The Ultimate Digital Marketing Training for 2026 (Scale from £0 to £50m+)

0:00Scaling a business through digital marketing can feel really hard. Trust me, I know. We've grown Exposure Ninja to a team of over a hundred and we've worked with hundreds of clients in every imaginable market around the world. Taking some of them from ideas phase all the way through to 8 figure revenues and eight figure X's. But the hardest part of growing a business through digital marketing isn't the eight figure part

0:24because by then you've got the revenue. You can afford an agency. You can work with a team. You can build your own team if you want. The hardest part of scaling a business through digital marketing is actually the startup and the early days phase. Whether you're a brand new business and you haven't generated your customers yet, or whether you're an existing business, but you haven't fully tapped into digital marketing yet, businesses in this stage can often get stuck into a chicken and egg cycle. And that's this. until they have the revenue to invest in digital marketing through an agency like Exposure Ninja, how do they get the growth? But until they get

1:02the growth, how do they get the revenue to invest in their digital marketing? So, they get stuck in this cycle. They don't have the revenue, they don't have the sales to invest in their growth, but until they have the growth, they can't invest in the marketing, right? Chicken and egg. Really difficult situation to be in. It might feel familiar to you. So businesses at this point have basically two choices. They can either pursue investment, get someone to come and invest in your business. You give them a chunk of your business, a chunk of the control, spend the next 6 to 12 months of your life pitching people on why they

1:35should invest in your idea. That's one route to go down. But the other route to go down, the much more sort of safe and the most frequently uh traveled route is to try and do your digital marketing yourself. But this can also be high-risisk, right? We all know businesses that have failed and withered and died because the business never found that marketing source of new customers in time and they either ran out of runway or they got tired and dispirited and it didn't work. This has become more common since digital

2:06marketing has become more competitive. Whatever channel you're using, whether it's SEO, pay-per-click, social, paid social, digital marketing is more competitive than it's ever been. So, businesses are stuck. they're stuck in this before they have the revenue to invest in an agency. Do we go investment or do we go do it ourselves? If we go do it ourselves, that feels more compelling. That feels like a a better

2:29option, but then that's also high risk. How do we learn about all this stuff? We're really busy. We're already doing loads of stuff, growing the business. Now, over the last eight years, Exposure Ninja has worked with hundreds of clients around the world in every imaginable market, and we've analyzed the digital marketing of tens of thousands of businesses. literally tens of thousands of businesses. And a few years ago, we started asking ourselves the question, if we were going to start a business or grow an existing business, but that was new to digital, what would we do? Is there a framework? Is there like a process that we could follow

3:06which we thought was really, you know, based on what works out there, is there a reliable process that we could follow to get ourselves the scale that we need? Now, we started asking this question a few years ago and I started spending a lot of time looking at our most successful clients, the clients that were seeing the biggest scale in their business, the clients that got the most traction with their marketing. We also started looking at the highest growth businesses out there. As you may have seen our YouTube videos where we analyze some of the highest growth businesses in the world who've used digital marketing and then we started looking at other

3:40high growth businesses. So businesses in like the Sunday Times Fastrackk 100 for example that were just rapidly growing and we started trying to distill okay what are all what the the commonalities what are the things that all of these businesses are doing what's the stuff that they're doing differently to the rest who are like flatlining or failing and what we started to distill was exactly what you see on this page the star marketing system now the star marketing system contains five principles if you like they're kind of legs on on a five-legged table if you want. Five-legged tables are fairly uncommon. So, but there's basically five

4:16aspects of the star marketing system. And each of these is really important. You can operate a business with only four of them in place. You can struggle your way through if only three of them in place. If only two of them in place, you're in difficulty. Okay, these five aspects are uncommon but very common sense. Okay, very few startup businesses put their time and energy into the right place in these five. Typically, most businesses go straight for traffic. You know, we just need to get more traffic to our business. And they've they haven't even considered the first aspect, which is positioning, and then everything else they do, they feel like

4:51they're beating their head against the wall because it's not working as well as it could. Or they get everything else right, but they fail to put the fifth one in place, progression, and they don't get the customer lifetime value that they really need in order to generate the profits to scale. So, each of these five aspect contributes

5:07something to the scale of a business. And on this page, you'll find out about a course that we've put together which takes you through each of these elements so you can copy and paste this framework into your business. So the first thing that you get as part of the course is that there are video modules for each of the five elements. These explain the theory behind them. So you've got the principles. You understand why this

5:31thing is important and how it works. There's also examples both of clients but also other businesses out there to make it feel a bit more real. And then there's practical. Now the practical piece is really important and I'm going to come back to that in just a second. The second aspect of the course as well as the video uh tutorials is the interviews. So what I've done is I've interviewed some of the team here at Exposure Ninja that do this stuff all day every day. For example, who better to talk about paid social than someone who spends their entire lives doing paid social advertising? So, we've brought

6:06them in to talk through their channels and to give you additional insight about how to run those campaigns for your business. The third aspect of the course is I think the most important and this is your worksheet. Now, your star system worksheet will become your blueprint. This will become your marketing road map that the entire business can follow. This is based on the worksheets that we

6:30use for our clients at Exposure Ninja. So all of the tasks that we do for our clients, all of the marketing activity that we do across their website, their conversion rate optimization, their SEO, uh content marketing, PPC, social media, paid social, all of this is contained in the client's worksheet. And we've taken this worksheet and adapted it for you so

6:50you can run your marketing campaign. exactly the same as we would for a client of Exposure Ninja, but obviously you can do it yourself rather than paying us 1020,000 a month to do it for you. This star system worksheet breaks down each of the elements in the modules in logical order and we've made it so

7:10it's really fill in the blanks for you. Let's say, for example, that you want to get your website ranking higher on Google. Well, there's a bunch of tabs here which show you exactly how to do keyword research. You just fill in the blanks and it tells you what priority keywords you need to be targeting on your website. Or maybe you need to do a technical SEO audit of your site. Well, the instructions are there. You just do the things that it shows you how to do and it shows you what the most important fixes are going to be on your site. Or maybe you need to improve the content on

7:39your site. Well, there's a thing that allows you to do that. And again, it's fill in the blanks to make it as easy as possible for you to do this stuff. So what you'll do is you'll go through the video courses, you'll watch the interviews, and you'll go through your worksheet and you'll fill in the blanks. What you'll have then is a complete digital marketing plan tailored and bespoke for your business. You then go and implement the stuff in that worksheet and that is how you get past this sticky chicken and egg. We don't have the budget to scale, but we can't

8:07scale until we have the budget thing. This will get you the traction and the growth that you need to start generating more revenue in the business so that you can either, you know, invest more in your own digital marketing knowledge and continue doing it for yourself or you can invest in an agency like Exposure Ninja to do this stuff for you. So, feel free to check out the stuff on this page all about the course showing you how it all works. And of course, check out the course. I'd love to see you on the inside. If you've got any questions at

8:34all, don't forget you can contact us. You can, you know, we're really happy to answer questions about this because we looked for something like this that existed and couldn't find it. We couldn't find a really practical guide to digital marketing. Everything is either really theory and no practical or it's all practical. This is how you run Facebook ads, but ignores the bigger question of yeah, but how do you know if your proposition is actually going to work on Facebook? How do you create an offer which gets people really excited and all the other stuff? And then what do you do to monetize the customers that you're getting through Facebook ads? So

9:09everything was either in one of these two camps. And what we've done with the star system course is yes, we've got the theory, we've got why stuff works and the examples, but we've also got the practicals to actually help you do this for your business. So I hope you enjoy the course. I look forward to seeing you

9:24on the inside. Welcome to the Exposure Ninja Star Marketing System course. I'm so excited to be sharing this stuff with you. Now, if it's all right with you, there's a whole bunch of information in this course. I'm actually going to keep this introduction section fairly short. I'm going to tell you how the style was developed. I'm going to show you through the worksheet that you're going to be using uh throughout and we're going to talk about the structure of each module and then we're just going to get on with it. So, if you don't already know me, my

9:51name is Tim. I am CEO of Exposure Ninja. We're a digital marketing agency. I've been working in digital marketing since 2005. Uh and we've been running Exposure Ninja since about 2013. I was freelance marketer before that. And what that has done is that's given me a huge range of digital marketing experience over this time. Exposure Ninja has always dealt with a lot of businesses, right? We've um we've done reviews for we've analyzed, we've consulted with, and we've worked with, if I had to guess, I'd say probably it's going to be over

10:2320,000 businesses in that time. Okay. free marketing review in particular. Hugely popular tool. We often consult with businesses on the back of this. We'll see their Google Analytics. We'll get to dig in and understand how the business works and how their marketing um has worked. And we've also got a YouTube channel where we do lots of deep dives and analyze large high performing um sites. We do lots of client work where we work with hundreds of clients across every imaginable market, working on their digital marketing, actually doing the stuff that I'm going to teach you in this course. And all of this has given us a really good perspective on

10:58what it takes to grow a business through digital marketing. And a few years ago, I started to get really obsessed with this idea of, well, we've seen so much digital marketing out there and we've implemented so much ourselves. What if we could reverse engineer what the best businesses are doing and turn it into a sort of model like a framework that we could then replicate and implement for our clients. And that's basically what we've been working on for the last 3 years. And then we decided why don't we share this information with people who maybe don't have the budget to work with exposure ninja or they have their own

11:35internal team and they want to implement this stuff themselves but working with us in a done for you way isn't right for them at this stage that is what this is. So in this course we're going to break down the exposure ninja star marketing system and it looks a little bit like this. In fact it looks exactly like this. This is it. So this is the exposure ninja star system. There are five different components or five different modules if you like. And those are the colored boxes. So we got positioning, we got presence, we got process, people, and progression. Now before I take you through each one of

12:08those and what they all kind of mean, um each one has its own framework, its own model, right? So the Bravo business builder is the framework inside the positioning module. And in this course, I'm going to take you through each of these in turn. We're going to talk about what it does, how it works. There's going to be some theory stuff, there's going to be some practical stuff, and there's going to be some exercise stuff as well for you to fill in. Now, you might be wondering, well, who is this

12:33for? Who has this been designed for? This star system training has been designed for either business owners or marketing managers or marketers working in businesses. Okay? So, this isn't like a a a student course for students of marketing or this isn't for people who are just curious about marketing, although of course they're welcome to take it, but really this is for people that are going to be implementing the marketing in their business. It's also

12:58not particularly designed for agencies. Although, of course, agencies are welcome to apply this um to their own client work too. But most of the exercises, in fact all of the exercises that we're going to be going through, you're going to be working through a worksheet which is is basically modeled on what we use at Exposure Ninja for our clients. So you're going to be doing a marketing campaign to your own business and then the training is designed to give you the context to be able to do that work well. So each um section like I say is there's a bit of theory because I have to explain some of the

13:31background. Uh, and then there's some exercises for you to fill in in the worksheet. And then there's in in many cases there are interviews with ninjas from the team because the reality is that for example, whether it's uh running Facebook ads or um Google ads or doing UX audits, whilst I've done a huge amount of this stuff myself over the years, we have people at Exposure Ninja

13:53that have huge background knowledge. They're extremely experienced in these areas and they are on the absolute cutting edge. So, in some cases, I'll be bringing in interviews and talking through with these people to help uh get their expertise over to you so that you can implement this stuff as well. Now, I'm going to take you through the worksheet and show you how that works in just a minute. But before we do that, let's go through an overview of what

14:18these five elements are. So, firstly, we've got positioning. Now, [snorts] positioning is about how your business is positioned in the market against your competitors. This is so important and quite often this is the piece that most particularly smaller businesses that are doing their own marketing or maybe getting a digital marketing program in place for the first

14:42time. This is the bit that they miss. They overlook it. They [snorts] think, "Ah, do you know what? All we need is traffic to our website. If we just had traffic to our website, all our problems would be solved. Our dreams would come true. Instant billionaires." Right? [snorts] but because they haven't got the positioning piece sorted, whatever they do just doesn't work out as well as it could do. So, there are five elements inside positioning. You've got the the branding and the visual. So, the business's kind of visual identity,

15:10what it looks like. This is important. Uh, and many businesses, particularly in the early stages, don't really have it figured out or they haven't figured out why some bits are really important. They're ignoring those bits. We'll talk about this in the module. Then we've got the R, the reason for existing. Again, absolutely fundamental. A lot of people start businesses because they want to do it, right? Find something you love and turn it into a business. Well, that's okay to an extent, but at some point when you want to scale, you need to be able to give potential customers a clear and compelling reason why they should do

15:42business with you, why they should buy from you, part with their money with you rather than somebody else. And that's this reason for existing. So, we're going to talk about some examples. We're going to look at some different ways of figuring out what your reason could be, what makes a good reason, what makes a bad reason. But that is a really crucial point of leverage because if we get this right, a lot of the other stuff gets easier. Then we've got a your target audience. Um, again, identifying your target audience, finding a choosing an audience which you can have a direct correlation with, a deep resonance with,

16:17makes all of the rest of your marketing that much easier. If you've ever run ads on Facebook, for example, and you think, "I've got this really compelling message, but they just get no traction at all." Often the problem is actually that you haven't designed your message around a specific target audience. And even when that person sees it, that perfect customer sees it because they don't resonate with it because it hasn't actually been designed and optimized for them and their drivers, it doesn't quite land and you don't get the results that

16:43you want. So that's the A component. Then we've got V. This is your tone of voice, how you talk. Uh, a lot of this will be designed, by the way, from your target customers. And we actually combine the audience and the the voice um in one because you can kind of reverse engineer what your business's voice needs to be based on your target audience. Very, very cool. And then finally, we've got O, the offering. So, this is the price to value relationship, if you like. Um, you don't need to be the cheapest, but if you're going to be the most expensive, there needs to be a

17:15reason why. there needs to be a justification. So, we talk about the price to value graph and where you need to be on that graph if you want to significantly increase market share which most businesses do. Then we've got presence. This is your website. So, this is your kind of online home if you like. This is about how we make that online home heavy lifting as we say, how we

17:36make your website do the work for you. It's a crucial marketing asset yet for many businesses their websites are really underperforming. Then we got processed. So process is all about how you turn cold unfamiliar people into leads or sales for your business. And a scalable business has a scalable process for doing that. So it's not ad hoc. It's not yeah well some people ask us this and some people do this. It's here's how people come into our business. Here's how people enter the steps that we go through with them. the things that need to happen at each stage and how we explain and present that on our website

18:13so that we get as many leads as possible from our site. Then we got the people component. This is about driving traffic to the whole system. So the first three are about kind of building a system which is optimized and ready to take people. And then in step four, we start driving people into this system. So this is when you scale the traffic coming into your business. We're going to look at five areas inside this. locating your perfect target customer, running profitable ads, having a good search visibility, organic search visibility, having great social presence, and then optimizing and refining as you go to make sure you're bringing in more of the

18:49customers and leads that you want and fewer of the stuff that you don't want. And then finally, we have progression. Progression is an underground invisible element to this system. Many businesses will get started with the first four elements. They'll have good positioning. They'll have a good website. They'll have some form of conversion process. Very often it's not very optimized, but they'll have something. And then they'll start driving traffic to it and they'll

19:16get leads and they'll get some sales. But then once those leads or sales have come into the business, that's kind of it. They're just left to sit there while the business owner and the marketers go off and find the new stuff that's out there. Progression is about how you turn those people that come anywhere near your business, how you turn them into fans, how you turn them into advocates, loyal customers, subscribers. So, and most of this should be done on autopilot. So a lot of this is about utilizing email marketing and building different automation streams to do this stuff on autopilot so that when someone comes onto your website they sign up for

19:53whatever they buy something from you. There is a sequence of things that happens in the background automatically to turn that person into a reviewer into a referer into a fan um into a repeat customer. And all of this stuff happens to help you scale because it's great getting a customer for the first time. It's even better keeping that customer for 10 plus years and having all of those follow-up purchases happen automatically or with very little manual involvement from you. So that's progression. So there's five elements to these system this system. And the way I like to explain them is imagine that you've got a five-sided table and the

20:31table has a leg in each corner. Right? If you had a five-sided table with a leg in each corner, that's going to be a pretty stable table, right? You can put big, heavy stuff on that table anywhere you like and the table's not going to fall over. The same with a business that has all five of these elements in place. Generally, they'll be a very scalable business. They'll be operationally sound. They'll be getting a good volume of leads and sales. It'll be very repeatable, recurring, tend to have a higher uh EBIT multiple if you were interested in selling because they've got all of these things in place. Now,

21:05what happens if you take one of the legs away from a five-sided table? Well, on the whole, it's still pretty stable, but now there's some areas where you've got to be a little bit careful. You got to be thinking about where you're putting stuff, and occasionally can be a little bit wobbly. Sometimes if you put something very heavy in the wrong place, it can fall over. But generally, that's unlikely. It's just a little bit less stable. Exactly the same for a business that has four of these elements, but there's a weakness or a deficiency or

21:32even a total lag in one of the areas. They will just be a little bit less stable. Take away two legs on a five-sided table. Now, you're constantly thinking about where are the weaknesses, where are the vulnerabilities. Exactly the same with a business that only has three of these elements in place. Once you've got a business that's that's missing two of these areas, well then you start to realize that actually this business is not meeting its full potential. There are some areas which feel a little bit wobbly. You might get less traffic than you like and you don't really know what to do. Things feel a

22:03little bit less secure, a little bit uh it's just, you know, when you're riding uh let's say you're riding a horse and it's a little bit weward. That's your three-sided table. Now, as soon as you've got a business that's only got two legs, well, that table is on the floor. And it's the same with a business that only has two of these elements in place. Usually, they will be in extreme struggle and take a huge amount of manual work to get the business growing either from the founder or from a very small team. So, a business that only has two of these elements in place, they

22:36will be having a difficult time, a very difficult time. Okay? Usually they're struggling, usually they need help. And of course one then you don't really have a business. You have uh the starting point of an idea really but really need to build this marketing machine. So think of this like a marketing machine a five-sided table with five different elements. Now as we're going through this course there is a huge amount of stuff in here. There really is. Um, when when I was putting this together, I was wrestling with the question, do I take stuff out in order to prioritize how easy this is to follow? I could make

23:14this really simple. I can make it quite an enjoyable experience, let's say, to just go through, tick some boxes, and feel like you've made great progress. or do I give you everything that I think you might need on your journey, even if that risks overwhelm? I've decided to go for the route, too. Because this, in reality, is what you actually need. It's all well and good me saying, you know what, there are three keys to a successful business. Great website,

23:45great conversion rate, great traffic. Off you go. Thing is, that's not all you need. You need to go through this stuff in more detail. There are levels to these things. There is organization, there is planning, there is strategy behind it. The positioning piece alone, so much to think about, so much to do. It touches on broader market strategy. It touches on like blue ocean strategy and business proposition design and all this type of stuff. And if I was building something that was really simple and reassuring to go through, I would have just cut this stuff out because honestly, you could just cut it out. But the reason I've included it is

24:24because I cannot tell you that this is the best system. Like this is a complete system to follow through unless we put that stuff in. The reality is we have dealt with clients that have the other elements in place, but they're missing this positioning thing. They don't have an appealing brand. Their reason for existing is fuzzy or muddy or it doesn't

24:45exist. Their target audience is unclear. Their tone of voice is uncompelling. their problem, their offering doesn't make sense. And because they don't have that stuff in place, all of the rest of it underperforms. It's like, imagine that you've got a pipe and you've got lots of valves along this pipe. Well, if you turn down the flow at the start of the pipe, the amount of water passing through all the subsequent valves is going to be lower. It's the same with this system. If you cut down, if you squash any one area, the other areas behind it will underperform because you've restricted the flow going into that area. If that makes sense. You'll

25:23learn that I love metaphors. I love relating it to like physical stuff because I it helps me understand these things. So, that's why there's a huge amount of stuff in here. Now, in order to not get overwhelmed and in order to prioritize what you're working on, you'll see we've also given you a prioritization sheet. So, as you're going through this course, there's going to be loads of things that you want to do. Not all of it is going to be top priority. So, this is where your prioritization sheet comes in. You don't have to do everything all at once to grow your business. The most useful use

25:54of your time is not to get everything designed, everything planned out, and then start implementing. The most useful use of your time is to start implementing the most important stuff as soon as you can because then it can start having an effect. So, uh, with that said, I'm going to start taking you through the, um, the worksheet that is included with this course. Um, so this worksheet is it's essentially based on the campaign planning worksheet that we use for clients at Exposure Ninja. So, you can make a copy of this. You can either go to file, make a copy, and then you can use it in Google Drive. Or if you want

26:34to use it in Excel, you can go to downloads and then you can download a Microsoft Excel version which will also work um in Apple Pages and then you can start using a version of it on your machine. Whatever you do, there's a whole number of different tabs and these tabs are broken into sections. So remember, we've got five elements at the start and there are five different kind of categories along the bottom here. We've got positioning, we've got a couple of sheets of presence, we've got uh process, and then we've got a whole bunch of people stuff. The people stuff is kind of the biggest practical module

27:05because this is all about traffic generation. There's lots of different strategies there. And then we've got some progression stuff. Lots and lots of people tabs. And then we've got some progression stuff. Then right at the end, we've got the to-dos and prioritization. So this is where you throw everything that you want to do all in this sheet. And then you can sort

27:24through and prioritize. So inside each of these tabs, well, you'll notice there's a couple of different types of tabs, right? Sometimes there's a questionnaire. There are questions to go through. And as I'm talking through the slides, you can be filling in these questions and answering them for yourself. So, this helps you organize your thoughts. It helps you prioritize the things that you need. It helps you identify what the marketing messages that you're going to be pushing are all about. Okay? So, that's what the questionnaires are for. They're to kind of help you think through things. In some cases, there is a checklist. So in the checklist, for example, this one in

28:00the uh presence section. So this is about your website and here's like a basic website um uh heavy lifting website blueprint checklist that helps you go through and analyze how do you sit against each of these principles and where are the opportunities for improvement? So the format here is a question is the answer yes or no? If the answer is no, what action can you take to improve this? And then there's an optional section for you where you can assign it to yourself or someone on your team or an external partner. And then once it's done, you can mark it done. So those are the main two types of um sheet

28:35you've got. You got questionnaires and you got checklists. And you'll see variations of this. So here's a landing page checklist. Um here's a process checklist. Uh here's a questionnaire for finding your best target customers. Then you've also got um some sheets like this. So, this is a paid traffic planner, which don't worry, we'll come back to all of this stuff in the modules, but this basically helps you prioritize and sort through lots of different options in your head so you can work out what your priorities are and stuff like that. So, each module has its own sheets in here, and we'll go through them in more detail, and I'll

29:07explain what they're all about as we go through those sections. So, that is the star system course. Um, it's going to be amazing. It's going to be huge. It's going to take quite a bit of work to go through, but I really hope that you're going to enjoy this as much as I've enjoyed putting this stuff together. Like I say, this is the kind of accumulation of so much marketing experience across Exposure Ninja over the decade that we've been in business and we've tried to break it down as um easily to digest as possible. There is a fair amount of strategy here as there needs to be because a lot of the time

29:45people think of marketing as you know I need more traffic to my website right I'm just going to go and put some pennies in the Google ads machine and my business is going to take off. What they don't realize is and here's another metaphor for you that actually a lot of this stuff is like winning a motor race. Right? When you're winning a motor race you need a great car, you need a great talented driver and you need great mechanics. you need a great technical team on the back end. Now, most people when they're just putting the money into Google ads, all that they're doing is

30:16they're just trying to buy a faster car. And what they don't realize is that actually they haven't focused on the driver. So, they don't know where they're going. They aren't good at navigating. They haven't got the strategy in place. And because they don't have that great mechanic team, they actually don't know how to implement what they're doing. So, they're just they're saying, "Right, the

30:36key to winning a motor race is speed." Well, yes it is, but as long as you're going in the right direction, you're good at racing, and you've got the the kind of technical knowhow. So, that's what this course is designed to do, give you all three. So, let's get started with module one, all about progression. I'll see you there. In module one of the star system, we're going to be talking about positioning. So this is where your business sits in the market. How you fit against your competitors, uh your tone of voice, your branding and visuals, your target audience, and the thing that

31:10you're offering. This is fundamental. Like I said in the intro, a lot of businesses, they rush past this because it might feel like an unnecessary step or, you know, branding and corporate strategy, that's kind of something for much bigger companies. But that's a big mistake because if you fail to get this stuff right, what you can end up doing is spending years pushing a business or a proposition that actually doesn't really resonate with the target market and that can be very expensive, very disheartening. On the other hand, if you get this right and if we think about some business, if you think about any viral business, basically stuff that

31:47just blows up and you know when you're uh reading uh you know the Sunday Times Fastrackk 100, right? and you're looking through these businesses, what they've been going four years and they're however big. Often it's because they've absolutely nailed their positioning. They're offering something that is so compelling to their market that everything else that they do, it makes so much sense and it's much easier to market a business that is strong in this

32:12area. So, skip this stuff at your peril. Now, what does a business that gets this stuff right look like? Well, they have product market fit. the thing that they're offering matches the thing that the market wants to buy. They are solving a significant enough problem for a sufficientlysized audience to achieve their goals. Really important this if you want to be a billionaire, if you want your company to be, you know, [snorts] worth a billion pounds or dollars or whatever, there's no use selling cookies on the corner of a street. It's just it's not going to happen. The numbers do not work. Now, you might be solving a significant

32:53enough problem, i.e. people love cookies, your cookies are brilliant, they're hungry. If you're selling it like say you're selling it outside a place where people are absolutely starving, like you're selling outside a swimming pool where everyone's been swimming and they're really hungry, right? Big problem. You're solving a significant problem there. So, people will pay you a premium for your cookies if you're selling them to them when they're really hungry and they got low blood sugar, but the audience isn't big enough. You could even sell them outside a sports stadium, but you're still not going to get to that. So, we need to be solving a significantly sized problem

33:27for enough people to achieve your goals. Now, if you've got much more modest goals, obviously that makes things a lot easier. If you ever only ever want to operate a lifestyle business, you don't have to be aggressive as aggressive with the proposition and how big your target audience is. But the important thing is whatever the size of your ambition is that we're matching the ambition to the problem that we're solving and the size of the audience that we're hoping to sell into. And then of course the key to getting traction with our positioning is to make sure that how we're offering this means that our audience chooses us

34:02over competitors. That's what we're aiming for in this section. sufficient problem to a sufficiently sized audience and people choose us over our competitors. So what are the elements that we need to go through in order to do this? Well, there are five aspects to positioning. We've got branding and visuals. So this is a visual identity of the business. We've got the reason for existing, why someone should choose you over a competitor. We have the audience. So your target customers, who specifically are we selling to? Do we go niche? Do we go broad? We've got the tone of voice and personality. So, what's the language that we use? What's the personality of

34:45our business? How do we make sure that what we're selling resonates with our customer? And then we've got our offering. So, this is the thing that we're actually going to the market with. Here's what it costs. Here's what you get. Okay? Now, all of these need to be in play in order to maximize the opportunity with positioning. And that's

35:02what we're going through in this module. So key metrics inside positioning. So how do you know if you've got a problem here or if you've got an opportunity with positioning? Well, there are a number of metrics which give us a bit of an indication about how strong our positioning is. Now I'm going to talk very broadly about these because quite of like with web conversion rate, there are lots of other elements in play. But if you've got a really low conversion rate on your website, right, you get a lot of people, there are a lot of sessions, a lot of events happening on your site, but very few actual

35:34conversions or any few goals or sales. Often, not always, but often this can be a positioning problem where it can be a reflection of a lack of positioning, a lack of strong positioning. Website engagement. If you have very low engagement with your site, sometimes it's because there's an aspect whether it's branding and visual identity or clear target audience which your audience just doesn't resonate with and they are leaving. Okay, so web

36:02engagement rate can be another one. Advert click-through rate. So this is potentially jargony, but it's pretty straightforward term. Basically, of all the people that see your advert, how many people are clicking on it? And again, if you've got weak positioning, if you don't haven't matched your ad copy or the images in your ad to your target audience, very few people will click on your ad and it will make make the whole campaign underperform. You'll have to overpay for the clicks that you do get. You won't get as much traffic as you want. You won't get as many sales or

36:31conversions as you want. Uh market research can also be impacted by this. So, how does your um when you're when you're doing some market research, you can get feedback like people don't really know about your business or uh what you're selling doesn't really resonate with people or they don't really feel like they have much need for it. We're going to talk about some basic methods of incredibly useful market research later on in this

36:54module. You can also use um search volume of your brand versus your competitors and how this changes over time, right? So let's say that you're selling uh calculators and your calculators called Ninja calculators and you're selling against Casio calculators. Well, you can use uh search tools like Seamrush or SE ranking or Google Trends to monitor how many people are searching for Ninja calculators versus Casio calculators over time. And you can use this to understand how well your positioning is landing with your audience, your sales team conversion rate. If your if your website is generating leads and your sales team then closed them, their conversion rate can be impacted by this

37:38stuff as well. Are we bringing the right target audience to our website? So when they're becoming a lead, our sales team can actually convert them. That's a big big thing and that's also affected by this. The social analytics, are you picking up new followers on your social channels? Are they the right sort of followers? Are they turning as customers and all this type of stuff. So you see there's lots and lots of different elements to branding uh positioning this whole concept before we even start to get into the tactics of digital marketing that can be influenced by this stuff. So let's talk about branding and visuals. Um first of all this is really

38:14really fundamental and it's pretty straightforward. Now I often when I'm doing a seminar I'll use this illustration. You may have seen me do this before on YouTube. I absolutely love it because when you're doing a seminar and you've got an exercise to run with people, it can be, you know, oh, am I going to get the right result? Is this going to work? Is my am I going to be able to illustrate my point? This always works, right? Every single time I've ever on it, it has worked. The largest audience I've done this with is probably 500 people, maybe 6, 700, huge number of people. And it worked really,

38:45really well there. And it's worked in small rooms as well. Works every time. So, I'm going to play it with you. If you've already seen it, then you know, don't reveal the answers. So, here we've got two different websites. Now, both of these sites sell a similar sort of thing. It's actually a survey uh

39:00software for agencies. Website A on the left, website B on the right. Website A on the screen. Website A on the left, B on the right. It's opposite when you're doing a seminar because you're facing your object. Um, so what I do in the seminar is I say to people now, which of these I'm going to ask for a show of hands. Which of these businesses do you think has a better

39:20product judging by their website? Website A, website B. Now, everybody says website B, right? And if I ask them why, well, their website looks nicer. Okay, very interesting. Which of these websites do you think has a better uh customer reviews? Better customer reviews, like better customer reputation, A or B? Everyone says B. Uh, which of these customers do you think has happier staff? A or B? Everyone says B. Which of these websites has cleaner customer toilets? Right, A or B? People are like, um, well, I just know it's going to be B, right? They can't see the toilet, but they just know it's going to be B. I'll ask something totally random

39:58like, which of these businesses is most up to date with their tax, A or B? B. And of course, the punchline is that this is the before and after of a website redesign. So, it's the same company. And then you watch the people in the audience and I'm like, you judgmental so and so, you've just told me that website B has cleaner customer toilets based on nothing other than the design of their website. First impressions matter, right? I remember very early on someone got very upset with this. You know, people shouldn't judge books by their covers. Website A might be a lovely business. You know,

40:33all this stuff. Yeah, they might be. People shouldn't judge books by their covers. Actually, maybe they should because that's technically what a book cover is for, right? So, people judge books by their covers. People are judging your business by your website right now. They're making all these assessments about every aspect of how your business is run, how good your products are, how good your customer service is. They are making all of those

40:55based on shortcut flawed assumptions. Flawed, but they're making those assumptions. Now, it's pointless us trying to fight those. We are first impression creatures. you are judging me on my appearance. I would be judging you on your appearance if we met. That's just what we do as animals. We cannot stop doing that. So, as marketers, we don't want to try and change people's fundamental nature. We want to play into that. So, we need to be really conscious about how our branding and visuals are

41:21coming across to our target audience. First impressions absolutely matter. We cannot discount that. We cannot ignore it. We cannot change that. People are judging your website right now. So if you're another thing I do in a seminar is I'll say right who wants to get their website up on the screen here now and we're all going to have a look at it and tear it apart and you see people like shrinking into their chairs like oh uh checking my phone oh yeah they don't

41:48want their website up on the screen. Well think about it. They might be in a room full of people who are potential customers. They're so embarrassed about their website they don't want it up in the screen in front of their potential customers. Makes no sense. If you're ashamed of your website, if a customer says, "What's your website address?" And you say, "Oh, it's, you know, blah blah blah exposion.com, but we're just about to redo it or you add some sort of caveat, that's really important because you're not going to push that as hard as you could if you were really proud of your site. So, first impressions and

42:18visuals absolutely matter. We cannot ignore the fact that we are design-led creatures. Now, there's another aspect of branding and visuals and that is consistency." Uh, consistency builds familiarity. The more times we feel more times we meet someone, the more we trust them. Even if there's absolutely no reason to trust them, they're a total con artist, but we've met them before, we feel like we trust them. It's exactly the same when you have a consistent brand across all of your channels. Now, I'm going to show you a website now. you know the airline that this site belongs to. Not because you've been on this site and because you

42:54recognize it, but because they are they have a very consistent branding across all of their marketing and they have done for years. This is EasyJet, right? They've chosen orange and white as their colors and that's it. Really simple. Now, there's loads of benefits to this. When EasyJet wants to design a social post, well, what accent colors do they use? Orange and white. When I want to, as an EasyJet employee, when I want to redo my employees signature, let's say, let's say I'm doing that myself, what

43:25colors do I use? I use orange and white. It's going to look like EasyJet, whatever I do because I'm using their accent colors. Probably just orange. Not a good idea to use white in your email signature, but you get the point. Here's another example. Blue and yellow, Ryionaire, right? We know it. We know it immediately because we know what colors they use in their branding. So the important thing here is to choose your colors and to choose a consistent visual approach. Now I'm going to show you um in the worksheet that you've got there is um an example our branding guidelines here is exposure ninja and I've shared these with you to

44:04show you what branding guidelines can look like. Now they don't your branding guidelines don't need to be this detailed. These are like super super overkill to an extent because we've also got tone of voice stuff in here as well. We've got 50 pages here. You don't need 50 pages. But what you do need to do, you can add the who we are stuff as well

44:23with your values and things like that. But what you do need to do is you need to choose your colors and your logos and your fonts, right? So things like um things like this where we talk about how our logo is going to be used. You'll never see the Exposure Ninja logo in red because that would not provide a consistent brand identity. You will always see us use the same fonts for headings and body copy. Even this doc uses those fonts. The presentation I'm giving you today uses these fonts because we have decided when you're inside the exposure ninja world, you see Leato and you see Mully and that is your

44:59life. You do not see calibbri. You do not see Ariel. We are being consistent with that because it creates a consistent brand identity. It feels familiar to people when they see something, when they see a piece of Exposure Ninja work, when they see a social media post, they know, right, this feels familiar. It's Exposure Ninja. Same with color schemes. You'll see all of the colors used in our world use these colors. If we want to use accents, we use black and white. And if we want to use tertiary colors, for example, for um icons or these little, you know, these little shinobi graphics and pictures, they're using a very set

45:36range of colors. So, this both limits us if we're using a Google sheet. We even have the defined colors for a Google sheet. This both limits us, but also makes means that when we post something on our socials, it feels consistent because we're using the same color palette all the time. So it takes some of the um the thought process away. It allows us to template stuff really easily and that saves us time. Same on

46:02our YouTube, same on everything. So that's familiarity. Um and that is branding guidelines. So you don't, like I say, you don't need to go through the whole thing. You don't need to do the 50page dock for yourself, but make sure that you have chosen and set in stone your color schemes, your logo, your fonts, and any rules about visual identity that you want to embed. Then when you work with an outside design firm or you work with an agency like Exposure Ninja, we ask clients, "Have

46:33you got branding guidelines?" If they say yes, they can guarantee and they're decent branding guidelines. They can guarantee every piece of work that we ever do on their behalf is going to look like their brand. If they say no, we don't have any branding guidelines. Well, then every piece of work that we do for them, it might look like them or it might not because nobody has actually decided what they look like. Okay? So, it saves everyone a whole bunch of time getting this stuff in place. So feel free to go through the branding guidelines doc and have a look for

47:04yourself and see how it works. Right, let's talk about the next component in positioning then. So that's branding and visuals. Now let's talk about your reason for existing. Now I mentioned in the intro the reason for existing is one of the most uh difficult and challenging things for a lot of startup businesses because people will often start a business doing something that they love. Right? I love eating chocolate. So, I might decide to start a chocolate business. I love dark chocolate. So, I'm gonna start a dark chocolate business and I'm gonna make these beautiful dark chocolates and I'm going to sell them online. And someone says, "Why should I buy from you rather

47:42than anybody else?" And I think, "Ah, that's a good question. Cuz I love chocolate cuz I'm making them myself." Well, maybe that's a benefit. Probably not if you know my cooking, but maybe that's a benefit. But then what happens when we scale? because I won't be able to make them all myself. So, because I haven't built that business with a reason for existing, I haven't spotted a gap in the market and say, "We're building this, all of my marketing becomes more difficult because I can only market myself as a me too. If you want dark chocolate, great. I've got dark chocolate for you. Happy days." And a

48:17customer looks at that and thinks, "So what? I've already got loads of dark chocolate." Right? So, we need to find a reason for existing. Now, by the way, what I'm not saying is that you have to create something completely new that the world has never seen before. That is a very difficult thing to get right. It's a very high-risk thing and you have to educate a huge number of people about this new thing that they've never seen before. Right? Selling a car for the

48:42first time. You don't need to do that. That's a difficult thing to do. I know it looks like a genius move in hindsight, but at the time actually pretty contentious to make cars on mass production. because people didn't know that they wanted it. So, you don't need to, you know, change the world here. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying you need to come up with something completely new and completely different, but you need to play into some sort of pain point that people have. So, let's look at some examples. You might remember Neutra Bullet. Anybody remember when this came

49:13out? I think it was uh 2015, I think. Now, I had one a few years before that cuz one of my friends was really, really into this. But 2015, Christmas 2015 was like peak neutra bullet. In fact, they sold one every 30 seconds. So, they're selling a whole bunch of these uh blenders with a cup attachment like this took 70% of sales in the market over that Christmas. And crazy fruit sales over that Christmas went up 21% which was attributed to the craze in smoothie making from people with their new neutrilets. So this literally changed the feeding habits of millions of

49:51humans. But what happened? Because blenders have existed for ages, right? I bought a Neutri Bullet. I already had a blender in. Now it may not have been shaped not like the Nutri Bullet, but it's, you know, it's basically the same thing, right? It's just a spinning blade. Why have I bought another thing rather than a Neutra

50:12Bullet, which I've already got? Particularly when stuff like this was already out there. So, Bosch have been making blenders since 1922, I believe. They've perfected it. Look at the attachments on this thing. This is Multi-talent 3. It's 800 W. It's brushed stainless steel. Yes, it's got something that looks like the Neutri Bullet stuff, but it's got a whole bunch of other stuff as well. It goes at different

50:34speeds. It's got two switching stages. It's got different types of blades. It's got things for ribboning your carrots and slicing your corettes. It's got way more than a Neutri Bullet. And it's a bit cheaper than a Neutri Bullet. So, what's going on here? How could Bosch be disrupted by Neutri Bullet when no one had ever heard of Neutra Bullet a few years earlier? They're sold by through TV infomercials by guys like this with very dubious sounding job titles and they talk about things like getting the most out of your life. You need to get the most out of your food. How could Neutra Bullet disrupt Bosch who are so

51:18well established? Well, it was all about the reason for purchase. NeutriBullet came with a completely different reason for purchase. Look at the pictures there. In fact, let's go back to the neutra bullet slide. What are we getting here? Look at these images. Are we talking about two-stage switching? Are we talking about 800 watts? Are we talking about all the different attachments? No, we're showing happy, fit people surrounded by fruit in aspirational environments. Right? We are selling a lifestyle. We are selling the the pictures could not contrast

51:56more. Right? is selling transformation. That is what people are buying when they buy a Neutra Bullet. They are not buying a two-stage switching 800 W blender. They've got one of them in the cupboard already. They haven't used it for years. But this advert persuaded them that if they buy this thing, they can get all of the vitamins and health benefits from fruit and veg without having to eat the fruit and veg. And it's really delicious and it works really well. So they rushed out to buy the Neutra Bullet even though it was exactly the same as what they already had because there was a compelling reason and that is

52:31transformation. That is what people really wanted to buy from this product. Not the spinning blade. They wanted the transformation. Another example now Pelaton has been up and down in stock price. It's had a difficult life as a business. But one thing that cannot be denied is that they have totally disrupted the exercise bike space. Pelaton is one of those brands now like Hoover where you go and do the hoovering. Well, you might be hoovering using a a Bosch vacuum cleaner, but you call it Hoovering because they've kind of established that category. Pelaton sells an exercise bike, which you've always been able to buy, with an iPad

53:11stuck on top. But it's not that though, is it? It's a private indoor cycling studio at your home. And because they're not just selling it as an exercise bike, that takes them out of the 200 pound exercise bike market and into the $150 a month boutique spin studio market because that's what they're selling. They're selling the personalized boutique spinning class. That's the thing that they're selling, not the exercise bike. The exercise bike is how you get the boutique spinning class. So,

53:45it's a totally totally different pitch. It looks the same, but if you look at their marketing, it's completely different. What they're really selling is they're selling timesaving. They're selling that cycle studio, the soul cycle, the, you know, the spin class gig. They're selling that offering to a group of people that don't have the time to go and get that. They don't have the time to go to the classes. And you can see this in the testimonials that they use on the site. best way to start or finish my day. It doesn't take time away from

54:19my family. So, what are they selling there? They're selling the family time. That's what they're selling, right? That's the thing that they're selling or they're selling the transformation experience plus family time. So, very very different reason for purchase. Exercise bike something that you struggle to motivate yourself to do. Pelaton really fun group classes, community vibe. You don't have to go all the way to your spin studio and it saves you money as well. Saves you money. It's a 2,000 exercise 2,000 exercise bike, 40 quid a month membership and they're positioning it as saving money because they're going up against $150 spin cycle classes. So,

55:00very different reason for existing. Another example, I know all of these are BTOC. We're going to look at a B2B example in a moment. The reason I use a lot of B to C examples in this sort of thing is because they're easiest to understand. Now, this is Gym Shark. They sell clothing. Um, here you can see a bunch of people wearing Gym Shark

55:17clothing. But the world is not short of sportsware, right? Nobody woke up and thought, "Nah, I wish I had a t-shirt that I could go to the gym in." Right? I know the founder Ben talks about the fact that they really wanted a specific type of shirt that they couldn't get and that's why they started the company. But like, don't be fooled. This is not a business that is revolutionizing the world of clothing. That is not what Gym Shark is selling. As you can see from this picture, what is Gym Shark selling? Gym Shark is selling membership to the club, the tribe that your favorite people are

55:56already a member of, right? This is join the cool kids gang. What do you notice about all of these people? Very similar type, demographic, social media influencer type. very very clear target audience. Now that is what Gym Shark is appealing. Gym Shark is selling actually not clothing. They are selling a sense of belonging to this tribe. Come with us. Join us. You're one of the cool kids now. That is what they are selling. Right? You don't get to become a company worth a billion pounds by just selling a few t-shirts because the world is not short of t-shirts. You can buy t-shirts very cheaply. It's about the brand. You know this. You know

56:38this. Are we using this in our businesses all the time? Maybe not. Excuse me. Okay, let's look at a B toc a B2B example now. Salesforce. Now, Salesforce is a CRM, customer relationship management tool. It's basically a place where you put your customer details and you can do customer service and you can sell, right? But there's loads of CRM.

