Drew Donaldson: Who here has ever assembled IKEA furniture or followed a recipe.
Or maybe remembered PEMDAS from middle school. Marketing, just like so many things relies on an order of operations and it's not something that a lot of people talk about. And I'm pretty sure the reason is because when most people try to explain this, it sounds like the IT guy explaining how he fixed your computer and just total glazing over of the eyes and just get me.
I'm gonna try to go as quickly as possible through this sequence, which is what I what really what it is. It's a methodical sequence that you should apply to all of your marketing to ensure you're not wasting money. So the first thing is customer research. And this is where, no matter if you are launching a brand new product or you are, revi revitalizing your marketing for an existing product that you've had for 10 years, this is where I start and this is where I start all of my clients at.
And I'll tell you a little about the QR code now, but if you guys wanna read ahead a little bit and scan that that's gonna be a nice takeaway for you. So when it comes to customer research, The biggest thing that you need to figure out is you need to figure out what is the pain that you're trying to solve, right?
What are the pains your customer's feeling? What is the desired outcome? What is the resolution to that pain look like? What does your service in particular do to benefit them and what is the value of that? And so if you scan that little QR code, that's going to bring you to what we call our feedback to offer framework, which allows you to have these customer interviews, collect all of this data, and then take it to the next level.
Which is offer development. Now we're gonna talk about this in a lot more detail later on. So stay tuned. But the most important thing to understand about offer development is that until you have an offer and validate it, which means you put it out in the market, you get feedback, you either make sales or you don't.
You don't move on beyond this step. We're not doing content marketing, we're not doing SS e o. We're not doing anything. We're not even building landing pages until we know the offer is valid and that people will buy. We're stuck here. If this doesn't work, if we bring some to the market and it's a no-go, then we go back to the drawing board.
We create a new offer and we bring it back into the market. This right here, I could stop the presentation here. I think I've already saved everyone on this call. Thousands of dollars because if you go and start building all these marketing assets, On an offer that's not valid. You've just wasted time and money when you could have just gone back rebuilt the offer and.
Now you have an offer that works great. You have your first few customers. The next part is testimonial cur curation. And this is really important because social proof is the best form of marketing for your business. It's the most trusted, it's the cheapest. It tends to be the cheapest, and it's the most truthful.
No matter what we write in an ad, nothing's gonna beat a person's individual experience working with our business. And so we want to curate as many testimonials on as many platforms as possible. And just to show you the power of this, when I first launched my firm, we launched, we, we were running pay per click ads, Facebook ads, and all of this.
And every single call I would get on would end very similar. You don't have any reviews. You don't have any testimonials, so I don't know. I don't think this is gonna be the right fit for me. Now granted, at this point in my career, I had been doing this well over a decade, right? I had JP Morgan as a client, and yet I'm being told by the local pizza shop that they didn't really trust what I had to do, right?
All my corporate credentials didn't mean anything because they couldn't see the success. That, that they wanted in their business. And so as soon as I got my first, really had the hustle to get my first five clients in the se, in the program, and they started seeing success. I got those testimonies as soon as possible, put 'em on the site the day a or the week after, rather, I put those on the site.
I closed my next 12 calls. Just boom, because that's the power they were able to go and they were able to see, hey, that's a business owner just like me. That's someone who had that transformational change I'm looking for. And that's the real power. Now, if you don't have any paid customers for this, if this is a new product, Give the service away for free.
I tell people this all the time and they look at me funny you want me to give stuff? Yes. Give it away. In exchange for testimonial, have that upfront contract to begin with, that, Hey, I'm gonna do this for you for free. I'm gonna let you into my, your, my community for free. But after six months, after three months after however long, I need you to write me a testimony.
I need you to report me a testimony. Is that okay? And most people will keep to their work. If you've provided them value they'll return that value for you. Now we get to funnel optimization, which is where everybody wants to start, but it's actually, you notice it's like midway through this process.
So this is where now we, we know that the offer works. We have customers, we have all those testimonials that is turning into an engine for us to drive even more business. Now we have all of the customer stories. We have their work, we have their feedback now pages to our websites, to our any of the funnel based assets, right?
Anything that we're looking to either capture a lead or make a conversion. So after that, we move on to. Digital content. Again, this is something people start with, but it doesn't make any sense because until we know that we have a landing page that converts, or a website that converts, until we know that we have an offer that converts, it's not really gonna matter what kind of content we put out there because we don't really know what kind of content we should be producing.
Sure, we can go to answer the public and look up and look what people are searching for, but that's not really gonna tell us what. What's gonna be relevant for our offer, because we haven't figured that out yet. Once we figured out, now it becomes really easy. All of our content should orbit around what that offer is.
So if your offer is, a life coaching package that's helping people get over trauma, and you're doing that through one-on-one sessions and the community. Your content should talk about the power of community and overcoming trauma. How do you know different exercises that you can do or different exercises that you go through in the coaching process to help people relieve that trauma?
Your content now becomes the story behind that offer. It provides all the context around that offer itself. Finally we get to s e o and I do label this. I am not an ss e o guy. I don't really believe in it. And the reason is simple with the world we live in now with chat, G P T, the way search and the way we find information is changing so rapidly that any investment you make in SS e o right now, Could very well be a wasted effort in literally the flick of a switch.
People right now, you can go to chat, g p t and just find an answer. You don't need to scroll through. And if you've ever spent any amount of time on chat, g p t, finding answers and getting that stuff, going back to Google feels a little bit like horse and carriage. It feels antiquated, feels odd. So why are we investing time and effort and money, most importantly, into a platform that.
We're not even sure if it's gonna be around in 10 years, right? It takes too long. It's one of those things, the only people I recommend this for are when your cost per acquisition, your cost per lead is so high that you have to do this. So I'm talking to you, finance guys. S e o, you gotta do it. Sorry.
That's the unfortunate. If you're an accountant, A C F P, any kind of wealth manager, you're gonna have to invest in s e o. Same thing with certain medical fields in certain markets. You're just gonna have to do it. Everyone else not worth the investment. I. Lastly, we get to print. And the reason I put print on here is, a lot of people poo print and say isn't that old fashioned?
No one ever uses it. Yeah, it is old fashioned, but it does still work. And it works because the market for print has gotten so small that now if you put something in someone's inbox mailbox, there's a good chance they'll see it. If you hang a door hanger on their their house. It's a hundred percent open rate, right?
If you're doing like a home services business or if you're building a local community. So print is a really powerful asset. However very expensive, right? And very prone to failure. If we wanna make sure that all of the pieces in the puzzle work first before we go and invest in something like print.
Otherwise, you'll end up like me with boxes of unused postcards in your closet that you know are never gonna get mailed out because you realize the QR code was wrong, or you realize that oh, that offer didn't really work as well as I thought it were. There wasn't any money in that offer, or, I lost money on that offer.
Whatever it was. So that's the sequence.
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