The Perfect Marketing Plan This post is all about maximizing your marketing results …while minimizing the stress for you, your team (and for your audience). This is what I call the “perfect marketing plan”. If you’re committed to your marketing and you’re still not getting the results you want, it’s likely you’re trying to do too much. When you do too much, you burn yourself out, you burn your team out (if you have one), and you burn out your audience too. When you do too much, you don’t have the time to invest yourself creatively to make all of your marketing world-class. Here’s a simple way to think about it: There are “A-level” promotions and “B-level” promotions. A-level are your big promotions. This is where you’re all hands on deck, pulling out all the stops. You may use a variety different marketing components for this promotion. You may have a video series. You may have webinars. You’re probably running Facebook ads. You’re probably building your list ahead of time. You’re probably planning email marketing campaigns. There are multiple phases to A-level promotions. You may even have a sales team and extra support. The bottom line is, these are massive promotions and they’re designed to bring in a LOT of new customers in a very short period of time. B-level promotions are a lot smaller. These promotions are often for one of your smaller products/offers, or for an evergreen offer that you run year round. For B-level promotions, you may send out a few posts on social media or run a few ads. You may send a few emails to your list. At max, for these B-level promotions, you may do a feature webinar. The bottom line is that B-level promotions designed to be low-key and largely hands-off. Psstt… I made some custom videos and PDFs about the perfect business model for YOU, depending on where you are in your business. It’s like this blog post but tailored specifically to you based on your answers to the mini survey. Click the button below to get yours. Download Your One-Page Strategy So you need to assign either an “A” or “B” to each of the products/services you offer. A-level promotions should be reserved for high ticket items that bring a lot of attention and revenue to your business. Anything that doesn’t fit this description is a B-level. Next you need to understand the perfect balance between A and B-level promotions. How many of each should you have throughout the year? After working with several clients in all kinds of markets, I’ve discovered that most businesses thrive with a maximum of FOUR A-level promotions EIGHT B-level promotions per year. Four A-level promotions means one major promotion per quarter. If you’re a speaker/author/influencer, that might mean two promotions per year for your membership site, one per year for your signature course, and perhaps one major promotion for something else like your book release or a live event. Let’s say you’re a software provider. You might have two A-level promotions per year for your main product, one major promotion per year for a live event or online training, and then you leave a slot open in case you develop a new product or upsell that you want to put in front of your audience. When you’re designing your year and creating your perfect marketing plan, make sure you put your A-level promotions in first. A-level promotions get top priority, and then everything else works around them. When you have this level of clarity, it makes decision making super easy because now when you’re presented with a new opportunity you can look at your calendar and say, “Have we already got an A-level promotion? Yes. Do we have room for anything else? No.” If you’re going to say “yes” to the new opportunity, it means that you have to cancel a promotion you’ve already scheduled. It’s not always easy but it is simple. If you decide to run than four A-level promotions per year, you run the risk of burning out your team and your audience. When you and your team are burnt out, productivity and moral suffers. When your audience is burnt out, you’re pulling their attention in too many directions and they get confused. A confused mind never buys so you want to be really careful to make it clear for your audience where you want their attention and when you want them to take action. If you make everything seem like a top priority and you’re pushing hard on multiple campaigns, nothing becomes a priority for them. Does that make sense? You’ve got to break it down. You got to be disciplined in this. Four major promotions per year with a few smaller promotions throughout. That’s how you maximize your results and minimize your stress. When you design your year this way it’s going to allow you and your team to pour all of your creative energy into your A-level promotions. When you stay true to that and don’t compromise, you take things up a notch and your marketing becomes world-class.