57:01What is Salesforce actually selling? Well, we don't even need to guess here because we can see from this landing page what they think they're selling. They're selling more sales, better service, greater customer insight. What's the reason for buying Salesforce? Because you're going to make more money. That's basically the pitch here. Very, very different reason. All of their marketing messages are configured around this. The copy on this page says things

57:27like, "Sell faster, sell better." They're selling sales. It says things like improve, centralize, and automate your sales process with SalesCloud. Streamline your customer service. What's the purpose of that? Reducing costs. Okay. Increasing customer satisfaction, retention, lifetime value of ServiceCloud. What they're selling there? They're selling increased value from your customers on an ongoing basis. Salesforce is in many ways making the ultimate pitch. They're saying the reason for purchasing our CRM rather than another CRM is that you will make more money with our CRM. That is their pitch. They're not saying, "We've got all these great features." They might say that later on down the page, but the opening message is we're here to

58:11make you more money. We're here to get you more sales, improve your attention, streamline your customer service, basically reduce costs and pain. So, reason for existing, very, very compelling. So, how do you find your reason for existing? Let's say at the moment you're the generic chocolate company. you don't really have a reason for existing yet. Well, we need to find one. So, how do we do this? Well, one of the things that we can do is we can work out what our customers are upset about, right? Um, if you watch anything about the impact that fashion has, particularly fast fashion, has on the environment, five minutes later you'll

58:51find yourself on the Patagonia website or downloading the Good on You app, right? Why? because all of a sudden you have a different framework of looking at the world and every market has people that are upset with the status quo in some way. We're going to look at some ways to find this stuff in just a

59:08minute. And also thinking about what do you stand for or what do you stand against? Now, even with my chocolate example, I will be massively for dark chocolate and massively against milk chocolate. Okay? So, I'd be like, well, milk chocolate isn't proper chocolate. It tastes really watery. There's loads of sugar in it. Dark chocolate is absolutely where it's at. Right? Hotel Chocolate have t-shirts

59:30that say more cocoa, right? That is me. I'm buying into that message. I'm part of that tribe. Right? So, what do you stand for? What do you stand against? There's going to be something that your business reacts viscerally against that you really hate about your space. If you've got passion, if you've been in your space long enough, there's going to

59:49be something that upsets you about it. And if you can tap into what upsets your customers and those things match, happy days. That might be your reason for existing. By the way, this stuff works. So, EY found that 87% of customers believe companies perform best over time if their purpose goes beyond profit. So, this is about monetizing that

1:00:12purpose. um companies with a purpose outperform S&P by 10x according to firms of endearment. So this stuff actually has a commercial impact as well as improving your marketing. So let's look at how we would identify some of these things that your customers or potential customers or your market might be upset about. Google is a

1:00:34fantastic tool. You heard it here first. One of the things that you can do is you can search for why do and then whatever your market never or why do your market always. So let's say that I was going to start a plumbing company, right? Why do plumbers never? Well, just there I've got two things that people are upset with the plumbing world about. Why do plumbers never turn up? Why do plumbers never call back? Great. So, if I'm setting up a plumbing company, my tagline, my reason for existing might be, we always turn up exactly when we say we're either 5 minutes early or we're on time or you get your money

1:01:06back. Simple. There's my reason for existing. I meet a potential customer on the street and they say, "Why should I buy from you rather than anybody else?" Well, because if we're not there on time, we will give you your money back. We'll do the job for free. Boom. I've got that customer. because that is an established complaint with an

1:01:25existing solution. Let's say I'm creating weight loss products, services, whatever. How do I lose weight without? And here I've got all the things that people don't want to have to do in order to lose weight. So, if I'm selling a weight loss course, I might say how to lose weight without doing exercise, right? I might make it all about the diet or I might say exercise means stuff that you don't enjoy. I actually don't think that you need to do stuff that you don't enjoy. I actually favor something that we call happy size or whatever. You know, it's so it's tapping into their thing and it's kind of giving them it but not

1:01:59really. So, how do I do something without how do I do pleasure without the pain? And then you can make that your reason for existing clothing brands that support. So, if you're a cause-based business, let's say you're a clothing brand, you want to, you know, you want to pick something that you're really passionate about, but you want to make sure there's sufficient awareness in your space, and you want make sure there's going to be a compelling reason. Clothing brands that

1:02:24support whatever. Okay. Um, clothing brands that support climate change. I think they mean clothing brands that support preventing climate change. Anyway, not sure. So, these are some ways that you can use Google to identify what people are already annoyed about. You can also go on sites like Reddit. So, let's say that we're building a Salesforce competitor. I could spend five minutes on Reddit in the Salesforce channel and come up with a list of features and a list of reasons why my CRM was going to be better than Salesforce

1:02:57just from the established complaints. Why is Salesforce so bad? Unintuitive, horrendous looking interface stuck in 1995. Okay, so great. My CRM all about beautiful design. We build the CRM that your team actually wants to use. The CRM that your team enjoys logging in on because when they enjoy logging in on it, they use it more. The entries are more complete. You get the business result. There's the story for my business. Boom. We prioritize design. We think it's important that your employees have somewhere to work which looks nice, which is why we make our design and our interface absolutely beautiful. There's my reason. That's how I sell against an

1:03:36established competitor. Really, really simple. So, what you want to do here is you want to forget about what you and your competitors actually sell and how for a minute. Just brainstorm it from a blank sheet of paper. What do your customers really want? What would what would get them saying, "Oh, yes. Finally, if you could offer that, because if you can offer that, that's the compelling reason. That's the thing that they

1:04:01want." And by the way, this works for even businesses that you'd think would be impossible to compete with. So say Amazon, let's say it's unless you're very very aggressive, you might think that it's impossible to compete with Amazon. And it is to an extent because what's Amazon's reason for people shopping with them? Well, it's basically massive choice. They've got a few reasons, but massive choice and fast delivery. Now, if you want to beat Amazon on choice, you're going to struggle. If you want to beat Amazon on delivery, you're going to struggle. So, will the company that beats Amazon beat them on delivery speed? It's very unlikely. It's very unlikely anybody

1:04:43could build a logistics network that could compete with Amazon. That ship has sailed. But the company that will be Amazon won't need to. The company that will be Amazon will address one of the problems that people have with Amazon, which might be huge numbers of lowquality products, unreliable reviews. You have to troll through mountains of stuff. And if you want to find something really good, it's very difficult because

1:05:06there's not much curation going on. Okay. So, Amazon's strength is also its weakness. Massive product selection. So, could you compete with Amazon by curating your product selection to ensure quality? Well, you probably could. There's certainly a segment of the market that would move over to an Amazon competitor that said, "We vet everything." That's why people still buy from you know department store e-commerce sites because the products are assured to be a certain quality. So think about what would your customers say ah yes finally and if you can make that your reason then your marketing becomes a lot easier because you're pushing a message which matches exactly

1:05:46what they want. Okay. Now, some common reasons that people choose. If you're still stuck or before you start on your brainstorming, here are some prompts that may help you. Price. So, often people can choose price as a compelling reason for purchase. You should buy from us because we are the cheapest or you should buy from us because we are the most expensive, which is also an interesting one. Now, we're going to talk a little bit more about price versus value in the offering section of this module later on, but there's been some really interesting

1:06:24studies on price. For example, oil of Olay before they changed their name to Olay. They wanted to shake their old expensive old lady image and they wanted to reposition their brand. So, what they did was they tested some different price points. They tested three in particular. Now in the US at this time they had a bit of a conundrum because they had the department stores which tended to be the um the you know the the the more expensive higher quality products and then they had like mass- prodduced retail at the lower end. And what they wanted to do was find a balance between these two different audiences. So the

1:07:06first price point they tested was $12.99. Now, at $12.99, the buyers who signal that they would be most likely to purchase were mass market, the discount shoppers. Few department stores, few of the expensive, high-end people were interested at this range because, you know, it's too cheap. It's not even on my radar. And we all have these things, right? We all have these things where, you know, if I'm out and let's say I want to buy a sandwich, I'm not going to buy a sandwich that's like really cheap because I just assume it's not going to be very good or it's going to be bad quality. So, we all have these kind of

1:07:41levels and thresholds. We all have an expectation of what things should cost. So, at $12.99, they got the the small ones, but they really turned off the department store buyers. So, then they tested $15.99. Now, at $15.99, both of them were less interested. Okay, the mass market buyers said, "Nah, it's too expensive for us." The department store people said, "No, we're still not

1:08:07interested." Okay, still not interested. That's really not for us. So, they kind of lost out. It confused people about the proposition. Is this an expensive product or is it a cheap product? Now, at $18.99, purchase intent went back up. At this point, people because they tapped into a newer audience, people were crossing over from prestige specialtity in department stores to buy this product in the retailers. So, they were buying it in discount drug and grocery stores because it was now expensive enough to be in their target zone. And this pivoting, moving their strategy to there actually helped Olay exceed their $1 billion sales targets by 2.5x. So, it was massive, massive. This

1:08:53helped them reposition their brand by charging more for the same product. Now, they obviously had marketing to back that up. They didn't just put the price up and that's the only thing that they changed. So, that's the important caveat. We'll talk more about this later on, but high price can also be a reason being the best service. Now, again, good customer

1:09:15service isn't always necessary. You can also sell a lack of customer service. For example, I don't actually ever want to talk to my bank. We've just moved banks at Exposure Ninja, and one of the main reasons is cuz I have to talk to HSBC and I have to talk to them a lot. I don't want to talk to my bank. I want my bank to operate with no this is a utility. I want them to operate just do their stuff, just get on with it. I want it to work. I don't want them to block our card and I have to phone a number and talk to someone for ages. I

1:09:48don't want to have to call up a customer relationship manager to get extra users. I want to be able to do it easily on an app because that takes one minute instead of a 30 minute appointment. I might have to go and visit someone. HSBC wants to tell me I had to go and visit someone to get new users set up for our account. I'm going to spend half a day getting new users set up for our business bank. Like what sort of world is that where a CEO wants to spend half their day on something pointless when you could just log into an app and just

1:10:16do it? So Amazon also takes this sort of approach, right? When you buy something from Amazon, you don't have to talk to customer service. There's no concurge. Everything you can do from the app. And Jeff Bezos very early on said if people are seeking out customer service, we actually see that as a bit of a fail. A user experience fail. They shouldn't have to seek out customer service. So lack of service, making sure everything

1:10:41is self-s served can also be a benefit. Choice uh again or lack of choice. So, Amazon offers you unlimited choice. Sometimes that's a complete nightmare. If you want to buy some smart shoes, go on Amazon. Good luck. Nightmare. Go somewhere else. They've curated a nice range. You can be assured of where they're coming from. What sort of quality are they real? All this type of stuff. Much better. So, curation can also be a reason that people would

1:11:08choose you over competitors. And safety or the removal of risk. Um, this is an interesting one. Anytime you see a a middle person in a in a transaction, right, you know that there is a problem with risk. So, I'll give you an example. In the UK, we have a lot of trades comparison services. So, I mentioned earlier, why do plumbers never turn out? Well, I started out Exposure Ninja building websites for trades. And one of [snorts] the things I figured out quickly is that these plumbers, they're

1:11:37not answering their phones, right? They're not. I was driving so much business, so many leads to these sites. I was tracking the phone number so I could see, but they weren't picking up the phones. I once spoke to a plumber who said unless a job builds more than £100, he doesn't even go back to collect the money from the customer. That's how unreliable these people are. Unless it was over a certain amount. He he would do the job. He just then wouldn't go back to collect their

1:12:03money, right? It's a different breed. So what you saw happening in the early 2010s and 201s was this whole industry set up to basically try and sanitize the world of trades. You got companies like Checker Trade who I consulted with in the very early days and what they were basically saying is this whole thing is a chaotic wild west. What we do is we sanitize this for you. We take the best ones, we vet them, we get reviews from their customers, and we make this reliable for you. So when you come onto our site, we are removing the perceived risk of this

1:12:43purchase. We're making it safe for you. And then you get other ones which you know, you could book the trade through the site or you could get quotes and it was basically a way of saying we know that there is this problem with risk when you phone a plumber or you contact a plumber. Massive risk that you never hear from them again, right? or they're completely unreliable or they're a total cowboy. So this industry was set up to try and remove that risk. So if you see profitable middlemen like this or middle women, you show that business, it shows that businesses have failed to differentiate themselves enough or that

1:13:17customers feel the buying process is risky or difficult. So, if I was going to set up a business like that, and I work in the world of middlemen, I would say, "Right, I'm going to beat all of them by being the most credible business. We're going to turn up in suits, right? We're going to offer guarantees against the things that people are most worried about." And you would sell against that, right? Really compelling reason. You We once had someone come over to our house to do a bit of work. They stood with their outdoor shoes on one of our child's bed toys because they just walked with their

1:13:50outdoor shoes to the house, right? So, if I was selling against that, we're clean, tidy, we're respectable. We treat your house like our own houses. We turn up on time. And here's our customer guarantee. And if we miss any of these, we will do the job for free. As soon as you do that, you position yourselves away from everybody else. all of your marketing becomes more effective because that's when the customers say, "Ah, yes, finally." And you get businesses that do this like Pimlo plumbers in Pimlo Pimlo plumbers in London charge ridiculous rates, but they can because they fix these problems for people. They've built a reputation based on not turning up

1:14:32with their rear ends hanging out, being on time, being respectful, clean vans, you know, fixed prices, all this type of stuff. So there are great economic rewards for fixing this type of thing. So um safety removal of risk also one as well. So how how else can you find your reason? Well going back to this idea of

1:14:53what are your customers annoyed about? What do your customer what do you stand for or against? Another thing that you can use is your background story. So this is the reason that you got into the business. For example, um in the early days of Exposure Ninja, our background story was and basically still is because it's 100% true. I built a website for my next door neighbor who's a plaster. It completely changed his life and that changed my life because finally I'd found something which I could do which changed people's lives. Right? I think that's fun. It's definitely what people like me, people pleasers um like doing is having a

1:15:27massive positive effect on other people. So I found this thing. It completely changed his life and I started an agency on the back of that. So now that's the origin story and when people hear that they're like, "Okay, I know who that person is. I know who this Tim guy is. I know what drives him." That's a cool story. It gives me credibility as well because obviously I had to change his life through this website in order for that thing to happen. And it shows that my heart's in it for the right reasons, right? I didn't start this because I thought, hm, you know what's the corner

1:15:56of the market? I could become a trillionaire through exploitation. Uh yeah, let's let's start some high interest doorstep loan business, right? Let's try and make loads of money on people's misery. It's not that, right? It's like what what drives me? What are my values? And that's what your origin story really gives you. Another example of a great origin story, Richard Branson. So the whole story of the Virgin Airlines was he was trying to get um an airline and you know he was trying to get a flight and it had been

1:16:28cancelled. So, um, they, you know, he charted a plane and split the cost and everyone and, you know, now he's a hero. He's one of us. He's helping people get to their destinations. And then they used the another story was uh facing against British Airways in the in the Atlantic routes and BA's dirty tricks campaign. And he tells this story about Virgin going up against, you know, the big boys, the enemy. And he does this to position them against the evil empire, right? Virgin is the underdog, the scrappy underdog, the hero that you want to win. Well, what does that do? That aligns you with Virgin. That proves why

1:17:07they're different because they don't embark in these dirty tricks. They're not evil. So, this origin story can kind of communicate your values to your audience in a way that can be difficult just through copy on your site. So um that is your reason. So there's some exercises in the sheet that you can go through to kind of work out what your reason might be. But spend some time on

1:17:30this because it is really important. Okay, let's look at the third aspect of positioning which is your audience, your target customers. Now, I'm actually going to combine the audience and the voice, the tone of voice, personality, because there is a lot of crossover here. And you can use your target audience and your audience research to

1:17:50inform your voice. I'll explain how. So, um, who do you really sell to? This is a question that many people struggle with and particularly in the early days of their business because the fear is and I've felt this fear by the way. If we identify our target audience too narrowly, we limit who can purchase our product. Why would we want to limit who can purchase our product? Because we

1:18:13want to sell as many as possible, right? But it's kind of counterintuitive. Now once you've built traction with a particular niche once you've established you know that you've got a particular target audience you've served them well then of course yes you expand but you expand in a very strategic way. Okay you expand in a very strategic way. So yeah we need to identify a clear target audience and then we need to make a marketing message which really truly resonates with them. Now this idea of you know expanding into different audiences people will look at uh large companies like Nike or McDonald's and

1:18:52they will say well they don't niche. Nike doesn't niche. You can see people of all different types in all different economic backgrounds wearing Nike products. They don't niche. Actually they do because if you look at Nike what you've actually got is a huge number of subbrands. Okay, you've got brands which are targeted to people of

1:19:15different interests, different sports. You've got brands targeted to people at different income levels. You can buy a Nike t-shirt for £10. You can buy a Nike t-shirt for £250. You can buy super secret one-off collabs with crazy designers if you want to. Right? So, actually, they've got very, you know, they've got loads of they're basically stacked niche. That's that's their approach. So although we can look at these brands and say yeah well they don't niche actually they they kind of are. So what we need to do is we need to identify who we really sell to. And we need to understand this target audience so deeply that we can have a virtual

1:19:52conversation with them so that we can model them so that we can bounce ideas off them and we know how they're going to respond to them because we've spent so much time digging in to what motivates them. So, the first question to ask when you're trying to work out who you're selling to and you've got your target customer in mind is why does this person need a change? Okay, what is motivating them to make a change in their lives? So, yeah, it's really if if and if if the answer is there is no need to make a change, then that can be an indication that that isn't the right

1:20:27audience for you. Because if there is no need to make a change, how are you going to sell them something? Right? We're all buying something because we're hoping for some sort of change in state. Another thing to think about is what happens if they get this choice right. Okay? So, what's the upside? So, when we we're doing this with um we do this with clients in our in our client calibration calls and what we're trying to understand is what are the towards motivations for your customers? I remember doing this with a um a business that sold photography courses. I did this personally and they actually didn't

1:21:08know. They didn't know why their customers bought. They didn't know what was motivating the purchase. They didn't know why customers would, you know, invest the time and money into this. They're just selling them or trying to sell them. They weren't really selling that many. I did some customer calls and I identified actually that what these customers really wanted to do this was like escapism for them. They weren't doing it necessarily to learn the techniques of these people. They kind of on the surface thought that that's what they were really just doing it because they enjoyed it, right? They just really doing it because it was like an

1:21:40indulgent time for them to indulge in their passion to listen to a grand master of photography. Um it allowed them to the the courses were beautiful. they're really wellframed, you know, really enjoyable to watch if you're that way inclined. So, that's really what they were selling to. So, they what they couldn't do, what they shouldn't do in their marketing materials is talk about all the techniques and tricks and stuff

1:22:06that you would learn from these courses. What they're much better doing is emphasizing the experience that you would have on these courses or watching these courses. The imagery shouldn't show someone like trying to figure out their camera for the first time. The imagery should show someone enjoying the course in a relaxed, highquality environment, smiling, right? That's what they're selling. They're selling, oh yes, really looking forward to digging into this for the next two hours. So, what happens if someone gets this gets this choice right? What happens if they choose you and it's a good choice? Well, they get happiness in this case. In some cases, uh, another client example I can

1:22:43think of, um, they sell, uh, they they sell like outdoor furniture and stuff like plant pots and trees and tables and stuff. They sell this stuff to to companies. So, like a facilities manager might be buying a bunch of chairs and tables for a chain of restaurants, for example. What happens if they get this choice right? Well, it turns out their boss thinks that they're good, right? So they're doing this for the credibility, the pat on the back from their boss. That's what's motivating them. So in the marketing messages, if we say, you know, cut your margins by or increase your margins by X, well, they're not really

1:23:20interested in this. They want the safety and the security of knowing that their boss is going to improve of them. This is no one ever got fired for hiring IBM, right? So what happens if they get this choice right? They don't get fired, they get a pat on a back. So you need to think about what happens if your

1:23:34customers make the right choice. Sometimes this is, you know, completely life-changing. Sometimes it's a very small thing. But we always need to know exactly what it is. What happens if they get this choice wrong? Okay, so in the case of nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, what happens if they get it wrong? Well, the implication is they

1:23:52might get fired. Pretty big implication for someone, right? In the case of this, you know, this uh this plant pot company and this outdoor furniture company, what happens if you get the choice wrong? or your boss isn't going to approve of you. So, that's something that we'll want to communicate in the marketing. We want to make this very clear that this is, you

1:24:13know, low risk. We have lots of reviews. We have lots of very happy facilities managers just like you who are very glad they've taken the choice to trust us and their managers thought that they were great. And we're going to include this in our marketing message because that's what our target audience wants to hear. That's what they need to hear in order

1:24:31to trigger that purchase. How knowledgeable is your target audience? This is really, really important as well. So, we're a marketing firm, as you know, and we identified quite early on that a lot of marketing firms talk total jargon and nonsense in their marketing material. So, they're marketing to people assuming that they have the same level of knowledge as the marketing firm. Well, this is completely ludicrous because if you're a business owner, you have nowhere near as much marketing knowledge as a digital marketing agency. So talking in jargon to the business owner is pointless because they immediately just get completely confused and think this person is trying to bamboozle me with

1:25:10gibberish which most of the time to be fair they actually are. So we said okay well if if they have a more entry-level knowledge what we need to do is explain things to people show them how it works and help them get a result. If we can do that then we can build credibility that way. So how knowledgeable is your audience? Do you need to give them detailed technical information or do you

1:25:28need to simplify them things for them? Now, sometimes you do need to give people technical information. If you're selling to doctors, for example, you don't want to say, "Oh, it's going to make your patients better and you're going to look like a superhero." You want to say, you know, for people with hematiosis, it's going to reduce their blood count by 42 and a half% on a blended average. you know, you need to talk jargon because that's how they establish credibility. But if that's not your audience, you need to make sure

1:25:59you're talking plain English to them. But the important thing is we need to understand how knowledgeable our customers actually are and not make assumptions. And this is where customer feedback calls come in. Now, customer feedback calls are one of my favorite marketing exercises to do. Very few people do them, by the way. So, I'm going to tell you how to do this. And I would say probably 90% of people aren't actually going to do this. I did this in a mastermind. uh people have paid a lot of money to be in that room and to hear about this stuff. And I know for a fact that only one of the people in the room

1:26:26actually did this. So that's the caveat, but these are amazing. And they will change the game for you if you spend half a day doing them. So here's how it works. You grab a small group of perfect customers. Look through your customer database. Grab some of the perfect ones. Reach out to them and say, "Hey, I'd love to get your feedback. Can I just book a call with you?" Now, bribe them if you need to. offer them an Amazon voucher, whatever. Make sure you say, if you're going to offer them, if you're going to bribe them though, make sure you say, "I'm offering you this." Not as, you

1:26:56know, contingent giving me what I want to hear, but this is for being completely honest with me in the feedback call. But the important thing is that you're getting them on the phone somehow to talk to them. And then you want to design a call script to ask them a whole bunch of questions about your business and not not about your business, about why they chose you or what what they use to make their decision. I'll talk you through some examples in just a second. And then you're going to run the calls and you're going to record them asterisk. The reason there's an asterisk there is

1:27:25because recording the calls is then going to give you a quote library which you can use later on in your buyer persona stuff. And you're going to learn loads. Now when I say you're going to learn loads from this process, I really mean you are going to learn absolutely loads. I've done this personally for clients uh wellestablished clients and there have been cases where I've done five customer feedback calls for a client, five, not 500, 50, five, and then we've met for a debriefing call and they've treated me like I know more about their business than they do. And guess what? I actually do because on

1:28:04those five calls, the amount of information that you get from these customers is so useful and so profound, particularly if they're all saying the same thing that the insights can last you for years, right? They they really really can. This is this is so so powerful. Now, some tips for this. When you're designing the call script, you generally

1:28:30want to ask open-ended questions, right? If you want to understand why somebody bought something, don't say why did you buy this, right? You want to ask no that's if you want to understand someone's towards motivation. Normally people's towards motivations, the reason they want things because they want to be like sexy, healthy, happy or rich, right? Those sorts of things. So don't

1:28:54say right, sexy, healthy, happy or rich. Why did you buy that photography course from me? What you want to say instead is something like, have you bought something like this before? What made you choose it? Because that kind of depersonalizes it for you and also gets them thinking, what's their selection criteria? How are they choosing this sort of thing? What's most important to them when they're purchasing something like this? So, asking these sorts of open-ended questions, why do you like that? or um if you had to recommend us to a friend, what would you say? That's a great one because what they'll do then is now that

1:29:32they know about your business because they bought from you, they'll pull out of all of your different features and benefits, they'll pull the ones that they think are most compelling to their friends and they'll tell you them. And this can be completely different to what you thought your main features were. We'll also ask them to rate things uh according to their importance. So for I

1:29:53was doing this for a a puzzle magazine. And this puzzle magazine, they were selling a whole bunch of these puzzle magazines through these Facebook ads. Uh and they didn't know why. They didn't really know why people were buying them. It sounds weird, but they they didn't really know what was resonating with the customers. So I said, "Right, we got we got to figure this out because if we can figure out why people are buying, we can accentuate that thing in the marketing messages and we can sell a whole bunch more. So what we did is we broke up all of the different features of their service. So of their product. So these

1:30:24puzzle magazines were like glossy. They were high quality magazines with you know good paper stock and rich print and color on all the pages stuff like that. So we asked people how important is that? We asked people how important is it that you can win a prize? How important is it that the puzzles are challenging? How important is it to keep your brain active? And what we got people to do on these customer calls is rate how important each of these different features was. What we could then do is reconfigure our our USPs or our marketing statements to be basically exactly what they told us. So in this

1:31:02case, it was keeping their brain active. Some people were buying it for their parents. They were sending it to their parents to keep their brain. Oh, great. So now we know we're going to run a Facebook ad to people who are younger, who have older parents, who are interested in this, this, this, live in this sort of situation. And we're going to use a message that says as people get older, they test their brain less. This is designed to keep your brain active and, you know, keep yourself healthy as you're getting older. Great. We know that that's going to resonate because that audience has told us this is why they're buying. So

1:31:33we're just giving it straight back to them. That's really what we want to do. So, ask people open-ended questions and ask them to rate the different features of your product according to importance so that you can make sure you're talking about things they care about, not the things that you think they should care about. Another tip, if you're going to ask for people's age, this is just a little throwaway tip. If you're going to ask for people's age on the calls, which is generally a good idea, make sure you ask for it at the end of the call because you've already built up the rapport. Don't ask for it at the start,

1:32:00otherwise beep. Okay, customer calls. Um, let's talk about tone of voice. So, as you starting to go through these customer calls and get this c sort of customer feedback, you can start to build out your tone of voice. So, tone of voice is the language and proprietary terms that you use to describe things. Okay? Your audience will feel more connected to you if you sound like them and you have a sort of common language, right? know your friends, how you've got words that you share in common and that builds that sense of rapport. So, Exposure Ninja, you'll hear us talking a lot about CTAs. Um, you know, we we'll

1:32:40use a whole range of phrases which are so obvious to us and our followers that I can't even think of them because they're just part of our everyday lexicon. You've probably heard loads of it right now, right? And we're very plain English because that's where where our target audience is. So, we're doing that because we spent so much time talking to our customers that this has become who we are. So, what are the words and phrases that your audience currently uses and how are these different to your competitors? What we really want to do is internalize our customers. We can build a profile for our business for them. So, if I

1:33:16internalize the customer, if I can model this person, think of like this. I'm creating this hologram. I know their personality. I know the words and phrases that they use. I know their likes and dislikes. I know what's most important to them. I'm creating this kind of virtual customer in my head. I can then build a business, build a marketing machine, if you like, that is optimized to to resonate with that customer. And that's really what we're looking for. We're looking for resonance. Okay. Now, resonance, I'm, you know, resonance is actually a really important kind of force. I did acoustics, acoustic engineering at uni and I was a professional musician. So

1:33:56resonance has has been a big part of my life. But resonance is a really interesting um phenomenon, right? When you have something that resonates, you need a very small amount of sound to it magnifies, right? Amplifies. You know when you've been driving a car and you go over a bumpy road and it's consistently bumpy and you get this kind of hum in the car and you can get a really really loud hum if the frequency of that hum matches the the the size of your eardrum for example or the you know the width of your head you can have your whole head vibrate and resonate. Well

1:34:33this is exactly what we want to do with our marketing. We want to match our customers resonant frequency so that when we give them a message, we don't have to shout it to them. We can just say that message to them and it resonates so strongly with them that it brings this large effect. That's what resonance is. You can feed something with a very small sound. You know, when you go into, you know, changing rooms and you find the resonant frequency of the changing rooms, you go and the whole room goes, what you're giving it is a very small amount of energy. But because you've matched that resonant frequency, the

1:35:06whole room creates this huge sound. That's what we can do with our marketing. If we find the resonant messages that match our audience, okay, the plumbing company, the resonant thing that's annoying people about plumbers, they don't turn up, they're messy, they leave a place in a state afterwards. Well, we don't have to shout this from the rooftops if we've created something that solves that problem. we can almost whisper it and because it matches what they're looking for so closely, they resonate. They get really excited by it and they make the purchase or they they become a contact. So, this is all about

1:35:40positioning. So, that's what we're really looking for. Now, there's [snorts] a tone of voice sheet in your ninja worksheet which we'll go through at the end of this module. And the tone of voice sheet basically has um different types of uh language that you can use, right? Uh very formal, very professional or quite relaxed or colloquial. And what it allows you to do is identify the type of language that you think most resonates with your audience. So this is a kind of template if you like to find your tone of voice and if you need to provide tone of voice to you know copywriters or people that you're working with you can

1:36:23use the words from this sheet. Um another point of this if in doubt rebel from what's already out there. So people often especially when they're starting business they want to fit in with what else is in the market. They look to their competitors and say right we basically need to do that. That's kind of what we need to be. we need to be the same as them. Well, actually, I would encourage you to kind of push against what's there. If in doubt, be different. Um, there's a great great uh marketing success story. Let me see if I can get it right. So, you know, salmon is pink, right? Salmon is pink because

1:36:59of what the salmon eat. And um a while back there were some you know some some farmers of white salmon that wanted to get traction in the salmon market. They wanted to sell their products in stores. But the problem they always came up against was that consumers think well salmon is pink. And if the salmon doesn't look pink something must be wrong. It's not quite salmon. Is this definitely salmon? Is it not some other type of white fish? Because the salmon I know is pink. So what the white salmon farmers did in their marketing was pretty clever. They um their their message when they put it

1:37:40into stores, they realized that consumers were rejecting it. So their marketing message, their line, their their tagline was this salmon is guaranteed not to turn pink in the can. So the implication there of course is that the other pink salmon that you're used to is kind of decomposed or somehow you know it's gone wrong. The white is the natural state and the pink is the unnatural state. Well, this salmon is

1:38:06guaranteed not to turn pink in the can. So what they did there is they kind of rewired the customer. They gave the customer a new expectation. They recalibrated the customer to their way of thinking by using a very different position. Now, of course, we know today that pink salmon has ultimately won the war. And one of the reasons it won the war is that the pink salmon fisheries fought back with an equally brilliant line, which was guaranteed no bleach used in this salmon, which of course fought against the white salmon and made it, you know, imply that there would be bleach in the salmon. Now, by the way,

1:38:42they didn't say that the white salmon farmers bleached their salmon at all. That doesn't matter. They just had to sew that seed of doubt. So, if in doubt, you want to kind of rebel from your competitors because your customers already have lots of choice out there. If you're selling into an established market, your customers already have a lot of choice out there of different options to purchase from. If you are going to stand out, you have to stand out. [laughter] Quote of the day there. Okay, so that is tone of voice and target audience. So, go through the sheet, make sure you can do some customer calls. I promise you,

1:39:15it'll be worth your time. It feels painful, particularly if you're an introvert like me. you don't necessarily like talking to all these new people, but actually people are absolutely lovely, especially when they know that there's an Amazon voucher on the other end of it for them. And the stuff that you learn will last you for years because you can then profile those

1:39:30customers. So, exactly. Okay, let's look at the next element of positioning. So, we've gone reason of existing uh audience, voice, which we just combined, and then the final thing we're going to look at in this module is offering. So, this is price versus value. Now, here's a watch. If you know anything about watches, you may know this is a PC Philippe. It's a

1:40:00Nautilus 3700-1. Um, it's an expensive watch. This watch costs about 190,000. You can get you can get one for 190 grand UK uh up to about 250,000. That's secondhand by the way, right? So you might spend quarter of a million pounds on this watch secondhand. Now what does the watch do? Well, it tells the time. It does. It tells it well, but it still needs manually winding. It's also got a little date thing as well, so you can check the date. Well, guess what? So does an Apple Watch, right? in an Apple Watch also tracks your fitness. Um, it can detect if you've got atrial arrhythmia in your heart. You can call

1:40:53your friends with it. You can look through pictures. You can be notified of you can be pi pay for stuff like it does loads. The feature range on an Apple Watch completely pummel Pate Philippe into the ground. It's a far superior watch in its functionality, but it costs about a thousandth of the Pate Philippe.

1:41:17So, what's going on here? Why is Pate Phipe able to justify such a high price and Apple has to charge or does charge a much lower price for something which on the surface of it might feel superior? Now, you might say, well, it's because the Pate Philipe looks classier. It just looks really nice. Aha, you may be right. It does look nice. It's aesthetically pleasing. I will give you that. I think this is quite a nice watch. But if it was purely based on looks, how come you can get that watch there

1:41:58for $89? Now, yes, it's a knockoff of the Pate Philippe. It's made by Lugig. I I don't know how to say that. LG XI G. It's a Nautilus. It's a quartz. It's $89. So, save yourself only, you know, $249,991

1:42:24and you can get this instead. Bargain, right? So why are Patek Phips so popular and this one isn't? If it was purely about looks, you'd say, "Well, they basically look exactly the same." Well, the difference is the story. The difference is the heritage of Pate Phipe. 1839 founded huge history of brand advertising which have convinced you that Pate Phipe is an incredibly valuable brand. They're incredibly valuable long-term. You know, you never own a Pate Philip. you merely look after it for the next generation. I remember seeing those ads as a child thinking what on earth is going on here but that built some reps in my mind established

1:43:04the value of Pate Philippe. Pate also has a history of innovations. They've got lots of patents for different complications, different functionalities. Yes, that's stuff that's from the past, but you know that still builds a bit of a heritage as a real innovator. They have a very limited run. So they build 50,000 watches per year. Most watch makers are making a million or more. Some of the most basic Patek Philippe watches take nine months to build. They can take up to two years to build a complicated one. So Patek has built this story which allows it to

1:43:42charge a higher price. They have social currency as a result. So you get celebrities wearing them. The queen owes owns Patek affiliate watches. Many of the most well-known people in the world have Pateks and they show them off. They hold their value well as a result. So it's all perception. It let's be clear, it's 100% perception here. No one is buying a protect Philippe because they need a watch that is that accurate. If they wanted pure accuracy, they get something that's connected to the internet so it is always accurate, right? There is no logical reason for protective. It is a demonstration of value. It's a demonstration of

1:44:20credibility and authority. It's all perception. But there is a justification for the 250,000. What they haven't done is they haven't just taken the $89 watch and just slapped a 250k price tag on it. They have built a story and they've built this over generations. This credibility that allows them to charge it. So why am I telling you all of this stuff? This is all about pricing and

1:44:49perception. This is all about pricing and perception. We have to understand before we decide how much to charge for our products or services, we have to understand people's um perception of price and value. We have to get the fundamentals right. This story has to make total sense to you before we're able to market and price our services because we need to understand this relationship. This is fundamental to how humans assign value to things. So what I want to do is talk through three pricing mistakes that businesses make and this

1:45:26really damages their marketing. Okay. Now the first pricing mistake is they choose a luxury price point with no justification. This is the PC Philippe example. If they didn't have all of that story stuff, if they just decided one day to make a watch and charge 250 grand for it, that would fail because they'd made this key mistake. Remember, we once had a client, they sold dresses or they wanted to sell dresses, £2,000 per dress, selling through e-commerce, completely unknown brand. There was no story behind the brand. There was no justification for this price other than Gucci does it. Well, if people buy Gucci dresses for $2,000, they will buy my

1:46:11dresses for $2,000. They will not. They did not. They still don't because Gucci has put all of their marketing dollars, the effort, the energy, the sponsorship, the endorsements, the runway shows, the ads, building that credibility, building the perception. You are buying a piece of that credibility. You're buying into the club when you buy a Gucci. You are not just

1:46:39buying a dress. Same with Patek Phipe. If you're going to have a luxury price point, there needs to be some sort of justification. So, it can either be emotional. It should really be emotional on some sort of level. It can either be this sort of intangible, yeah, but everyone's got pate or everyone who I look up to has pate or it should be

1:46:59justified based on like hard facts. Well, the reason this water bottle, for example, cost £100. But the reason this water bottle cost £100, the reason it has a luxury price point isn't because they just decided to stick £100 price tag on it. It's because it's got a UV thing inside it which cleans it. So, it's constantly clean. It's sterilizing the water through its UV lights that I don't know how much any of this is true, but they told me a story and I bought it and I bought it twice, right? They justified the price point. So, if we're going to sell out a price point, we have

1:47:32to. Now, telltale signs that you're making this mistake. If you have a super low conversion rate, right? People are coming onto your product, but the rate that they're adding to basket is low, that can often be that you've mismatched the price to what they're seeing the value as. And no matter what you try, you cannot get those products sold. Often that that is the price that they are seeing versus the value that they are seeing just doesn't match. Okay. Luxury price point with no justification. Mistake number one. Killer. If you're going to sell a luxury price, there has to be some sort of justification. Either logical water

1:48:06bottle or emotional part. Okay. Second mistake with pricing and value. an unnecessary commitment to being the cheapest. Particularly uh easy for beginner marketers to fall into this trap thinking that you have to be the cheapest because of some sort of inbuilt inferiority complex which makes you think that the only way people are ever going to buy or only ever going to trust you is if you cost less than your competitors. Now an example of this uh very recent actually this week a client at Exposure Ninja they're a sustainability focused brand they for some reason they are relentlessly price matching against unsustainable competitors so you know high street and

1:48:50big box retailers physical retailers they are price matching their sustainable e-commerce delivered products against you know a pile of stuff inside a Costco and their belief is that if we're going to sell this stuff, we need to be the cheapest or we need to be as cheap. It's totally erroneous because they're selling sustainability. That should be the thing that they're selling. That's their

1:49:14focus, right? That's the thing that they need to be pushing. So, it's either sustainability or its price point, but you don't need to be both. Now, you can be both, but you still have to pick a winner. You have to pick the one that is going to be that you're going to be leading with. And then the other one has to be sacrificed to an extent. So people will buy sustainability, they'll pay more for sustainable because they appreciate it has a greater cost to put this stuff together. It has a greater cost to ship it in a sustainable way. All this type of stuff. They don't need to see that it

1:49:44costs the same. And in fact, that can actually breed skepticism. You know, if you see it costs 15 p to carbon offset your Ryan Air flight to around the world, you're immediately skeptical about that because there's no way that that sustainability initiative can be so cheap. So it doesn't feel believable. So actually sustainability should come with a slight increase in price in order to be most believable. So this unnecessary commitment to being the cheapest. It trips up all sorts of people. People think that because they're a new business or because you know they're yet to get established, they have to be the

1:50:17cheapest in order to get any traction. That's not what it's about at all. You don't have to be cheapest. You have to be good value, but that doesn't mean that you have to be the cheapest. You could be the most expensive providing that you're providing the value. We'll talk about this in just a second. Now, telltale signs that you're falling into this trap. If you have unsustainable profit margins, spot the pun there, unsustainable profit margins. So, you know, we've had companies come to us that want to do marketing and they've got, you know, a one or two% profit margin or they're selling through e-commerce and they want to pay to run

1:50:45ads, but their profit margin is like 5 to 9%. And as soon as you start looking at the cost per acquisition of a new customer, you realize there's no way that they can afford to market their business. They cannot afford to grow because their margins aren't high enough because they're not charging enough because they're not communicating enough value to be able to charge a higher price. Does that make sense? So, you need to be able to communicate higher value so you can charge a higher price so that you can afford to market and scale the business. You need good margin in your business if you're going to

