was a person who said that if they had $5 in their pocket, they would spend $1 creating their product or service, and they would spend $4 marketing it. So it’s so true that you have to understand marketing – and if you do not understand marketing, then you’re pretty much going to be like a fish out of water. Because you have to be able to find your customers, right? You have to be able to find your demographics. That’s why Facebook marketing has been so powerful, because of the ability to acutely target your specific demographic.

So what is marketing online, right? How do you go about actually marketing your business online? If you want to scale to seven, eight or nine figures, you have to understand how to market your business online. But you also have to create the right product or service that’s actually designed to target the demographic that you’re going after, right? So if you are not solving a pain point, if you’re not addressing that clearly – then you really are going to struggle actually getting the product or service out there. Now I know that some products or services, they absolutely go viral – and there’s a reason for that, and we’re not talking about that here.

We’re talking about brute force literally paying for marketing. Because if you are not paying for marketing, you cannot continue to grow your business, or you will not be able to scale past the point that you’re at right now. Now if you’ve ever heard somebody once say that, “What took you to the current level that you’re at is not going to take you to the next level.” It’s so true. Because whatever you’ve been used to doing, whatever you’ve done until this point is not going to work to get you to the next point, right? So you have to kind of buckle down and figure out a way that you can actually go out there and scale past where you are today, right?

If you’re at seven figures, you want to figure out how to get eight. If you’re at eight figures, you want to figure out – get to nine, etc. So how do you go about actually effectively marketing your business? Now I’ve been writing and teaching about online marketing, probably for almost the past decade now. But formally probably since just about 2012 or 2013. So quite a while now. There are so many things that literally you have to do, but I think that one of the most important things that most people do not do, is they do not build a relationship with their customers, okay? So what do I mean?

I’m talking about email sequences, right? So if you are not giving away something for free on your website, if you’re not adding value in some way to entice people to join, right? You don’t just want a website or a place, a digital destination where people go and they’re able to just browse and then leave. You want to kind of drive them into what’s called a sales funnel, right? You want to drive them into a place where they begin to enjoy the customer experience from you. So that’s really, really important to do.

So what is a sales funnel? A sales funnel is literally the new website. If you do not have a sales funnel, go right now to clickfunnels.com, and set up a free account for 14 days, and figure out what it is and get an in-depth overview, get an in-depth training about sales funnels and how they could drastically impact your business and take you to that next level. So a sales funnel is effectively – imagine just a funnel, where at the top liquid gets poured in, and then it filters down through, right? So that liquid, you can imagine like prospects, people that are browsing, right? You want to take them down the various stages to get them to go from a browser to a buyer.

So marketing online is pretty much how you do just that. How do you get somebody to– Who is just browsing, or who just thinks possibly they might be interested in what you have, to actually buying it? Because you know what? Nobody wants what you’re selling, okay? As harsh as that sounds, nobody wants it. You have to compel them to want it, right? To do that, you have to use a lot of psychology, consumer psychology basically, right? So how do you do that? How do you do all these things?

Well the number one way to actually get somebody to buy from you, is to develop a relationship with that person. Like for example, did you know that there are some statistics that basically say that most people will never buy from a business on first interaction? So it takes them three to six months to buy something that they were initially interested in, and sometimes they don’t buy from the first business that they found it on.

So the way to change that, the way to flip that script – is to actually create a very, very long email sequence. Now if you guys know about Brendon Burchard – Brendon Burchard, he is a super skilled marketer, and just an overall motivating guy. But he has 191 week email sequence. 191 weeks, not days. I’m talking about weeks. So you just do the math, that’s more than three years, okay. So if you are not using email sequences to develop a relationship with your customers, you are literally doing yourself a disservice.

Russell Brunson has a 56 week email sequence kind of strung together from sequence to sequence, and different people have – really, really successful online marketers have very, very long email sequences. People like Mike Diller, Lewis Hals – all of them. If you subscribe to their list, you’ll see that the emails keep going and going and going and going. If you stop interacting with those emails for a very long time, you’ll get a subsequent email that says, “I’m taking you off this list unless you click something.”