How to Boost Your Mental Energy When You Feel Drained Entrepreneurship… it’s exhausting, right? It’s good to feel drained at the END of the day. In the middle of the day, that’s not so good. Oftentimes we need a “boost” to keep us going, especially when we’re working with deadlines and important projects. So how do you boost your mental energy when it’s low? I think everybody has different methods for this. These are the ones that work for me: Listen to Music That Pumps You Up The fastest and easiest way for me to give myself a boost is to put on a good old dance song. That can include going in the car and cranking up a tune that I can sing at the top of my lungs, or having a little dance party with the kids at night where we’re running around the house and we’re dancing to a song. Dancing and music immediately energize me, so that’s one thing that I always do. Read Feedback From People You’ve Impacted The second thing that I do is I love reading testimonials or case studies. I also enjoy reading comments from customers who have received value and gotten results. This connects me to the “why?” of my business. I’m doing this because I want to help people. I want to serve entrepreneurs. Reading their success and the momentum that they’re creating in their business fires me up! Connect With Your BIG “Why?” What’s your big “why?” – why do you do what you do? For me, my business is designed to serve entrepreneurs but my entire CAREER is designed to spend time with my wife, Amy, and the kids. Sharing experiences with the people who matter most is what I live for. It’s my BIG “why?”. It’s easy to second-guess ourselves as entrepreneurs. Sometimes we resent the responsibility that entrepreneurship brings and we find ourselves wishing for something more simple and stable. When I’m feeling this way, I remind myself that entrepreneurship allows me to provide my family with so many freedoms and opportunities that I couldn’t if I worked a “regular” job. Thinking about this brings me right back into focus. It energizes me and makes me remember why I’m doing this. Right now, the opportunities for you and I are incredible. This is the greatest time ever to be an entrepreneur. We have the chance to contribute to our family, to our community, and to the world in a much bigger way than we ever have before. Summary There’s probably a million little ways to give yourself a boost, but these are the ones that work for me: I listen to music that pumps me up. I sing at the top of my lungs or I dance with the kids. I connect with my customers and listen to their stories and the progress and the results that they’re making. And, most importantly, I connect to the bigger why. Your turn: How do you boost your energy when it’s low?
How to Make Meaningful Progress, Even When You Feel Totally Stuck I guarantee you, my friend, you are not the only person that has ever felt stuck. At one point in my life, I felt very stuck. I had just graduated university. All my peers were going off into the corporate world. I, on the other hand, was not. That was not the path that I wanted to go down. Although there’s nothing wrong with it, the corporate world just didn’t feel right for me. I felt like a square peg in a round hole and I didn’t know what to do. I felt stuck. What I did, and this is the advice I’m going to share with you, is very straightforward and simple. Focus on your next step. You’ve got to get moving. Most of us, when we feel stuck, we don’t do anything. We start thinking about the absolute perfect step that we can take but, the reality is, there is no perfect step. What ends up happening is you waste a bunch of time thinking about it… and you don’t do anything! Instead of planning your perfect next step, you just have to take a step. Once you take a step, momentum will bring all kinds of opportunities your way. So there I was, I’d just graduated university and I knew I didn’t want to go down the corporate path. What was I going to do? I started speaking to other students because that was something that I DID know how to do, and I realized I was really passionate about the subject of creativity. Creativity took me from failing out of university to graduating top of my class. I was passionate about it and I wanted to share it with other students, so I started my entrepreneurial career as a speaker, speaking to students about creativity. Speaking led to me learning about online marketing, which led me to creating a piece of software called WishList Member, a platform for membership sites. WishList led me to developing a whole bunch of expertise around recurring revenue and membership sites, which led me to where I am now – serving tens of thousands of people, helping them transform their knowledge and influence into recurring revenue. If you had told me back then that I would do all these things, I would have laughed. I would have said, “What are you talking about? I know nothing about that. There’s no way I’d be able to do that. There’s no way I’d be able to build software.” I couldn’t have connected the dots to plan that “perfect” next step. Instead, I took a small step that put me in motion. So how do we stop ourselves from falling in the “perfect” next step trap? Start with the things that interest you most. My wife absolutely loves to travel. She’s been trying to think of different business ideas involving travel. I told her, “Look, start with what you’re passionate about. Pretend like you’re an investigator. Go to the different places that you love and start exploring. When you learn about people doing interesting things, go and check them out. Find out what they’re doing. And then start volunteering. Start helping. Start serving.” Helping others is one of the best ways to get unstuck. One of the best things that you and I can do when we’re stuck is to go out and help others, specifically in an area that we’re passionate about. Chances are, as soon as you start doing that, you are going to start finding opportunities. I’ll never forget a quote I heard from the great Mike Litman back in the day: “You don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it going.” When you’re stuck, you don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going. Take your first step. As soon as you do, it’s going to lead to your next step and the step after that. Before you know it, momentum will be on your side and all kinds of opportunities will come your way.