1:51:14maximize the marketing opportunities. Otherwise, you price yourself out of so many different marketing channels, particularly with lots of visibility on conversions from iOS. Um, now that third-party cookies are coming out, a lot of the time you won't actually be able to track your conversions so scientifically as you could in the past, which means that you've got to kind of take a gamble on some of this stuff. If your margins are razor thin, all of that stuff has to go. All of that stuff gets tanked as soon as there's any sort of recession or economic downturn. So, you need to really have some sort of margin built into the business. And mistake

1:51:48number three with pricing is matching competitors price with inferior offering. This is a variation of Gucci does it, but a lot of businesses do this. I remember a software client of ours many years ago also doing this. We're like, how do you come up with this price? Well, Salesforce charges this much. Yeah, but Salesforce is amazing. You're completely unknown and your feature set is like half of what it is and the thing keeps breaking and you're not even out of beta yet. Like there's no, you know, there's no match of value there. Um, lots of examples in drop shipping here. You get e-commerce stores selling generic drop ships. Uh we've got

1:52:25uh or we've had clients in the drop shipping space. Um often we turn away drop shipping businesses, this one included. Toys and Electronics, they're selling at the same price as Amazon, but you can get exactly the same product on Amazon. You can get it next day, but this store is selling it with four-week delivery time because it's coming directly from China and their website is completely unfamiliar. So whereas on Amazon, you've got an account, you can log in on the app and you can swipe to buy. one touch. On this site, you've got to go through a whole new client sign up process. Oh, and it's going to take four

1:52:54weeks to arrive for you, and there's no saving on price. Well, how are they going to compete? They can't compete. Their margins are thinner than Amazon, for one. The offering is completely inferior. There's no way that anybody would buy a product like this. And yet so many drop ship stores in particular will rush into digital marketing because they've been sold this dream of like e-commerce is easy, drop shipping is easy. All you need to do is just, you know, put a together a rubbish website and just throw on some random products

1:53:26and hey, you're a drop ship millionaire. Like because they haven't figured out where the position in the market is. They've just started from what's the shortest possible route to me having a business possible. even if there's no justification for the audience ever purchasing anything from me. So, they haven't got the positioning piece in this module sorted and it's never going to work. Now, telltale signs of this an obsession with shortcuts and hacks. If you find yourself being sucked into the latest digital marketing shortcut or hack, you find yourself kind of pushing against any suggestion that the marketing stuff might be hard work, that can be an indication that actually you

1:54:02might have an inferior offering as well because you haven't put the work in to find out what customers really want. And in most markets, winning that space, offering something that is genuinely better value, even if it's not cheaper, is hard work. You have to put in a lot of energy to do that. So, it can be very difficult to do that if you're obsessed and always looking for shortcuts and hacks. And also, if you have little affinity or interest with the business or your customers, you feel like you're not really not in it. You just want to make it and then like flip it or, you

1:54:31know, you just want to just run it on autopilot, passive income type thing, then often that's an indication you don't really have much affinity. You don't really care about what you're doing that much. And again, that can be very difficult to win long term unless you're really into this and you're putting the time and energy in because the reality is every successful client that we've ever worked with is obsessed with being better than everybody else in their space and it's very difficult to

1:54:57shortcut your way to being the best. Now, the final thing I wanted to share in this section is this rather pixelated chart. And this isn't an explosion ninja chart. I grabbed this online, but this is perfect, right? This is perceived price and perceived benefit or perceived value. I think perceived value is probably better than perceived benefits because that potentially indicates there's a number of benefits. Whereas it's just the overall value. So if you are high price, for example, number one is high price, but the benefits are

1:55:25great, right? The value is great. Great. They're on the line. That's a pretty safe place to be. Number two, mid-range price, mid-range benefit. That's also okay. Number three, low cost, low value. Yeah, but they're consistent, right? So, you're okay. All of those businesses will be steadystate businesses. They will grow. If you put the graft in, you

1:55:48can market them effectively. Now, yeah, but Gucci does it. 2,000 dresses. That is high price, low perceived benefit. Unknown brand. I don't get any of the Gucci credibility from wearing this dress. And yet, I'm being asked to pay two grand for it. That is number four. They will lose market share if they ever get any at all. Right? Because that there's a complete mismatch. But you can also have a mismatch the other way with number five. So high value, this is very disruptive. This is high value. This is like the software company has figured out a way to automate something that used to be very manual. So therefore

1:56:25they can sell it at a lower price, but it can be even better. Right? That's number five. So lower price than some in the market. and higher value. And that is the perfect place to be if you can, as long as your margins and stuff make sense. What you don't want to do is just sell at loss to be in number five place and win market share and then wake up and realize that you're burning through billions of dollars every quarter like Uber. Um, so so think about where you sit on this graph. Where does your business sit and where do you want to sit? How could you? By tweaking your

1:57:01positioning, by understanding what your reason for existing needs to be, by identifying what's most important to your target audience, crafting a tone of voice which really resonates with them, and by building an offering which matches price and value, how could you move yourself more towards five or at least providing more value than you're charging for? So, that is the first module complete. You've done it. So, in the next video, I'm going to talk you through the sheet, uh, the worksheet and just talk you through the questionnaire, which will help you work through some of this stuff. Hope you've enjoyed it. See you then. So, as we go along with these

1:57:39modules, you'll want to fill in your star marketing system worksheet. This is a spreadsheet guide that you can fill in and you can answer the questions and it will help you think through things. Now, the positioning questionnaire is the first tab in the spreadsheet and this is the companion for the first module, the positioning module. So in this tab are a bunch of questions which are designed to just get you thinking through the different concepts that we've covered in this first module. So we asked some

1:58:06fundamentals in one to two uh sentences. What does your business do and what is your primary marketing goal? These are just to get you kind of warmed up and thinking about actually what you want to achieve from this course and the one to two business uh sentence what does your business do? This is designed to get you thinking about how your customers would

1:58:23respond to your business description. We've then got the branding guidelines and you've got the exposure ninja branding guideline link there. So you can have a look at that and use that to you know whether you use it as a template for your own or whether you just decide to build your own whatever that's completely fine. There's an example. Then we've got some prompts in the reason for existing here as well. So got some questions that you can go through and I give yourself a bit of time to think through these because the more you write often find with these sorts of things the more you write it's

1:58:53like you start to get the surface level stuff out first but then if you keep going if you keep pushing you start going a little bit deeper. So, I just encourage you to go a little bit longer than you might usually in some of these answers and think through, you know, past that surface level stuff, the stuff that just rolls off the tip of your tongue to start getting to the real meaty stuff um inside your business. Now, when your customers contact you, what do they say they want is a really important question. We're not saying what do they want? We're saying what do they say they

1:59:25want. So this is about their language and it's also about what they perceive their problem to be. Okay. Um when executives go to the high performance coach, what they say they want is they want a more effective business. What they really want is personal therapy, [laughter] right? But if the executive coach sold personal therapy, they wouldn't get that resonance because

1:59:52that's not what people actually need. It's not what they really want. what they think they want is something else. You have to sell what people think they want and then give them what they actually need. Uh and then why do people choose you over your competitors? [sighs and gasps] What I'm trying to get to here is tangible reasons why someone should choose you. Okay, tangible reasons. So this water bottle is superior because it cleans the water and it cleans the bottle. That's a clear reason and then

2:00:17it can justify higher price later on. There's some questions about target audience. Uh the tone of voice sheet as well. Um there's a link there to the different uh languages and you can choose your um your different uh your different conversation styles based on these options and you can work out which section is going to resonate most with

2:00:37your audience. Uh so that you've got that for um for you know if you're working with copywriters or you're working with a marketing company or whatever. Uh we've also got who do you stand for, what do you stand for, what do you stand against. Again think deeper with these. And then you've got offering against your competitors. So this is talking about how you're different to your competitors and trying to work out what the priceable what the clear value differences are between you and your competitors. Okay. So competitor water bottle dirty filthy whatever. This water

2:01:12bottle clean. uh competitor water bottle. Another one might be um you know smaller whereas this one is big. Right? So what we're trying to do is think how we're different these competitors in a way that we can actually ascribe value to. Right? So it's not just oh yeah this one's black and the other one's white.

2:01:32There's no value associated with that. Has to be some sort of value that value uh in the eyes of your customer. Then where are you priced compared to others in your market? So think of the graph. Then what differentiates you before a customer purchases, during and after. So this is about thinking through the purchase process and how you can stand out against your competitors at each stage. Okay? So when you buy something on a luxury e-commerce store, for example, often your experience of that purchase can be very different. You might have to sign up um to some sort of

2:02:05membership club first. Then you get access to the store. Then they send you a lovely email. They might send you some special gifts. They might send you something in the package as well. They might have fragrance the package like very different experience. So think through when someone is going through your uh purchase process what how you can differentiate at each different stage of that process. And if there is no differentiation between you and your competitors, maybe there you have an opportunity. So those are the um the questions and the prompts in the positioning questionnaire. Enjoy them

2:02:40and I will see you in module two. I get it. Your business is sophisticated. You have expertise and lots of it. Your customers are a discerning bunch of highly intelligent intellectuals smarter than the average bear or cat just like you. Your digital marketing might be underperforming because you're giving your customers way too much credit in the intelligence department than they deserve. But what if I told you that your customers are still clicking on links like this girl didn't know what's inside her? Not until they cut off her pants. Shocking. And baby ducks see water for the first time. Can you believe what they do? I mean, if you are

2:03:16curious like I was, they sip the water for a little while and then some of them jump in and have a little swim. But the point is that you might be turning your customers off by sharing too much of your expertise in your website and on your social content. And this happens more often than not. The businesses that think they've nailed this are often the ones that are most guilty of sharing too much expertise. Yeah, I hate to break it to you, but your customers might be stupider than you think. And if I'm right, it means that your website and social content is going to be generating

2:03:45less traffic and fewer conversions than it should be. So, let's get this sorted. But let's start with the story. and I'm going to change the client's business to protect their identity. So, we're working with this company and let's say that they're a consultancy firm that helps businesses buy other companies. Now, our clients had really deep expertise in this area. They know every aspect of buying and selling a business because they've been in this industry for years. They know it inside out. They know all the jargon. They know all the processes. They've done this loads and loads of times. So, of course, on their website, they wanted to share this

2:04:14expertise. They wanted to demonstrate that they are the gurus in this space. Perfectly natural, you might say. Of course, you might say, "Great idea," you might say. The trouble is that their customers are buying a business for the first time. Their customers don't know the jargon world. They're still on the starting line grappling with the basics. So, if our client shows up as a jargon spouting guru, that mismatch between the expertise levels is going to completely alienate their customers, meaning that their website's not going to convert as well, and they're not going to get as much traffic as they could be. Now, you might be watching this thinking, "Oh,

2:04:51they're crazy. How could they get this so wrong?" But let me suggest this to you. My guess is that if your business has a sales team, that sales team understands less about the products and services and the intricacies and the detail than the others in the company. Unfortunately, in many organizations, the sales team is sort of looked down on for this lesser level of knowledge. But that is probably wrong. Whereas actually your sales team or your customer support team might actually be the ones that are most closely calibrated to your

2:05:19customer's level of expertise. Okay? Okay, so there's really two areas where your customer being slightly stupider than you think can really hurt your digital marketing efforts. The first is when you have a technical content mismatch. Now, a little while ago, I needed to see a neurologist. And I saw a few neurologists, and I quickly realized that there are two types of neurologists in the world. The first type is what I'm calling the impenetrable guru. They understand deeply how your brain works, all the chemicals, all the functions, the triggers, and all of this type of stuff. and they love nothing more than sharing this knowledge with you as

2:05:51rapidly and as much detail as possible. The second type of neurologist is what I call the credible normal folk. Now, of course, they've got a really good level of neurology qualification and understanding. These people are still certified neurologists, but what they really understand is that the patient doesn't need to know all of the detail. The patient just basically wants to know what should I do? Now in business the tendency is to try and appear as the impenetrable guru to demonstrate everything that we know about our area of expertise in order to impress our potential customers and clients. But what actually tends to get the result is

2:06:26to be the credible normal folk. The person or business or brand whose expertise is condensed into something that the customer understands and values and we talk in their terms. Let's look at an example on this product page for a Samsung portable radiography unit, which is kind of like an X-ray machine that you can wheel around a hospital. Notice how the tone and the expertise of this content is not focused on the person who understands deeply the technology behind this machine at all. How they've positioned this product is basically how Apple positions an iPhone. They're talking about things like charging times, how long you can use it, how many

2:07:05pictures it takes, and how long it lasts on standby. They break down how this product helps you at different stages of your workflow by presenting each feature in ways that the customer understands. Everything is written in complete plain English. [music] You might think that you would never be able to buy a portable radiography unit because you don't have the expertise. But I can tell you that if you spend some time reading this product page, you'll be quite quickly convinced that this is an excellent product for your needs because everything is written in a way that you understand. They haven't focused on the technical details because they know that

2:07:40the technical details are not what sells this product. In another example, which is much more BTOC, these Alienware headphones are sold to gamers. A lot of headphone firms invariably end up talking about things like impedance, frequency response, signal to noise ratio, the materials used in the drivers. But the trouble is that none of this means anything to the regular customer. These headphones are pitched to gamers. And Dell has understood that to gamers, the most important thing is that they enjoy their games, that they're comfortable to wear, and that they freaking win. Check out this

2:08:11paragraph. What winning sounds like. Hear the enemy before they hear you, even from a distance. with Alienware immersive audio technology featuring our best-in-class custom tuned drivers, custom designed acoustic chambers, and custom fit ear pads that give you a wider and more dynamic sound stage both in battle and out. They're talking their customers language, and they're saying these headphones will help you win. All that technical gibberish and specification is buried at the bottom of the page because they know that's not what's going to sell this product. So, how about you? Can you say that your website, social, and blog content always ties back to your customers goals and

2:08:47the stuff that's most important to them? Or do you fall prey to the classic trap of sharing everything that you know about your product or service in the hope of impressing your customer? Now, sometimes you find a market that hasn't quite made up its mind about how much technical info it needs to share for its customers. And I think bespoke vitamins is one such example. So the pitch for bespoke vitamins is basically you fill in a questionnaire that asks you about age, gender, lifestyle, and any things that you want to fix like I'm always tired or I get grumpy or whatever. And they will then mix your vitamins for you

2:09:17and they typically cost more than if you're just going to buy a multivitamin that you take every day. So that's the pitch, but there's a spectrum of how technical you present this information to potential customers. So in the blue corner, we have a company like Bionic who shares fairly technical level information on their site and the site looks quite technical to try and back this up. So here we've got the different ratios of each vitamin for different types of people. We're showing them in

2:09:38milligs and micrograms, I think that is. We've got stuff here like 10 million possible formula combinations. Sounds complicated. We've got these charts. We've got the questionnaire here being presented. It kind of looks like a white paper. It looks quite scientific. We've got more formulation here as well. And the whole thing looks quite sciency. Now over in the red corner, we've got companies like Vitamin Buddy, which are pitched completely differently. It's

2:10:00bright colors. It's healthy. It's happy. It's saving you time. Find out what vitamins your body really needs and get your first 30 days on us. Start the quiz. There's no information here about million micrograms for each different type of person. It's just vegan friendly, made in the UK and gluten-free. How it works. Take the quiz, get your plan, choose your plan, receive your vitamins. Wham. They haven't built their credibility through sharing sciency stuff. They've built their credibility through sharing some of the sciency people behind the business. And then you've got companies in the middle of this spectrum, the purple corner, who are mostly just, hey, personalized vitamins, take the quiz,

2:10:33but then they do have a bit of sciency stuff in there as well. Now, I don't know what's right for this customer base. I don't know what the right answer is in this market. But if I was in this space, I'd be spending some serious time talking to customers and potential customers to find out where they were at, how much knowledge they had about this stuff, what they were looking for in a company. I might try and find someone who spends their time talking to these people. So, someone in vitamin sales or even staff at health food shops who might have spent their time advising customers and will be able to give you

2:11:03an indication of how the general public is calibrated and thinks about this stuff. The most dangerous thing I could do though would be to spend a year getting really stuck into building the personalized vitamin company, understanding the details of every aspect of it, and then going straight into writing copy for it or writing social content or designing the marketing strategy because I'm going to be completely miscalibrated to my potential customers. I'm going to have become the impenetrable guru during that time and I'm going to have lost my ability to talk in the language that my customers use. I'm going to bore them to death unless they've taken anti-boredom

2:11:37vitamins. And by the way, this is also another reason why having an outside marketing agency like Exposure Ninja can really help because we can give you feedback on this stuff based on our audience research. Now, of course, I don't want to minimize the importance of technical expertise when you're selling to a very sophisticated and technical customer, but I'm yet to see a business where their customer wasn't slightly less technically inclined than they originally thought. The second way this can hurt your digital marketing is if you're focusing your audience too narrowly. To explain what I mean, let me show you some examples. The first and most extreme example is Gary Vee. So if

2:12:07you don't know Gary, he has agencies which work with predominantly larger brands. So his target audience is like the chief marketing officer of Unilever. So why is the content on his YouTube page all about the path to happiness, three ingredients to success? This is where unhappiness begins. He realizes that YouTube is a flywheel marketing channel. I.e. the more visibility and the more engagement he gets, the more visibility and the more engagement he gets. A great way to appear on the radar for the CMO of Unilever is to appear in their YouTube feed with millions of views. This is very difficult for these people to ignore. It then sets him apart

2:12:46from all of his competitors. This content is a message for the masses to build visibility and get on the radar of a niche group. And to an extent, this is the model used by most social media influencers because all social media channels are basically flywheel marketing channels. Sally crow is an example on LinkedIn. So her business Elvest is an investment platform for

2:13:08women who have a lot of money to invest. But her social media content is general finance, leadership, and gender equality. This is a message for the masses to build visibility, knowing that that visibility is going to get her on the radar of her target customer. Now, this is the same on all social channels. As you build up that flywheel momentum by getting more visibility, you get more visibility from that and get on the radar of your target customers. Now, the same can be said with your website content and the stuff that you post on your blog. So, here we're looking at

2:13:38aabbrs.com. They are an insolveny practitioner firm. So, they help businesses that are going out of business to wind down and liquidate basically. Why have they posted this post which ranks for when is my VAT due? This is a really broad topic considering that their actual target audience is company directors who are probably about to go out of business. They even post stuff that seems completely unrelated to this like what small business grants are available for

2:14:03women. So what's the game plan here? Well, the game plan is to get traffic links and credibility. For example, this link from Iowa State University for that article about small business grants for women. All of this builds the site's authority and allows them to rank for higher commercial intent terms like voluntary liquidation. It's a message for the masses which increases their

2:14:23visibility amongst their niche audience. So had they just stuck to posting content for people that are right in the stage of liquidation, they wouldn't have had those links. They wouldn't have had that authority and they wouldn't have appeared in the game when that person searches for voluntary liquidation. It's a message for the masses that increases their visibility for their niche audience. and it's only happened because they're willing to not be seen as the impenetrable guru spouting technical jargon and demonstrating how much they

2:14:51understand about their business. In this module, we're going to be looking at presence and a model called the heavy lifting website blueprint. So, this is all about making sure that your website does what it actually needs to do and that it's not some inner pointless floating thing that's holding back your entire digital marketing. It kind of goes without saying that your site and the performance of your site is so fundamental to everything about your digital marketing because for most businesses, the performance of their website is the performance of their marketing. if they can't, you know, get conversions from their pay-per-click traffic, if they can't optimize their

2:15:32site to rank on search, it doesn't matter what they're doing with those channels. If the traffic's coming to the website and it's not turning into business, everything is pointless, right? So, in this module, we're going to be looking at how to make a great website which actually works. So, um what are the components or what does

2:15:53success in this area look like? Well, you want a brand and product or service to have a representative and attractive online home, your website that you control. Now, I've actually said online home because these same principles apply if you're driving traffic to say an Amazon product page or an Amazon business page or your Etsy store page or whatever. So, the same principles apply to those online homes as well. But for the sake of argument, most of the time today we're going to be talking about your website because for most businesses that is the thing that they are driving

2:16:28their traffic to. So three things there. Representative obviously it needs to look like you. It needs to include all of the elements from positioning from module one. It needs to be attractive. It needs to do the a good job of selling you. Now that doesn't mean that it has to be super high-end design as we'll look at later on. And you need to control it. and we'll talk about why this is so important. So, some of the metrics that can indicate that we have an opportunity or a problem in this area. Your web conversion rate. Now, as we said in module one, your web conversion rate can

2:17:04actually be influenced by lots of different factors, but certainly the quality of your website and the principles in this module can definitely influence your conversion rate as can your performance in analytics as can heat maps. We'll be talking a bit about um heat maps uh as well and the use of heat maps and how they can give us all sorts of information that we don't get purely from analytics and I'm going to be showing you some examples um and taking you through some actual heat maps so you can see uh how they can give us some really useful information and the time required to maintain your

2:17:38website also a very important consideration here. Okay. So let's look at the components of uh module two. Then this presence section. Firstly we have congruence. So congruence is making sure that your website actually represents your business. This sounds so basic and so straightforward but as I'll show you it's not as straightforward as it might appear. But basically, we want to make sure that all of the elements from positioning, that first module, all that great work that you've done around branding, your reason for existing, matching with your target audience, getting your tone of voice right, and making sure your offering presents your price and your value in a compelling

2:18:20way. We want to make sure that all of that is on your website. Otherwise, that stuff is kind of pointless, right? Next, we want to make sure, well, we'll come back to the other things when we come back to them, [laughter] right? So firstly though, we're going to start with an exercise. I want you to imagine that you're going to book a plumber. Now, I know we've talked about plumbers a lot. You might think I've got some sort of obsession with plumbers, but I often use plumbers as an example in these situations because we provide training and stuff for people in lots of different countries, but every country

2:18:51has a plumber and they call them plumbers. [laughter] So that's why we often use plumbers as a reference point. There's no um there's nothing more to it than that. So anyway, I want you to imagine that you're booking a plumber and you've got two different websites uh to go on or two different you you've got two different websites open. You've got to choose which one to contact. Now,

2:19:13which one of those looks more real? Which one looks more trustworthy? Who would turn up on time? It's not as simple, is it? It's not as simple as that one in uh in module one where we had the beautiful website and the really ugly homemade one because the homemade looking website here I actually full disclosure I designed that one on the right back in 2012 would have been maybe even 2011. It

2:19:43might have even been earlier than that. 2011 or 2012 I would have built that website for Jeff. And this website has done very well for Jeff. And in fact, there are a lot of trades sites out there that look like this, which I built. And one of the most curious things about trade sites is this idea of being congruent, right? I found that having a picture like that one of Jeff there where he's got his spanner out, he's like under the sink, increased conversion rate compared to

2:20:20the picture on the left. with, you know, Chad from the stock photo library with his hard hat on with his smart shirt on who doesn't look like a plumber. He doesn't look like he's ever done any plumbing in his life. So, the homemade picture actually sold more than the wellresented stock photo picture. Kind of makes sense, right? Now, what I'm not saying here is that your website needs to look rubbish. We saw in the first module how a site that sets a poor first impression actually can be really damaging to the impression that people have of your business. So this is not like you need to aim for lowquality

2:21:04design. If I was designing this site for Jeff today, it would look better than that. We would not be using that kind of drop shadow white effect on the background of the letters. That passed in 2011 2012. Fast forward to today, not so much. This is an old site and looks like an old site, but it's this idea of congruence. It's being consistent with

2:21:26what people expect this business to be. This is really important. If your site looks expensive, people will expect you to be expensive, right? Lowric shoppers will be put off because they will assume, ah, this site is expensive. That is not for me. They will disqualify themselves before they even contact you. and high price shoppers will be attracted because it looks expensive. That's what I want. If your site looks cheap, vice versa, the high price people are going to be put off thinking, "This looks a bit low-end." The price shoppers are going to be, "Yeah, this looks like a bit of me. It looks a little bit rough around

2:22:03the edges, which is exactly what I would expect at my price point." Now, if your site looks cheap, but your prices are expensive, this is when you have trouble because people who contact you will be high price uh sorry, you'll be uh low price shoppers. If your site looks cheap, they're going to contact you saying, "Hey, this looks like a bit of me, but a little bit rough around the edges." And will be horrified when your

2:22:23prices are expensive. Okay? The high price customers will have disqualified themselves because the site looks cheap. So, we need to make sure that your site is congruent with your business and where you sit in the market. And if being real is important to you, then you need to be real on your website. Here's another example. Um,

2:22:45this, you know, ties back to module one. We talked about target audience, understanding who your target audience is. And congrance is also about making sure that the images on your site reflect your target audience. Now, if you've ever tried to research dental implants, you will find these sorts of images on dentists websites. Okay. What do we see? What are the commonalities? Firstly, all the models

2:23:10are female, right? for dental implants. They all seem to be female. They're all, I'm going to say younger than what, 35 maybe, with quite a few of them being younger than 30. Some of them looking younger than 25. So, what's the trouble with this? Well, dentists use these types of images or or more accurately, dentist website design companies use these sorts of images because what they think they're selling is an aspirational image. They think that the typical dental implant customer wants to look younger. They want to look beautiful. They want perfect teeth. So,

2:23:47we need to use these sorts of images. What's the issue? This is not the outcome. This is not the typical customer that they want. The typical customer for dental implants doesn't believe that they will ever look like that because actually the average age of a dental implants patient is 52. These sorts of images are much more powerful, right? These are the target customer in a typical before and the target after

2:24:17the desired outcome. Very, very different set of images, isn't it? Very different set. And you can see how this sort of customer would be disqualified looking at images on the first page because they think, well, this isn't for me. Now, of course, if you're dental implants dentist, you do want to show a range of people of different ages because you don't necessarily want to discourage the younger visitor. But the important thing is here is to recognize that in the world of dentistry, the customer group for Invisalign and the customer group

2:24:50for dental implants are very different. Booper gets it. This booper page is brilliant for um congruence. That I wish I'd done this years ago feeling. That is exactly what they want that target audience to say. I wish I'd done this years ago is exact that I would imagine that would be a quote from one of their customers and they've done a great job of matching that customer and they've

2:25:17just stuck the testimonial on there. Whether it's a testimonial, whether it's a headline, doesn't really matter. It it's absolutely going to resonate with that audience. Okay. Um so we need to make sure that the images that we're using are consistent. So let's think about what makes a congruent website. We want to make sure that your site displays all of the Bravo elements from the progression module. So branding, first impressions, your reason for existing. Represent your target audience in the images that you're using. Use your tone of voice which you know resonates from your target customers and preferably has been derived from talking to your target customers. And then your offering

2:25:56represents the right mix of value and pricing. Even if you don't put your prices on your website, you need to be demonstrating the value that you add over your competitors who are at the similar price point on your site so people feel compelled to actually do business with you and reach out to you

2:26:12in the first place. You need your copy to meet people where they are. So, we kind of touched on this a bit with the target audience and the tone of voice stuff. If you can precisely describe your customers problems and repeat them back to them, that's a great way of building rapport. That I wish I'd done this years ago

2:26:36smile is is a perfect example of this. That is someone who's been putting off this decision, living with a missing tooth for a while, and then they finally get it done. So, they realize, booper realizes there that it's selling against inertia. It's selling against someone who's been thinking of doing this for years and they finally get it done and they think, "Ah, I wish I'd done that years ago." That's what they need. They need to reflect that sense of regret back onto the customer in order to spur them to make that purchase there and then. So, we need to meet your customers where they are, spit their problems back

2:27:08to them and show, look, if you're feeling like this, don't worry. We've got you. Reflect their pain and aspiration. Show that you understand. Show that you understand their ambition level. Show that you can be a partner for them. That you are part of that future that they're projecting that they're hoping for, whilst also understanding any pain that they might be going through now to show that you can help them with that

2:27:34transformation. And you need to propose a compelling low-risk solution which we'll cover in the next module in the process section. So that is congruence. Let's have a look now at convenience. So convenience is the next element. This is all about usability and the absence of hurdles. Um we're going to talk about one thing which is like absolutely fundamental and we're not going to spend a huge amount of time on it because it is just fundamental. Website speed. Okay. Now both Google and Facebook have declared that load speed has an impact on how visible a page will be on their platforms. Basically, no technology company wants to serve their visitors

2:28:16slow websites because every technology company wants to keep you in their app. If I'm on the Google app or if I'm browsing Google, Google needs to keep me on that app because as soon as I get bored, I'm going to Tik Tok and then I'm not coming back for another half an hour, right? So, they need to keep me on that site. So, to keep me on that site, they need to serve me fast websites because if I'm getting bored waiting 10 seconds for a site to load, it's all over. and then Google has lost me, not just you have lost me. Same with Facebook. They don't want people to have

2:28:46slow experiences in their apps. So, they're going to punish sites which have slow loading time. Now, another study by section.io found that pages loading in 7 seconds on average had a 3.4 times higher bounce rate than pages loading in two seconds. Okay? So, bounce rate being the percentage of people that land on a page and immediately leave. So if your site loads slower, you're going to have significantly more people bounce off than if it loads quickly. Okay. So what can we say? Well, we can say that site speed matters. Now, there's a couple of tools that you can use to measure your site speed. GTMetrics, uh, and then page

2:29:27speed insights, which is a Google tool. We've got videos on our YouTube channel about these, so I'm not going to go into loads of detail on like how to interpret the results on on all of this type of stuff. I'm also not going to be able to give you specific tips on how to speed up your sites because it's going to depend on your platforms and the

2:29:44particular problems that you're having. Basically, website speed is about removing stuff which loads slowly. There's not really much that you can do to like speed it up. It's just removing lot it's just removing slow stuff or speeding up the slow things. So, depending on what's making your site slow, you know, that that's the fix. So, there's lots of possible things. because I can't say right just go and press this button and click this to make your site fast. Um and even when we're working on client sites sometimes the fixes for site speed are quite intense. Um so it's not often possible to diagnose even very quickly. You have to go in and start

2:30:19fiddling with stuff in order to make it work. But there is one important caveat here is not to get obsessed with sight speed. There are better things to get obsessed with than sight speed. Uh we had a client last year who um really really was obsessed with their website speed to an unhealthy degree. You know, they they thought more about their site speed. They checked it multiple times a day on different tools with different uh you know, with different IP blockers to go from different locations and you know, the site loaded quickly. So, as long as your site loads quickly and when you're browsing around it, you're not

2:30:54thinking this is slow and it's reasonable on page speed insights. You might not be A+ on every single tool. That is completely okay. As long as your site is not like problematically slow, then usually you won't notice much negative effects of it. So, don't become obsessed with it. It's just one aspect of a successful site. It has much less impact than something like good quality headlines and a great proposition, but it is still important. You still need to work on it. Okay, let's talk about heat mapping. Now, heat mapping is a really useful tool. We love analytics. We love having the data and the, you know, the

2:31:30the stats on a site, but heat mapping can give you really good um qualitative information about how people are using your site. So, the heat maps that I'm going to show you are from Hot Jar, ho tj.com. hotjar.com. Great tool, pretty simple to use. Basically, you insert a snippet of code on your site and it tracks how people are using your site. It measures where their mouse is going and uh where they're clicking. It measures how far they're scrolling down the page and it shows you in a sort of visual map what's going on with your website. So what I wanted to show you was some heat maps

2:32:07from different sites to show you some of the most common patterns that we notice from reviewing heat map tools. Also in this course is included an interview with Joe who is one of our super super dev team and Joe is actually uh he's about to do a PhD at the time of filming this. He's about to start his PhD on conversion optimization, doing a whole bunch of really groundbreaking work on conversion optimization, user experience. Um, most of which has never been done before. So, we really, a lot of the stuff that we explain with conversion optimization is stuff that we have learned and it's stuff that we've

2:32:44observed over the years because there is no, you know, one single this is how conversion optimization works rule book if you like there are with some other channels. Um, so Joe is kind of working on putting that kind of rule book together if you like. So hotjar.com that's the source of these heat maps. But let's have a look at some different heat maps and see what sorts of lessons

2:33:07that we can learn. So here was a site I this site is a few years old now but really instructive and important lesson and demonstrates why heat mapping is so important. So this site um was uh we actually rebuilt this site and not least because of the results from this heat map. So this was a site that client had had built previously or built themselves and we

2:33:31rebuilt it to be much higher performing. But what you can see from this heat map is there's like a there's like a dark overlay. It wasn't this dark, but there's like a dark overlay and then the more people click on a certain area, the the darker the red. Okay? Okay, so the blues are clicks, the yellows are like lots of people clicking, and then the red is where loads of people click. So what do we notice about this site? Well, the first thing that we notice is the bar up at the top, the search bar, has quite a few clicks in. This is a hot zone. Now,

2:34:01anytime people are going straight to a search bar on a site, that can indicate that actually they find the navigation a little bit confusing or they don't fancy the challenge of the navigation. So either they can't find that they want through the menu system which is really where you want them to you want people to be able to use the menu system and you want it to be very straightforward to use otherwise people having to get their keyboards out on their phones or their laptops or their computer whatever and that's more work for them. We don't want to force our visitors to have to hunt and do work. So anytime we see a

2:34:35lot of people using the search bar, that can be a concern if there is a menu system that they should be using instead. But the other thing that you notice about this, the other thing that strikes you immediately is that the menu on this site is very short. It says home, about us, upload artwork, contact us, free brochure, FAQ. Then we've got some account stuff as well. Now, their

2:35:00product menu is all the way down here. So this is actually below the fold. This is below the page that would open on desktop. This would be a primarily desktop site. Very very B2B heavy um for banner stands and stuff. So this is this is businesses that are using this. This is marketers who are on their computers.

2:35:18Vast majority of the traffic is desktop. But we're putting the product menu below the fold. So people have to scroll to find the product menu. Now we can see this is a potential issue because we can see that these product category buckets we can see lots of people are clicking these. Now we can also see that people are clicking on this person's face which is a fairly common thing to do. People often click on a face. They're very clickable. But it's really this menu which is a is a big issue because this is not a compelling way to give people lots of different category options. It's quite

2:35:56hard work. There's a you'd be better off categorizing this um uh you know one level up. So banner stands uh exhibition stands you know portable st whatever. So one category then they click through and then they find something else. But where this layout really became an issue is when we looked at scroll depth. So scroll depth is how far people are getting down the page. And what you get when you analyze

2:36:23scroll depth is is an image like this. And this shows you what percentage of people are getting down the page. So this this white line that you may be able to see here, this is the average fold. So this is the average cutoff at the base of the site when someone loads it on desktop. And then we've got these little um kind of triggers or

2:36:42thresholds. So 75% of visitors get here. So what that means is that 25% of people don't score below the fold at all. Okay, 25% of people have already dropped out by this stage. So 25% of people have dropped out before they even see a full line of these product images here. 50% of people have dropped out by this stage. But look, that is exactly where their product menu starts. So this sidebar menu, which is the main menu on their site, half of the website visitors have left the site, have given up before they've even seen this menu, let alone clicking on it. And if we look at the

2:37:27number of clicks, they're really, really low. So, we completely flipped this site and instead made this menu the main menu with a drop-down with categorization and subcategorization to make it really easy for people to find the products for them. So, they don't have to go through search, they don't have to scroll down miles. This is some of the insight that you can get uh with heat maps. Now, here's another example. Um, this is a this is a good menu. This is exactly what we want to see. We want to see a

2:37:56relatively small number of menu options. Uh this is a site that does um replacement windows and doors. And what we can see here is we can see they've categorized their products under windows and doors. Now you want to give people easy options to choose from. Let's say I need a new type of window. Now on the surface right now, I might not know what type of window I know I need, but I know it's either going to be a window or it's going to be a door. So when I hover over this, I can see a drop down and I can start to c start to

2:38:26subcategorize myself. Okay, so is it wooden or is it uh is it, you know, metal or plastic or whatever the thing windows are made out of that like weird plasticky type stuff. And then I can categorize myself underneath that is like a sash window or something else or folding window in all different types of windows. You can allow people to just make a series of obvious decisions in order to get to the thing that they want. Rather than just give them, right, here's 40 different things. Some of them are relevant to you, some of them aren't. Just dig through, see what you can find, see if you can find the right

2:38:56one for them. That's not helpful at all. What we want to do is give them a series of obvious options so that we're never asking them to choose between more than we usually work from a maximum of seven different options. We're never asking them to choose between more than a maximum of seven. and it's very easy for them to make each decision. So they can go down this kind of decision tree. So this is a good menu system. And notice that there's a get a quote button up at the top here as well. So we know that people are doing exactly what they should be. And by the way, this kind of

2:39:26tail down here, this is people clicking on the submen items underneath. So when they click on that, it's a drop down. Then you see different menu items and you can see where people are going to be clicking on those. So that's a good menu. picks up a lot of attention. This one is a bad menu because people don't even get to it and people are asking in the search bar instead. So that's some of the sorts of

2:39:49stuff that you can see from heat maps. Here's another example. This is a product page. Uh so very relevant for our e-commerce uh viewers. Now what we can see from this for example is that the product images are very very important to purchases because actually most people are clicking on the product images. um they want to see more pictures. So what we would do in this sort of stage, 40% of the clicks on this page are actually on more images. What we would do on this sort of page is we look at what featured image we're using and see if that and see testing a different one to see if we

2:40:23could get something which meant people didn't have to flick through so many different images. Or we might show a product video. If we know the images are important, people want to see how this thing works. There are some unanswered questions about the description. We want to give them as much visual info as possible. So maybe a video would help with this so that they can make a really

2:40:41easy decision. Okay, here's another example. Now, we're going to talk about mobile friendliness and heat maps can also help us with mobile friendly sites. Obviously, it's fundamental that your website works on mobile and that it works really well on mobile. In the worksheet, you'll notice that there's a checklist item called mobile content priority matching desktop content priority. And here's what that means. So on this website, uh, which is a software firm, I believe software client of ours, um, you can see

2:41:18there's three different pricing options. Pretty straightforward. Uh, on desktop you can see we've got the startup, which is the cheapest one. Then you've got the next one, startup plus, which is the more expensive one. And then you've got the scale up on which is the most expensive. By the way, if you're wondering why all the numbers have asterisks, it's because Hot Jar does that automatically. So that if someone's on a website filling in a phone number, it wants to asterisk it out so that there's no user data breaches. So it does things like asterisk out um phone numbers and email addresses, any sort of personal data. So that's why it's just

2:41:50blanked out any numbers. That's not what the website actually looks like, by the way. But you can see on desktop this is following a pretty standard format. We've got the banner on the most popular one that is clearly, you know, we we're trying to anchor to the most expensive one and the cheapest one because we know

2:42:07that people will choose the middle one. So that's pretty good layout for that user, right? For getting people to sign up. And we can see the heat map is showing us most people choose that option on desktop. So, what about the layout on mobile? Well, something really interesting happens on mobile because this is a responsive design. And because the startup plus the middle option is now pushed below the fold and isn't open on page load, the startup one goes to the top of the page as you would expect with a default

2:42:44um with a default responsive layout. What this ends up meaning is that most people are now clicking and most people are starting their free trial on the least expensive option. So for this business, the content prioritization on mobile doesn't match desktop because actually they want to prioritize the middle option. So put the middle option at the top if you know that you're going to get most people signing up for that because it's at the top. Okay. So this

2:43:10is what we mean by content matching. content um prioritization matching. Obviously, the impact of this is that they're going to get less revenue because people are signing up for lower trials on mobile, not because the lower trial is the one to take. It's purely because it's appearing first and they're just clicking. Okay. Um here's another example. Uh this I mean there's loads wrong with this site. This is a this is a really this is one of the worst examples of mobile content mis prioritization I've seen. Um, this is a

2:43:42very low converting website, by the way. Very homemade website from a business that had a relatively unclear proposition. Notice how the mobile layout, look at the content. So, what you're looking at is sequential screens on a mobile. So, you'd be scrolling. You'd see the first column, then you keep scrolling this column. So, this is the same page, but I've just broken it up into sections for you. And what you can see from this is

2:44:06this is a service page on their website. So, the question you would have is, what is this business doing? what's the service for me? But look at this. We've just got information about the organization here. We've got people's pictures. We've got their personal bios. More pictures, more bios. It's all self-indulgent focused on us stuff. We have to scroll what, like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven page scrolls before we even get to what this business does. So on desktop this might be fine if you've got like a sidebar or something which talks about you and the information about your business is on the right hand side but

2:44:46then when you move that to mobile and it goes responsive all all of a sudden all that information that's on that right hand side gets pushed right to the bottom of the page and it means that people just get this totally different impression of what the site is about. So 58% of people leave without even learning what this business does. Um which is uh difficult. It's difficult to

2:45:09make those numbers work. Let's say. Okay. So let's look at some other convenience elements because really convenience is about making sure our site is as usable as possible for our target customers. You've got accessibility tests. And I've linked a great one in the worksheet. And accessibility is really important. This is about making sure things like the color contrast on your site are okay for people who are partially cited. It's about making sure that your images have alt tags so that if someone is using a screen reader, so a piece of software that reads out what's on the screen because they can't see or that, you know, they've got visual impairment,

2:45:45that it reads out what's on the images. It's about making sure that uh your elements aren't too close together. It's about making sure that your font size is appropriate. So these accessibility tests are great to help partially cited people on your site. And don't just assume, well, none of our customers are like that because lots of people have accessibility tools that they use um on their browsers. Even if they don't have like a severe disability, they'll have accessibility tools that they're using on their browsers. So you don't want to, you know, um you don't want to reject any any portion of potential customers just because they have some sort of

2:46:19disability that your website hasn't catered for. uh one-click navigation to all pages. This is the kind of holy grail. This is about making sure your menu system kind of cascades. So, if you've got a mega menu system, if you've got loads of different uh products or category options on your site, or if you've got

2:46:37um dropdowns with dropdowns after them. So, it means that people can navigate by just moving their mouse or tapping their finger and then click through to the ultimate page that they want to find on your site. That's ideal. What we don't want to do is force people to, you know, click on one category, opens the entire page, click on another subcategory, opens the entire page, click on the product, opens that page. You might have to do that, but you don't really want to do that because then you've got like three different page loads and if each one takes a few seconds and a bit of navigation to find and quite quickly,

2:47:12you've built up a long user journey there and that risks putting people off them getting bored. Whereas if you can give them, you know, menu, if you can help them get there just through going to the menu system and they can get straight to their final destination, happy days because that's only one page

2:47:27load. Um, you also want live chat and site search analysis. So what we mean by this is if you've got live chat on your site, it's a very good idea to have it on your site if you can possibly manage it. Um, if you've got live chat on your site or if you've got a site search bar, have a look at what people are asking for and are they asking for, you know, do you sell this? And you're like, yeah, of course we sell this, it's just on this page. Well, if a lot of people are asking, do you sell this? What they're telling you is your site convenience is

2:48:01poor. Because they should be able to find that right now. Of course, you're going to get lazy people who just like, you know, people who just walk straight to the shop assistant in a shop and say, "Hey, do you sell this?" and they're like, "Yeah, it's you just walk past it. Why don't you actually look with your eyes?"