So why do you see emails like that? It’s because – do want to train your prospects to click. You want to train your prospects to do little– To do little tasks that you set for them. Like to click a link or to go read a post, or to respond to something – right? A poll or anything like that. Because you’re training the prospects. These are just all kind of micro little commitments that you can get them to make. So that on the next one, they can purchase. So if you have ever heard anything about influence – you’ll know that if you get somebody to commit to three small things, it’s almost for sure that they’re going to commit to the fourth thing. Now it doesn’t matter how small these three little things are. If you get a person to commit to them, you’re going to get the sale if you ask for it on the fourth ask.

So for example, a lot of people who are in the persuasion market – like the dating market, right? They teach other people how – if you can get someone to follow you from one side of the bar to the other, or if you can get somebody to accept a drink, or you could get somebody to do this, or get somebody to do that – all little small kind of micro commitments. On the fourth one, you can do the big ask. In sales, it’s the same thing. If you can get somebody to commit to three small things – and you can do this on the phone, or you can do this via email or whatever it is, right? These are all micro commitments. Micro commitments are powerful. On the fourth one you ask for a sale.

So if you could get– In any area of your life, it doesn’t matter what it is. If you were negotiating something, if you can get somebody to commit to three small things – the fourth one is almost a for sure, “yes.” So don’t forget that. But when it comes to marketing online, the two most powerful things literally are the sales funnel and developing a relationship with your prospect.

So one of the reasons why I’m also creating this podcast – to give you a little bit of an insight into what I’m doing on the personal branding side – is I’m developing a relationship with you, the listener. Okay, so this is an extension of long form writing. This is an extension of blogging. For so many months now, people have been asking me to share more, to get more personal. To kind of talk to get– The evolution of that was the thoughts of the day on the blog. But then ultimately it’s been this podcast, because so many people have been asking for it that I buckled in and did it, right? This is coming from an introvert who just wants to kind of sit behind a computer screen and write code, or just write, right? Write long form copy, or write a book or something like that. Those are all really important.

But sharing, right? Sharing and developing that relationship. Like that’s – that takes time. So if you’re not doing that, you’re doing yourself a disservice. So if you do not have an email list, then that is the thing that you have to do right now. If you have an email list, I want you to go in there and extend the email sequence and get personal. Share stories, get them to not only interact with your emails, but add a lot of value. Because you want to set yourself up as an authority. So that’s really at the fundamental heart of marketing your business online.

I could talk about so many different things like PPC ads and the best way to design copy for a Facebook ad. Or how you should write a headline and– There’s a ton of different things that you need to do. But at the very, very heart of everything is the fact that most people will not buy in the first interaction, so you need a sales funnel. Also you need a long email sequence. How are you going to get somebody to subscribe to your email list if you have no authority, or if you have very little authority, or if you just have a website and you haven’t been going in that direction? Let’s say you’re e-comm or whatever. Is, you have to deliver something of value.

So figure out who your prospects are. Hopefully you know who they are. You know who your target demographic is at this point. Create something that’s going to add value – whether it’s a checklist, a cheat sheet – a PDF e-book or whatever it is, it doesn’t matter, okay? Figure out a way that you could add value to their lives. So this is really, really important when it comes to growing and scaling any business. If you are not doing this, again, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

So here are some action items for you, right? So if you don’t have an email list – either go to a place like Convert Kit, Aweber – there’s a ton of different sites where you can actually do your marketing online with an email list. Just go out there and find the right email list for– The email list provider for you – Constant Contact, whoever it is. Go and set up an email list, create a lead magnet. Now you don’t have to create the lead magnet yourself. You can go on fiverr.com, or you can go on upwork.com and find somebody to help you. All you have to do is set that up so that – you can get people to subscribe to your list, but also you have to create a very long email sequence.

So this boils down to the art of writing. What I would suggest doing is going out there and subscribing to all of the email lists that you can find – and just reading their emails every single day, and start interacting with them. See what they’re sending. Go to Brendon Burchard, go to Lewis Hals, and just go – go sign up, and start receiving those emails, and start reading them. Because email is huge, I assure you. If you are not in the know, you have to understand that so many sales are happening through emails.

So I hope that this episode added a lot of value for you. I would love to go on forever and ever, but I will definitely dive into more of the micro aspects of this on upcoming episodes. So again, if you like this podcast – please subscribe, share, comment, all that stuff. I would really appreciate it. It would help me out a lot. I think it would help out a lot of other people out there who are listening, and who are looking for real value. So until next time, I will talk to you guys soon.