If you’re looking to grow your business this year, where should you put your focus? In this episode I’ll tell you how to prevent yourself from getting distracted by focusing on what really matters.

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Big Ideas

Traffic [1:58]

Our focus to grow our business really boils down to three key areas. Area number one – traffic. We’ve got to get people to see our offers. You can have the greatest product in the world, but if nobody is seeing it or hearing about it, it’s not going to serve anybody and you won’t grow your business.

There are only a few ways of getting more traffic to your offer. One is free and organic traffic that typically comes from growing your social media profiles and then driving the people that see you on your social media to some type of a list builder. It can come from a podcast like this, a YouTube channel, or a Facebook page where you’re growing your audience and serving them on a regular basis. The downside to this is that it takes time, it’s like a slow burn, but it has compounding impacts on your business. So, it’s not something that you don’t want to do, you 100% want to do it, but just know that you’re not going to get an immediate return as you begin to put your focus here. 

The second way to get traffic is with paid ads. This is where you’re paying to drive traffic to some type of a list builder or offer. This obviously has more immediate benefits because you can instantly turn on the traffic, it just costs money. But for our team, the whole focus this year is to generate a low dollar front-end offer to be able to offset our ad costs, so that we can really spend more money in our ads and generate a lot more traffic without it costing the business a whole lot.

The third source of traffic is your referral traffic. This comes from JV partners who already have an audience and are sharing your products or services with their audience. It might also come from collaborations, where you are sharing somebody else on your Instagram and then they’re sharing you on their Instagram, and together, you’re growing your audiences. This is a great way to get more traffic, it’s kind of a combination where you have to be intentional about it and really put the time and energy into it, but you get more immediate traffic right off the bat.

Conversion [6:40] 

The second area of focus is conversion. If you get a whole bunch of traffic, but nobody’s actually buying, then there’s a big problem and you’re not going to grow the business. One of the things I’d encourage you to do is to look at your conversion points. For example, you might have really successful conversions in terms of your opt-in page for a webinar, but the number of people who are showing up to a live webinar is really low. So, you don’t necessarily have to fix the opt-in page, you just need a better process for getting people to show up live. 

As it relates to conversions, I recommend that you start with the most important piece of all, which is always going to be your headline. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an opt-in page, a sales page, or anything, the headline is the very thing that I want you experimenting with the most. That’s the thing that people see immediately when they’re coming to your page and that’s going to persuade them to continue to read or fill in their information.

Retention [8:52] 

The third bucket, in particular for those of us in the membership and subscription space, is retention. The money in memberships and subscriptions is made in keeping people happy. The longer we keep them happy, the more they continue to pay each month, and the more they continue to pay, the more money the business makes.

There are many things you can do from a retention standpoint, but here’s a low-hanging fruit I’ll share with you. Studies have shown that you can more than triple the lifetime value of your members if they have a positive experience within the first 30 days. That means your onboarding is incredibly important, because if the onboarding is set up properly, then people are going to have a great experience. And if they have a great experience, you’re going to triple the lifetime value of that member or customer.

Identify Your Priority [10:04] 

There are many different things that you can do, but I’m trying to help you identify the few things that are really going to move the needle for you this year. You can try to do all the things, but I’m recommending you to just focus on one primary area. Is that going to be traffic? Is that going to be conversions? Or is that going to be retention? I don’t know what the answer is for you, but I do know that you should pick one of those areas as the primary focus for quarter one of this year. If you do that and double down your focus on that, it’s going to have exponential gains in your business this year.

Memorable Quotes

“You can have the greatest product in the world, but if nobody is seeing it or hearing about it, it’s not going to serve anybody.” – Stu McLaren

Resources

Marketing Your Business Episode 1 Podcast
Marketing Your Business Episode 129 Podcast
Stu McLaren’s Instagram

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