2:48:15So, you're going to get some of those. If you get a lot of people saying, "Do you sell this?" Or worse, "Do you like they asking some fundamental question about your business?" We get you we used to get people getting really confused about Exposure Ninja. Like, do you actually do marketing for businesses? Like, wow. Are we that unclear with our proposition and with our content on our site that they can't even figure out whether we do marketing for companies or whether we're just an information business? That's mad, right? So it was that live site s that live chat and that site search analysis digging through this sort of information on your site to

2:48:54see what are people searching in our search bar. What are people asking for on our live chat and is there any implication there about how we need to make our site easier for people to navigate? Um echoed calls to action. So this is about making sure that if you've got a call to action at the top of your site, this is particularly important for a service business that wants to generate leads. If you've got a call to action at the top of your site that says something like book a free consultation, and we'll talk about this in the next module, what to what to put in that box. But if

2:49:22you've got a call to action at the top of your site that says book a free consultation or whatever. If someone doesn't request that consultation in that box, do you then echo that call to action further down the page? Because if you don't, unless someone is ready at the top of the page when they scroll down, they might have forgotten that you were offering that thing or they might not have been their radar might not have been up the first time you showed it to them. Whereas by the time they get midway down the page or towards the bottom of the page, now they might be

2:49:52ready to convert. If you haven't echoed your call to action throughout that page, you are going to lose some conversions. So if you've got a CTA, make sure it's echoed. Make sure you don't just show it once on the page or you have it, you know, scrolls down the page with the visitor or whatever implementation you can, but you never want your calls to action to be too far away from where the visitor is, wherever

2:50:15they are on the page. Uh, you also want to mystery shop your calls to action as well. Particularly important if there's some sort of integration with your sales team. So, making sure that the connection between once I fill in this form or once I purchase this thing, what happens? How long does it take? Would I get confused? Does somebody get back in contact with me? You [snorts] know, I've just been on a a site today. I know the cost per click, it was for a consultancy, like a a financial consultancy firm. I know their cost per click for the sorts of keywords that they're bidding on is

2:50:49going to be 20 to30. So, I clicked on their site, filled in their form a few days ago. I booked an appointment with them. So, I converted. They missed the call day one. They missed the They then rebooked it, missed the call day two. I'm never going to do business with them. So, they're spending 20 to30 pounds per click. Let's say they've got a conversion rate of 10%, which would be amazing. They're spending 200 to£300 at least per lead. In reality, their conversion rate is probably half that. So, it might be spending4 to600 per lead. And then

2:51:23they're missing the calls. Imagine that. Crazy. So, make sure you're mystery shopping your calls to action to check that the handover between, you know, your website to what's actually happening on the back end is good, it works, people aren't getting stuck, there's no errors or timeouts, that type of thing. Really important. Uh, make sure that there is an obvious next step on every single one of your pages as well. So, we'll talk more about conversion optimization in the next module, but the goal of every single page on your website is to generate the lead or sale. Even if it's a seemingly arbitrary page, like your about us page,

2:52:01the goal of the about us page is actually to convince someone through your story that you are a good business to do business with. So, there needs to be some kind of call to action. You still want to generate leads through through that page. If you're an e-commerce business and you've got blog posts, for example, the goal of those blog posts really should be to drive people through to the product and category pages on your site. So, there needs to be next steps on every single page of your website. Otherwise, if you're forcing visitors to kind of dig through the information to find out how they should do business with you, that's

2:52:30low on convenience and you're going to get a reduced conversion rate. Uh really basic stuff like phone numbers need to be click to call. If you don't have click to call phone numbers on your site, then when someone's looking at it on mobile, worst case scenario is your phone number is part of an image on their site. And what happens then is they've got to remember the number, run

2:52:52over to their phone app and type it in. Sometimes when they go back to the phone app, the number that they typed in has gone. So, it's actually impossible to use. You want to make your phone numbers clickable so you can just tap it and then off they go. And email addresses also need to be, you know, click to email. Ideally, you'd be sending people through to contact forms rather than email addresses as well. Um, also something to watch out for is to make sure that your forms autofill. So, often this is about giving the form fields the right name. So, if you're asking for someone's first name, for

2:53:24example, that that form field needs to be called first name so that when they're using it, say on their phone, it would just autofill. Particularly if you're on like Safari or sometime something like that, you can get autofill to fill in your entire form for you. makes it much easier for someone to become a lead than if they manually have

2:53:42to type in all of the stuff. Particularly if they've got a long email address, they're having to type in their email address in your form. Nightmare. So, make sure that you've got autofill. If you're an e-commerce firm, you need to have payment integrations with stuff like Google Pay, Apple Pay, uh, Cler, PayPal, you know, Amazon Pay, Shop Fay, Shop Pay for Shopify, all of these kind of one-click payment things just make it

2:54:09so much more convenient to check out. The the goal of this section really is to remove hurdles between the customer and giving you money. Okay, now we've rattled through the convenient stuff because a lot of it is also the next stage. Uh the next module touches on some of these things as well. Okay, part three of presence. We've looked at congrence. We've looked at convenience, the usability, and the absence of hurdles, removing hurdles, removing

2:54:37friction. Now, let's look at content. Now, in some ways, I've got a bit of an issue with the word content. Some people who've been following me for a while know this. I was mentoring a guy and he always used to rib me for this. I don't like the word content because it kind of it's like listening to a great speech, you know, a great rousing speech and just saying, "Yeah, that's just sound, right?" Content can mean just garbage boilerplate text copy or it can mean the most beautifully written compelling sales copy in the world. It can mean a fantastic promotional sales video that builds amazing rapport and gets loads of

2:55:18information across or it can mean total garbage. So I think the danger of the word content is that we dismiss it as like a a utility rather than actually something that can be really powerful and really effective in our marketing. Um main website content mistakes that people make things like making their sales copy too short, right? the the the content on their pages, making it really quick because they're like, "Nobody reads copy." Well, you know who reads long form copy? Buyers, right? Gary Halbert, if you don't know him, fantastic market. He's got this great quote. Sales copy can't be too long, only too boring. Now, people will say,

2:56:00um, "Nobody reads, nobody reads lots of words on a computer screen." I will tell you, people do read lots of words on a computer screen. If you've ever sat and read through, you know, a 20 tweet Twitter thread or if you've ever read an amazing engaging interview with someone on a computer screen, I can tell you people read a lot of content on their computer screens. People don't read a lot of text on a website if it's boring or if it's presented in a boring way. So, we have to make sure it's broken up. We have to make sure they're great subheadings. And we have to make

2:56:34sure that the copy is interesting and relevant to them by tone of voice, right target audience, positioning, all that stuff from module one. A big mistake is a lack of signpost, headings, and subheadings. This is something that the usability test will also flag if you're using headings correctly. So your main heading at the top of the page, your H1, this describes what the page is about. This is the uh

2:57:01the VAT accounting service in Bristol. That is the the main H1 heading. And then under that we've got your H2 headings which are kind of subposts. They're signposts so that if someone is scanning that page, they can find the information that is most relevant for them. So a question I might have on that VAT accounting service in Bristol, I might have a question, what size

2:57:24businesses do you deal with? Right. Well, the next stage two says small and mediumsiz company VAT accounting. I'm like great, relevant for me. Small and mediumsiz business. If that's what resonates with me, if that's the language I'm using, I know this is relevant for me. If I want more information, I can read the copy. If I don't, I can scan through to the next heading. So, those signpost headings are a great way of helping people find the

2:57:46information that they need. uh too much jargon, not matching the target audience's language, not matching the phrases that they use, talking in our own language. If it feels impenetrable, it feels boring, it feels um kind of difficult to, you know, to get through, to dig through, to understand. I was sent a website the other day. We had a good laugh with Exposure Ninja. None of us could actually figure out what the website was even about. There was so much jargon. It

2:58:15was just it was totally impenetrable. Now, this business actually they help people. It looks like they help people kind of configure this or be more productive, but we we you know, we couldn't figure it out. They're thinking they're really clear. They're thinking they're being offthe-wall and clever, but actually it's so confusing you can't even get close to it. So, make sure that you're using your target audience's language back to them. you know, a great salesperson when you whenever you talk to a great salesperson, if you go into like a kitchen showroom and they say, "So, you

2:58:45know, what are you really looking for?" And you say, "Oh, you know, we're looking for a kitchen where we can entertain our friends and we can have people around. We've got a big island where we can do lots of prep and we can look out and see everyone." Now, if you're talking to a great salesperson, they are logging those phrases. So, when they show you, well, okay, let me show you this kitchen. That's a great kitchen because great place to entertain all your friends and they're using your keywords back at you, right? They're using the language that you use. They're

2:59:15just spitting it straight back to you. And that's great because they know that that's going to resonate. They know that's going to land because you just used it. That's what you want to do with your website content. That's why you've done the customer calls from module one. You've got that phrase bank of phrases that your customers use. Then you can just stick them straight on your

2:59:33website. You know they're going to land. you know they're going to resonate with that customer because that customer has just given them to you. You're just spitting them straight back at them. Um here's an example of a site which does a lot of this stuff well. So there's actually quite a lot of content on this site content. There's quite a lot of text on this site. Copy sales copy. Um but it doesn't feel difficult. It doesn't feel difficult to read because it's broken up. Okay. This is also a heat map. I wanted to show you this because there's a whole bunch of stuff going on here. We've got um echoed calls

3:00:07to action throughout the page. You can see no obligation consultation. Even right at the bottom of the page there, we've still got clicks on the free quote form. Even though very few people ever get to the bottom of a long homepage like this, those that do are quite serious. Um we've got a good amount of menu usage. We've got some good CTA usage. We can see people are using the promotional video. Um but we've also got this idea of copy, right? You can see we've got uh sections almost like service buckets about the different

3:00:34types of driveway project that they do. Um we've given them headlines so people can find the right area for them. Then we've given them some subcopy. So this is great for visitors because it allows them to qualify themselves a bit more. Um for over how many years we've been doing these commercial road servicing projects. that gives them credibility which incentivizes me to click if that's relevant for me. Also really helps with search engine optimization because Google can see there's loads of content on this site. But you can see there's no

3:01:06one kind of block of massive text. Everything is broken up with subheadings so you can find the stuff that's most easy for you to read through, including this type of stuff here. That's a pretty good example. Um lots of subheadings and uh testimonials. actually also using we're using testimonials to say the things that we can't really say about ourselves which is a technique you'll you'll hear us talking about a lot. So very professional service. We wouldn't hesitate to recommend your company. My new driveway looks fantastic. Well, we could say drive our driveways look fantastic. Much more compelling to use a

3:01:41testimonial to say exactly that. Right. It's that booper site from previous. I wish I'd done this years ago. Yeah. Use your customer testimonials to say things that you can't. Okay. Uh, next element of the presence, the heavy lifting website blueprint is control. Now, there's not actually a huge amount to say about control other than you need it over your website. This is such a stumbling block and it's honestly it's I started Exposure Ninja because I got really upset with people being sold dodgy SEO by

3:02:16Yel Yel.com. Right? I'm just going to say how it is. I got really upset with these tradesmen being ripped off by Yel selling them rubbish SEO. And the thing that really upsets me today is web development companies selling websites to businesses where that business has no control over that site. The web development company

3:02:38is the gatekeeper. They own the site. They built the custom platform, whatever. Now the business is a kind of hostage or the website is a hostage and no one knows how to edit the site. This is a real issue with digital marketing because you need to be able to control most elements of your site. To not be able to control your website is like I don't know. It's just bad. I was trying to think of a parallel. There is no

3:03:06parallel. It's an absolute deal breaker. We've just signed up a client actually and we're digging through their website for the first time. Amazing business, but we can see the site is an absolute monster. So, we're like, great, there's loads of stuff to fix on here. is what it's kind of what you want to see. You want to see a really poorly performing site, really underoptimized for SEO, um, looks pretty dreadful, loads of missing stuff. We know we can get that site really fixed up and and working really well. But the trouble is they don't have control over the site. The web development company has built it in some

3:03:39custom platform which has no, you know, friendly backend for us to get access to. So everyone's locked out. So what their options? They just spend 20 grand on this thing and they're basically their options are don't work on it and never progress to digital marketing or get it rebuilt and they've just had it

3:03:59done. So it's really really a big issue. It's an absolute deal breaker because if you can't control your site, you can't do the stuff that we're talking about. So here's some of the things that you need to be able to do. You need to be able to add page content. So, add copy to existing pages, add videos, add images to those pages, change the layout of those pages. You need to be able to add blogs. If your site doesn't have a

3:04:21blog, you need to be able to add a blog. Relatively straightforward. You need to be able to update images, change them around, you know, change your sliders, all that type of stuff. You need to be able to change headings, the headings at the top of the page, but also do things like add new pages. You need to be able to add pages and choose where they sit in your menus. You need

3:04:40to be able to create new menu systems. You need to be able to create parent and child menus so you can have a drop-down with subpages and sub menus underneath those. You need to be able to update your metas, your page titles and your meta descriptions for SEO. You need to be able to do the other on-site SEO stuff like controlling which pages are being indexed, which pages aren't. Like you need control over your site. So what we tend to recommend is that people use established platforms like WordPress, Shopify, stuff like that that is proven that has a high percentage of internet share. Having a high percentage of

3:05:19internet share like WordPress at one point powered 25% of the internet. I think Shopify is like a third of e-commerce or something like that. Like once you get to that scale, they've built a platform which people like. And if people like it, that means it performs well, right? You can market it properly. If it's some really unknown small independent platform, it hasn't passed that test yet. It

3:05:46hasn't been verified by a lot of people. And if you're competing against something like Shopify or WordPress, chances are you're going to struggle. There have been a lot of e-commerce competitors, a lot of e-commerce platforms that have come and gone against Shopify over the years and in the end they can't compete. So, they drop off. And what happens when they drop off is they don't just shut the

3:06:05platform, they just stop updating it. So, you get a whole bunch of people who have their sites built on these platforms that slowly go out of date, broken functionality. you know, someone changes the next to the next generation of PHP on their server and the whole platform breaks because, you know, their their you know, their their e-commerce platform hasn't been updated to work with that and it just becomes this cascading devolution into hell where your site is slowly falling apart and pieces are breaking off and there's nothing that you can do. So, pick a big platform to go with and pick something where you've got control and make this an absolute

3:06:43deal breaker. If you're getting a new site developed, ask the firm, "Who's going to control this? Can I take this away? If all of your entire company dies, what happens with this site? Can I easily find developers to work on it?" And if the answer is no, run a mile. Don't stop running until they're completely out of sight. like the little girl in in Glorious that film where she just keeps running and keeps running and doesn't turn back. That's what you need to do if someone tries to sell you a site on a custom platform because it is almost always a total nightmare. Okay, so in this module um you'll see that

3:07:18you've got two different checklists here. You've got your main website presence checklist. Um so this takes you through the three elements of this and asks you questions in a checklist here. So, this is designed to prompt you to get you to think about what you might need to improve in each of these areas. You'll also notice there is a a landing page checklist. So, this is um a very kind of general farreaching checklist that we use at Exposure Ninja when we're running a campaign on a checklist. Uh sorry, when we're running a campaign on a landing page to check that it is fit for purpose. So, this will help you go

3:07:56through each of the different elements. This is important for landing pages where you're going to be driving cold paid traffic to that page. So, this is cold traffic that has no prior knowledge of the business. If you're driving that sort of traffic to a page on the site, this is a checklist that will help you make sure that that page is ready for that traffic. So, it's marked as advanced because this is optional. You don't need to use it unless you're going, you know, you're building landing pages and also, you know, this is like a good kind of overview of everything. But if you want something specific for

3:08:27landing pages, there is an extra uh landing page checklist in there for you as well. So, make sure you go through this, make sure you give it enough time, and of course, you need to implement the stuff from this because the goal isn't just to fill in the sheet to the best of your ability. The goal is to actually implement the stuff on your website. The stuff in presence is usually really high priority. So, when you're sticking it in your prioritization uh thing, remember that any changes to your website are usually more important than changes to your traffic strategies, unless your traffic strategies are wasting money because anything that you

3:09:01do across your website will have an impact to your existing traffic that you are already getting. So, it's usually high priority stuff. Everything is copy. Whether it's words on your website, the writing used in your ad, captions on your social media post, the messages that you send to customers and clients, copywriting is persuading people through language. And really, that is fundamentally what marketing is all about. So, in this video, I'm going to share six copywriting tricks that every marketer should know. Good copy sells more, and it always has done. Right at the start of my marketing career, I really got fascinated with some of the greats of the advertising and marketing

3:09:42history if you like. People like David Oglevie, uh John Caples, Claude Hopkins. These are people that operated at a time where marketing technology was minimal. They didn't have Facebook ad audiences. They didn't have retargeting pixels. All they had were magazine or newspaper ads and long- form sales letters sent through direct mail. Copy was the star of the show. Now these days there's so much attention in marketing on the technology on the media buying side of the marketing world. So this is the Facebook ads how we get the message out to clients and customers. But really what's often forgotten is the copy, the actual message that we are communicating

3:10:25with these people. And what's most fascinating about copywriting is that the fundamentals of good copy haven't changed. In this video, we're going to look at some examples from the old greats. And we're also going to look at some very modern examples. And we will see that whilst the language might change, the particular words that are being used, the principles that are at play haven't [music] changed at all and will never change because fundamentally this is about persuading people to do

3:10:52something, [music] to take an action. Oh, I hope you're ready to geek out. I love this stuff. Copyrightiting trick number one is the use of meaningful specifics. Meaningful specifics, Tim, what does that mean? Let me show you a very good example. So, Apple are absolute masters at the use of meaningful specifics. This is their sales page for the iPhone 13 Pro, which is essentially the iPhone 12 Pro, but it's got a slightly better camera. It's a little bit stronger, and it's a bit faster. That's essentially the the gist of what they're selling. but they use meaningful specifics to make it feel like an absolutely [music] revolutionary

3:11:29product. So, here's the intro copy. A dramatically more powerful camera system, a display so responsive, every interaction feels new again. The world's fastest smartphone chip, exceptional durability, and a huge leap in battery life. Let's pro. Now, the use of the word pro is important. We'll come back to that later on, but I want to draw your attention to some of the very specific things that they're talking about here. So this phone is essentially the same as the last one, but what they do is they pitch very specific features and go into detail about them to make it feel completely revolutionary. For

3:12:04example, here we have the side body. This isn't just stainless steel. This is surgical grade stainless steel. The glass but it's not glass. It's a ceramic shield. tougher than any smartphone glass, which by the way covers the liquid retina display, which is basically a high resolution display with rounded edges, but it's not. It's a liquid retina display. Then we've got

3:12:28industry-leading IP68 water resistance. Why not call it splashproof or waterproof, right? Because this gives us meaningful specifics. Further on down we go, we've got this new camera. Um, what's great about the camera? Well, there specific details. [music] 2.2x more light through the wide camera, 92% more light through the ultrawide camera. So why do they go into detail when they could just say better camera won't smash so much when you drop it while you're on the toilet? Because these meaningful specifics give credibility. This is not about sharing the dull minutia that nobody cares about. is about identifying specific things and giving enough detail to paint a picture in the audience's mind of this

3:13:11being very detail focused and very very believable. Now I'm going to show you another example this time from Oglev on advertising. This is an ad uh written by David Oglevy's agency back in the 50s I think for a Rolls-Royce. Now this ad is fantastic. We'll show you a picture of the ad on the screen. Uh firstly we've got the image of the Rolls-Royce at the top. This car looks massive. The

3:13:33headline, genius, at 60 miles an hour. The loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock. Now, the ad itself is made up of 13 bullet points illustrating why this is the best car in the world. Okay? And all of these are essentially little mini stories about specific features [music] of the product. So, for example, bullet point number five says, "The finished car spends a week in the final test shop being fine-tuned. Here it is subjected to 98 separate orals. For example, the engineers use a stethoscope to listen for axle wine. Now, you could say that's an irrelevant detail that no purchase of a Rolls-Royce ever needs to know. But I

3:14:14would challenge you. They might not need to know it, but telling them that gives them a feeling of the QA and the attention to detail that goes into building this car. It's all about painting a picture and telling a story through these meaningful specifics. So, here's your question. If you are better than your competitors, how specifically are you better? What are the specific details of your product or service that you can share with customers to give them an insight into how much you are better than everybody else? For example,

3:14:46this is a lightweight plastic tripod. Um, but if I said, "Would you like this lightweight plastic tripod?" You might think that sounds like a fairly cheap commoditized product. But what if instead this was an ultra portable tripod engineered from aluminium and technopolymer capable of withstanding the most extreme conditions on Earth? Well, technically that's true. That's exactly what this

3:15:14is. But it sounds completely different. A lightweight plastic tripod sounds like crap. Whereas an ultra portable tripod engineered from aluminium and technopolymer capable of standing the most extreme conditions on earth sounds like something that you would pay a premium for. It's the same tripod with the same features, but the use of meaningful specifics elevate it completely. Copyrightiting trick number two is to answer objections. Now most people are comfortable with the idea of answering objections, but treat this as a sales thing. Answering objections is something the sales team do. Well, I would challenge you. If you're not answering objections in your copy, people aren't even having a conversation

3:15:56with your sales team. We need to make sure that their core objections are answered before we even ask them to convert. Back to the Oglev ad. Now, this car looks absolutely massive. One of the objections that they will have faced is this thing looks like a ship. There is no way I could drive that. So, what they have done very cunningly, two of the bullet points right at the start of the

3:16:20ad, tackle this objection head on. Bullet point number three says, "The Rolls-Royce is designed as an owner driven car. It is 18 in shorter than the largest domestic cars. They are taking that objection on headon. Yeah, this thing looks massive, but actually it's smaller than some, and it's been designed for you to drive." Bullet point number four, the car has power steering,

3:16:42power brakes, and automatic gear shift. It is very easy to drive and to park. No chauffeer required. Now, the no chauffeur required bit is really smart because there's an implication of luxury there that otherwise this is a chauffeer car. But the fact that they are taking those objections headon is really clever. So think through what are the objections that a potential customer might have to doing business with you or even just taking the next step in your sales process and are you answering those in your sales copy? Trick number three is to get your customers to say the things that you can't. Okay, I'm going to show you an example of this. So

3:17:20this is the Boom by Cindy Joseph range. This is a a business owned and run by Ezra Firestone, a fantastic marketer. And look at the product page on this site. The first headline that you see isn't the product name. I think that's the product name. This is the first thing that you see. Not exaggerating when I say these are the absolute best products I have ever used from Joen a

3:17:45Boomstick Trio customer. Okay. Boom. Desperately want to say this is the best makeup product that you've ever used. But they can't really say that cuz if they say that they come across a bit, you know, right? but they can use their customers to say it. Now, we've been using testimonials in ad creative for a long time. For example, in Facebook ads, if we've got a product which is maybe kind of difficult to explain or we just really want to sell the benefit, but we can't just make a huge claim ourselves, we'll use a testimonial that makes that claim or says the lovely thing about the product that we can't. This is also to

3:18:22an extent what a brand does when it shares an influencers's review of its product because the influencer is talking in a very compelling way saying the things that the brand doesn't want to. So rather than the brand saying that thing it can just share the influencers post which is why influencer marketing can be so effective. Now I've always been fascinated by weight loss marketing. It's a really interesting space, not least because we are basically selling to people that very often don't want to make any changes in their life at all, but they want a different result. So, a lot of marketing has to tread this very thin line between

3:18:56saying you don't have to change anything, which is of course not true, but they also want to sell the result that people are going to get. And Weight Watchers, or WW as it's now known, treads this line all day, every day. They are constantly telling their potential customers, you don't need to change anything about your life and yet you're going to lose weight in various ways. Here's a current ad that they're running which does exactly that. So again, they've got to be careful about what they can say, but they can get a customer to say, "You can eat bread every day and lose weight." The underlying message there is, "You can

3:19:30still do what you want to do, but you're going to get this result." So again, they're using the customer to say something that they can't or that they don't want to do. Four comes from Dan Kennedy from his excellent, excellent book, The Ultimate Sales Letter. This is my very dogeared copy, and that is to read your copy out loud. When you've written your own copy, particularly when you're reading it on a screen, the tendency is to miss out the glitches and the little bits that feel a bit weird cuz you know what it says. Whereas, reading it out loud makes you process it in the same way that the reader is going

3:20:04to be processing it. So, it's really good to read your copy out loud. Now, Dan in the salesletter book talks about one of his clients who would not only read the copy out, they were selling to blue collar workers. So, they would go down to a bar and they would read the copy out to the people at the bar who

3:20:23were basically their target audience. Now, of course, they were looking for things like, "Do these audience people have any questions? Are there any unanswered questions or objections that we need to cover in the copy?" But they were also looking for the golden response, which was, "Where can I get this? This sounds amazing." And that would tell them that they were on to a real winning proposition and they had some great copy. Reading your copy out loud also helps because it's much easier to read simple copy than complicated copy. And generally we want to write for a younger and less experienced audience than our actual customers because it's

3:21:00very tempting to write complex wordy copy if we have an educated customer. Whereas actually when people are reading something for the first time that stuff can be quite impenetrable. It can be quite difficult to consume. So generally we want to tone things down, use simpler sentences and write for a much more basic audience than actually our customers might be. Tip number five is to use scarcity. Now, Robert Ringer has a fantastic book called [music] Winning Through intimidation. And I know that the word intimidation doesn't exactly sound very, you know, PC, but what he's really talking about is intimidation tactics in copy. Now, one of the intimidation tactics is the use of

3:21:41scarcity. Scarcity is a well-known principle in sales. So, for example, if you have a limited supply of something, then you will let your customers know that you have a limited supply because if there's one thing people don't like, it's being told that they can't have something. So, that will increase their perceived value of it and their desire to get it. So, that's one element of scarcity. But another intimidation tactic is to say that most people will buy something to imply that this is a very popular choice, most people are going to get it. The implication there, of course, is that if you don't get it, you are an [music] outsider. There's

3:22:17something wrong with you. There's something weird. So, you can use this tactic in your copy to just imply that something is a very popular and safe choice. I remember listening to a story from a guy called Simon Coulson who was out buying his new Ferrari. And the Ferrari salesman was saying, "Well, do you want to buy these little flashing lights at the top of the steering wheel showing you when you need to change gear?" and he said, "Oh, that doesn't really sound like an extra that I'm

3:22:43massively going to use, so I'm okay." And the Ferrari salesman did a genius thing. He said, "So many people get this extra feature that if you don't, you might impact the resale value of the car." Kind of got you, hasn't he? What did you do? He bought the stupid lights, of course, because most people do. Now, there's actually an inverse force to this that you can use in your copy, and that is that not everyone is qualified to buy this. Back to our friends with the iPhone. Why is this iPhone called the iPhone 13 Pro? Why do they talk about Pro and why do they use

3:23:21Pro so much in their copy? Well, they do this because a small percentage of the population identify themselves as pro. This plays to their self-image. They see themselves as somewhat superior in some way. And this means that they are more attracted to this because it is not for everyone. This isn't for the mere mortals. This is for the pros. [music] I speak with fairly detailed knowledge of this audience. Now, I'm going to read you another old ad, this time from John Cable's book, Making Ads Pay. And this uses exactly this same principle. So, I'm going to just read you a snippet of it, not the whole thing. Now, the

3:23:59headline says, "A wonderful 2 years trip at full pay, but only men with imagination can take it." Now, as I'm reading this, I want you to think about how are they disqualifying people? How are they saying that not everyone is qualified for this? The ad says, "About one man in 10 will be appealed to by this page. The other nine will be hard workers, earnest, ambitious in their way, but to them, a coupon is a coupon,

3:24:24a book is a book, a course is a course." The one man in 10 has imagination and imagination rules the world. This is amazing. The leap of logic is only one person in 10 is going to be interested in this and is going to buy this. That is because they have imagination. That is because imagination rules the world. So they've made a link there between one in 10 will buy this. Those that do rule the world. It's superb. And of course, what does it do? It dismisses and ridicules everybody who doesn't get this as they are ambitious in their way. I mean, what a cuss on those people. A

3:25:06book is a book. You know, these are basic dumb stupid people. But, you know, this is not for the superior, the people who really rule the world with imagination. Isn't it amazing? So, look at how you can play to your customer's ego. How can you differentiate your customer from the people that don't buy and make sure that they feel special

3:25:27because they are buying from you? Copyrightiting trick number six, and this is really a super tip, is to make it entertaining. And the reason this is a super tip is because if your copy isn't entertaining, people won't even see the other techniques that they're using because they won't read it. As Victor Schwab says, more adults go to

3:25:45movies than to schools of instruction. The equivalent today would be that more people are flicking through Tik Tok in their evenings than they are reading detailed guides and going on Wikipedia to truly educate themselves. [music] We are all here to be entertained. One of my favorite modern copywriters is Frank Kern, and he advises people who are going to be studying copy to read trashy novels and tabloid newspapers because these are fantastic at getting and holding people's attention, often even if they're in very distracting environments. Now, the first step to making your copy entertaining is to think about your headline. Now, we're going to show you a page of Google

3:26:25search results, and I want you to think about what's the first thing that you notice on this page.

3:26:36Probably the headlines. What do you notice first about this page? Probably the headline. Right now, according to Copy Blogger, eight out of 10 people read a headline and only two out of 10 people will read the body copy. Now, I was actually in two minds about adding that stat because I don't know where they got it from or what it actually relates to. But if you watch any eyetracking surveys, then you'll see a very similar thing where people do go straight to the headline. And if you do the flash test, then it's consistently the information in the headline that is most easy to recall. Now, often with

3:27:05digital marketing, there are competing forces for our headlines. For example, on a page like this where they would want to rank this page on Google for camera backpacks. So, they can't just look at this as a pure copywriting exercise, it also has to be an SEO exercise. But actually using your target keywords as your headline can make it very compelling because don't forget if I just typed in camera backpacks and I found this page and I see the keyword camera backpacks that is exactly what I'm looking for. That is exactly the

3:27:36phrase that I've got going in my head. So I'm going to get this sense of ah I'm in the right place which is basically what a good headline can do. But let's talk about entertaining copy and what makes entertaining copy. Well, this ties back to writing conversationally, writing how you would talk. When's the last time you were having a conversation with someone and you just tuned out,

3:27:59walked off, and went somewhere else? Well, if you're my wife, it happens a lot. [music] That that's another story. But most of the time, our conversations keep us engaged because we're used to having a conversation with someone where they're talking in an engaging and interesting way. So why when we're writing for our marketing do we lose that ability to communicate in an engaging way and instead revert to overly boring, bland, dry copy style? It doesn't [music] make any sense at all. And yet almost everybody does it. This is why more people engage on social with influencer posts than business posts because the influencers are interesting and

3:28:42conversational and the businesses are boring. [music] It's also why you see brands using more emojis because they want to replicate that conversational informal style that their audience adopts. Now, whilst it's fairly common to see emojis in Facebook ad copy and in email subject lines, I suspect we will see an increasing usage of emojis in website copy as well as people try to make it more engaging and replicate the sort of interactions that we're used to

3:29:10having with people on our devices. Another way to make your copy engaging is to make sure that you're signposting people to the sections that are most relevant for them. Again, Apple does a pretty good job of this by not only breaking up their sales page with images and different transitions and different types of um engagement and animation, [music] but also by signposting each section so people can find the information that is most relevant to them. There is nothing worse for copy engagement than forcing people to troll through huge body chunks of copy in order to find the stuff that's of interest to them. I say there's nothing worse. There's plenty of

3:29:48things that are worse, but but for keeping someone's attention with copy is not ideal. So use short sentences, active language. Above all, talk about the things that are most interesting to your customer. Particularly if you can talk about your customer themselves. Talking about people's current situations, their problems, their hopes and dreams is really engaging. There is nothing that we want to read more than writing which is about us, which makes us feel like we're being listened to and that we're being heard. So, write about your customer and you will keep them engaged. So, there you have it. Six copywriting tricks that every marketer should know to help you sell more. We

3:30:27looked at using meaningful specifics, answering objections, letting your customers say the things that you can't, using those testimonials to make those big bold claims. Reading your copy out loud. You can take this to another level by reading it to someone else or even reading it to your target customer. And you're looking for that, oh, that sounds good. Where can I get this type response? We also looked at using

3:30:50scarcity in the three flavors of that. Remember, limited supply. Most people will buy this. and also the flip version of that which is most people won't qualify for this. And then finally, we talked about keeping your copy engaging and the various tools and techniques that you can use to do that. Boy, do we have a treat for you today. The absolute legend, one and only direct response copywriting hero, John Carlton, has come onto the show. Um, now for those of you who who don't know John, he's one of a kind of A-list of direct response copywriters who was active back in the day of um direct mail and magazine ads

3:31:32and newspaper ads and infomercials. And uh these guys were they're responsible for some of the most powerful adverts of all time. And he'll talk through some of these um during the show. If you're watching this on YouTube, we've got an extra special treat for you because we're actually going to show you some of the ads that he wrote. So, we're going to show you on the screen um as the podcast is playing so you can see the sort of style. So, it's one thing to talk about these ads, but if you actually see them, you'll see that the style is is unlike anything that you see online today. It absolutely

3:32:08grabs your attention and it's the most interesting thing you'll read all day which is when he talks through that's exactly what he was going for. So real chance to learn from a true legend and take those principles that were so wellestablished and so effective in infomercials, direct mail, magazine and newspaper ads and translate them to today's world of Facebook ads, YouTube videos, website copy, you know, how do we use these things? And actually what he says is actually the principles haven't really changed. We just need to tweak the usage slightly. So, fascinating guy, some great stories, uh, and I think you'll really enjoy it. Of course, if you want help with your

3:32:48digital marketing, then you can request your free website and digital marketing review from the ninjas here at Exposure Ninja. So, all you need to do is head over to exposurinja.com. Tell us a little bit about your business and we'll conduct a review of your website, your marketing, and your competitors, and we'll give you a prioritized action plan that you can follow over the next 6 to 12 months to significantly increase your leads and sales through your website. So, it's completely free of charge. You go to exposurinja.com and then you can go forward/re and just fill in the form and request your review. Anyway, without further ado, I want to unleash the legend John

3:33:29Carlson. Welcome to the show, John. Okay, so prepare for a bit of a swollen head. Um, I've been following you for a long time. You're widely regarded as one of the world's leading direct response copywriters, spoken about alongside people like Dan Kennedy and Gary Halbert. Um, in fact, Gary once wrote about you in his letter, said something very nice. Um so firstly thank you for coming on to the show to share your experience with direct response copy. Perhaps for people who are used to thinking of copy as a uh a tool to make websites rank um you come

3:34:07from a very different place don't you? You come from a place where copy is actually used to persuade people to buy. So perhaps we could start by your definition of of what makes good copy. Well I am old school. I have uh a foot in both worlds, the old school world of direct mail, print advertising,

3:34:28and really face-to-face salesmanship. And I was a very early adopter of online marketing. I was one of the first guys on the web. My blog goes back to 2004. Um so I've been I've been an enthusiastic uh participant in both of those worlds. And um the one thing that hasn't changed in copy is the fact that it is salesmanship in print. Uh that that was coined a long time ago. Uh a lot of the uh copywriters, the top copywriters you'll meet or you'll hear from or probably deal with if you start to get into what we call the A-list, which are writers that you can just go to. You're

3:35:11going to pay a lot of money and they're going to make the stuff work really well. um they are all steeped in writing about copy that goes back to the 1920s and even earlier. Uh Claude Hopkins wrote in the 1920s. Um and there's like a secret club of direct response copywriters who are really um interested in what what the older principles are because those principles never changed. Uh we we talk about somebody once found out that there were actually used chariot salesmen in ancient Rome and we imagine they were using the same tactics that that people use now to sell used cars. Um there's there's a certain way to persuade a

3:35:58human being and the general thing that we call it is salesmanship. But really you're taking a human being is one of the most reluctant, stubborn, skeptical animals on the planet. It's almost impossible to get them to just do what you want them to do. So learning salesmanship is about learning uh persuasion. It's about learning how to bond and especially for direct response, how to incite action. Whether it is click on this link or buy this product or move to the next step in the process, whatever it is, you have to get people

3:36:33off of their ass to be able to do that. I talk about the typical client being a snambulant blob welded to the couch so firmly that he wouldn't, you know, move to escape a burning house. and you have to get him to pick up the phone or click on a link or somehow get his wallet out and pull out his credit card and and start and start to make the buying decisions that that make a business

3:36:58thrive. And it's not something simple. It's very easy to get someone to say, "Yeah, you know, that that's a pretty good offer you got there. That's that's pretty neat. Maybe someday down the road when I really really need it. I think maybe I'll I'll remember it. Give it a try." That's easy to get to. much harder is to get them to that. Oh, wait on a second. Let me get my credit card out and don't you dare go away while I while I punch in all the numbers. Um, huge territory between those two states. And most people only get to that point of just having people say, "Yeah, that's a

3:37:31really good product you got there." And they don't go any further. So, direct response is all about inciting action. And it's not a simple thing to do. Sure. Um, I I guess these days, you know, and agencies like us are partly guilty of of fueling this. We're told that everything has changed in marketing. You know, marketing 2.0, then marketing 3.0, and how this new Facebook ads thing has come and just changed

3:37:56everything. Yeah. How much in your opinion has actually changed since the days of Claude Hopkins or since the days of infomercial when it comes to copy and what actually makes people buy? Not a lot. I have 20 year actually older than 25 and even 30 year old ads that are still generating royalties for me. They started out as direct mail pieces

3:38:20or print ads in magazines or newspapers. They when the web got going in the early as they got changed to web copy pretty much verbatim and then when uh video sales letters started being the thing they got changed to video sales letters. Very few changes in the copy. The only changes in the copy were the response elements. It's like here's what you need to do now. So rather than fill out this coupon or call this 800 number, it's

3:38:47click on this link and things like that. So no changes at all. These things are still running. They run regularly. I get checks every month for them. So [clears throat] there nothing's really changed. One of the advantages of understanding direct response copywriting is that most of the advertising world has no clue what it's about. They they certainly toss the phrase around and they can even talk about it. Maybe they've read a few books, but they don't understand all of the implications and it's why the top direct response copyriters are the highest paid writers in the world. Um because they know how to translate good salesmanship into print and make it

3:39:26work. So the the differences that have happened have yes there's a difference in um in attention spans yet a lot of the VSSLs go up to 30 minutes um of there's I I the way I've changed my writing is I used to write uh older writers like me were trained to uh respect space because if you had an extra page in a direct mail piece or you had or your ad went longer in say a print ad in a magazine or newspaper, you had to pay for that. So we we tended to write in large paragraphs and we tended to block things together. Um online you

3:40:08don't have to do that. Space is a luxury that we all enjoy. So I've gone to almost single sentence paragraphs and zipping people down because I want them to move, you know, I want them to uh go down another page and another page and another page as they go. I want to make it a breathless ride. Um so certainly that has changed but uh otherwise it's almost identical to what it was before. The the web the main thing people don't understand about online marketing is that the web is just a vehicle for your little salesman uh your ads or your little tiny salesman. And when it was direct mail you put your

3:40:48little salesman in an envelope and send them out into the world. when they were uh magazine ads, you put them inside the magazine and send them out to all the people who read the magazine. Now online, you put them either in an email and send them out or you put them online and and direct traffic to it. But it's the same thing. The the web is just a vehicle. There will be other vehicles coming along soon. The only thing we haven't conquered is smell. So, you know, the next big thing will be computers that can actually have smell involved, which would be great for advertisers because smell uh certain

3:41:20smells generate memories and you can lock people into NLP u you know memory sequences and things like that. So, but otherwise it's just the web is a great vehicle because it combines visual, it comb, it it combines AV audio, audio visual. Uh you can have just writing, you can have streaming, you video, you can have all kinds of different ways of doing it. It's still just a medium. It's not that much different than television and print advertising and doortodoor of people, you know, knocking on the door and talking to you. Does that make

3:41:53sense? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. the sub amulant blob just has a phone rather than a TV remote control or newspaper completely. That's right. So let's let's talk about website copy specifically. So website copy is is often an afterthought. Um we have a page that's designed and we know we need to fill it with some kind of text. If if we apply the the principles that you're talking about and and write good salesmanship in in print on a website, what sort of difference can that make to the performance of a website? Lots of people think about, you know, things like layout and having a nice clear call to action. Those are the things that

3:42:29make an impact on a website. But actually, if we look at the copy, what's the impact that a good copy can have on a website's performance? You know, you talking about, you know, putting blocks of copy in there. That takes me back to some of my first jobs back in the 1980s when I [clears throat] would go in and I would have to work with designers when I

3:42:50was working with agencies and writing. And the designer would present me a design and say, "Here's where the copy goes." He give me a little tiny space in this huge ad. He says, "I I I want copy to be gray floating blocks of distraction." And it's like, you thought the design was going to work. And that's when I learned to get really hardcore about stuff. I used to get in their faces and they'd have to separate me from the designer. I would refuse to work with certain guys and I would challenge the client who was the agency to run my copy with no design at all,

3:43:23just straight, you know, typed letters versus whatever the other guy do. And of course, I would win every time. And so you you eventually develop a a u the the top writers, the A-list I call them, are writers to prove themselves. You don't go to a A-list writer and say, "Send me some samples. Maybe we'll hire." You go to them and you beg them to find us open space in their calendar over the next next year at their price. Um and the way they get to that point is by winning, is by is by actually making ads work. So, um yeah, uh the the the battle between design and

3:44:06copy will never end. Um I I used to joke about getting designers fired. I was a designer for a while. I understand the designer mindset. There are a bunch of designers. The top the A-list of designers out there work for the largest mailers like like I don't know if you guys know the financial giants like

3:44:26Agora Publishing and things like that. The designers that work for those guys are really steeped in direct response and they know that copy is king. So they are going to make their designs make the copy pop. They're going to the the the designs are going to make make or the the the copy is is the star of the show and they're going to make that and everything else it the only job of every other element of the design is to make the copy more readable um and have more effect. So some of these designers come in and they will help the copy. they they start with a pretty much a block of

3:45:02copy that the writer writes and then [clears throat] whether they're doing a VSSL or they're doing a static page online, they will add pictures, they will add color, they will they will change the fonts, they will they will indent certain things, expand other things, they will do other things, but it's not for design. It's for readability and for the salesmanship that's going on. So, it's kind of like taking a raw salesman. You know, I used to joke that when I was training people, I would rather take a near illiterate um salesman, street salesman, and turn him into a copywriter than to start with a professor with a you know, a professor

3:45:42in a business school who's who's giving out business degrees because he won't know how to sell. It's more important to know how to sell. You can dress that up. You can take the illiterate guy, teach him to read, you can you can change his clothes. you can give him a haircut and and and clean him up and put him out there and he's going to know how to

3:46:01sell. He's going to make that happen. You start with a guy that looks really good and try to teach him to sell, that's a whole different uh ball game and that's much much more difficult to do. So, the advantage that direct response people have is understanding salesmanship. It's the secret sauce to everything good that happens in business. And smart people don't try to don't try to throttle that in in the

3:46:25least bit. Yeah, for sure. So, so for the listener who's thinking, "Oh my copyy's probably not up to scratch." What are some of the I guess the biggest sins that you see people making today that they should go and look through their website copy? Just taking it as an example, um to see if there's anything there that could be holding back the performance of their

3:46:46site. Sure. I I deal with this a lot in my coaching. I I consult with a lot of people and it almost always gets down to the actual copy. Um it's not not being interesting, not trying to persuade, not not bonding with the person, not having a conversation. Read your copy out loud and then imagine your customer. um each each ad that goes out there, each time you write something, whether it's an email or a web page or a video or you send out direct mail, you're you're you're handling people one at a time. I call it eye to thou writing, but it's just basically you and the person you're

3:47:29talking to and you're trying to make a sale. And the the the attitude I want is if you've ever been in a room, you look over to say you're at a party, you look over and there's two people with chairs pulled face to face. They're leaning to they're leaning close to each other. They're talking in hushed excited tones. That's what I want my ads to do. I want that conversation. Now, in most ads, you

3:47:55can only have a one-sided conversation. But if you have empathy, if you understand what's going on in your prospect's mind, then you can fill in the blanks and you can start to answer their questions or or voice their questions. So you can say, "Right about now, you're thinking I'm full of beans, right?" And then you answer that. Um the baby,

3:48:18is that a baby monitor? Yeah, it's my little boy, Luca. He's like 10 months old having a great time. That's great. That's great. He's going to be a monster marketer. I can tell. Absolutely. Yeah. So, where was I? Oh, see, so that that that conversation. So, take your copy, whatever it is, and imagine you're sitting across from one of your hottest prospects and and your part of the conversation is your copy. Read it out loud and imagine the response that somebody's going to have. Even better, take it out and actually actually do it to somebody. Actually read that to somebody and watch what their responses are. If their eyes start rolling or they

3:48:54yawn or they make an excuse and want to leave the room, then you're just you're just talking. You're talking at somebody. Great copy is talking with somebody. There's bonding going on. There's persuasion. There's give and take. And again, tons and tons and tons of of empathy. And it's a it's a conversation. It's a it's a it's two human beings having an interaction. And most people don't write that way. They write in generalities, you know, or they write in platitudes or they or they talk

3:49:23at people and and that's just a no no. Have a freaking conversation with the most important person in your life right now. The prospect who just needs to be convinced enough to click on the link to send you his credit card to do whatever the next step is you want. If you can't convince a hot prospect to do that with the copy you're using, you're certainly not going to not do not going to uh

3:49:46persuade lukewarm or cold prospects. It's it's going to feel quite scary for people to take this approach, isn't it? Because I think there's an expectation, particularly on the website, that everything needs to feel professional and it needs to we need to talk in this kind of bland corporate tone otherwise people are going to think, you know, less of of our companies. Is that something that you find yourself coming

3:50:10up against? Are you dealing with a lot of large companies like uh General Motors? Uh well, sometimes large companies, but but also smaller companies can be guilty of this because they look up to the large companies and say, "Ah, we want to be big like General Motors, so we need to talk like that." So, I I get this a lot and people people say, "What about my reputation? I can't I can't just be colloquial. I can't use slaying and stuff. What about my reputation?" My answer is always the

3:50:39same. What reputation? If if unless you're selling the heck out unless you are dominant in the market, then you don't have a reputation. You're trying to get one. You're trying to work it up. I don't care how many years you've been in business. If you're going up against uh you know, if you have a a brickandmortar store and you're trying to sell furniture and you're worried about the way you're phrasing your ads because because you see the big furniture store that with you know the the big national furniture store not doing that, then you know you're you're playing a rigged game. You're trying you're going into their field and trying

3:51:12to play their game and you don't know you don't know all the ins and outs. Make it your own game. one of the best way in furniture sales. I I actually worked with a guy in furniture sales many years ago and we got him to start doing really really personal ads and he was just right. He was having fun with it. He was making fun of the competition and he and he would do the equivalent of of having pictures where he was actually knifing a a sofa and you'd cut the sofa and say this one's on sale, you know, and he's and first one down here gets it

3:51:42for 20 bucks. and people were flooding his store because they love the salesmanship, the theater, the the the the drama of it, the spectacle. So to to think that your reputation is going to be harmed, your your reputation matters to one person in your life and that ain't your wife, that isn't your kids, that isn't your buddies down at the at the pub. Uh that isn't anybody but the guy who's going to buy your product. That's the person you want to worry about. and he wants to understand who he's dealing with. He wants to be able to trust them. People like to buy from people they understand or think are

3:52:18like them or share their values. Uh people like plain talk. They they they don't like uh uh fancy uh language that's hard to understand. They're not impressed with the fact that you can write at a college level. You know, ads have got to be around fifth grade level. I I don't know what that is in in uh British terms. um uh level level five or something. I don't know. Whatever. I think it might be around like year seven over here. So, is it like 11 or 12 years

3:52:48old? Is that right? Yes. Cool. So, I generally write that's not a hard and fast. I generally write a little higher like like if you follow me on Facebook or go to my blog, I will generally write to a to a college level, but only because I'm not selling at that point. Whenever I write for a client, I'm selling. I bring it way down. And if I have to explain something, one of the if I have to use a large word or a phrase, an industry phrase that I'm not sure they understand, then I always follow it with a parenthetical comment that says in plain English that just

3:53:22means and then I talk in colloquial terms. So always bringing it down to never assume they understand what you're talking about. You know, a huge thing that people do is when they think, "Okay, I'm going to start talking in slang or I'm going to start talking colloquial colloquially and they start using phrases that are only well known among the insiders in the industry, forgetting that their customers aren't insiders. That's why they're coming to you for help or or to buy. So, you got to keep explaining them. Never assume that they're as hip as you are. your customer needs something is in some level of trauma either because he needs

3:53:58what you have or he's been looking for what you have and has never found it or is worried about the consequences of having it or not having it. All kinds of things are going on in his head. So, he's not you he's not he's not hip to all the details of this. So, you got to you got to make all this palatable to

3:54:14him and you use language to do it. Yeah, for sure. I think that approach is also quite disarming, isn't it? because it makes the reader feel this person is just like me and they're not I it doesn't feel like I'm being sold to necessarily or it doesn't feel like someone's trying to manipulate me because it's all very colloquial and

3:54:32plain English. People who say they don't want to be sold. I it's perfectly understandable and in in this modern age we are inundated with with with ads and people you can't turn around. You can't even every time the phone rings now with it could be a rooc call. You know over over here in the states we get 70% of the calls we receive in our cell phones are roos trying to sell us or trying to scam us on on uh on credit card stuff. It's it's it's an epidemic and it's really bad. So people feel like they have to steal themselves against being sold. But really, if you become a problem solver

3:55:14as opposed to a salesman in their eyes, you're still selling, but you are you are you you understand their situation. You understand what they're going through. You have a solution. It's a solution they should probably jump on right now. And if you the what what I tell marketers is that if you have the solution to your prospect's problem or you or you have an answer to whatever is ailing him in life or whatever is keep holding him back and you don't use every salesmanship tactic in the book to get him to act then shame on you because you are not allowing him to have a better

3:55:51life. He may need to be knocked off his game a little bit and left a little vulnerable and you may have to do a few strange um excuse me I I have a cold so my ear is plugging up. You you may have to pull out some tricks and things like you know there's only five left. You got to answer today or it goes away. You know the next person not on the list gets it after you or any of those things that people kind of cringe at. We need to do this because again, humans are stubborn. They're skeptical. They're cynical and they're afraid of making a

3:56:25mistake if they buy something. They're afraid of of having to go because they got to go and explain it to their spouse a lot of times or they got to justify themselves to the neighbor. They got so you have to arm them for that. You got to help them help them explain to others why this is a great deal, why it makes so much sense to do it this way. And then when they they feel they can they can solve the problems of other people questioning their judgment, then they can start relaxing and thinking about how they're going to do it. This is why we need such long copy usually to make

3:56:57make the sale. You have to overcome a lot of objections, a lot of resistance and a lot of obstacles in the person's mind to make even a small sale. Sure. Uh when you're working on a client campaign, how do you what what's your process for identifying what the top objections are going to be or or do they just you you just know what they are

3:57:19instinctively? No, almost never do one of the advantages I had early on in my career was every job was a new market, a new product, a new client. Um I didn't start getting repeat clients uh in until a couple of years down the road. I I would work for agencies. So, every job would be a new their client would be a new market and everything. And when I do things outside of agencies, I was I was a freelancer for agencies. When I was a freelancer in the general market, I was

3:57:48just taking every offer that came along. So, I was often faced with completely different markets. And I would go read up on it. I would do it. I would do the equivalent of a Google search. Back then, that meant going to the freaking library. But now I I would do a Google search, but I also do what I did at the very beginning, which was simple research. You interview everybody you can. You interview the boss. If if you're a writer and you're writing for somebody, if you are the marketer and you have to decide how to sell something new in your market or sales are down,

3:58:22you have to rethink how to sell whatever it is you have. Then you got to sit down, you got to do your own research on your own market. You got to find out the demographics of the people you're after, but even more so than their age and income and where they live and all of that. It's the psychological stuff. If you have any track record at all, and this is what I would do with new

3:58:41clients. I want to interview the owner. Yes. But I don't take what the owner says as gospel because he's often isolated from what's going on. So, I want to talk to the feet in the street, the salesman if he has any. The guys are on the phone with people. I especially want to talk to the um customer service. I want to find out what the main complaints are. I want to find out what the main reason people ask for refunds are. I want to find out all that good stuff that the owner often is oblivious of. And if you're the owner, you better go and talk to customer service a lot

3:59:12all the time. Find out what people are complaining about, what their questions are, things like that. These are things you must address because people who buy and then ask for a refund. If you can save those refunds by addressing those issues, then that's as good as another sale. So rather than losing one, going down one, you you keep the sale. That's like making a sale. And to people that you go out who are thinking who are one step sideways of them, who are thinking, "Yeah, buy except I'm not sure if it will fit in my living room." Whatever

3:59:42the problem is, then you address it. Hey, are you afraid this is not going to fit in your living room? do this, take a tape measure out, you know, if you got more than 10 feet, you know, from the wall, something like that, just just address those things. So, you know, for four for knowledge is u is is a powerful

3:59:59uh weapon. How talking about powerful weapons, the story behind a business or or a product? I think there can be a lot of trepidation about sharing that. It's almost as if well people don't really care about the behindthe-scenes stuff. Is is the story of a business or a product something that you'd use and and how do you tell whether it's going to be

4:00:19a useful sales asset? Well, usually the story does matter. It's called an origin story. If you're into um uh like Joseph Campbell, a lot of u copywriters get into psychology or NLP or certain things because they want to know how people process ideas and how they think. So, psychology is huge, but you only need pop psychology really. So, um

4:00:52[sighs] what was the question exactly? How often would you use a product or business's story and how do you tell if it's going to be used? That's right. So, so when I talk about the origin story, a lot of times it does make sense. If you were a disgruntled employee of of another large company and you realize that company was not meeting the demands or the needs of their customers and you formed your own

4:01:14company, then that's a that's a lock. That's a great story. You'll notice that a lot of people who sell services talk about the rags to riches. I was living in my car and blah blah blah. I I actually have that exact story. It's a real story that I use in my um in my speeches that that I give on stages around the world. Um and and it does a couple of things. It humanizes you. It also it also brings to the forefront just how powerful this stuff is. Uh if you have a rags the richest story or here we started with

4:01:49almost nothing or or anything like that. Um, you do you guys do you have Shark Tank over there? Is it just Yeah, we got Dragon Stand as the equivalent. Dragon's Den. So, you have you have the British version. Um, you'll notice a lot of those guys go on and enable to to enable to end entice the the uh venture capitalists into funding them. They will tell their origin story. Here's why I'm doing this. And and there's a couple and you'll see them blow it sometimes, too, because they will try to rely on raw emotion. this is my last chance. I've sunk every penny I have into this and if

4:02:25this doesn't work, I'm destitute. That ain't going to do it. But if you say, I put my heart and soul into this and when it didn't work, I kept after it and I made it work and I did all the stuff. Then you're going to get people saying, "Okay, I like that." That's the kind of entrepreneurial spirit we're looking

4:02:39for. So, so there's that kind of thing. There's also the the the just the sheer bonding of letting people know that you're not a corporation. um a corporate even a corporation is other people. It's like Elon Musk is is his corporation's face and for better or worse he he helps he helps personalize everything. So when people have a Tesla and they see a Tesla on the road, oh there's Elon's, you know, you know, automobile. Um uh uh all all of the guys, Steve Jobs, all of the guys that became faces, their personalities didn't have to be the kind of guy you'd want to sit down and have a

4:03:23beer with at the pub. They could be the kind of guy that yes, I want him in charge of things or I believe that what he's doing. So, um the the origins, it depends. If you have a boring origin story, you know, yes, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I went to the finest schools. My father gifted me this business, you know, then that that's not a story unless you could turn it around and make fun of yourself at the end. And I took that those gifts and I immediately ran everything in the ground one day away from bankruptcy. How do I turn it

4:03:55around? I blank. And then you move on. So, so it's it's it's kind of like, you know, the advertising is like a big cocktail party. You got to meet strangers and you have to, you know, one of the things we talk about with the USP, which is the unique uh uh unique uh sales positioning term that you have, is it needs to be a part of an elevator chat. An elevator chat is you're in an elevator going from the ninth floor to the ground floor with somebody who would be a hot prospect if you could only tell him in that time from the ninth floor to

4:04:32the first floor what it is you do and what you offer. So let's say you're walking into an elevator on the ninth floor and the guy next to you is talking to another guy and he says, "Oh yeah, I have this huge problem at work. I blah I don't have enough sales. I don't whatever it is." And whatever he says is what you solve. Then you turn around, you go, "Excuse me, I couldn't help over here." What do you say in those seconds going from the ninth floor to the first floor to get him get him interested enough to maybe say, "Let's talk more or to accept your business card and say,

4:05:04"Yes, I will definitely call you or to have him understand what's going on." Most people can't do that. It's very brief. It's very and and it has to it has to hit hard. So, you don't go into a Yeah. When I started out, you know, I was born in a log cabinet. You can't do

4:05:20that in that very short period of time. You have to get straight to the point. Then when you get out of the elevator and he says, "I'm interested. What else you got?" Then you can then you can start that process of here's how we arrived here. It's very interesting. I used to be a blah blah blah. I used to work for the CIA and then you know that got me into psychology and I learned how people are blah blah blah. Whatever that story is. So the top writers can take any story you have and turn it into an interesting hook. But a lot of people

4:05:47are too blinded by their own stories. Um, I used to find my best hooks and a hook is usually in a headline that like grabs you and goes, "What? That can't be or you know what? What's this idiot idiot talking about?" Now, I I used to find my best hooks by getting the the u uh person who who was running the company, my client, to talk about his old stories. And he would often say, "Ah, we have an old story about blah blah blah, but I don't I don't like telling that anymore because everyone's bored by it." And what he means is that his wife doesn't want to hear it

4:06:20anymore. His family's tired of hearing it. His buddies at the pub don't want to hear it. And his colleagues don't want to hear the stories anymore. But his customer, his his potential customers haven't heard that story yet. And it was really powerful the first couple times he told it. He just told it too often. So when I find those stories and it's often in the origins where they came from, how they stumbled on on the on the product or the idea, the formula or whatever, there's often a fascinating story that gets ignored because the owner is tired of telling it and everyone around him or close to him is

4:06:52tired of hearing it. So he thinks it's not good anymore. Sure. There's something about stories that just I notice a lot of times at seminars when people are a bit bored and they're playing on their phones and then as soon as the speaker starts telling a story, they put their phones down and they start watching, don't they? And if it's you were saying about the they're having to justify the purchase, their partner, it's often the story that they will take to their partner. There just seems to be something about stories which like shortcuts into people rather than just features and benefits. I think before writing we relied on stories for

4:07:27transferring information um songs and stories and that's how you told people what the seasons were about how to remember when to plant when to when to harvest when to uh hibernate you know when when you know it's we are wired we are we are intrinsically wired to like and process stories. It puts everything into perspective for us. So all top writers are great storytellers. They may be short stories. But the more you can weave it together in a story, this is how myths happen. This is how legends happen. This is how reputations happen

4:08:08is by having a story you can relate to. What's you know like Gary Halbert, I think you've you mentioned that people, you know, know Gary Halbert. I was I was Gary Halbert's best friend for 30 years. Um, and people would dis can to this day, years after he's he's been gone, have a story to tell. If you get a hundred people who are Gary Halbert fans in a room and you ask them to tell the story that kind of epitomizes Gary, more than half will tell the same story. Maybe threearters will tell the same story. And the other ones will tell stories that the other ones will have heard and they'll say,

4:08:43"Yeah, yeah, I remember when he blah blah blah, he said this or he said that." So stories are great. uh uh memory enhancing things. And you got to remember that even though people are being bombarded with advertising, you still have to be memorable out there. You have to have some easy shortcut way for people to remember who you are, to remember your name, your business name, what it is you do. Uh because it's it's a people's minds are are being overwhelmed all the time. That's why you want people to act right now. While their eyes are on your web page or on your ad or watching your, you want them

4:09:21to act right now because if they walk away, salesmen know that the chances of of making that sale just plummet immediately for every minute that they that they do not act right away. You're talking about losing 50% of your audience and another 50 and another 50 and another. Yeah, that's so true. Um, as you were talking about um, hooks, I was just grabbing up some of your ads. I love the amazing secret discovered by onelegged golfer. Adds 50 yards to your drives, eliminates hooks and slices. So, that's

4:09:52like a straight between the eyes hook. As soon as I see that, I have to read that ad, right? I guess today when you know you're imagining someone's recorded a a video ad on Facebook, so their audience is scrolling through and then the video starts autoplaying and if they got captions, you've probably got like 5 seconds to try and hook them with something like that. How do if we talk about creating video scripts and and videos that sell, how can we kind of replicate that big, bold, crazy headline that just entices people in a video without this kind of, "Hi, my name is blah blah blah and all that kind of

4:10:30boring crap that people start videos with." Like, h, how do we take some of that magic and put it into video form? Well, the way I write VSSL scripts is the way I write ads. I have a headline. Now, in a in an ad, a written ad, you would see the bolder uh uh font, you know, you know it's a headline because it's a bold font like in a newspaper or something, then a

4:10:54subhead and then you get into the copy. When you're speaking, you use the same words. You you just you aren't saying a headline. You you may phrase it slightly differently, like here's something you don't hear every day, and then then you you bomb right right into it. But it's the same same idea, the same copy. So the the way to to understand that is to get ads like the onelegged golfer ad to get a lot of those ads together and look at them and try to try to understand what the magic that that is going on. A lot of that that onelegged golfer ad appeared like a bolt out of lightning

4:11:29out of nowhere in the very stayed boring golf magazines. We went straight into golf magazines. 100 grand a pop. We had three pages. Nobody had ever done that. They' never seen that. the the the ad the media department at the magazines. So, this was uh Golf Digest, I believe, or Golf Magazine, the biggest one on the stands, still the biggest one on the stands. They tried to talk my client out of running this ad. They said, "This isn't going to work. You know, we don't want to take you they they don't they didn't want to take a 100 grand from these guys because and we didn't know it

4:12:04was going to work either because that was the first golf ad I wrote, actually." And uh but I had a pretty good hunch it was going to work and they did it and it worked like crazy. So about the third or fourth time they inserted that ad in a row in the magazine. Then the guys started saying

4:12:20why why do you keep running this dog ad? Then my client was just you know didn't say anything and they started moving it farther back in the magazine. They started trying to do things to sabotage it because they felt it was bringing down the classiness of their magazine. But what what they what that ad did was talk to the regular golfer, which is 90% of the audience. And what the magazine wanted to talk to was the 10% of the guys who were young and athletic and had windmill swings and were really good already. And that's who that's who they imagined their readers were when in fact

4:12:54their readers were old, fat, arthritic, and couldn't break a hundred to save their lives. And that's the guys we wanted. We didn't want those athletic guys. one of the guys who were intrigued by the idea of a one-legged golfer. Oh my god, what you know what what he knows maybe. So, and the the copy of that ad talks about I don't care what kind of shape you're in. And the next ad I wrote was about a guy who had who had

4:13:18arthritis. He was like 60 years old. I've got to find that one. That is a brilliant ad. Way overweight. Yeah. It was like he humiliates PGA pros on this secret. Uh and it's a true story. the the pros play, you know, when they're not playing for the camera, they play their own games and they play with their own money. If they lose, they're not or if they win, they're not winning a corporate sponsor's money. They're winning. The other the other guy pulls out his wallet and shells out, you know, 50 grand. And this guy was beating the heck out of me. He was fat and he was

4:13:46overweight and his knees were were so, you know, the doctors wanted to operate immediately on his knees. And that was something that people could really identify with cuz most golfers I golf and most golfers I know are older, their backs hurt, you know, they they don't have they don't have a windmill swing. They're there's a lot of holes in their game and they they want to they want to learn the inside stuff that so quickly they can start humiliating those young guys that that have been humiliating them. So this was psychology, this was uh common sense. All of this stuff ca came into play. And it's like you the

4:14:22thing about an ad, whether it's a VSSL, a web page, a direct mail letter, something in a magazine, or even face to face, you have to be the most exciting thing he's seen today. You have to be the thing that gets his blood moving. I say his his or hers. um you have to be the the one thing that he remembers today that shocks him out of his complacency that makes that blob sit up and go what? And uh you know to do that and and you also have to remember that you know in a big um in a big audience you're going to get maybe four or 5%

4:14:59actually two to 5% of the people are going to respond to you. If you can get 5% on a on an ad that's running that's a that's a major hit. That's a control. And that means 95% of the people are paying no attention or aren't interested right now or you didn't somehow flip them. So we're not talking about going to an audience of 100 people and sell making 100 sales. You're going to make two to five sales. So you got to mult So then the game is is scaling. Rather than try to sell to 100 people, you try to sell to 100,000 people. Then the number

4:15:30of sales go up and then you're off to the races. But you're only Gary Hobby used to call it sell to the foxes, not the dogs. Don't worry about what the people who aren't going to buy think or say about your stuff. Worry about what the people who might buy, you know, are are going to say and make sure that they buy. That's a very very important difference in the way you look at your

4:15:51ad. the headline in that ad that you referenced there. How does an outof shape 55year-old golfer crippled by arthritis and 71 pounds overweight still consistently humiliate PGA pros in head-to-head matches for hitting every T-shot further and straighter down the fairway? It's all true, by the way. And it's it's kind of funny, isn't it, to read it, you're like, surely and there's like a super headline which says, "If petite women and 12year-old kids are using this secret tip, perfect drives over 250 yards. Imagine what it can do for you. Are you ever scared that you've pushed it so far it becomes

4:16:29unbelievable? So that client, I don't know if you know the story, but I had actually retired from business for a little while. I uh I I quit working with I was working very closely with Gary Halbert. I just took a break. I took a couple years off and I formed a three-piece rock and roll band and played in biker bars all over Northern Nevada. Um, and was having a lot of fun and just dabbling. I was living off my royalties. So, I I was living the life. This client wanted me to write for them. They were desperate for me to write for them. And I said,

4:17:04and they said, "What will it take?" And I said, "You know, a very high percentage of every sale you make, and you got to run everything I write." And they said, "We will do that. We will run everything you write word for word as you write and we will take the heat. The only thing they would would they might want to negotiate certain legal claims, but I'm very careful about legal claims anyway. So what they did essentially was take the leash off me. Up to that point, I had never had an ad run that a for a client that the client hadn't stepped on in some way, hadn't changed a word in

4:17:39the headline, hadn't changed some of the copy, hadn't done some stuff. They felt they had to do it. It's infuriating and it's what 99% of all copyriters go through. They never get to see their stuff out there as they know it should be done, you know, in original state. These guys said, "We'll do it." And I said, "You're on." And we I wrote for them for 20 years and uh it was the most fun I ever had. And I would and they started learning how to find these hooks. So after a while, they started coming to me and they found they found a blind golfer. Uh there's actually a

4:18:13blind golfing association United States. I had no idea existed. Uh they found a guy who was made the last spot in the LA Open. It was 1989 LA Open, I believe. But he was on his deathbed the day before literally with pneumonia, I think. I can't remember what it was. And he got off and he crawled to and he qualified for the last spot in the LA Open. That made the headline. And then they just started finding all these strange stores that I could do. And these guys had videoed video teaching video or DVD uh teaching programs where they could teach you how to chip, how to

4:18:47putt and things like that. So every there was a lot of those programs out there, but what sold them was the story. M so the guy you know the guy who worked with a blind golfer and the blind golfer taught him things he didn't believe that you know could could work but they worked and they were and he realized how they could help you know people with good eyesight how they could take the same principles and here's the story and here's the product and we're off to the races. So that went on. So, as far as pushing it too much, I if what I got a

4:19:20call from that client once and they said, "John, you know, the last two ads you wrote that we ran uh in Golf Magazine, they they were also in bodybuilding and supplements and a bunch of different stuff, but the golf was really rocking it for a while there." and they said, [clears throat] "The last couple of ads you wrote, neither um uh Russ nor I, those were the two owners, got any sleep for like a week waiting for that ad to hit. And when it hit, you know, then, you know, we were still nervous. We got some, you know, flak back and things like that, but the ads

4:19:53worked really, really well." And he was leading up to something. He says, "The reason I'm telling you this is that this ad, if if we run this ad, I'm going to sleep like a baby tonight." and he says, "So, I want you to beef it up." So, he came back to me and he said, "Make this more dangerous." Because he knew that if he was going to sleep well when that ad was submitted, it it wasn't going to do as well as the other ones. So, you know, that was that was some interesting stuff. So, no, I have an internal monitor. I I'm very empathetic with people. I'm very

4:20:29sympathetic. So, I understand people and I I led a hard life, so I understand this stuff. So, I have an internal governor that warns me when I'm going too far. That said, Gary Halber and I used to write our bad best headlines by starting out going too far. We would write headlines of stuff that no way would they would we allow them out into the real world. There'd be swearing in them, sexual innuendo, there would be horrific stuff. But from that the genesis of the idea, what if we could sort of say that but not in those words. What if we could make people think there was a sexual element here or

4:21:05make people understand the sexual element or make people understand these things but not say it so couch it so we would walk it back. We'd start out over the line and walk it back till we're just inside the line and that's the perfect headline. Most people they write ads, they start meek and they try to

4:21:20beef it up. That doesn't work. So, if we want to study the most unfiltered John Carton possible, go and check out the golf ads. Is that what you're saying? Golf and the uh self-defense ads. Um, yeah. Uh, a lot of them are included in my books and stuff. So, you know, I don't know if you're giving people my my blog or Yes, you're telling them. So, yeah, we link all of that stuff in the

4:21:49show notes for sure. Good. So if you go to the blog, my books are are offered there. The blog is, by the way, the archives are all free and it goes back to 2004. So that's a uh and I talk about a lot of this stuff. It's all it's all aimed at entrepreneurs and writers and marketers and business people. So

4:22:09it's a hell of a resource. It's fun. Yeah. Um cool. Are you okay for another five minutes, John? Is that all right? Sure. Awesome. Um so I want to ask you about email. Um, I know that, you know, whether it's the A pile or B pile or I think Dan Kennedy said people sorting

4:22:25their mail over the waste paper basket. That was Gary. Was that Gary speaker? Yeah. And the the the kind of story behind that was if you don't stand out when you're sending people mail, you're not even going to get read. So what's in your sales letter is completely pointless. Obviously nowadays we have email um and the same kind of principles apply but now we've got things like Gmail actually filtering out your emails so you don't even get through to people in the first place. How can people cut through the noise in such a a kind of brutal world now? How can we actually get our emails

4:23:03read and use things like compelling headlines? Well Dean Jackson had the most brilliant one. You you know about Dean? Okay. So Dean Jackson talks about the sevenword headline, you know, are you still looking for a house in, you know, Cleveland, Ohio, something like that. So by by asking intriguing questions, by by tapping into what what the prospect is thinking, if you're using house lists, you should know what those people are

4:23:31thinking about, what their concerns are. House list can be half half prospects, half customers, mostly customers, mostly prospects. Doesn't matter. They've already responded. They've gotten on your list. You're writing to them. That's a chance to be very, very personable. How do you get a How do you get grandma to open an email? How do you get um How do you get your buddy of, you know, who's going to meet you at the pub, you know, next Friday to open your email? How do you get How do you get people you know and care about to open your emails? What kind of subject lines do you have? Do you do boring stuff

4:24:04like, "Hey, here's a interesting way to save five bucks on your next shopping spree." you know, no, you don't you don't do that. Um, to the buddies, to the guys, you know, a lot of times it's the outrageous headlines or some version of you have got to see this, something like that. Um, or u uh the the email subject line is what's most important, of course, and that is a mini headline, and it's a small short headline. Uh, Twitter was great when it first came out with the uh uh was it 140 uh uh

4:24:37character count. Yeah. Because it forced people to get really really compact in their thinking. Uh Google Adwords when they came out, now it's just Google advertising, but when AdWords first came out, they had, you know, the the definite limits and what you can do in an ad, the line one, line two, and then line three um force people to start getting really piffy and start thinking about what they're doing. And email is the last refuge of this. It's people can still write longer uh subject lines, but they don't always show up in your inbox. So, it said who else? And then there's nothing else there. So, you

4:25:11got to you got to think about how how fast you can get in there. And and you do you you want to be the most interesting thing they've read today. You want to you want to u you want to needle the the points that hurt. You want to you you want to offer some kind

4:25:25of a story. you you want to get in. There's all kinds of things you can use in your emails depending on your relationship with the list. If you're going to cold people, if you're somehow got an email list where everyone's cold and they haven't heard of you, then you got to be you have to approach that as you're walking into a big party and no one knows who you are. No one cares who you are. No one's going to introduce you. Or try to get somebody to introduce

4:25:50you. That's third party validation. often that can be, you know, here's why Bob's friend if you're going to Bob's list. Here's why Bob Smith's um here's why Bob Smith uh stocks my ads, for example. You know, if you're going to Bob Smith's list, for example, something like that. So, so there's all these different ways, but you have every the most thought has to go into the into the subject line to get

4:26:14people in. Then you continue the story. You don't abruptly say, "Ha, now that I've got your undivided attention." You know the old joke about the guys who used to run uh uh ads in the classified that would say sex and it says, "Now that I got your attention, let me tell you about this insurance, you know, opportunity." Uh you can't do that. Um although you can try it, but you'll

4:26:35you'll you'll generate ill will. Um but you just got to think about what can you say that will get someone's interest. Head turning interest. So, you walk into a party, you say something, and people turn around and they they look at you. Um, it's your job to understand what irks them, what excites them, what they hate, what they love, what they uh what they're most interested, what kind of pain they're going through, things like that. So, you don't try to come in in a roundabout way or lack of days. come in and you shock people or you let people know you know what they're thinking or you you know you you

4:27:13you start a conversation that's going to be the most exciting thing that's happened to them today even in an email far as length of email I do both short and long sometimes very short ones leads to a link and then it takes off so the job of the email is to get them to hit the link to go to the blog or somewhere else where the main the main sales pitch happens so the job of the email is just to get them to hit the link. That's all I'm thinking about. I'm not thinking about the sale, nothing. Sometimes the email does some selling. If the email is

4:27:45doing the selling, then it needs to be a a lot longer and the story has to be more intense and you're essentially doing a very long uh email. I've made those work. They generally don't work as well. Uh I do in between emails mostly. I just, you know, I keep everything very pathy. I deliver what I need to deliver and then I either send them to a link or

4:28:09I try to make the sale right away. Fantastic. Thank you, John. Um, I want to ask you finally about becoming a better writer. There are going to be a lot of people who have listened to this and feel inspired to improve their own copy. Um, and and folks like yourself often work from what are called swipe files, which is maybe your collection of ads or or copy that you like has been successful. So when you're sitting down to write, whether it's an email or a Facebook ad or a Google ad or whatever, you you have something to work from. For people who are aspiring to be as as good

4:28:40at their craft as you are, how important is a swipe file and and how do you kind of start compiling it? Is it just stuff that you like or stuff that you've tested or stuff that you see around? You know, it has to be controls. You have to understand what a control is. A control is an ad that goes out and it works. And the larger companies are

4:29:00always running competing ads against it. Either AB split test or AB ABC ABC ABC split test. They're always running other ads trying to beat the control. So the happiest day in a business owner's life is when he has has the first control. He has an ad that worked. It it brought back a profit and it worked really well. Now his next job is to knock that off to write another ad that will be better than than that ad. maybe a different writer, maybe the same writer, maybe a different idea, whatever. Keep trying to do that and then when that one becomes a

4:29:31control, then the next one comes along. So, swipe files should you should always know what the results were of the ad. Try to find out. And in the old days, if you saw an ad appear in a magazine over and over again, you could assume it was a winner because they wouldn't run a loser. Um, online, it's how long the things are. I I I often, not often, I have gotten clients to call competitors before and just ask them, "Hey, I just

4:30:01noticed you guys are running a new ad. Is that working?" And the person on the phone will say, "Yeah, it's the best ad we've run, you know, in six months." You know, so and that's fair. That's, you know, all fair and level four. So, that kind of uh that kind of research counts. Um, when I was doing direct mail, I used to get some of the best direct mail. I had an end to what was working or not because I knew people who knew people at the agency so I'd find out. So I never tried to tear apart and research any of the losers. I would look at them and and

4:30:33maybe try to see what went wrong, but the ones I studied were the winners and I break them down where, you know, what is he saying here? How is this leading me to the next part of the letter? Things like that. So if you can get controls um and usually it's by you know repetition how often they you see them or try to find out if they worked then you know there are some top riders some A-list riders who only write from their swipe files if it's they will reach down they'll pick up my you know onelegged golfer ad and they're selling mousetraps now or they're selling you know

4:31:09insurance and they'll say how could I make that work for insurance what could I change and actually I actually gave a seminar about I don't know 10 years ago called license to steal and I actually taught people how to take my ads just my ads and convert them to whatever they were doing. So it doesn't matter that I was selling golf if you say the one-legged golfer. So the one-legged golfer if you're selling mousetraps it's going to be something about a guy who is in pest control or something like that and something odd like the blind pest control guy or you know whatever. So you you can fit that in. So you you begin to

4:31:45you understand the little chunks of salesmanship that happen in headlines and copy all all the way through the entire process. You say, "I could I could use that for whatever I'm doing." And yeah, there are a number of writers, not all of them. Most of us like to do original stuff, but some writers just rely on their swipe files for inspiration, for ideas on headlines, and uh for actual actual headlines with just

4:32:09a few changes to make it work for them. John makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. Makes 100% sense. I think the tendency can be just to grab things that we like. And of course, like you you said, you don't really know if that works. So, you kind of need to get calibrated first, don't you? You don't

4:32:23want to copy a loser. For sure. There you go. That's a great word. Thank you so much, John. This has been uh amazing. Um yeah, thank you so much for your time. I I want to respect your time and and uh we're wrapped up with now with an hour. So, where can people find out more about you, follow your blog, and of course, read your awesome

4:32:41book? Yeah, just go to john-carlton.com. Uh, it's jo-c.com. That's the blog. And it's kind of the the one-stop place you can find out about consulting. All of my books are listed there. And again, the archives are free and they go back to 2004. Um, and I would suggest that you sign up at the very top there's a free special report, something about 11 blunders. And you sign up there and you will be alerted to when there's a new blog post and you can find out other things that's going on. If I'm going to be speaking somewhere, I'm going to be holding a mastermind in some city, you'll find out

4:33:23about it. And uh, that's the best way is to get on my list and uh, you know, take it from there. Awesome. Go go go go go to the blog and feast. That would be the my advice. John, thank you so much for your time today, buddy. Much appreciated. Yes, appreciate it. Thank you, Tim. All righty. In module three, we're talking about process. And process is the process that you go through to turn someone who is new to your business, who comes across your website or your pages online and turn them into a customer or a lead. This is really important because if you're driving traffic to a website

4:34:00and you have a great uh business positioning, you have a great business presence, um this process will define the conversion rate of that traffic into leads or sales, you get this right, this can actually provide a kind of differentiator against others in your market. In other words, if you have a more compelling process for turning visitors into customers or leads, then you can win in a market even if everything else is identical. Though, of course, you don't want everything else to be identical, but if everything else is equal and you have a superior process, you will still win. Um, so this

4:34:36is uh this is a really exciting thing. It's very central to what we do at Exposure Ninja and it's also been central to Exposure Ninja's growth as well. And I'm very happy to talk about how we've used this ourselves to build the agency over the years. Uh so it's the third element and we've got the qualified customer closer framework. Now what does qualified customer closer implementation? What does a successful process look like? Well, it means that you have a highly effective and scalable way to turn cold traffic into good quality leads and customers. Now, this is where things slightly diverge for our e-commerce viewers and our lead

4:35:14generation viewers. And I'm lumping uh software as a service into e-commerce in this case. So, in e-commerce and software um and in lead genen, you'll have a slightly different approach though the fundamentals, the theory behind it is exactly the same. Now what we want to do is we want a very so highly effective means that we have a a high conversion rate of someone coming onto your website and becoming a lead or sale and scalable means that if there is any human involvement this is incredibly systemized. Um it's optimized because the process is standard across you know all of the leads that come in. So, Exposure Ninja's marketing review is uh

4:35:59one version of this in potentially what could be quite a difficult to scale uh front end of a business. We review people's websites and their digital marketing and this provides the entry point for them becoming a lead for our agency business. And because we've done this thousands, tens of thousands of times, we've totally standardized that front-end process. And that means that we can optimize each component of that and automate a lot of it as well. Now for e-commerce businesses, so that

4:36:29that's the model for lead generation. It's finding some way of standardizing the entry point for your business. Finding a way to sell this uh kind of compellingly on your site to people who are coming on. For e-commerce businesses, this is slightly different, but it's still important. Now, you might think that as an e-commerce business, your goal is just to get the first sale

4:36:50when someone lands on your site. That is a goal, but it's not the only goal. And often the businesses that scale fastest, they might not get the sale and the first visit to the website because actually what's almost as valuable as that first sale is that customer detail, getting the email address, the name or whatever in return for something. So that's what we're going to be looking at today. So what's the components of the qualified customer closer uh framework? Well, first off, we start with credibility. We need a way of

4:37:19demonstrating credibility on the site. Then we need some sort of lure. This is the thing that we are offering people in return for their action, for their details really, for their data. We need to make sure that objection handling is used across the site and in particular where we're asking people to give us their trust. So we need to give people a reason to trust us where we're asking them to give us their trust. Uh we need to use social proof to show that they are not the first person to take this leap. Other people have done it and other people are very happy at their

4:37:49decision. We need to make it incredibly easy for people to do this as well. So removing friction in the conversion process, not just across the website. And we need to be giving people a representative result. So this means that the thing that we're offering them is a representative taster of the benefits that they'll get from doing business with us on an ongoing basis. So what are the key metrics that would tell us that we have an opportunity in process to improve? Well, we would look at web conversion rate. Um if web conversion rate is low, now I know that this is a symptom of positioning. It's

4:38:24also a symptom of uh the the presence your website and and the performance of your site also impacts web conversion rate. But um this working on this process can significantly impact conversion rate. And we'll look at examples today where the difference might be 30x right [laughter] in conversion rate just from getting this process right. It can also impact heat maps and patterns depending on what we're offering where we're offering it. This can cause people to focus on certain areas of our site to our benefit. Live chat engagements and responses. Um, what we really want to do if you're a if you're a software business or a lead generation business

4:39:05or even an e-commerce business is we want to try and offer something that is so compelling and so easy to understand that people aren't reaching out to us. They're not asking us questions. They're not going to the contact form and saying, "Hi, I was just wondering if you do this." Because for all of those people, we have a standardized process that they go through. Right? When you go to Amazon, you don't go, "Hi, Jeff. Just wondering if you sell books." we they they have a standardized process. They have a way of helping people find that stuff and they have something that is so compelling that you know if someone was

4:39:38like oh I I don't know if you work with like you know say they came to Exposure Ninja I'm not sure if you work with law firms I just wondered do you know you do this sort of digital marketing we get none of that question because guess what we're not saying to people if you want digital marketing contact us because then we're putting the onus on them what we're saying is if you have a website and you want to see how it's performing fill in the website review and then it's up to us to tell them if we think that we can help them. So by doing that we

4:40:05cast a much wider net. We bring in so many more leads to the business and it makes it incredibly scalable and uh sales conversion rate as well. So if we get this process right and you have a sales team selling to your leads their conversion rate will increase too because we are pre-qualifying and we are doing some of that sales process in in this stage here. So, why is this stuff important? Well, when a thousand people visit a website, we have two groups. We have normally the 99% that leave without doing anything and then we have the 1% that actually take an action. Now, that probably sounds wasteful and that

4:40:45is a hideously wasteful looking pie chart. It's designed to look wasteful and it is wasteful. Um, the most brutal thing of all is that for some businesses a 1% conversion rate will be an improvement. uh we are regularly sent sites to review which have a 0.1.3% conversion rate. In other words, they have to get like 300 people or a thousand people to their website to get one lead or sale. [laughter] Let that sink in for a minute. And the reason is

4:41:18because they're not doing this stuff. Okay? The reason is they've got a contact form on their contact page. And if someone manages to qualify themselves and identify that this business is a good fit for them and sell themselves on the whole idea and answer all of their own objections, then they might take the initiative to go to the contact page and say, "Hey, just wondering if you could

4:41:35help me." And then they become a lead. But obviously, it's a very small percentage of people that will ever do that. So yeah, 1% might feel wasteful. In reality, 1% is like a dream ambition for a lot of businesses. It doesn't have to be like this is the good news. So, we use our own site uh frequently as an example of this um and our own free website and marketing

4:42:02review. Now, what happens if we throw a thousand people at a page like this? Well, we still get two groups of people, but obviously the converters are much larger here. So, in this case, uh with you know that particular iteration of the page, 36.47% of people take an action. So, we're still losing most people. We're still

4:42:22not converting more than we're losing. And I've never seen an example of a site that converts more than it loses. You will always lose more people than you get. Um, you know, you could be offering free money, right? And you would still not have a conversion rate of over 50%. I'm willing to bet. Now, the exception can be, you know, if you're selling, there's one time where we've converted over 50%, but it was to our existing list. Okay? to our existing customers and it wasn't something that was open to cold traffic, but if we're sending cold traffic there, you're never going to convert over 50%. So, you can

4:42:57kill yourself trying, but you won't get there. So, 36.47, very different experience. Obviously, this means um that we're going to get generating 36 times the leads with the same amount of traffic. Now, thinking about what this does for your business, by the way, this is freak show. This is ridiculous. Let's say that the number is 30 leads, right? So, let's say that there's a 3% conversion rate versus a 1% conversion rate. But think about what this does for all of your

4:43:30marketing. It means if you're generating three times as many leads from your ads, for example, well, you can now afford to spend three times more on your ads, which means that you can out bid all of your competitors converting at 1%. If you're converting at 3% versus 1% with your competitors for organic search, you can afford to put much more resource into ranking and optimizing your organic search knowing that you're going to get a much bigger result from it. So by making your process more efficient and effective, it means that every piece of marketing you do then becomes more effective. Anything that you do to throw

4:44:10traffic at a machine which is really well optimized to convert that traffic, the ROI is much higher. So you can put much more energy into that work. So this is a really good thing. Obviously it affords one all sorts of privileges. It can pay for ads. you can grow more quickly, you can invest in more team, all of this type of stuff. Um, so really what we're talking about is conversion rate optimization, which is tweaking the layout, instructions, and messaging on your site so that visitors do exactly what you want them to do. Now, some of the things that we're going to go through today will seem obvious because

4:44:43they are so painfully logical. But just because they're logical doesn't make them any less important. Generally, us humans, we are not logical beings. And many of us spend our entire lives fighting against logic and the status quo. For example, um if you go to a creative agency to have your website designed, what is a creative agency? Well, by nature, what they're trying to do is surprise and delight people. By surprising and delighting people, we are going away from the beaten path. If you go to a creative agency to have an e-commerce store designed and you say, "We want you to," you know, you're very rarely going to get something that looks

4:45:24like Amazon because Amazon is very logically designed. It's very optimized and focused and each piece is being split tested and this will drive a creative mad because they want freedom. They want to express themselves. But Amazon is not built on someone's perspective. Amazon is built on let's look at users and what users do and what we need to do in order to make users do

4:45:46what we want which is buy the thing. Well, a creative agency is completely opposed to that, aren't they? They want to um exert their ideas that, you know, they get this warm fuzzy feeling from putting their creativity in others. And that's not a bad thing, but it's a very bad thing for conversion optimization, let me tell you. Because you don't want to go against Amazon. You are not going to beat Amazon at conversion optimization. They have more data than anybody else. They have taught the world how to use e-commerce. So, you won't beat Amazon at conversion rate optimization. Un unless you've got something that very few have ever seen,

4:46:24you will not beat them. So, fighting against that, fighting against logic, you know, can can be very dangerous. Um, so we're going to look at some different ways of doing this. Um, right. Let's look at credibility first of all. Now the fundamental mantra I guess for credibility is if we don't give visitors a reason to believe that what you do is good, they won't believe what you do is good. Okay? If we don't give people a reason to believe that what you do is good, they won't believe what you do is good. You know that you're good, right? You know that you're good. You know that you work

4:46:59really hard. You know that your business is trying as hard as it can to be the best it possibly can be. Your visitors have no idea. They're judging you on, remember, the before and after of the website. They're judging you on all sorts of other things. So, it's up to us. It's our responsibility to convince people that we are the best choice for them. So, how do we do this? Well, you may have seen me uh rave about this uh

4:47:25before. This website looks like garbage. Let's be honest. This is for a fitness camp. It's just full of before and afters. There is no information about what's in the fitness camp. There is no um you don't get the diet plans. You don't get to see pictures. You don't get to see pictures of everyone working out.

4:47:42There is none of that. There is loads going on here. This is absolute genius. This is the before and afters uh for this fitness camp. Now, I'm going to read you a little bit of this because there is so much I don't know if it's intentional, but there is so much marketing skill in this. It's unreal. So the first paragraph, this top guy, at age 50, Tim Howerin, a fireman from California, is now in the best shape of his life. In the 12 weeks following camp, Tim went from 21% to 9% body fat while dropping 30 lbs on the scale. He has completely transformed his heart

4:48:19health and his doctor could not be happier. Tim credits the simple yet effective 25minute workouts taught at camp, the balanced nutrition, and the online peer support community as a huge part of his success. Okay. Now, if you were to scroll down the page, you would see various different before and afters. It's the same thing though always. You know, person who looks like the typical website visitor in this case as the before and person who looks like slightly better than the typical website visitor's goal. Okay? It's important that they're slightly better because nobody believes that they will get the full result, but if they can reconcile themselves that they'll get maybe 50% or

4:49:0070% of the way there, then they'll be happy with that. So, we've got this before and after, which is consistent. Now, the the images, the people that are used are a diverse bunch designed to represent lots of people at different age groups, different genders, uh different ethnicities. The whole goal here is that you see someone in the before who looks like you currently, right? My problem, I'm the first guy, right? And I'm 50 and I've got the belly like that and I want to get Well, I don't need to be as ripped as him, but if I was even half of that rip, then I'd

4:49:33be happy, right? That's what they want. That's what they want. They want that resonance. Now, what about the wording that's being used here? Remember, we're talking about credibility. We were talking about giving people a reason to believe. Why is it important that Tim is a fireman from California? Why is that important? Well, it's important because that's a meaningful specific. It they don't need to give

4:49:58that information that he's a fireman. It's completely irrelevant to his results. But what it does do is it convinces you, the visitor, this is an ordinary person. He's not some fitness instructor. He's not some, you know, high-flying person who can do magic tricks. This is a fireman, right? Why is it important that he went from 21% to 9% body fat? Well, it's specific. That makes it more believable, right? While dropping 30 lbs on the scale, just in case dropping weight is your goal versus losing body fat. Heart health. They're looking for that trigger. Ah, right. I

4:50:31know I've got trouble with heart health. Boom. Resonating with me. His doctor could not be happier. So, what's the objection that's being handled there? What's the credibility they're building there? Well, is this really safe? Well, his doctor could not be happier. Okay. Uh Tim credits a simple yet effective 25inut workouts. So that's a short time period. Anyone can afford 25 minutes, right? [cough] Balanced nutrition online peer support

4:50:58community blah blah blah. Now each of these follows exactly the same format, right? There's some meaningful specifics about people designed to resonate with the target customer and those meaningful specifics compound to make something that is incredibly credible. Okay, incredibly credible. You believe all of these stories because there is so much specific and there's no reason not to believe. By the way, I'm not saying that they're fake. That they are probably not fake. I would be very surprised if they were. So when I'm at a seminar, I'll I'll show this and I'll read a bit and I'll say, "Right, who in this room believes that this fitness camp is good

4:51:35at what it does?" just from what you've seen so far. And most people say, "Right, this this fitness camp works. This thing works." Now, they don't know anything about the camp. They don't know where it's based. They haven't seen any pictures it. They haven't seen the credentials of the person who's running it. They don't know any of this stuff. But just from pummeling them with before and afters, pummeling them with this credibility, everybody makes the judgment this thing

4:52:01works. Now, this fitness camp is run by Bill Phillips. And um if you don't know Bill, he's a bit of a I don't know if he knows this, but for me, he's a bit of a guru on the use of before and afters. So, he wrote a book called Body for Life, which was basically it's a diet book. So, he's like a trainer in the US, right? He wrote a book called Body for Life, which was basically about how to transform yourself. But what he did, which was genius in the book, is he peppered the cover with before and afters. I remember seeing an edition of the book where you

4:52:34open the book and the whole inside front cover and the inside back cover were just covered in before and after pictures who've been through the book, covered in it. And when you see this on the shelf against other books, other diet books, other weight loss books, which was, you know, this was in an era of books, um you cannot but leave with the impression that this is an incredibly effective thing. So, Bill also created a supplement company called EAS. Um, both heavily marketed using before and afters. He actually sold EAS

4:53:09for 160 million. Where did it all go wrong? Um, they actually the the company that bought it then sold it on for, I think, 320 a few years later. But this is an entire, you know, empire. This looks like a crappy website for a fitness camp. The person behind this is a multi multi-millionaire and they've built that on before and afters. That's been the common thread across everything that they've done. So, um, what we need to do as whatever we're selling, we're probably not selling fitness. You might be selling fitness, but most of us probably aren't. What we

4:53:44need to do is replicate this strategy. So, how do we replicate the before and after for our business? Now, if you're a software company, for example, your before is going to be your customer's current state. So, I'm patching together loads of different solutions, trying to run my business with this software, and it's real nightmare. Then, I got this new software, and it was amazing. It's improved our productivity or it's improved our results. It's improved our speed, whatever. Right? That's the before and after. The before needs to be

4:54:17recognizable where people are at now. the after needs to be where they want to be or preferably slightly better than where they want to be because they won't believe that they can get the full benefit from it. If you are uh an e-commerce company, right, and you're selling some sort of product which provides benefit, I just just reviewed one of our our new clients direct to consumer business. They sell like value added chocolate, I'm going to call it say. So chocolate has other benefits to it like it helps you rest, it helps you give you energy or whatever. So, the before and after that they can use is,

4:54:49you know, I've been feeling really sluggish. I've, you know, not been really feeling myself. Haven't been able to get my energy through the workout. I've noticed a significant difference in my energy levels since taking this chocolate. And by the way, the chocolate is absolutely delicious. That's the before and after. That's the transformation that people want. So, how can you use transformations on your website and in your business? Because if you can do that, it's an incredibly

4:55:12strong way of building credibility. Another way of building credibility is the use of logos, companies that you've worked with. The reason that this works is it's a shortcut, right? So, here's a client's site that we built and we used NHS, Lafage, Appetito, Deote, and BBC who were clients that this business had worked with. They never before thought of using this. When we said, who have you worked with? They're like, oh yeah, we've done some gigs for, you know, like uh, you know, some hospitals in the NHS and stuff and we've done some stuff for Deote and we did some big gig for the BB. Great. Why are we using that on the

4:55:44website? Because the the the pattern that people go through when they land on this page is I don't know who to choose. I've never hired an AV company before. Every time I do, it just feels like something I don't really understand. I don't know what good looks like. But these companies are more successful than me. These companies are bigger than me

4:56:02and they've chosen this organization. Therefore, who am I to argue with that? Right? Reminds me, there's a Dan Kennedy story of the um the when Burger King were trying to figure out where to put their restaurants, right? Um this is a big deal. When you're trying to locate a fast food restaurant, you want to put it somewhere where you're going to get enough like walk past traffic or drive past traffic. And this guy, it turned out he just been going and playing golf. Um, and what he'd been doing is when he goes to a new town to find out where they should put the restaurant, he just looks at where the

4:56:39McDonald's is positioned, thinking, well, if McDonald's has got like the A team in this, they've got the best, you know, fastest growing restaurant. They've figured this stuff out, they've figured out where to locate it, who am I to try and beat them? I'm just going to put our restaurant like across the street from them, right? Why wouldn't you? Because that's clearly the best place to be. So, it's that that idea of like, well, the BBC BBC is pretty good at choosing an AV company, right? So, well, I'm just going to shortcut this decision. Copy them. Great. That's

4:57:09that's going to be a good result for me. So, what we're trying to do is another credibility trigger. It's a shortcut to get people to trust you and believe uh that um they are the best. So, in the first month that this site launched, it converted over 6%. Which was triple what their old website did. And one of the main features, there's lots going on here, but one of the main features is this use of logos as a shortcut to

4:57:32credibility. So that's credibility. How can you use credibility in your business? So think about the testimonials, the before and after, the case study type things, and companies that have trusted you or people that have trusted you. If you're not a B2B company, then using customer testimonials, if you can possibly use their faces as well makes them more believable. um and allows you to have a diverse range of people so that people can uh recognize someone that matches them. So someone in your position chose us and they're happy with that

4:58:04situation. That's exactly what we want. Okay, let's now talk about the lure that you're using. So this is the thing that you're offering people in order to get them to act. Now the rule here is if we want someone to act, we have to use an attractive lure, right? My mate Andy is a fisherman and if he goes out fishing for his carp using uh I don't know an iPhone for example as the bait well carp aren't interested in iPhone that might be attractive to someone who wants an iPhone but it's not it's not interest it's not attractive to a carp. A carp wants a boiled fish pellet which stinks

4:58:44and is horrible. That's attractive to them. So, when we're talking about using an attractive look, we want to make sure that we're being attractive to our target customer, not just attractive to us or attractive to what we think our customer might want. We have to resonate with them. Okay. Um, so here is how most people try and lure customers into working with them. We have no affiliation with this website, by the way. So, at the bottom of this site, it says, uh, you can send us a message using our contact form. Okay, that's the lure. For a free obligation, free no obligation quote. You can send us a

4:59:16message using our contact form. So, how strong is that as a lure? How tempted are we to grab onto that hook? And fishing is a good metaphor, right? Because a wy carp when it sees a piece of food in the back of its mind is there might be a hook on the end of this, right? I might be about to do something very bad. So, the lure has to be sufficiently attractive to get them to suspend that disbelief and go for it and grab it even with the risk that there's a hook. And it's exactly the same for customers. Is that attractive enough to allow us suspend our disbelief and put

4:59:49ourselves in a bit of risk to contact this business with the risk that they might try and close us? They might try and you know cold call us forever. They might be total scammers. There is risk here for us as consumers. So how do we offset that risk and how do we make that lure attractive enough that we can get past that? So freedom obligation quote send us a message using our contact form could be better. So something like this

5:00:15would normally convert at zero to 1%. Now they could make it slightly better by actually putting the form straight on the page rather than just forcing someone to go to the contact page. Two reasons. Number one, people might not be able to find the contact page as unbelievable as that is. But number two, um if they you know every time there's a page load, there's a room for an error, right? The page might not load, [laughter] right? Uh the link might be broken that day. Whatever. If you put the page, if you put the form on the page, you remove one big step from that two-step sequence, right? Get to the

5:00:49page, fill in the form. Well, all they need to do is just fill in the form. Happy days. So, remove the step. That usually increases the conversion rate. Usually, we'd expect that to go to like 1 to 2%. also makes it very clear what a visitor is supposed to do next because a contact form particularly on the side of a page, you know, you notice this as soon as you land on the page rather than having to read through the copy because very few people will get to the bottom of a page of copy like that and read the small print at the bottom of a page. So

5:01:16that's very invisible as a CTA, a call to action. Now, we can make this even better by adding a lure. So this is another site that we've built for a client and the text. So, notice that the form is on the page. It's on the page as soon as you land on the page as well. Um, and the copy over here says, "Need help with

5:01:34your exhibition stand for your event. For a free, no obligation personalized quote and a free 3D visual of your stand, get in touch with our friendly team." So, um, this has lure. This has something that you get. It's not just for a free obligation quote. You also get a free 3D visual of your stand. So what we did here is we asked them what their sales process was and they said well our sales process when someone gets in contact with us we'll always design a 3D visual of their stand for them so that they can sign it off because people if people are going to get you know like

5:02:10a stand like you can see in the background for BDO if people are going to get a stand like that they need to be able to see it first so that they know it's exactly what they want. So this is just standard part of our sales process. So, we thought, great, let's take that step of your sales process, which you're doing anyway, and let's position it on the website as a lure to get people to get a quote in the first place. So, the

5:02:33company here isn't doing anything extra. Still going through their exact same sales process, but because we're using this lure, we're able to increase their conversion rate. Um, and what this does, normally you can get something to five to five to 10% using this sort of thing. Now, obviously, it depends on the traffic source. It depends on how strong the lure is. depends on the quality of the traffic, all that type of stuff. But in this particular example, I think

5:02:56we're around 9.1 9.16% I believe. So makes it much much much more effective. We also uh remove some uh objection there as well. Get in touch with our friendly team. So this isn't like call sales, which for me is just the most the least turn on of a call to action. You know, call sales on 0845. It's just horrible, horrible as a call to action. Um, so yeah, lots going on there. There's actually quite a lot going on on this page. You see, we've got the the use of the logos as credibility devices. We've got the Trust Pilot um stars as well. Um, we've got the uh free, we've got all the benefits

5:03:39stacked underneath. We've got repeated echoed calls to action throughout this whole page. There are lots and lots of um different CTAs. We've got CTAs targeted at people who like different methods. So, we've got the form. We've also in the header got call now for free exhibition standard advice. So we've got we're offering advice there not just you know call sales and then we've got a phone number should people prefer to call that number is obviously click to

5:04:01call too. So yeah lots of stuff going on there. Now this is one of the best performing sites we've ever worked on. Um this is uh back in the days of PPI. Um oh this was this was a great fun camp. Lots of people hated PPI. We absolutely loved it at Explosion Ninja. We had a great time with a whole bunch of PPI clients. This was a really high performing campaign actually. Um, this is uh, you know, mo most PPI claims companies didn't have the best reputation, let's be honest, but most PPI and by the way, if you're from outside the US, uh, sorry, outside the UK, then payment protection

5:04:38insurance was uh, like an insurance um, thing that was added on when people paid for something. So when they took out, you know, a payment plan on a new sofa or something, it would there'd be a little box that was ticked or something that was added on called payment protection insurance. And basically, if you ran out of money while you were paying it off, then, you know, the insurance would cover it. And the UK government decided that this had been missold and missold on a massive massive scale through all these insurance uh and financial companies. So there was this big hoo-ha where people who had taken

5:05:15out insurance uh payment uh products over a huge range of time could now claim that money back. They could claim compensation. So you got all of these claims companies like our client Canary claims. We had a few clients in the space um like these companies who would then help people recover their PPI claims. So that's the backstory. now incredibly competitive market, very high volume because this was something that literally hundreds [snorts] of thousands or maybe even millions of people had bought. So there became this huge race to mobilize this huge group of people to request their PPI claims and it was very very competitive, one of the most

5:05:54competitive markets in the space while this stuff was going on. And then to make it even more competitive, the government decided that there was a deadline at which people couldn't claim PPI anymore. So you had this kind of crescendo of companies fighting for these people and fighting to market and we loved it. We love fighting for these

5:06:13people and had some fantastic results. So here's a website uh that we were working on um during this time and we drove loads and loads of traffic to it and we needed to get the conversion rate working really well. And one of the things that we did is most PPI companies they would say you know contact us. contact us if you think you might have had PPI and you know we can sort you out. Well, our client wanted to work in huge volume. They wanted to take this thing to another level. So, we knew that we had to have a more compelling call to action than just contact us. So, we

5:06:45chose a call to action of find out how find out if you had PPI because if you think about the process that someone needs to go through to claiming PPI, step one is I need to understand if I even had it. Step two is I then need to understand what my options are to get it back. And step three is I need to go through that process. So we said right let's give people this first option. We don't want people to have to contact us and have a conversation. We just want to automate a way where people can find out if they have PPI which is exactly what

5:07:12we did. So this form says have you had PPI? And look at what we're actually able to get from people in order to do this. We're able to get their bank cards, their name, email, phone number, and their full address as step one in a CTA. Now something like this uh between 10 and 30% conversion rate um I think actually from organic traffic this was converting at over 30%. Which is stupid absolutely stupid. Um and the reason is because find out if you had PPI is an attractive lure. I need to do this as part of the process. Whereas contact us I've got no idea what the benefit is

5:07:52there. you're just basically throwing a hook into the water and asking the fish to hook themselves. Well, they're not going to do that, are they? Whereas, if you can give them a benefit, that would be great. And we decided to take this to a another level. Um, we actually set up this site on our own as a tester. There was no company behind this. We just wanted to see what sort of conversion rate we could get. So we built a store card payment protection insurance website and uh we said actually find out how much you could claim because we thought find out if you had PPI is one

5:08:21thing but what people really want is the money. That's what they really want. So the image there is you know we're selling the the end benefit. Are you owed hundreds or thousands of pounds for storecard PPI? Find out now how much you could claim. And this converted even higher. This was over 33% which is absolutely mad. Okay, mad. So, most of the time you are not looking for these sorts. I might have misqued. This is the 33%. I'm I've got a feeling that this was either 14 or 17% from organic. So, I might have misqued you there. So, I think this was 14 or 17. This was 33. I

5:08:58want to make sure that's correct. Um, anyway, ridiculous results. Now, to be clear, you're not aiming for that. If you've got a conversion rate of three or 4%, you shouldn't now feel like you're a slug with no personality because you're not hitting plus 30%. Like that's ridiculous. It's freak show. It's circus animals. This is ludicrous. Okay, so you're not aiming for that. I mean, if you can get that, then fantastic, but it's very it's very rare that you would get that. Most sites can build a really solid marketing campaign around a conversion goal which is bringing them between two and 3%. If you can get 4%,

5:09:37happy days. Obviously, like I say, it depends on traffic sources. It also depends on your mix of mobile and desktop traffic. As traffic has become increasingly mobile, conversion rates on mobile are almost always lower and sometimes quite significantly. So, we'll often find that a site that is predominantly desktop traffic will have a higher conversion rate than traffic that is predominantly mobile just because people tend to convert less often on a mobile than they do on desktop. It's just a fact of life. So, there are like there are factors here and there are things which will impact this. But yeah, the point here is we want to make sure our lure is

5:10:13sufficiently attractive to get people over their hesitation about acting. So, that's the second element. Next, we want to think about objection handling. Now, objection handling is a very common concept in sales. In a sales call, we would expect to have a list of possible objections and we would expect to have rehearsed um uh ways of handling each of those objections, phrases, stories to use to handle those objections. But in marketing, objection handling is pretty rare. And most of the time, it's ignored. We mainly just generate leads and then we hope that the leads come in and then we can handle any objections they might have. But quite often there

5:10:55are actually conversion blockers which will prevent someone from even becoming a lead or from purchasing from you in the first place. So we don't even get the opportunity to objection handle behind the scenes. In other words, we need to objection handle on the website itself. So um you may know that one of my favorite searches to carry out is by Viagra. I love searching for buy Viagra and I do it usually at least once a quarter. And one of the reasons that I love doing this is because Biagara is such a competitive term that you see some of the world's most effective objection handling. You see some of the

5:11:28world's most effective digital marketing really. Anything porn pills, casino, anything that's ranking in those sorts of categories, there is some fantastic SEO because they're so competitive and there is so much money to be made. Now, one of the sites that's been ranking consistently, in fact, I actually want to show you uh I want to show you the live site, not just this slide. So, I'm going to open it up and we're just going to have a

5:11:50look. So, we're going to search for Dr. Fox Viagra. And you can see here is this beautiful, incredible page. Um, an absolute beast of a page. And what I want you to look at here is that the number of objections that are being handled. It is quite astounding. So, first up, we've got phone number. Now, the use of a phone number on a website like this is important. They don't necessarily want people to call, but they want the credibility. One of the objections is I don't know anything about this. It's an online service. Using the phone number gives it a real presence, if you like, and they're using a local number as

5:12:29well. They're not using an 0800, an 0845. They're using a Bristol 017 number. What about the other objections they might be handling? fully UK regulated. Well, that's handling an objection. Uh, regulated by the CQC, managed by GPS working in the NHS. So, this isn't some dodgy operation. We're not shipping the products over to you. They're illegal black market from these weird places. You know, this is all UKbased. Are they any good? Well,

5:12:55there's loads and loads of reviews. Another credibility trigger there as well. Objection handling. Discrete parcels. You're not going to get a big fanfare as the delivery driver walks down the road who's just left his Viagra truck parked on your front drive with his big parcel branded Viagra for impotent men. Here we go. You know, hey, welcome everyone. Gather around as we present this Viagra to Mr. Tim Cameron Kid. There's none of that, right? This is it's discreet and that's an objection that people will have. We've even got a

5:13:28video about how the whole thing works. Uh, we've got the inspection there. Then let's look at the amount of content on this page. Um, we've got information about the prices. We've got prescription fees. We've got some of the different options here. Actually, this is slightly different to the page that is ranking. Um, but never mind. We've got then got we've got the order process. So, some information about that because people might have objections about that. We've got the recent reviews. We've got the fact that they're recent is is quite important. They're not actually that recent. They seem to have only been pulling through from the 5th of April,

5:14:00but there you go. They got a lot of reviews from the 5th of April. Then we've got all of this supplementary information as well, which is mainly designed to um handle objections. So, basically, oh, then we've got some in the press here as well, uh to again give them more credibility and trusted shops here too. So, there's lots and lots of objection handling going on on this page to make you uh believe that this is going to be a good option for you. And that's really important. So, the best thing to do, the best exercise to run through here is list all of the possible objections that someone might have to

5:14:36working with or buying from you. Whatever you sell, whether you're e-commerce or service or software, think about the I I usually get people to write out 20 different objections. What are the 20 reasons not and not even that someone wouldn't buy from you that they wouldn't even contact you in the first place? What are those things that would stop them? conversion blockers or lead blockers. Think of those 20 questions and then think about how you would handle each of them. This is a mammoth exercise, but it's a mammoth exercise that you can then use to improve the conversion rate of every single page of your site because you can make sure that

5:15:10those objections are handled. Now, that doesn't mean you need to have like an objection handling section on your site. You saw how Dr. Fox did it. They know those objections. They know that, you know, discrete packaging the or they can say discrete packaging and that handles that whole objection about embarrassing. This is embarrassing. I'm concerned people are going to find out. Like there's loads of possible things about and they just handle it with a phrase discrete packaging, right? Or they just handle all of this thing about like, is it legit? Is it a real place? Am I, you know, am I getting scammed here? CQC UK

5:15:44pharmacy phone number. Boom. objection handled, right? So, it doesn't need to be that you need to write like why don't people buy from us? Reason one, this and here's the answer. These can be little signs. It can be just little tells that give people that mental tick in the box to say this is going to be okay. So, that's the exercise to run through um to handle objections. But this is really important. If you don't handle those objections, the people that have those objections won't be able to get over some of them and therefore you won't even get the chance to talk to them or

5:16:17to sell to them in the first place. We're going to look at social proof. So, what we're trying to do with social proof is we're trying to reassure people that you are not the first person to make this decision. Okay? If you choose us, you are not the first person to do this. Lots of other people have done this, right? If you've read any of the, you know, the pop psychology books about when you want people to recycle their towels in a hotel, what you don't say is, "Please recycle your towel." You say, "Loads of people recycle their

5:16:45towels and here's how they do it." Right? Because people are like, "Okay, well, this is the thing to do. This is you, if you've ever stood up, if you ever stood in a street and looked up, you'll notice that not many people look up. If you get five of you and you all look up, then all of a sudden, every passer by starts looking up." And before

5:17:02long, the whole street is looking up. wondering what everyone's looking up at, right? So, we are we we are creatures that are guided by uh social norms and we want to fit in, right? We don't want to take a risky outside choice most of the time, particularly when it matters. So, social proof is really important on your site. Now, I'm a huge fan of national accident helpline. I just have a a real love and fascination of businesses in spaces like personal injury, which maybe aren't the most glamorous of businesses, but that makes their marketing challenge even more difficult. So, I love marketing these types of things. And I love National

5:17:38Helpline uh or at least their marketing. I've got no idea about the business. The whole thing could be a total scam. I don't know. But I love their digital marketing. I should caveat that. And they use social proof fantastically. So look at when you land on this um this page. By the way, the compensation calculator is fantastic as a call to action. Think about how we get people to convert. Do we say are they saying if you think you might need compensation, contact us? No. Are they saying find out if you have if you are entitled to compensation? Not really. It's actually a calculator. This is find out how much

5:18:13you could claim. Right. Bang on. They nailed it here with this CTA. It's exactly the lure that they really want to offer. But look at how they're using social proof. They've got the excellent five stars, 12,413 reviews on Trust Pilot. Huge number and it's a third party, so it makes it very, very credible. But the thing I want to show you here is they echo this. They echo this social proof. So, they've got the social proof there at the top of the page. So, as soon as you land on it, that's the tick to say, "Right, okay. This seems to be legit, right? This this seems to be

5:18:48okay. I can play with this site. So then you go down here and you start thinking about it and the button on this page is always positioned around here. There's six steps. The button is always around here. But look what they've put right next to the button. They've echoed the social proof just in case while you were thinking about this that you forgot National Accident Helpline was a safe option. They've echoed it and they've even got a testimonial right there. All good and fast. Great. And it was a very

5:19:18recent one as well. So this is genius. This is I words cannot express the love I have for the thought that goes into National Accident Helpline's website. It makes me so happy to look at this stuff because they think about these things. So what really what we're looking to do here is anywhere we're look anywhere we're asking someone to trust us, we're giving them a reason to trust us. That's exactly what they're doing. We're asking people to trust us here. This is where they have to take the action. There is the social proof. You don't have to go

5:19:45far. you don't have to hunt for it. Another example here we have Auto Trader. So this is where you fill in your information to uh list your car. So I mean create your ad is maybe a little bit they could possibly go for something like uh find out how much your car could be worth or something like that. And then once you've done that they could say you know do you want to create your

5:20:09ad out of this but you know whatever. But the point here is the social proof. So, what they haven't done on this page is they're not really even selling you on anything else about Autotrader. It's just every 60 seconds. So, there's some social proof. Lots of people do this. You're not the first. And then we've got all of these reviews. And then we've got the testimonials that are verified and they're all recent, right? Michelle Jackson, but you know, they're all recent. So, that gives them credibility. So, they're using this social proof as well. So, I

5:20:42love that as well. And then they've got objection handling there as well, by the way. Free 7-day warranty with qualifying adverts. So, what if this doesn't work for me? Objection handle. Boom. Tick. Okay. Now, we're going to look at ease of requesting your call to action. Ease of filling your thing in. Now, I know some of this has looked at lead generation, e-commerce businesses. Stick with me. All of this applies not necessarily to your product purchase, although of course it does. You want good product page layouts and nice straightforward checkouts. If you can put social proof in your checkout process as well, that really helps. Um,

5:21:20I know not always easy to do, particularly if on Shopify, you need to go to Shopify Plus to have custom layouts, but whatever. Um, but all of this stuff applies. Ease of use is incredibly important. What we really want to do is we want to make the lure appealing and then we want to drop it right in front of the fish, okay? So the fish doesn't have to go swimming around hunting for this bait so it can grab the

5:21:43lure. We want to make it really obvious. So where do people most people put their calls to action? The thing that their entire page their entire website is designed to do. Yeah, they put it at the bottom of the page. Um and this call to action is freaking horrible. It says to find out how to cut costs and future proof your IT systems. Uh call us on

5:22:040845. Right? Call us on 0845. So most people still think the 0845 numbers cost money to call. So you're actually kind of punishing them for becoming a lead. Right? [laughter] Imagine Amazon. You know, if you want to buy this book, call us on 0845. [laughter] [gasps] Just ludicrous. So most people put the most important part of their

5:22:25website in the least important place. And around 2% of clicks happen in the footer. They put it just above the footer. They've hidden it really nicely where fewest people are likely to find it. So actually your conversion goal should be the most visible element on every page of your site. So we talked about Amazon earlier. It's very difficult to beat Amazon as a a conversion optimized website. Really it is. Um so rather than trying to beat Amazon, let's just accept that Amazon

5:22:54has taught the world how to buy online. Amazon for many of us is the the the first time and the most common experience we have with making purchases online. And what we don't want to do is we don't want to go against all of that kind of ingrain thinking, those years of conditioning from everyone who's bought stuff on Amazon. So, what's going on on this page? Well, we've got the product on the left and then we've got the buy button on the right, exactly where we would expect it, surrounded by white space with a nice board around it. Very, very straightforward. We've got information further down the page if

5:23:29people want it. We've got just enough info above the fold so that people can buy it if they want to and they can do so immediately. Job done. So when we're designing a site, what do we do? We take the Amazon approach. CTA on the right exactly where people expect it. If they're ready to make the purchase or become a lead or whatever there and then they absolutely can do. If they're not, we echo the call to action further down the page. We're not trying to break from the norm here. We can be creative in all sorts of ways with our marketing, but when it comes to website layout, we do

5:24:02not want to be creative. The most creative site I've ever seen, I've told this story a whole bunch of times, so apologies if you heard it. Most creative site I've ever seen was for a a niche law firm, a very very good at what they do, and they operate in a very um I'm going to say a very almost altruistic um aspect of law. They work for uh people on housing benefits who are in a particular it it doesn't really matter what they do but the guy who runs this firm absolutely lovely guy super super you couldn't work with a nicer person and he comes bounding over to me

5:24:41and you know virtually and says you know Tim we got this new website want to get it ranked and stuff like this I'm like cool cool let's have a look at the site this site is beautiful um it's by a French design agency you know with one loads of Webby Awards, super celebrated. Everyone's like, "Wow, this site is amazing." As you scroll down, all these animations are flying in. He's got this menu system where you click on this little icon and this menu like flows out down the page and you can go through all your options and this, you know, must have taken I don't even know how they

5:25:12begin to wireframe that. We build sites all day long. I don't even know how they would have gone about building this. But as soon as I saw it, I said to him, "Mate, you're going to have to get this redesigned." I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but you're going to have to get this

5:25:24redesigned. And he says, why? I said, well, the trouble is, when people go on the website for what you're offering, they're not looking to be blown away by some super creative UX experience. They're not coming onto your site for an animation experience, the latest implementation of HTML 5, are they? They're coming onto your site because they want to establish, are you any good? They want to go through the closer checklist basically and then they want to become a lead. I can't even figure out where your menu is. We need to say menu. We don't need to have a burger icon because people don't know what that

5:25:57means. We need to show them the menu options and let them click on the drop downs and find the page for them and then fill in a form which is exactly where we want to see them. We don't want to create something that's like beautiful and creative and jars against us and takes two minutes of joyful play to find where we need to go next. that just doesn't work. Now, a lot of people will say, "I don't want to cheapen the look of my website with all these calls to action. If people really want me, you know, they're going to take the

5:26:25initiative. They're going to find us. They're going to reach out to us." I remember dealing with a a luxury AV firm um in a very, very rich area of the UK. And they said exactly this. We don't want to cheapen the look of our website by having a crude call to action like get a consultation or find out more or,

5:26:42you know, book your free demonstration. We we don't want to have anything like that. We we want us to look, you know, exclusive and all that type. Well, that's fine. But you have to realize that even for your clientele, a large portion of them aren't going to do that work. If you want to maximize the leads from your website, you need to go to people. You need to give them a clear next step. This is like um you know, you're dancing at the primary school

5:27:09disco and you know, I remember dancing. I really wanted to dance with Kelly, but you know, I'm just like, I'm not going to go over there. That's going to cheapen my look, right? I need to maintain my integrity, so I'm just going to dance over here. And, you know, she'll come over. She didn't come over.

5:27:22They never do. You have to go to them. That's the rule. That's the rule in school discos. That's the rule with digital marketing and your website layout. So, we want to give our target audience who we think of as Homer Simpson, not because they're stupid or lazy, but because they're confused, they've never been on your site before. They don't know anything about your business. We want to give them exactly what they want, exactly where they are expecting to see it. We don't want to break from the norm. We don't want to, you know, freak them out. We don't want to entertain them. We just Right here,

5:27:54Homer, you want donuts? Here's a donut. By the way, we built this site for Chaz and it's uh conversion rate is double what their previous site converted at. We're actually just about to build their next version of their site at the time of recording this. Look at the credibility there. All those logos, uh, we've got information about them. We got the phone numbers. We've got the FIFO trusted service award. We've got the

5:28:17clear CTA. You know, everything's there. Cool. Okay. Final um, aspect of the closer framework under process and this is delivering a representative results to people. So representative results. So when someone gets in contact with you, what's the result that they get? So we're we're delivering them something. So part of this is about the lure that we're giving them, but part of this is about actually what we give them. So here's how to think of this. Here's a little exercise that you can run. So if we imagine that our customers go through a process that's like this, right? Wherever they start, they this is where they're landing on our site. they

5:29:01are in some sort of situation and they have an outcome and they need to go through a whole bunch of steps to get there. Now, this is different for service companies. It's different for ecom. So, we're going to look at both. Okay? We're going to look at what service companies first and we're going to look at ecom. Now, the goal of your website's call to action is to move

5:29:21people further along this line. Okay? Okay, whether you're service or whether you're ecom, the goal of your website's call to action is to get people moving along this line because this is a journey that you need to go on together. And if you can start nudging people along this line earlier, you can firstly build a relationship with them. If you're working with them in some area or if you've got their sign up details

5:29:43somehow, you're building a relationship. And secondly, you can start to deliver the result, the ultimate result that they're looking for, which gives them confidence that if they buy from you, if they take that relationship further, they're going to get the result that they're after, right? They're going to end up at their their desired target. So, let's look at some different examples. Firstly, we're going to look at a service company. So, let's say that your ultimate goal, you want someone to sign up for their service. And really, they want to sign up for the service as well because that's going to be the thing that gets them the results. So,

5:30:12what are the steps? So, what are the stages that need to happen first? Well, you probably at some point you probably want to send somebody a proposal. Now, some people will be willing to just land on your website and request a proposal, right? Some people will do that, but everyone who does, there will be others that aren't quite ready because they haven't qualified

5:30:33you. They don't know if you're right. Okay. So, if we just say, you know, request a proposal or contact us to request a proposal or something like that, that's okay. We will get some and there might be times where we want to disqualify people who aren't ready to, you know, they're not ready to commit to a relationship like that. But there's a lot of stuff that needs to go on before

5:30:55someone is ready to request a proposal. So what we might want to do and by the way once they've requested a proposal obviously we then might have a meeting to discuss um you know and then it's going to sign up for the service. So that's going to be a process that we need to go through but on your website what you might want to do is you might want to have some sort of free

5:31:15consultation which gives them a result. So this isn't just a generic hey free consultation. Let's say that you're an accountant, right? And you're trying to get a um you're trying to get business for your new tax return service or you've identified that tax returns are something that you start doing for people and then you're able to upsell or cross-ell into other areas of accountancy. Well, you might offer a free tax return consultation or a tax return analysis where you have a look at their tax return last year and you see if they could have saved any tax based on what they've put in. And this might

5:31:46be a short meeting that you have with them that you know you do to build rapport. And then you say, "Right, great. Well, you know what? For the next year, actually, we don't want to make these mistakes. This could have been worth x,000 to you last year. If we're working together this year, I'm going to make sure that we take care of this properly for you." Okay? So, you're delivering them a result, which gets them along this line. It also means that your proposal is way more tailored to their specific situation. Uh let's say that you're an HR consultancy firm. You might want to offer a free employee

5:32:17contract review, right? So, you'll review their existing employee contracts, look for any holes, look for any potential landmines, that type of stuff. Well, you're giving them a benefit. You're also giving them you're giving yourself some ammunition because you now know what the issues are that you can then make your proposal more effective. If you're a sales consultancy, let's say, let's say you go into organizations and you help them to sell better, well, you might have a free sales call consultation or free sales call review where people send you a recording of the sales call. You give them some quick feedback on how they can improve their

5:32:51sales calls. Well, from there, they can go and implement it or they can just look at it and go, "Wow, you know, this is really good. This person clearly knows what they want." And then you say, "Well, you know, I can help you train your sales team. I can help you build your sales call scripts and get in fact this is a really good idea and and get this stuff sorted for you. Okay, we might do that. Um, so what you're doing is you're offering a free consultation, but you're tying it to a result. You're giving them some sort of tangible result. It works for you because you

5:33:18then have information about what they need so that you can tailor your proposal. And it works for them because they then have a result that they can take away and they can say, "Right, this person really knows what they're doing because I can already see what they've given me." Okay. Now, an example for a client that we've done this for um uh the hearing aid company. So, they sell hearing aids. They've got physical stores um across areas of the UK. And what we identified is that whilst not everybody so so the people that buy hearing aids privately, right, um they don't always know that they've got

5:33:55a hearing problem. They might think that their ears are just a bit blocked up. So what we did is we at the same time the NHS which is the the health service in the UK was taking away wax removal. Right? So usually you could go to your GP or whoever and they would like spray a thing in your ear and it would remove

5:34:14your ear wax so you can hear clearly. The NHS was taking this service away. So we thought ah there's a couple of things going on here. We can offer wax removal. We can sell wax removal very low cost as a trip wire purchase. It's basically the free consultation. We charged a bit for it, I think. And we offered this through the ads. So rather than offering hearing aids stuff in the ads, we offered the wax removal service in the ads because we knew that when people came in, firstly, we could start having a conversation with them about hearing tests, but we also knew that a lot of

5:34:47people who were coming in for wax removal would end upselling into hearing aids because actually it turns out that even with the wax removed, they still couldn't hear properly. So this was a really it's it we talk about creativity and marketing really creative way of approaching this. We got nominated for a whole bunch of awards like Northern Digital and Paid Media Awards based on this idea of everyone else in their

5:35:09market is trying to sell hearing aids. We're like, well, let's just forget that for a second cuz that's really expensive to advertise against and there's a quite small market that thinks they're in the market for hearing aids compared to the much larger and cheaper market for wax removal where we can get leads and we can get people into the place much cheaper and quicker. And then it turns out a good proportion of them will upsell into hearing aids as well. So, what we're really looking for is, you know, when you go into the, you know, go to the bakery and they've got that like plate of brownies on the top with

5:35:39cocktail sticks in, right? And it says, "Please take one." And you're like, "I really want one, but as soon as I take it, I know that representative result is going to be so tantalizing." And they're going to buy a whole bunch of these. Or is it just me? Maybe they just build it for me. I don't know. But this is the

5:35:55representative result. It's the brownie. It's the sample. The free take one with the cocktail stick. That's what you want to offer with your call to action. This is what the result should be bringing them. Okay, let's look at an example. Um, I'm going to give you Am I going to give you an example on e-commerce? I think I'm going to give you an example in e-commerce. We'll come back to that in a

5:36:16second. Uh, oh no, we're going to come back to that in a minute. Actually, before we move on to e-commerce, um, here's an example. This is a this is actually a word of warning. So, this is a uh conversion optimization case study for ADT. They're like an alarms company. And they started out with a call to action

5:36:36on their website, Book a Free Survey. So, Book a Free Survey is an interesting call to action for an alarms company. Because what is a survey? We don't really know. Um, is it for an alarm? We don't know. We think it might be. Do I need a survey for an alarm? Not too sure. There's a lot of potential objections to that. So, they tested changing to get a free quote. Now, on the surface of it, get a free quote might seem like less of a value ad, right? What's my takeaway from a free quote? Well, the only thing I haven't when I take a when I have a free

5:37:14quote is I've got the the number, the quote. I don't have any benefit. Where's the brownie? Well, the thing about this market is that this is a purchase that people make out of total necessity. And it turned out in this case actually that's all they wanted. They didn't want a survey. They didn't necessarily want someone to come and mess with their house. They didn't want a salesperson to turn up and make their life difficult. It doesn't sound survey sounds painful. It sounds like a lot of work. Like an audit. How exciting does an audit sound? It sounds horrible. Audit is something that the tax office does to you when you've been

5:37:50naughty, right? This is not good. Survey kind of falls into that category potentially. Whereas get a free quote. I know what that is. So the wording is important here. Let's say that with Exposure Ninja, let's say you've been running your own Google ad campaign. Now, if I say we can do you a PPC audit, we can do a Google ad audit. How compelling does that sound? Does that get your blood pressure raising? Does that get the heart pounding? Probably not. PPC audit. It sounds a little bit painful. It sounds like there's going to be criticism there. Whereas, if I say, "All right, can we offer you a PPC

5:38:24profitability boost that we'll have a look at your account? We'll give you some recommendations on how you can increase the profit of your pay-per-click ads without increasing your budget." Well, that sounds a bit better, doesn't it? Profitability booster. That sounds a bit more fun. That sounds a bit more enticing. That's more and and guess what? That's the representative result because that's actually the work that we're going to be doing if we end up working with you as a client, boosting the profitability of your PPC. That's our whole goal. That's why we're here. So, that's more of a representative result than just giving you a spreadsheet of stuff that you're

5:38:54failing at. And it's more compellingly presented. So, the wording is really important. So, um if you are a lead genen business or service company, here are some CTA tips. Uh firstly, it needs to be scalable. This really needs to be a replicable system. If you want to scale it, what you don't want to do is have some kind of ad hoc thing where you or someone in the business, worst case

5:39:16you, has to put in a few hours of work. Okay, so Exposure Ninja, I used to do all the audits in the early days of the company. Absolute nightmare. Luckily, we're only getting a few requests a day. It's not the volumes that we're getting now, but that was really tough, right? Um, in the very early days, we're getting even fewer than that. So, what we need to do is build some sort of scalable system. You don't want to stitch yourself up here. We don't want to say, you know, we're going to design you your perfect future and you know, you're an architecture firm. We're going to design you your house. We're going to

5:39:47go through the planning application audit for you all free of charge and if you like it, you can pay us. We're not saying that, right? We want something that is scalable that delivers a result but doesn't stitch you up. Um, this is we also need to keep into consideration the wide net versus a sniper rifle. If you've only got a few people in your company, you don't want to be generating dozens of leads a day because this whole thing could just tie you up completely. Likewise, if you notice that the people coming through your thing that you're offering are low quality, what you might be doing is over

5:40:20incentivizing people to get in contact with you. Okay? So, say that you are, you know, say you are an architecture firm, uh, you know, will sketch you out your dream home, for example. That's a dangerous CTA to offer because you might get a whole bunch of people that really aren't serious about that at all and you'll chew up all of your time doing these for a potentially relatively low

5:40:41conversion rate on actual conversions. So, what you might want to do instead is put some sort of qualification criteria. Um, we will design your dream home for you if you upload your plot. You know, you send us your plot details or something like that, right? then you're qualifying. You're setting a a threshold, which means you have to have sourced your plot. So therefore, you have to be at least reasonably serious about this. Okay? So you want to think about casting a wide net versus sniper rifle. If you only have the resources to cater to very small group of people, you might just want to pick them off with a

5:41:13sniper rifle rather than gathering thousands of them and then you have to try and sort out to find who's serious and who's not. Um, if your audience is unaware of the scale of their problem, usually your call to action, the thing that you're offering, you're helping them understand the scale of their problem. Right? If I don't know how much I'm overpaying in tax, the call to action, the thing that I'm offering, the result is I'm going to show you how much you're overpaying in your tax. Okay? So if the audience is unaware of the scale of their problem, if they don't know how much inefficiency there is in their business, they don't

5:41:49know how much they're wasting on their energy bills, they don't know, you know, whatever they don't know, that's what you're there to help them solve. If they are aware of the scale, but they don't have a resolution, then your call to action, the thing that you're offering is the road map to get to that resolution. Okay? So tired of wasting thousands on your energy bill? We will help you find the best suppliers or get a free consultation to see how much you could save or to get a free consultation to find out how you could save money on your energy bill. So, we're giving them a road map to that solution if they're

5:42:23already aware of this. If they're already aware of the scale of the problem, okay, does that make sense? So, first thing you need to do is categorize whether your audience is aware or not of the scale of their problem. IT companies always struggle with this because if you're an IT firm and you're selling IT support, what's the le what's the lead magnet? What's the benefit there? Well, it depends on whether people know the

5:42:47scale of their problem or not, right? So, think about scale. If they know it, then you're offering the roadmap to that's that's the thing you're offering. So, that's service and lead generation. What about e-commerce um businesses? what do you do uh to use these principles? Well, you still have this line, right? You still have where people are and where they where you want them to end up. Now, many people think that the e-commerce relationship starts at the first product purchase, but that's a

5:43:16mistake and it's a very costly mistake. The product purchase is an important step on that journey, but it's not the only step. It's not the beginning and hopefully it's not the end either. Most of the time, what we want to do is we want product purchase. We then want them to make some sort of repeat purchase. And the kind of ultimate goal is that they're subscribed to something because then that's an automatic repeat purchase without you having to put work in. So this is kind of the holy grail for most e-commerce businesses. They want some sort of subscription because then they have a very low or even zero cost of

5:43:49repeat purchase. But the mistake that people make is they think, well, we're just going to stick our website up and when people buy from us, that's when the dance begins. actually the dance should have begun quite a bit earlier. So most of the time there'll be some sort of firsttime voucher code or some sort of first time you know new to us will get the whatever there's some sort of incentive to get people involved and this has become really really common. Um so much so it's now the default. So when you go on a site like castor here we have unlock 15% off full priced items when you sign up

5:44:24for email and SMS. Okay the buttons are interesting. Put your email in. Continue. Right. So that's step one. You put your email in first. You then ask your phone number for SMS. If you only put your email in, they've already got your email. Okay? So they're not asking for email and phone in the same step. It's a two-step form. Email first. If you only put that in, you haven't completed it, but they've got your email, so they can then chase you off your phone number. And continue is the button. The different one, the exit button is no, I'll pay full price, which feels like a stupid thing to click, right? So, trying

5:45:03to trying to I don't know, sanity guilt you into clicking it. 15% full price is their kind of qualifying criteria. 15% is pretty decent, but actually this is now becoming the default in what we're seeing with ecom. 10% is really struggling to cut through. It doesn't feel like a valid discount. And the reason that they're willing to do this, by the way, is because they know that their sale conversion rate is is never going to be, you know, 5 10%

5:45:33for new customers. It's just not. Whereas, if they put that in there, they might get 5 10 15 20% new visitors signing up for that and then they can start the relationship. Then they can start marketing marketing to you very heavily using SMS. they can throw your email address in whatever ad platform that they're using to retarget to you, remarket to you as well. Now the dance begins. Now they've got you. Now they can really start marketing to you. So some CTA tips for our ecom friends. Um 10% isn't as exciting as it was. So usually we're seeing people having to push harder than this. 15% is good. 20%

5:46:12is really tasty. If you can go any higher, that gets really interesting. um voucher codes versus auto discount. So, the benefit of offering a voucher, there's two benefits of offering a voucher code rather than just automatically applying discount for first-time customers. The first benefit to offering a voucher code is people might forget to use it. Okay? If

5:46:33you're saying, "Here's the voucher code. Use this at checkout." And then they go through the checkout process and you know, they use Apple Pay or Google Pay or whatever, they might just forget to use it completely or they might miss the field. The second benefit is, you know, you get that um I don't know what I don't know what it would be called like voucher code bounce or something where

5:46:50people see the empty voucher code field. They're like, "Ah, other people aren't paying full price, but I don't have a voucher code here." Well, if you give them a new user voucher code, now they feel like, "Right, great. I've got a voucher code. That's good." Okay. So, you avoid that. You increase the conversion rate through your checkout process as well. Um, we also need to talk about SMS. increasingly popular for ecom sites to capture phone numbers so they can do SMS marketing. Clavio we'll be talking about in module five that allows you to use SMS. We're going to talk about what to send these people of

5:47:23course as well. So once you've collected the email addresses of your people, we're going to talk about what to send them and the different automations, the different funnels you need to be pushing them through. We're going to do all of that in module five. Um but yeah, if you're an ecom, very much consider SMS. I noticed that with some of the new direct to consumer ecoms, I sign up for this stuff because I'm just a geek about it. I'm getting way more SMS than I am emails from them, which is really

5:47:45interesting and it cuts through, right? Because emails, they all go to the promotions tab. SMS, it's always coming through. I'm getting it on my watch. It's coming up on my laptop while I'm working. Like, it's relentless, right? [snorts] So, that is process. We've looked at a huge amount here with credibility, lure, objection handing, social proof, ease, and making sure that

5:48:05you're offering a representative result. So that is the process stage. You are now more than halfway through. So we've done positioning, we've done the presence, then we've got process. Next up, we're looking at traffic. So in the next module, we're going to be talking about people. I will see you then. All right. So as part of your process module, you'll see that there is a tab in the worksheet called the process closer checklist. So this is the checklist to go through to make sure that you're implementing all of the different elements that we've talked about from credibility, lure, objection handling, social proof, ease and result, the representative result as well. So um

5:48:42for example, uh if we're talking about lure, is the bait you're using to track leads or sales at least as desirable as what your competitors are using? Be honest with yourself here. If what you're offering isn't as desirable, if you're ecom, you're offering 5%, they're all offering 15%. Let's be honest about that. You might not need to beat them on discount codes, but maybe you can add something else to your lure. Um, if service lead generation, does it give them a desirable outcome when they fill in your form? So, did they actually get something tangible from it? You know, this type of stuff. Uh, so there's all

5:49:15the different questions down here. Um, yes, no, and if no, what can you do to improve it? Then you can assign it to someone, either yourself or someone on your team or whatever. And once it's done, you can mark it done. Don't forget this stuff is actually really important. This stuff tends to come towards the top of the priority list because it's stuff that can improve your conversion rate even with your existing traffic. But you'll want to stick stuff into your to-do list and prioritization stuff. Um you can add new, you know, categories, sections of this, and you absolutely should. Um and make sure that you've got

5:49:48all this stuff filled in. Give it the priority, set it a set a deadline to it. You can assign it to someone on your team if you need to. And this gives you a logical way of working through all of your shopping list as you're going through the course so you don't get totally overwhelmed. So that is the process stage of the ninja worksheet. Um see you in the next video. We first looked at how we can motivate people who are just looking and try and knock them into those impulse purchases. We then looked at how we could remove some of the impact of high shipping costs by

5:50:21offering memberships or trigger points where people could increase their basket value in order to get free shipping. Then we took an intensely critical look at the frankly unacceptable practice of requiring people to sign up for an account before they go to checkout. We then looked at how to boot.

5:50:45You see them come onto your website and your heart rate starts to raise a little bit. You see them find their way to a product category page. They're close. They find a product that they like. They click on the product page and you can see them browsing, looking at the information. Result. They've clicked add to cart. Here we go. You feel your pulse start to raise a little bit more. No matter how many sales you get, the thrill of watching a live purchase never dies. They go through to the checkout, but then nothing. They leave. They close

5:51:18their browser window, never to return. Hurt, you start scheming. Can you find them? What was their IP address again? Where are they based? Wait, could I visit them? They're only a couple hundred miles away. Maybe they'll be back. But what if they're not? Let's look them up on Facebook. Basket cart, or checkout abandonment is painful, and it doesn't get any easier as the numbers start to scale. If you've ever watched visitors using your e-commerce store live in your analytics,

5:51:53oh, it can be a torturous thing. Checkout, basket, or cart abandonment never gets any easier. As the numbers scale, you just get more frustrated at these horrific leeches on society daring to click on your products and add them to their baskets but not finish the purchase. But in this video, we're going to address the top causes of basket and checkout abandonment and how to [music] fix them. Some terminology stuff because the phrases cart abandonment and checkout abandonment are thrown around kind of interchangeably. They actually do mean different things. And by the way, for those who aren't in the UK, basket or basket if you're up north

5:52:32means cart. So cart abandonment and basket abandonment, they mean exactly the same thing. Right? If it's not already complicated enough, when you go onto an e-commerce store and you put a product in your basket or your cart, but you then don't check out, that is called cart abandonment. You've got your cart, but you've abandoned it. You haven't gone to the next stage. If you open that basket or cart, then click check out, and you go into the checkout process, but you don't finish it, that is checkout abandonment. Now, what we're going to be looking at today are ways of mitigating both of these things. One of

5:53:07the most useful places that you can go to get insights on this stuff is Google Analytics. And if you go to conversions, e-commerce, shopping behavior, you should see a chart that looks something like this. What this shows you is the different stages of your e-commerce funnel. For example, in this case, we can see there have been 66,000 sessions in this time period with 21,000 of those sessions having product views, i.e. the person visited a product page. 3 and a half thousand of those sessions had an add to basket in. 2,800 of those sessions had someone begin the checkout process and 1,133 of them resulted in sales. And what we

5:53:48can see is the percentage drop off at each stage. Now the question that you might have right now is is my data normal? My data looks different to this. And it's a very common question that store owners have. What is an acceptable checkout abandonment rate? Well, what I wanted to do is show you three different examples from three different businesses

5:54:09to show you how and why this can vary. So in this first example we can see that we have a basket abandonment rate of 38%. So on average 38% of the people the sessions that have add to baskets don't result in a checkout. Now in this example we can see a basket abandonment rate of 44% and in this example a basket

5:54:34abandonment rate of 51%. Now, we might look at this and think, "Oh, no, 51%. That is horrific." But this particular business is a B2B company and their customers put items in their basket to use as a quote generator. They then get in contact with the business to talk through the quote and see if they can negotiate a bulk

5:54:57discount. So, that is absolutely fine. Another major difference that you might see with your car is the number of sessions that result in product views. For example, in this one, we've got 19% of sessions resulting in product views. Whereas in this one, we can see a whopping 43% of sessions resulting in product views. So, if you've got the 19%, you might be thinking, "Oh no, my website visitors aren't even viewing my products." Well, in this case, that's because they've got loads of really good ranking quality information on the types of products that they sell. they're picking up a lot offormational searches that are coming to the website. So,

5:55:37they're not just getting commercial traffic. Whereas on this site, the majority of the phrases that they're ranking for are purely commercial. They don't have as much informationational content on their website. So, that is why a higher proportion of their sessions are resulting in product views. So, what I'm saying with this is there are loads of variables that will impact what your cart abandonment, what your checkout abandonment rate looks like, including the quality and the intent of your traffic, the percentage of returning visitors, so you know exactly what they're getting versus new visitors is how much consideration goes into the purchase of your product. For example, if you're selling prom dresses, you're

5:56:15going to be getting a lot of people that are just adding to basket to save it for later as they're browsing around the internet. Whereas, if you're selling SD cards, you're going to get a lot of people that know exactly what they need and they just need to buy it. So, that's going to result in different checkout and cart abandonment rates. Now, I really wanted to give you an average across all of e-commerce. So, I've got

5:56:35some stats for you. You want some stats? I've got stats for you. According to Fresh Relevance, the average cart abandonment rate is 57.6%. But wait, Sales Cycle says it's 84.27%. Pretty big difference between 84% and 57%, right? Yes, exactly. What looks good for you might be horrific for another business. The most useful approach is to take a look at analytics, benchmark each of these levels, and then work on improving the percentage of people that move from one level to another. Benchmark against yourself, and continually focus on improvement. If we're going to solve cart and checkout abandonment, the first question we need to ask is why do people abandon? Well,

5:57:19luckily the Bayard Institute has collected some data for us. They conducted a study of US adults where they asked if you've abandoned a car in the last 3 months, what were the reasons that you abandoned it for? And what they got was not massively surprising to be honest. By far the biggest reason that people abandon cars is that they were just browsing. They had no intent of purchasing. They were just throwing items into their cart. No surprises here. Now, whilst we're not going to be able to avoid this completely, what we can do is nudge some of these people into impulse purchases. We'll come back to that later on. Of all the people that

5:57:56had intent, i.e. they weren't just browsing. The most common reason that people abandoned cart was that extra costs were too high. For example, things like shipping, taxes, and fees. Well, let's solve that one in a minute as well. The next most common reason was that the website wanted them to create an account. Nothing more annoying than trying to purchase and all of a sudden you're thrown up with some register thing. You're like, I don't want to register. I just want to check out. Now, what's really important here is we actually do want people to register for an account. We want people to be members of our ecom store so that we can market

5:58:28to them continually. This isn't about not forcing people to sign up or not encouraging them to sign up. This is purely about when you ask for that. We're going to look at a really elegant implementation of this strategy just a bit later on. The next reason, too long or complicated checkout process. The next was that people didn't trust the site with their card information. We're going to look at how to build credibility. Then I couldn't see or

5:58:53calculate the total order cost up front. The website had errors or crashed. Ouch. Returns policy wasn't satisfactory. There weren't enough payment methods. Or the credit card was declined. Now, I'm going to lump in these last two together, and we're going to solve that one as well. So, you can see that here we've got a bunch of things regarding website functionality, but also business

5:59:14decisions, things like delivery times. This is about the relationship you have and the package that you have with your couer. So, that's beyond the scope of this video. Today, we're going to be looking at the conversion elements and how what we do on your website to remove some of these objections. Okay. So, the I'm just browsing people. How do we get them to purchase? Well, what we can really do is nudge them from I'm just

5:59:38browsing into an impulse purchase. That's all we can really do. We have to allow people to just browse. And we're fine with people adding their stuff to a cart. Now, we can help them with this by making their cart autosave so that when they come back to our site, they've still got their cart there. Better still is that you allow people to save their cart. and you can get Shopify plugins that will allow you to do this where they can enter their email address to save it for later. This means that you

6:00:06can run cart abandonment emails to them. It also means that if they check into your cart from another browser, you can allow them to sign in and see the stuff that they've got there. But let's return to this idea of bumping them into an impulse purchase cuz everyone loves a good impulse purchase, right? Well, here I am on the Boots website. I'm just going to add a product to my basket and then I'm going to click view basket and check out. Now, I might be here on impulse perhaps, but what I'm seeing now is I'm seeing a little nudge to get me to purchase because I've got a couple of

6:00:37free gifts already in my cart. So, this is a great way of nudging people into an impulse purchase. There's other stuff going on on this page, which we're going to come back to in just a minute. Anything that you can do to push people into that impulse purchase from just looking mode is a good thing in the e-commerce conversion will make your Google Analytics e-commerce conversion rate very happy. Okay. Next, those unexpected costs. We've all been through it. You go through the process, you find the right products that you want, you stick them in your cart, you go to checkout, you see a horrific delivery cost, and you're immediately put off. Of

6:01:10course, the ultimate answer is to not have horrific delivery costs. Although weirdly there are some occasions where you might want to have high delivery costs. We'll come back to that in a minute just as well. But the overall thing is you don't want to have big delivery costs. Now there's of course an argument to say if you do have high delivery cost because what you're delivering costs a lot of money to deliver where do you present that? Do you present that upfront on your website, for example, in a benefits bar, knowing that some people are just going to bounce immediately as soon as they see that delivery cost or do you wait

6:01:41till they've gone through the process of adding items to their cart to show them the delivery cost at the end? Well, Neil Patel says you want to bounce them straight away. I completely disagree with that. I think you want them to have gone through the process of adding stuff into their cart. They've put in that time and energy to find the right products. they have a sunk cost already, then you hit them with a delivery cost if they're unattractive. Now, of course, obviously you don't want them to bounce at all if they see your delivery cost, but if you're going to have a certain number of people bounce, it's better to

6:02:11have that as a high cart abandonment rather than a high bounce rate in the first place. Now, one thing you can do is advertise the trigger points at which people get free delivery. You can see here on this B2B e-commerce site, free next day delivery, orders 100 and over. Great. So, whatever the delivery costs are, I know that I will get free delivery over a certain amount. And it's at this point where a high delivery cost potentially becomes an incentive. Let me explain. Let's say that I've spent £90 on this site and I know that if I spend

6:02:41over £100, I get free next day delivery. Now, it's at this point where actually, weirdly, a high delivery cost can actually incentivize a higher order value. Stick with me. Let's say that I'm on this site and I've spent £70. I go to the checkout and I see that my delivery costs are £15. £15? Ouch. I also see

6:03:02that I get free delivery over £100. Well, I can spend another £30 on product to get free delivery. Basically, another £15 to get £30 worth of product. My additional purchase is half price. Happy days. I'm now incentivized to increase my average order value because that delivery cost was high. If that delivery cost wasn't as high, let's say it was only two or three pounds, I wouldn't have been as incentivized to get over that free delivery threshold. So, you can see how a high delivery cost in some circumstances can actually increase your

6:03:35average order value. You thought digital marketing was simple. It's not simple, but it's definitely fun. Now, going back to the boots example, you can see that they show us how close we are to that free delivery threshold. I then have products here related to what I've got which I can use to nudge me over that free delivery threshold. Smart move. Now, this isn't massively easy to implement and according to the platform that you're on and the extensions you've got, you may or may not be able to do this, but it's a good thing to do. This is ideal because it removes the thinking part out of your customers checkout

6:04:12process. And anytime we can remove the thinking part out of anything, we know we're going to get some results. Now, here's a weird example to watch out for. Here I am on buhoo.com, and I'm being asked to put in my shipping information before I can see any price, before I even see the delivery cost. On mobile, that's okay because when I get down and see that my delivery cost is a whopping £5.99 on the £5 dress that I've ordered on this example, you can't see, but the product I'm buying is this halterneck puff sleeve smok. You know, I just thought I'd mix it up a bit for the

6:04:46Exposure Ninja videos. Anyway, it's a five pound product and they want to charge me £5.99 for next day delivery, which by the way isn't the cheapest delivery option they have. They just want to charge me for next day for some reason. Now, this would be a real turnoff to me, but I can see that for a whole year, for an extra £2, I can get free next day delivery unlimited. Happy days. That sounds good to me. The problem is on desktop I don't get that same logical process. I go straight to the shipping page and I can see immediately this delivery cost which looks really high. I've got no knowledge

6:05:23at this point that I can reduce that. I don't know that I can change for different options and I don't know that the premier option is available. So, I would imagine that the basket abandonment rate on desktop will be significantly higher because people are being hit with this high delivery cost immediately without any context or

6:05:40information about how to lower it. Whereas on mobile, we get that information in a different order, which makes it more digestible. The simplest way, of course, to get through all of this is to just offer free shipping. But obviously, it's not possible for every business. All righty. The next thing we need to get over is forcing people to create an account before they can even check out. Like we said earlier, we want people to create an account. It's great if they create an account cuz then you've got their information. You can remarket, you can send a bandit card,

6:06:10all that type of stuff. Happy days. [music] We love people signing up for account. But what's not cool is forcing them to do this before they go to the checkout. We just hate this for some reason as human beings. Just like we hate being burnt, we hate being killed, we hate being forced to sign up before we can check out. I'm going to show you some bad ways of doing this to prove that nobody gets it 100% right 100% of the time. We're back to our old friend's boots. Let's say that we've seen these things. We like our free gifts. We're going to be just browsing. That turns

6:06:42into an impulse purchase. Happy days. We click check out. Then what happens? Well, the first thing that happens is we go to this page. I want to check out as guest. I don't have an account. Well, the check out as guest thing isn't massively obvious. The fact that this is a tab isn't particularly clear. It's not

6:06:59highlighted. It's not a clear button. But let's say I go to it anyway. I then have to click through another message. They're forcing me to read stuff. I just want to freaking check out and give you my money. Please stop getting in my way. But no, I have to click continue. Then what happens is totally inexcusable. I'm

6:07:19then forced to go through a recapture. Are you freaking kidding me? Okay, fine. I'm not a robot. Then we have to wait for all of this to happen. Absolute wash out. You want people to be able to check out as quickly as possible. By the way, if you think that's bad, check this out. On zilly.com, you can't even see products without signing up. Am I qualified to sign up for this? Do I know anything about this business? Do I know that it sells the right products for me? Do I know that they ship to my location? Do I know that the terms are acceptable to me? Do I

6:07:52know that they sell at the right price for me? No, I know nothing. I'm being forced to sign up before I can even look at the website. I just hope they're not running PPC to this or any traffic to this. All right, let's look at a good example to cleanse our souls. This is how Nike or Nike if you're American encourages you to become a member. And by the way, becoming a member is just their membership club. So they have your sign up details. So the first stage is we go through the delivery details. We put in our information about where we're sending the thing through to. We then

6:08:26have a choice of deliveries. We can either pay for delivery or free. We can become a Nike member. And all we need to do is fill in our information. Now to me, this is absolute genius because this is when membership makes the most sense. They're not asking me to become a member earlier than it absolutely makes sense to for me. I'm essentially being paid £450 to sign up for membership and that's what it feels like. So, it's a great implementation and Nike fair play for delaying that request. Love you. You just did it. Okay, let's address the credibility thing. The thing about people being afraid to put in their card

6:09:04details or somehow unsure about the business. Now, adding credibility triggers to your checkout pages and your cart pages is not only a great way to give your business credibility, but it's also a great way to answer any lastminute objections people might have about things like delivery reliability or the quality of your brand. Now, one of my favorite spaces for analyzing this type of thing is the atome orthodontics solution industry, right? Smile Direct Club and all of those. Now, this is a fascinating space. We're going to do some videos on them. Um, loads of the businesses in this space just copy each other. A lot of their websites basically

6:09:42look exactly the same. Now, the customer journey, for those who aren't familiar, you get an impression kit, which you little trays that you stick in your mouth. You then send that back and then they start you on your program of getting straight teeth. So, this impression kit is a really important sale because this is their trip wire. They're not really generating leads through an email capture. They just want you to buy the impression kit. So this page becomes really important. The first thing to notice about this page is that it's both a product page and the checkout page. They don't have a separate page. This is obviously easier

6:10:17for a business that sells one product or one trip wire. So not everyone can do this, but we can take these lessons and apply them to the checkout page as well. So notice how they've got information about the product just like we would expect on any product page. We then go into the shipping stuff and the payment stuff. The bit that's really interesting for me is this credibility that's added just below the shipping stuff. So, if you're filling it out, you're like, e, maybe not sure, maybe let's have a little look. More than 1 million satisfied griners and counting is a great credibility headline. Absolutely love it. Then we've got people of

6:10:53different ages, genders, races. You can see yourself in here. You can see that this is a universal product. People are loving it. It's userenerated photos as well, which gives credibility, which is fantastic. If we're still not convinced, underneath that, we have 21,000 five-star reviews on the site. So, what's the impression that you get from this? This is pretty safe. This is a safe bet. That uncertainty, that doubt that you might have is washed away in a tide of testimonials. Love it. Now, it's not possible for every business to add credibility stuff like testimonials and reviews to their cart pages and their checkout pages. For example, if you're

6:11:34on Shopify, unless you're on Plus, you're going to have difficulty adding testimonials to your checkout pages, but you can usually add them to your cart pages with an extension. So, do what you can here. You're not going to be able to get it perfect. And of course, if you're selling loads of products, you might find it difficult to have product specific reviews in the basket. So, just opt for business reviews instead, reviews of the company as a whole. The rule here is that the more you can do is better. You don't have to wait to get it perfect before you implement it. The final checkout abandonment gremlin that

6:12:03we're gonna squish is credit card is declined, not enough payment options. Credit cards get declined for all sorts of reasons and not just because people don't have any money. As an HSBC business banking customer, I can tell you HSBC's fraud team can block a payment that we've made every week for the last 8 years to exactly the same vendor for exactly the same amount. I think it's just their way of showing that they care. But allowing your customers to pay with an alternate payment method, for example, PayPal, Amazon Pay, if their main credit card gets blocked is a really good thing to do. Also worth noting is the rise of

6:12:44Apple Pay. So if you've ever watched someone realize that they don't have their card on them and they have to go and type the details, they have to get up and go and find their card and hunt and peck their credit card into some nonautofill card form. You will appreciate the value of having two taps on the side of your phone to pay for something. Apple Pay and Google Pay have changed the game. And with platforms like Stripe promising merchants up to 2.5x increase in conversions by using Apple Pay and Google Pay, it makes it an absolute no-brainer. One final thing to touch on here is the rise of the split

6:13:22payment options. Cler, Clear Pay, Layby, all these types of things. Really contentious and huge debt bubble that's likely to burst all over everyone's faces at some point. But until that happens, you can use them to increase your e-commerce conversion rate. For example, Cler claims that installment financing and checkout increases conversion rate by 30% and average order value by 58%. Now, you might think, well, the products we offer not really worth splitting payments for. Well, going back to boohoo.com, here you can see how I could pay for my £5 dress in six weekly installments. So affordability as a relative term and these services increase conversion rate because they allow people to split

6:14:06payments on even minuscule purchases. So I hope you found this video useful. We've looked at the top causes of cart and checkout abandonment and some of the ways that you can remove or reduce them. We first looked at how we can motivate people who are just looking and try and knock them into those impulse purchases. We then looked at how we could remove some of the impact of high shipping costs by offering memberships or trigger points where people could increase their basket value in order to get free shipping. Then we took an intensely critical look at the frankly unacceptable practice of requiring people to sign up for an account before

6:14:46they go to checkout and what to do instead so they still sign up for an account during checkout. We then looked at how to boost your credibility through the use of testimonials and reviews both through the basket cart page and the checkout. And finally, we talked about payment options and how to increase the number of payment options you offer to your customers. So, they have many

6:15:05different ways of giving you money. Welcome to the biggie. This is how to drive people to your system, to your star marketing system. So, you've got your positioning, your business is you found a position that works. You know your target audience, you got your t your voice, your offering, you got a good balance between price and value. Then you've optimized your website. It's consistent. It's congrent. You've got the right amount of content. You've got control of your site. You've got a process which turns leads or visitors into leads and sales. Now, it's time to drive people to this system now that you know that it's going to be converting

6:15:42well. It's going to be having a good impact for your business. So, there's a lot to go through in this module because we're essentially covering lots of different traffic sources. Some of it is going to be relevant for your business. Some of it is not because, you know, we got lots of different types of businesses watching this. If you're a B2B software company, then some of the, you know, the organic social stuff might not be as relevant to you. If you're a direct consumer e-commerce, then maybe some of the content strategy might not be as relevant to you, but then again, it might be. So that's why we're sharing

6:16:12everything here because the value is in not in thinking well this isn't relevant to my business. The value is in thinking how could I use this you know if none of my competitors are thinking in this way what here what is here that I could use that I could implement which would be different which would set us apart open us up to a new audience so that's why we're going to share everything. So this is step four of the system. Where is my mouse? Uh this is step four of the system and uh we've got the traffic lassu system. So before we talk about what the

6:16:48elements of lassu are, uh let's talk about what a good high-erforming successful people module looks like. You really want multiple reliable streams of traffic. Okay, multiple reliable. Those are key. Multiple. You don't want to be overrelying on one particular traffic source. Ever since my very early days in digital marketing, I remember watching a lovely old couple with their um with their hobby website which provided a good living for them and allowed them to work together and travel the world. I remember seeing this business which was totally reliant on Google organic search decimated overnight literally overnight by an algorithm update. And from that day I said I will never never have a

6:17:34business or advise a company to be relying on one traffic source only. You always need at least two traffic sources, preferably more and ideally an organic source which is subject to algorithms and then a paid source which you can throw more money in to get more results because then what happens is if the organic source atro fees if something happens to it then you can throw more money into the paid traffic while you get the organic back up. So we want multiple and we want reliable streams of traffic. So this isn't dependent on, you know, you having to do something, you having to go out there

6:18:13and give talks or run an exhibition. We want them to just be, you know, steadily building over time. We know where our best customers come from and how to get more of them. So this is also about analyzing what we've already got and making sure we're optimizing to get more of that result as well. So what are the

6:18:32components of the traffic lassu system? Well, firstly, locations, hangouts, triggers, and patterns. We want to understand where our audience is. Where are their online hangouts? Where can we find them in a lots of them in a location? What's going to trigger them to come to us? What are they talking about? What are the conversations we can insert ourselves in? So, that's the first element. This is about

6:18:57understanding where they exist online. If you're going to build a store, a physical store, well, you need to find out where is the customer group for. It's no good going to a deprived area and setting up a luxury fashion retailer. Okay, wrong location. So, we need to find the right location. And this works for our business as well. We need to understand the phrases that people are searching for, the social networks they're hanging out on, um where they're spending their time online, the magazines, the websites that

6:19:24they're reading. Then, we want some form of ad channel really working for us. Now there are some businesses that can't run ads. Uh those businesses might be um you know selling tobacco type products or selling drugs and stuff like this. Alcohol can be very difficult to advertise in some spaces as well. So obviously there are restrictions here but for the majority

6:19:47of businesses we can find ad channels. Even those businesses you know an ad channel is just paying to get access to a certain group of customers. So this might be that you have a a tie up with a you know a content website or something like that. But we ideally we want some form of ad channel. So in this section I'm going to be bringing in a couple of the the pay-per-click team here at Exposure Ninja. So we're going to be talking to a paid search specialist and a paid social specialist and they're going to be talking us through what sort of businesses can work with these

6:20:18channels and their top tips for running, managing, and optimizing these channels on an ongoing basis as well. We're then going to talk about search. Um, so search organic uh search on Google. So we're not the paid search will be covered in the ad channels. We're talking about organic search here. I'm going to be sharing a whole bunch of different spreadsheets that you can use um as part of your

6:20:42worksheet to speed up your SEO work. This is based on the stuff that we do for clients at IN. We're then going to look at social. And again, I'm going to bring in a social media ninja from the team here at the Exposure Ninja to talk about, you know, what sort of content works, how important different types of content are, what you should be posting,

6:21:00how frequently, um, that type of stuff. So, you got some real topical deep expertise there, and of course, how to optimize it, and then optimization and analytics. So, optimization, analytics, we'll be covering in each of the different sections. There's not going to be a separate area for that. We're going to be talking about optimization analytics throughout because everything that we're doing here, everything that you're doing for driving traffic. It's not set and forget. It's not you just do this one time. Right, that's our SEO ticked off. I go to the beach or right,

6:21:30there's the Google ads set up. Brilliant. Let's just leave them to run. Because these things, if you leave them to run, they nose dive, right? It's like a an airplane. You need to keep powering it. Otherwise, yeah, it might stay in the air for a bit, but eventually it's going to start facing down. So, it's all about understanding what's going on and where to get more of the most productive traffic uh that you possibly can. Okay, so key metrics. How do we know if we've got an opportunity or if we've or if

6:22:01we're doing very well in this area? Well, obviously the traffic volume to your website. If you got low traffic volume, then generally you're doing poor in this area. we either have too few traffic sources or the traffic sources that we have aren't welldeveloped enough. Uh search rankings, very few businesses can't benefit from having great SEO visibility. SEO is, you know, it's my favorite traffic source. The reason I'm more obsessed with SEO than any other source of traffic, and I'm open with this about the team, they know this, is because in all of history, in the history of marketing, if you could say to a marketer, excuse me,

6:22:43[sighs] if you could say sneeze to a marketer, if you could say to a marketer, we can put you in front of people who are looking for exactly what it is that you sell. and not only what it is that you sell, but they're looking for it at the exact moment that they want to purchase it. How valuable is that to you? Well, that is the that is the holy grail, right? Being found by people who are looking for exactly what we offer, right? At that moment that they're

6:23:09looking to buy it, that is brilliant. They might get something better. Yes, eventually we might have a chip in our brain. So, as soon as we think we might want something that somebody might be able to run an ad, but for now, someone typing into Google, I want to buy a water bottle that cleans itself. Perfect. If I'm selling water bottles that clean itself, I will I will carve a path to be able to get that visibility. So, search ranking is very important. Um, both on Google and on YouTube if that's relevant to your business. Uh your web conversion rate also can be an important uh indication

6:23:46here whether your traffic is good quality or not. If your traffic traffic's rubbish, you got people coming through for all sorts of random phrases, your adverts are poorly targeted, your conversion rate might be low and it might be nothing to do with your website. It might be the fact that you're getting junk traffic onto your site in the first place. Uh ad impressions. So, how often are your ads actually being seen? Very difficult to get conversions if you're not being seen. So, how many times are people seeing your ads? Your ad click-through rate can inform the quality of your ads

6:24:15and also the cost of your ads as well. So those are some of the metrics that we use to define whether a business is doing well in this area. So let's [snorts] look at this first element, locations, hangouts, triggers, and patterns. Now in this section, I'm going to take you through some theory. Then we're going to jump over to the worksheet and we're going to start digging through some of this stuff and looking through some real life examples as well because pra this section is more practical than any of the others. Lots of the others are theory and you got to think about this. A lot of this stuff

6:24:44you need to go and actually do stuff and do your own research. So I'm going to show you how this stuff works. Okay, so locations, triggers, hangouts, and patterns. Where do we find our perfect customers? Where do we find the people that we really want to get more of? So there's a couple of different kind of sections of this. There's qualitative measures. So how do we Well, I don't

6:25:03know how to describe qualitative. Qualitative versus quantitive. We're going to look at the qualitative first stuff first. So, um, checking your competitor's traffic sources, having a look at where your competitors are prioritizing their traffic is a great way of working out where you should be prioritizing your traffic. Now, you don't just want to copy your competitors because they might be dumb. They might not be doing a good job. Particularly if you're B2B or you're a you're a niche business, your competitors might be very

6:25:31stupid. Even so, if they're winning in any sort of, you know, by any sort of standard, if they're winning, you make you want to make sure you understand why they're winning so that then you can make a conscious decision. Am I going to copy their traffic strategies or are we just going to, you know, we're going to go in a completely different direction because

6:25:49they're barking up the wrong tree. They're just still accidentally winning. So, uh, we're going to look at search, both organic and paid. We're going to do this all now. I'm going to show you some examples. Uh we're going to look at social, both organic social and paid social and uh digital PR and content marketing. Okay, so we're going to go over so if you open your worksheet, you're going to see that we've broken this thing in uh to two sections. We've got qualitative and then we've got the quantitative stuff here. So firstly, we're going to do some competitor analysis. Where are our competitors focusing? Now I'm going

6:26:25to do a very rough example for you today. We're going to say that we've got, let's do this, right? This is an Aura ring. It's a like a tracking fitness ring. Smart um smart connected like health stuff is pretty on trend. It's a direct consumer brand. U but they've got to educate their customers.

6:26:46So, it's a quite an interesting thing. It's a bit relevant [snorts] for B2B because they've got a big content play. They've got to educate people about why they might need something like this, which is often a very common thing for B2B. And of course it is e-commerce as well because they are selling something but it's not pure e-commerce. It's something that I could find which is kind of it plays on a lot of um a lot of common elements. So what we're going to do we're going to check their search paid and organic and we're going to check their social paid and organic and we're going to check their content and

6:27:15digital PR. So to do this very difficult to do this without a tool. Okay. This stuff is much easier with some sort of tool. Now I use Seamrush. It's my favorite digital marketing tool. It's got I don't really need anything else to be honest. Sometimes I use Mars, but very rarely I use Mars. Most of the time I just use Semrush. You can get a free trial of Semrush. It is a paid tool, but you can get a free trial at

6:27:40thankyouinjas.com. So if you just go to thankyouninjas.com, you can get a free trial of Serrush. I think it's 30 days. It's not publicly available. So you can get it. You have to put in your card details, but then you can do the research. If you don't want to pay for it, you can do the research and then just cancel it at the end. That's fine, right? It's a fantastic tool. I don't know anything free that is as good as Seamrush, which is why I recommend it. So, what we're going to do, we're going to analyze Aura as if they're a competitor. I'm going to take you through the process. They're

6:28:11doing a good job of a lot of their marketing is another reason I've chosen them. So, I'm going to take you through the process, show you how I would analyze them, and then you can go and replicate this for your competitors and fill in the insights in this worksheet. Okay? So, as we're going, what you want to do is fill in, okay, where are they focusing? What are they doing a good job of? What are they leaving gaps in? And you by doing this across your five your top five uh business or search competitors, whichever you choose, your top five competitors, you can begin to build up a picture of where does our

6:28:42industry, where does our market think the customer is located. So, we're going to start with search first of all. So, I'm going to get the Aura site up. It's at a ring.com. Um, this is it. So, first thing we're going to do, we're going to analyze the organic traffic. So, I'm going to stick them in here at the top of Semrush. So, thank you ninjas.com is the URL to get your free trial of this. This is going to give us a kind of dashboard of their overall worldwide visibility. Okay. So, it shows us their organic traffic, which

6:29:15is their traffic from organic search. So, from SEO, from Google basically. Um, it shows us their paid search traffic, so how much they're spending to advertise on Google and the volume of traffic that they're getting. It shows us their back links. So, how many times they are linked from other websites, which is important for SEO. Now, when I start analyzing a business, the first thing that I want to do is really understand the organic keywords that they're ranking for. Now, Aura, they have visibility across lots of different countries. Um, I'm based in the UK, but I'm going to analyze their US visibility because that's the market that they're

6:29:55most active in. So, I want to understand how they're marketing in their top territory. And then if I'm going to compete with them in the US, I need that stuff. If I'm going to compete with them in the UK, I'm going to be like, well, I'm probably going to take their US strategy and apply that to them. You know, deploy that against them because it's typically going to be more advanced than what they're doing in the UK. So, we're going to click on uh down here, view organic top organic keywords. This is going to show us the phrases that they're ranking for. So we can see their

6:30:25traffic trend over time and I'm looking over a number of years here since 2012 2013 nothing going on and then things started to take off in 2018 and then things have started going very well particularly in 2022. There's loads that we can learn from this immediately. I'm just going to shrink that down to last two years to get a give us a bit of a sense of the timings. The first thing that we're looking at here is we can see that a lot of the traffic they're getting actually let me show you let me talk you through this table first of all. So down here we

6:30:56can see the keywords that they're ranking for. Uh then we've got Semrush has categorized the intent of this keyword whether it'sformational which is I navigational which is N. So in other words, you know, you go on to Google and you search for Facebook, right? You're not doing a research project about Facebook. You're trying to find the

6:31:17Facebook websites. That's navigational. Um or whether there is a transactional intent. So we'd call this commercial intent. They put a T there. Um so that means that typically someone wants to buy. Now I wouldn't trust these 100%. Use your judgment, but you know, it can be interesting. So it shows us the keyword. It shows us what Samrush thinks the intent is. It shows us their position in search. So one is the top of Google. If we scroll down, uh if we go to like page five, we will probably see they've got some stuff which isn't position one. So position four means

6:31:53fourth on page one. Okay. Um they got a lot of keywords in page one, but we'll talk about this. [snorts] uh then we can see the percentage of their traffic that is being driven by this particular keyword. So Samrush is saying they're getting about 44% of their traffic through the keyword aura ring. Okay. Then we've got um keyword difficulty. How difficult it would be to outrank this. We want to take that with a heavy dose of salt. Then we've got cost per click. So how much advertisers are spending on this keyword if they want to advertise for this. And then finally, we've got the URL that is

6:32:30ranking. Okay, this is all interesting stuff. None of this is irrelevant really. Um, it's all interesting stuff. Now, the first thing I can see from this though is that Aura is getting almost all of their traffic seems to be from branded search. People searching for Aura Ring. So, these aren't people necessarily searching for fitness ring. They are getting some traffic for non-branded search. So here we can see stages of sleep. So people searching for information about sleep, which is interesting. That's like something that we might take if we're competing with this. But most of their traffic is from branded search. So we can deduce from that that they've done a lot of work to

6:33:14make sure that their brand is very vis visible. This is a very dominant business in their space in this whole like fitness ring thing. they are pretty dominant in this space. So, sorry, I'm just What's happened there? We just need to go back. Um, so what I'm going to do now, I'm actually going to take out the um I'm going to take out their branded search. Okay, I want to try and filter out their branded search because if I'm competing against them, I'm probably not going to be trying to outrank them for their brand name if they've got this much brand visibility. So, what I'm going to do,

6:33:55I'm going to set up an advanced filter and I'm going to start uh filtering stuff containing aura. Okay, I don't want to include that. Now, I'm also going to look for stuff where people have misspelled it. So, I don't want that aura either because I don't want to see just like I'm going to get some misspellings because it's a difficult word. Um, so

6:34:17I'm I'm obviously going to find some. uh any other or there's loads of oh there's load there's going to be so many different versions of their spelling. So right we're just going to apply that and what that's going to do is take up as much of that branded traffic as possible. It's still mostly people searching for Aura Ring. They just don't know how to spell it. But from a competitor perspective what I'm most most interested in is I'm most interested in the keywords that I could rank for. So sleep ring ring that tracks sleep. Then we've got some statistics, some kind of research things that people are searching for, heart

6:34:54rate variability, one of the metrics that they track and that type of stuff. So when you're doing this, you're looking for the keywords that will be bringing your competitors non-branded traffic, i.e. traffic that doesn't know it wants to purchase that particular solution yet. If you're an accountant, stuff would be like accountancy. That would be a non-branded search term that you would want to understand how well your competitors are ranking for. So, we can see they've got some decent visibility for some of these, but actually the percentage of their traffic that they're getting for these sorts of keywords is not huge. There aren't millions and millions of people

6:35:35searching for sleep ring, for example. Uh we do have 3,600 people searching for sleep per sleep ring per month. So, that might be a phrase that we want to rank for. But if I want to blow this business up into a billion-doll company, I'm going to have to go beyond that because if we think about target audience, we want a sizable enough audience with a sizable enough problem to be able to

6:35:59solve our to be able to meet our goals. If I want to turn this into a billion dollar company, I'm not going to go do it on search volume of 3,600. So, what I'm going to have to do is I'm going to have to start thinking about, okay, what other phrases would I want to target if I'm selling a competitor to this product? I might want to target people searching for things like why am I always tired or um think ways to lose weight or ways to sleep better or you know things like this. So, I'm going to start thinking about the problems that people might have and I'm going to start

6:36:29thinking, okay, how might I rank my site for that? So what we're understanding here is Aura's organic visibility and what their strategy is. Now we can also look at their the URLs that are ranking on their site. So over here I can see that heart rate variability the page that's ranking there unsurprisingly is a page that's

6:36:49dedicated to heart rate variability. How good is this page? Well, it's actually not great because the the heading here is what is HRV? Well, really if they wanted to dominate ranking for this, they should say what is heart rate variability HRV in brackets. How good is this post? Um, it looks pretty detailed, but you know, there's no real subheadings to help me guide through this. It doesn't look particularly engaging. There isn't uh images. There's not a video helping me to learn about this. I don't know who wrote this. This is a medical topic, so we'd want someone medical. The worst thing about this is I'm not seeing a

6:37:33call to action that says something over here like, "Track your heart rate variability with Aura. Here's how Aura tracks heart rate variability." I'm not seeing that. So, if I'm competing against this, I'm thinking, great, I might be able to outrank this by making the content better, and then I might be able to turn more of the traffic to this content into leads or sales for my business than Aura is doing. So, that immediately shows me that this maybe isn't a focus for Aura, but actually it could be a focus for them. So, the general the general sort of vibe I'm getting from this is that organic search hasn't

6:38:15really been a top priority for them. There are other telltale signs as well. For example, here we are on their website. We've got their page titles and meta descriptions. We'll look into this in in more detail with the SEO later on, but their page title here is accurate health information accessible to everyone. Nobody is searching for that. So, that is a really silly page title to have. They don't even use their brand name in their page title. Like, this is underoptimized. So, if I'm filling in my sheet here, I'm like, Aura's organic search. So, if this was going to be Aura, Aura's organic search doesn't

6:38:50really seem to be a top priority. They're mostly just relying on branded search traffic. Okay, so that's the first thing I'm noticing. Um, I can then look at if I want to outrank them. Let's have a look at their links. Let's have a look at the links that are coming onto their site because that'll show before we do that. I'm also going to have a

6:39:10look at the pages that they're ranking. So here we've got their URLs, right? We can start to figure out how their site is ranking by looking at the different pages that are ranking on their site. So for example, we see that their website is either it's either their homepage that's ranking for something or it's a

6:39:27blog post. That's pretty much it, right? These are all blog posts that they're writing or it's their homepage. There's nothing else. So, what they don't have is they don't have incredible um you know product specific pages like tracking sleep with Aura, right? Sleep tracker. They don't have uh what Aura does as a menu heading. And then under that we've got sleep tracker, activity tracker, recovery tracker, and then they don't have optimized pages for each of

6:39:54these which are targeting those terms. Does that make sense? If they were doing that, I could copy that. I could add that to my strategy. They're not doing that. So either they've tested this stuff and found it doesn't work, but actually most likely they're doing so well in other areas that they're just not focusing on this stuff. So I'm thinking great, this is something I'm going to attack them. This is an angle I'm going to attack them with, right? Um you can also have a look at the pages section here and this will show you which pages are driving the most traffic. So, we do have some traffic on

6:40:26uh their product page, but remember we've taken out all branded traffic in our last search, which is why we're not seeing that product show up. This is branded traffic that's coming through to this page. So, other than that, really, we don't have much traffic coming through to their other pages, considering how much traffic this site could be getting. Traffic coming through to their homepage,

6:40:48412,000. Everything else is pretty minimal. Okay? Okay. And a lot of this is coming through as branded traffic. So there's an opportunity for me. Right. Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to have a look at their links because two components with search that we really control on a daily basis, the content and the links. So we've had a bit of a look at where they're ranking. We're going to take a look at their website content in just a minute. Let's have a look at their links. Um they've got a lot of links. So, they've got 186,000 different links coming from 11,000 different websites. So, if I'm going up

6:41:24against them as a startup business, I've got my work cut out to get this sort of links. This is a very wellpromoted brand with a huge visibility to pick up this sort of thing. And judging by the rest of their on-site SEO, I would suspect that they're not doing much like intentional link building. This is stuff that they're picking up through doing PR and content marketing and outreach and stuff like that. So, let's have a look at some of the referring domains. This is going to give us an idea of their strategy and how they've been getting this uh this sort of visibility. Now, what we're seeing here, authority score,

6:42:02this is basically how much authority this site has. This is a representation of how useful this link is going to be to their ranking. So, 31 isn't great. This is like one to 100. Um, and we're actually going to order this by authority score in just a minute. Then we can see the root domain. So this is the website basically that is linking in. We can see the links that are coming in from that website. So some of these websites have multiple links coming through to Aura's site. We can see them if we click that thing. I'm not going to wait for it to load. 26,775

6:42:35different links. And we can see when these links have been seen. Some of them have been lost as well. Now, what I'm going to do if I'm analyzing their strategy, I'm going to order this by authority score. That's going to show me the highest authority links that they're getting first. These are typically going to be the ones that have the biggest impact on their ranking. So, if I'm building a link building strategy for my business, I want to copy these sorts of things to begin with. Unsurprisingly, we're seeing some of the highest authority sites on the internet here because ARO is well known. So, we can

6:43:08see where these links are coming from. Uh we've got one, we've got links from Google. Uh these are links to the app store, but also links from their podcast. So looks like we've got uh affiliate links from somebody's podcast. So that tells us that there is some sort of affiliate strategy going on. And obviously that's going to give us uh

6:43:28links from the Google site. We've got links from Wikipedia. Good idea to get links from Wikipedia when you can. Um we've got links from Apple. So that's going to be you can see here mobile OS, Apple iOS. This is going to be links uh from their app store I would imagine. Uh we've got links from GitHub which is a code repository. So they might be posting their code for people to give feedback on Yahoo. This looks like something about uh the business or

6:43:56financials. Yeah. Okay. Uh we've got different sites here like Amazon, Adobe. So, we're really getting a feel here for how they've built up such a large volume of links. They've built this. You can't like you can kind of go out and manually build these links, but it's a lot of work. This is this is what happens when you're a very large business. So, as we start scrolling down, we find the uh we find the the the more intentional links, right? So, they've got news coverage. So, they're on CNN. Now, how are they on CNN? Well, they've done some

6:44:36outreach this looks like um on CNN. They're piggybacking on a trending topic, which is elections. So, this is something that people are already talking about and they've done some digital PR uh [snorts] on this. It looks like don't let election stress ruin your sleep. Here's what to do. And then right so what they've done is they've done a survey here to collect user data and found some statistically interesting stuff around election night. Okay. And then they've used that to go and do PR to go and do some content marketing to get links from um from CNN health. So, if you wanted to, what it looks like is

6:45:24that they've got this page here, which is all about where they share that that data. What you could then do is you could go into Seamrush and have a look at all the links they've got from towards this page, and that would give you their kind of PR outreach strategy about which publications have they reached out to. So, if I'm looking at a competitor like this, I'm aware that they are doing this, you know, they're

6:45:46doing some of this stuff intentionally. They're picking up some of this stuff kind of accidentally because they've got an app. It's in app stores because they've got, you know, affiliate programs that they're running with different podcasters. They're also doing some of this stuff intentionally. They're doing some outreach. Um, we can see they've got other publications here. New York Times. Let's see what their strategy is here. Uh, they've got reviews, so they may have paid for

6:46:07those. We don't really know. Um, featured in various gift guides. A lot of this is like building relationships with journalists and stuff as well. Um, what else? Let's have a look at Bloomberg. These are all really good links by the way. Uh their founder is also investing in other things which is getting them links

6:46:27about that. Right? So you get the gist. So what you can start to do here is you can start to build up a picture of your competitor's link building strategy if they have one. Now Aura has a fantastic link profile. Most of the companies that you're going up against, unless you're going up against really well-known, like super viral brands like Aura, they're not going to have this. You might find some junk links, you might find a few news sites, if you're lucky, you'll find virtually nothing. And then you can copy the strategies from someone like Aura and you can deploy those on your business and then you're going to

6:47:01get completely different set of results. Okay, so that's the backlink part. So, so far we've looked at rankings, we've looked at backlinks. Let's have a quick look at the content that they're using on the site. So, we had a look at their uh content for their blog section. Let's have a look at the main content on their site. So, what we're really looking to do here, remember we talked about content earlier on in the website

6:47:22section. Extremely important for SEO. We want a site that has plenty of content on it. But content on a site like this, you often don't get very much because this is designed by the designers and they don't want to ruin it by making it all contenty, which is a shame. So, we got a bit of content here. Not a huge amount. This page is looks to be primarily designed mobile first. You can see how it's very focused in the center of the page. Uh, yeah, we do have a fair amount of content here to I was expecting a lot less than this. So, we've got a fair

6:47:56amount here. Now, if they were really smart, what they would do here is you see in these sections here, adapts and responds to you. Well, that's not something that people would search. Um, what this would really focus on is something like, you know, health tracking without the fuss, okay? Because health tracking is something that people would search and that's a term that we want to feed Google. So, we want to show Google this page is relevant for health

6:48:22tracking so we can rank for those terms. So rather than going for adapts and responds to you, which is actually really kind of floaty and doesn't really make any sense, you can say health tracking without the fast or you know adaptable health tracking that responds to you or responds to your life. And then what you could do here is automatic activity detection. You could have something like tracks activity without you having to do anything, you know, you know, whatever it might be. I'm not very good at coming up with copy on the fly, but you can see you're trying to use your target keywords. trying to use the

6:48:52phrases that people are kind of looking for. So, but anyway, we've got a good amount of content here. So, this is something that we would then take and apply on our site. So, it looks like they're doing okay with backlinks despite not really focusing on that and not really being too intentional on they've done some PR, which is great, but their organic search on the whole leaves a bit to be desired because they would have more pages than this. they would have better optimized page titles. We'll come back to this later on. Um, so I'm going to say organic search is not a priority, but they're doing okay because of other

6:49:31stuff that they're doing. So, the next thing that we're going to do in Semrush is we're going to have a look at their paid search. So, if we go back over to their um if we go back over to their domain analytics, we'll be able to see this paid search piece here. So again, we can choose to analyze their Google search in various different countries. I'm going to use the US because that's the one that they're going to be prioritizing the most. But of course, you can compare your competitors paid search strategies in different countries if they're using different strategies in different countries. So what we see here is a

6:50:06little bit similar to what we saw with the organic visibility. We've got the keyword that they are advertising or that they are appearing against. If we hover over this, we can see the actual advert that's running. We can see the position on Google for this keyword. Um, we can see the number of times this is searched per month on average. This is a guess. I wouldn't take this with any sort of whatever. Um, but it's a good indication. And we can see how much people are on average

6:50:34willing to advertise for these phrases. We can see the URL is being used and we can see approximately how much traffic Seamrush would be expecting them to get from these keywords. And by that we can deduce how much they're spending to rank for these keywords in paid search and as a total how much they're spending per month on search traffic. So it looks like they're spending around about 125k

6:50:58per month on paid search on Google ads. So they're not spending lightly. Now, what's interesting here is they're spending a lot of money on branded traffic. Now, often people do. Um, there are very good reasons why people might do that, but they're spending a lot of money on branded traffic. I'm immediately looking at this though and

6:51:19thinking this is actually pretty silly. They're they're potentially wasting a lot of money as well. For example, they're spending around $85,000 a month advertising for wedding rings. Now, yes, these look all right, but it's not a wedding ring. There's no way for my wedding ring I'm buying something which goes technology, you know, the technology goes obsolete every few years. No way. So, unless they've tested this, which I'm not sure they have, cuz if they had tested it, they would probably be driving people through to a dedicated page which sells the idea of using Aura as a wedding ring. You don't just want to send people through to your

6:52:00homepage. Because if I search for wedding ring and I land on your homepage, I'm like, wait, this isn't wedding ring. This is a fitness ring. I need to be sold on the idea of, hey, did you know these people, you know, uh, you know, crazy fitness people use as their wedding ring. Give the wedding ring that means more than anything. Give the only wedding ring that will actually impact your loved one's life. You know, something like that, right? But you need to make that pitch. There's no pitch here. There's no pitch at all. are just throwing up an ad for this term, driving people through to the homepage and

6:52:31hoping, right? So, this looks really really scatter approach. Um, smart ring, yeah, fine. Can understand the the justification for that. Step counter, that's pretty vague. Men's ring, also pretty vague. I would want to know that that is converting really well or I've got some sort of lead magnet on there because I don't think that is going to yeah I'm not entirely sure. Jewelry ring I would probably avoid that. Goldsmiths is a jewelers. They sell a whole bunch of different stuff. There is no way I

6:53:08could imagine that paying off for them. They're not spending a huge amount on that but I would not be advertising for that. Um I watch. So, that's a misspelling of the Apple Watch. Don't know. So, I'm looking at this thinking they're spending a lot of money on this. Most of it is branded and for the rest of it, I'm not convinced they really know what they're doing here. If I were them and I had these separate pages for like um track your recovery or you know, how to recover faster from exercise with your aura. I would be running ads on phrases like that like exercise recovery tips or something like

6:53:46that. Drive them to a content page. The clicks would be really cheap. Dedicated landing page which pitches aura. You know, it's really straightforward. If a business is spending that much, I'd be wanting to see some of this stuff. So again, when you're running this with your competitors, have a look. Do the keywords really make sense or are they appearing for a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't really make sense? It can either mean that they're targeting poorly or they're not targeting properly. They don't have the negative keywords in there. So, appearing for a whole bunch of stuff that they don't need to. Do their ads look good? We'll

6:54:18talk about Google ads uh later on, but do the ads look compelling? Do they share the benefits? Think about the positioning. Do they share reasons for purchase which are compelling to our target audience? Do they know who their target audience is from the ads? Do they use a clear tone of voice or are they a bit generic? they bit, you know, you read the ad and you're not really

6:54:39motivated to do anything. Then have a look at how much they're spending their split between the different um ad uh the the split between how much they're spending on branded and non-branded traffic. So this will give you a bit of a you know a bit of a picture. So the honest picture I'm getting from Moa if I was competing against them is that actually search either isn't a priority but it's certainly not a core competency of their marketing team. So if I'm competing against them, I'm going really heavy on search. I'm going really heavy on search. If I'm competing against a business like this which has taken off,

6:55:10they're spending loads of money, but actually it looks like some they don't have some of the bases the basics covered. I'm going really heavy on that. Okay. Not trying to compete with their branded uh with their brand, but everything else I'm going really heavy. So, that piques my interest. Let's have a look now at their social. Uh so what we're going to do, we're going to find um we're going to head over to their Facebook page. So normally we can see we're going to have a look at all of their social channels and we're going to see what they are doing. So you want to

6:55:44do this for your competitors as well. Obviously look beyond the number of followers they've got or has got loads of followers. That's great. But we can have a look at the strategies that they're using. Um how consistent is their brand? How consistent is their tone of voice? All this type of stuff. Let's have a look. So, how often are they posting? That looks like they posted this yesterday. Um, do people like this? Do people like this sort of content? Let's have a look. Some people are saying, "Can't wait to try it out. Looks like they've got some customer service complaints." Um, they got lots of questions here. Are they

6:56:17answering the questions? Yes, they are, which is good. Um, yeah, this looks fine. I mean, the content's pretty generic, isn't it? that they could have just taken that from, you know, anywhere. There's no brand tone of voice there. There's not there's not consistent colors. They've got the right font. I think they're using a consistent font, but other than that, I'm not seeing anything else there. What

6:56:41have we got here? We got a video. Fine. Not much engagement with this one. What have we got here? Another video. Okay, this looks interesting. So, you got a whole bunch of different strategies that they're going on uh that are going on here. Lots of different ideas, collaborations, all this type of stuff. Seems like video is their main priority here. Someone's selling them a lot of video. Uh they got this collab with Gucci as well, right? So, we start to build up a bit of a picture of what sorts of content they're posting. You can have a look at what sort of stuff is getting good engagement, what sort of

6:57:15stuff isn't. And if you just scroll through their feed, you can see what the color schemes they're using, what's their general aesthetic, who is their target audience, and is that clear? Now, clearly, we've got a younger target audience here. We've got um yeah, we've got fairly consistent images, although I think their branding really is is is a little bit all over the place. There's lots of different fonts. That looks like a completely different brand to this stuff, for example. got mish mashes of fonts, all that type of stuff. So, I might be competing against them there. Uh let's have a look at their Twitter. So, very

6:57:52few businesses make a a good attempt of their Twitter. It's very difficult um to get it working for most businesses. Uh we can see they are posting stuff. They are getting some engagement. Um but again, they got a similar thing going on with their Instagram where there's lots of different styles and stuff going on. Okay, we can see what they're doing there. Um, right. Let's have a look at their Facebook page. How often are they posting here? What sort of engagement

6:58:18are they getting? Go away. So, fairly low engagement considering their number of likes. Uh, 66,000 likes certainly could be stronger. They're basically posting the same content across all their channels, right? They're not building stuff which is native. They're not necessarily asking questions. um they're not necessarily trying to get engagement with their audience. They're not showcasing their community. They're not doing any of that. They're it's just a feed like it's just broadcasting out. Okay. So, there's

6:58:54option. There's opportunity there. Okay. The next and let's check their YouTube. Then we're going to come back and look at paid. So, with YouTube, they've barely got started. 8,000 subscribers shows this isn't really a main focus for them. Now, one of the things that you can see with their YouTube channel is it looks like they are using this to run ads because anytime you see these short videos, these are typically uh like pre-roll or mid-roll ads. You wouldn't normally just post a one minute video on YouTube. That's not what many people would do. So, this is usually because they've uploaded this for ads. They needed to run this so that they could

6:59:30run ads. And that looks like basically what they've got. If we click on videos, we'll see they don't really post any longer form content at all. So, you know, this isn't a strategy for them. So, that gives us an opportunity. Would we want to use YouTube as a marketing channel? Would we want to um push this more? Would we want to get uh our content on here? Would we want to get some influencer? Would we want to have a face of the business to go up against this? You know, that sort of thing, right? Let's have a look at their um their ad strategy then on social. So,

7:00:05the best place to go really is the uh Facebook ad library. So, if you go to facebook.com/ads/ library, you can see all of the ads that any business is running on Facebook. So, I'm going to go to worldwide. You set your location. You set your ad category. So, you want to go to all ads. And then I'm just going to search for

7:00:27Aura Ring. I spell it right. Here we are. And then once we click on this, we will see all of the ads that they're running. So when you're analyzing a competitor on Facebook, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you're looking for. The first thing I'm looking for is how frequently are they updating their ads, how frequently they adding new content. This can give us a bit of an insight into how seriously

7:00:50they're taking this marketing channel. So we can see there's three days between these first two. uh they posted multiple variants of their ads on the 6th. Uh we can see that they've used the same copy here and they they're split testing different um images which is kind of interesting. They're running a fair few different types of ads, aren't they? Lots of stuff posted on the same day. Uh posted in different um languages as well for different variations, which is kind of

7:01:19interesting. So we can start to build up a picture of how seriously they're taking as an ad channel. We can also see the different channels that these ads are running. So they're running on Facebook, Instagram, across their audience network and inside messenger as well. We can see the ad details. We can um often see how much uh we can see other versions of that. We can often see

7:01:44we go back. H what you're really doing when you're when you're running this sort of analysis, what you're really doing is you're just you're just taking it all in. As you start looking through this stuff might be it might seem quite confusing like the first time that you do it. But as you do this like five times, 10 times for different competitors, you're kind of almost like programming your AI to work out what's good or not. So if you've got five competitors and three of them are running like they're thinking about their ads and they're running lots of ads or you can see that they've got ads

7:02:21down here which they launched ages and ages ago, right? Let's find their oldest ad. So this has started running on March 20 March 2022 which at the time I'm making this about four months ago. So this is a control. This ad is working. We know that this works. So if we're going to make an ad, we might copy this, right? And as you start to look through and as you start to notice more stuff about what your competitors are doing, you'll start to work out what fits with your brand. What sorts of things do you want to run for your business? you're going to understand the priorities of

7:02:57your competitors. So from Aura, just from the analysis that we've done here, which has taken what half an hour or something, we can see search, they're doing all right with search, but only because they're branded really for the rest of it. They're not really focusing on it. It doesn't seem to be a priority or they don't know what they're doing with it. They've got a lot of links because they've been doing PR and they've been doing some outreach, so they've got lots of people talking about them. social. They're just kind of posting the same thing on lots of different social channels, which isn't usually the best strategy, but the

7:03:28content does look good. They are spending time and energy making nice images, nice videos. Like, they're putting effort into this. Paid social, they're doing quite a lot with Facebook and Instagram. They've got a lot of different ad variants. They're running lots of stuff. That means they're testing it. So, that seems to be a real priority for them. um YouTube, they're running paid ads, but they're not doing much organically. So, this is kind of the picture that we're building up with

7:03:53Aura is that it's paid acquisition. They're spending money to acquire customers primarily on social media. So, now when you're analyzing your competitors, you might find a completely different mix, completely different focus, but whatever you find, it's going to be within what we've looked at today, search, social, and then paid across paid search and paid social. when you're doing a backlink analysis, you're going to see their content, their digital PR strategy as well. So, that's how I would

7:04:22start to do the qualitative research. Now, you've also got another section. I'm go back to this. Don't worry, there's not too much longer in this. I know there's a huge amount of information here. You've also got quantitive research which you can do on your audience. Okay, your audience. So, we [snorts] want to be making sure that we are understanding where our target customers are coming from, where our best customers are coming from. There's a few ways of doing this. Firstly, do you survey your new customers and prospects

7:04:54to find out where they found you? Because even inside Google Analytics, which we'll look at in just a second, even inside Google Analytics, we'll see where the conversions are coming from, but we don't we're not able to tie that to, well, this person was actually a perfect customer. So we all we can see is that we're getting lots of leads from one particular traffic channel, lots of traffic from one particular channel, but we don't know where the best customers are coming from necessarily. If you're e-commerce, you can, but you know, for a lead generation business, you can't. So you want to be surveying your new customers and prospects, asking people

7:05:27where they found you, so you can build up a picture of where the best customers are finding you. So, we'll either do this in the lead capture form, ideally not, or we'll do this in uh some sort of new customer signup form. Where did you find us? That type of thing. Um, use Google Analytics. Of course, Google Analytics has plenty of data, but it doesn't often give you the stuff that surveying your customers will. Um, so

7:05:52you do want to use both. And your keyword research as well. So let's have a look at some of the main areas that you'll be looking at inside Google Analytics. Now we're looking at universal analytics here, not G4. We'll be adding G4 um components to this course as we go. Most people at the time of making this using universal analytics. So that's where we're focusing our attention. So when you open Google Analytics, you will often see this or if you go to all traffic channels, you will see something that looks like this. And what we've got here is we've got the different sources of traffic that are

7:06:30coming through to your website. We can see how many users you're getting here. Uh how many different sessions, so each user might have multiple sessions. And we can see some metrics around things like bounce rate, uh how long people are spending on the site, how many pages they're visiting per session, what the conversion rate is of different goals, and how many goals are actually being

7:06:50completed in this time. So this helps us build a picture about which traffic channels are performing best for us, which traffic channels are performing worse for us and so on. Now if you're looking at data like this, for example, you know, it's really difficult to give benchmark data on on sites. Um we we do have videos on Google Analytics where we do give a bit more benchmark data, but just from looking at this bounce rate looks really high. So, I'm looking at some of these traffic channels like organic search and I'm thinking they might be getting a lot of unqualified traffic here. We'd normally want that bounce rate to be sort of less

7:07:24than 55 60%. Depending on the split between mobile and desktop, but uh this site is actually quite desktop heavy. So, we'd want that to be a bit lower. So, there might be a traffic issue there. The thing that makes me think actually it might be more of a website issue is the fact that this bounce rate is high across the board. Okay. So, we might be thinking there's a website um issue there. something about this site

7:07:46maybe isn't working particularly well. Pages per session. So, how many pages are people viewing on your site? You want this obviously to be as high as possible. That shows you you've got good quality traffic coming through. Again, also you're looking for variance between um variation between different traffic channels. So, display traffic, for example, is usually known to be rubbish quality, right? This is the ads that you'll see when you're browsing around, you know, in your Gmail or whatever. A lot of display traffic clicks on the ads accidentally. So we don't expect it to be good quality traffic. So the fact that actually it's performing better than organic tells me

7:08:23that there might be some quality issue with organic search traffic. Although average session duration is lower uh conversion rate, so what percentage of people are turning into leads or sales, whatever your conversion goal is set to, and then number of conversions. So you want to have a look at where your best traffic is coming from. Basically, which traffic sources are bringing you the most traffic, but also which traffic sources are bringing you the highest converting traffic. If something like paid search has a very low conversion rate, that can tell you that you're bidding on the wrong keywords. For example, aura ring, I would expect they've got a very low

7:08:59conversion rate on wedding rings because that's not usually what people are looking for. So you can have a much lower conversion rate on wedding rings than someone searching for aura ring generation 3 for example. So you want to do this for your site to analyze which traffic channels are performing best for you. Some other areas that you want to have a bit of a look inside Google

7:09:22Analytics. One of the areas inside organic traffic is you know organic traffic can be lots of different types of people. So we've seen with Aura you've got people coming through searching for their brand. you've got people coming through searching for heart rate variability and you know all these kind offormational topics. So you don't want to lump all traffic necessarily in the same category and say well all our organic traffic is rubbish. You might what you might want to do is break that out and understand how different types of traffic perform

7:09:51differently. So what you can do is you can create a segment in or in Google Analytics. So I've created a segment here for organic traffic. So just click on add segment, scroll down and click organic and then go to behavior site content landing pages. And then you will see all of the top landing pages for organic traffic. So this is the pages that people are coming into your site from through search. And when we see this for this particular site, we can see why their bounce rate is so high. Because actually if we compare traffic coming through to their homepage, which is often branded traffic, which is often traffic with a

7:10:31high commercial intent, we can see that their metrics are really, really good. Really good. 40% bounce rate, solid. Uh 1.45 pages per session, pretty good as well. Um actually this site when you log in, you go to a different domain. So that's why it be that um high conversion rate again because a lot of this traffic is coming to login. But if we have a look at their blog, this isformational traffic. This is the sort of traffic that might be less likely to convert because they've searched for what is heart rate variability for example rather than um I want to buy something. So we'd expect this traffic to perform worse and it

7:11:12does. It has a very high bounce rate, lower pages per session, low session duration, very low conversion rate. we still take that traffic because this is free conversions, but we might want to do something with these pages. So, that's another area inside Google Analytics that can be really instructive to help you identify where your best traffic sources are coming from inside Google uh inside organic search. Is it homepage? Is it key page traffic that's turning into business for you? Or is it blogs that are driving lots of your traffic, but they're not converting well? In which case, what can you do with your blogs? Like, what's the

7:11:48difference, for example, between these two blogs? Why is this blog converting at 0.12%? Why is this blog converting at significantly higher, like five times higher? Because maybe there's some lessons that we can learn there. So, that's another area that you want to check out with Google Analytics. Another thing that you will want to do, by the way, this can also help you identify your audience's top pain points. If you've written about lots of pain points in your blog, then you can see which of those blogs is performing best, which is highest traffic, which is highest conversion rate. Ah, that's something that they really care about. And then

7:12:24you can write more on that. Another area that you want to check out inside Google Analytics is your locations. You can even drill this down into city as well. So if you click on the little city uh secondary or primary dimension then you can see not only which countries are driving the most traffic and conversions for you but which cities are driving the most conversions for you. This can be useful if you don't know, right? If you don't know, for example, this business, if we drill down into city, we see that actually um a significant portion of their traffic, like 10 uh sorry, 21% of their total

7:13:01conversions are coming from London. Well, that's one city. So, what we might want to do is analyze, is this because London is particularly optimized for this thing that this website is offering? And if so, do we want to run really hard with our ads there? Do we want to do content marketing and digital PR to London publications because we know that this resonates with a London audience? So, this can help you kind of find pockets of your audience which you might want to advertise more to. What's going on with Nairobi, right? Because this business actually doesn't do much advertising in Nairobi. So the fact that they've got some, you know, they've got

7:13:40traffic, organic traffic coming through in Nairobi and it seems to be converting, okay, it's not brilliant, but they'll take it. Well, should we be doing more there? Should we be running some ads there? Should we be doing some content marketing or digital PR there? So, that can help you um kind of identify areas to advertise. So, that's a quantitative uh way, one of the quantitive ways. And you can see there's some questions and prompts here to help you locate this target audience. So that's a rather monster look at locating your target customers qualitatively and quantitatively based on your competitors and based on analysis of your existing

7:14:22traffic in Google Analytics. So for the rest of this module, we're going to be looking at the particular ad traffic channels. We're going to look at search. We're going to look at social as well. And for the search piece, I'm going to be taking you through uh the tabs in this spreadsheet to show you how to

7:14:40implement this stuff. So, see you there. Let's be honest, SEO can sometimes feel like a long hard slog. But we're not going to be talking about the slog part of SEO today, right, Luna? We're going to be showing you some 5minute fixes that you can start implementing on your site immediately to start getting some results. Our first fix, title tags, also called page titles, are still word for word one of the most important SEO elements on each page of your site. They're a little hidden piece of code on every page of your site that shows up in the browser tab at the top of the window and also in

7:15:15the Google search results. Now, not only does Google look at the content of your title tags to understand which phrases your pages should be ranking for, but also if you've got great title tags showing up in the SERs, people are more likely to click on your site, which is going to get you more traffic and more conversions, which is what we're all here for. Now, we don't talk about title tags too much at Exposion Ninja these days because truth be told, they're such a basic SEO thing. But take a look at this. The title tag of one of the most

7:15:42popular news sites in the world, home. In fact, the BBC's main title tag is BBC-home. If you search for accountants, you might see this site in the search results. Welcome to icedew.com AEW. What does it mean? Well, it turns out it means the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. But you'd never guess that from the title

7:16:04tag. She's devastated. Why is this mad? Well, title tags are really important for SEO. BBC is not trying to rank for the word home. IC AEW is not trying to rank for the phrase IC AEW. That's their domain. They would rank for that anyway. So a good page title includes the target keywords that you want that page to rank for. So for example, if we search for accounting software, we see the page titles of the sites that are ranking are things like accounting software, do beautiful business zero UK, online accounting software for small business, the best small business accounting software for 2022, best accounting software UK, accounting software for

7:16:40small business. What do you notice? They all use the target keyword accounting software. To do anything else is utter madness. Quick tip here. If you want to check out some great page titles to get something which people are going to click through on, one place to analyze is not just your organic ranking competitors, i.e. the other sites that are ranking for this keyword. But also

7:16:59take a look at the ads that are running. Because with the ads that are running, whilst these aren't page titles, these are advertising headlines, advertisers will often be split testing these to work out what gets the most clicks. and they'll get this data much faster than people testing their page titles. So, for example, in two of these ads that are showing up, we can see that these software companies are targeting the type of business that they want to sell their accounting software to, namely small businesses and small and medium-siz businesses. So, I might include small businesses in my page title, knowing that small business accounting people are going to be more

7:17:31likely to click through on that because it's clearly relevant to them. Smart. Okay. Tip number two is metadescriptions. Now, metad descriptions are kind of like the slightly less famous celebrity sibling, but they don't get as much attention as page titles. They don't have much effect, but they're still kind of useful and they can still be a quick way to blow up your traffic. Here's why. So, the meta description is usually the text that shows in the search results. For example, this stuff here. Now, either you set your own meta description or Google just pulls some copy from your page and shows that instead. But usually that doesn't work out too well. For

7:18:04example, look at this meta description. we just have a list of different banks. It doesn't really mean anything. It's not particularly compelling and I might be less likely to click on it because of the meta description. Now, they've actually got a pretty decent page title. So, I might still click on this search result, but it's unlikely to be because of the meta description. Now, by contrast, this meta description says, "Find and compare the best business bank

7:18:24account in the UK for your company. Compare rates, features, and pros and cons of the top providers." That's compelling. It tells me exactly what I'm going to get. Now whilst Google doesn't look at the content of your metad description to decide ranking or relevance to certain keywords, what will happen is if someone searches for a particular keyword, they see your website listed with your metad description and then they click on your result, well that's going to show Google that you're relevant for that search term. So by having a great compelling metad description and getting those clicks, you're likely to improve your ranking over time. Some other great

7:18:55metadescription tips, you can use meta descriptions to peique people's curiosity. For example, let's say that I've searched for infusionoft alternatives. I can think of no infusionoft great, but let's be honest, everyone who's using it is looking for an alternative. Here we have a fantastic page title, the five best infusionoft alternatives. I'll never use keep again. Keep it being another name for infusionoft. And a great meta description. In my opinion, all of these are better than infusionoft. They offer better flexibility with pricing. I am tantalized. I'm going to click on that because it is really compelling and interesting to me. Another thing you can do in your meta descriptions is give

7:19:29people your call to action. I.e. tell them what they're going to be able to do on the page. This does two things. Firstly, it attracts people that are most likely to take that action. I usually those that have the most commercial intent, those are ready to take a next step. But the second thing it does is it preconverts people so that when I get on that page, I already know the goal of that page and I'm looking for that thing subconsciously. For example, let's say that you search for teeth straightening and you find the Smile Direct Club site. Here you see the meta description says, "Take

7:19:57impressions, order your clear aligners online now and get straight teeth in months. See if you're a candidate for our affordable braces alternative now." So, what am I going to get when I land on that page? Well, I'm going to be able to see if I'm a candidate. Okay, 5 minute fix number three is content headings. Jeez, if I had a care bear for every time I saw terrible underoptimized content headings, I'd be sending

7:20:20mountains of care bears to landfill. Now, if we stick with the teeth straightening example, what is wrong with this page? I mean, sure, apart from the page title, the lack of content, the absence of any sort of introduction to this business whatsoever, the lack of instructions about what to do next, apart from all of that, what's wrong

7:20:37with this page? This heading overbite, it gives absolutely no context to new visitors. Not only is this unlikely to rank because Google would look at this page and say, what should it rank for? Maybe the phrase overbite. If it did rank for that phrase, nobody is going to spend time on this page because there is no context. The heading does nothing to set the scene for the new visitor that's landed on the page. Now, what this page probably really wants to target is a phrase like how to fix overbite. That's a problem phrase that this business solves. [music] So, that should be the page title and it should be the content

7:21:12heading here. Now this is quite a common problem and what happens is when people design a website they design the subpages of that site to sort of act as a next step from the homepage and what they don't think about is making those subpages rank in their own right if this subpage was designed to rank in its own right. It would therefore need to accept cold traffic i.e. people that had no context. they hadn't already been on the homepage. And if it was going to do that, for example, targeting a phrase like how to fix overbite, that would need to be the topic of the page. And

7:21:42then Invisalign would be presented as the solution to that problem. Now, they could quite easily do this, but not with a heading like that. [screaming] Here's another example. Going back to accountants, we can see in their page title that the phrase they want to target is payroll services. But the trouble is when we get on the page, the heading is just payroll. [music] Well, this page is not about payroll. This page is about payroll services. This is an accountancy firm that provides payroll services. So whilst this seems like a small thing, actually this intent gap is massive. If this page was actually about payroll and it was about

7:22:14the ins and outs of payroll and how payroll worked and what it was and how long payroll had been in existence, then fine, but it's not. And that intent gap is really important. Okay, tip number four. This might take you a little longer than 5 minutes, but it's going to save you a ton of time. So I'm still going to include it today. and that is rewriting old posts. Rather than writing a whole new article for your site each week or month, sometimes it's much faster and more effective to go back and rewrite old posts instead. And we do this all the time for clients. So, let's

7:22:43say for example that we've got a client in accountancy software and we're trying to rank for anformational phrase like how to automate payroll because we know that people who are searching for that could be interested in buying accountancy software. Now, let's say that they've got an old post on their site which is doing okay, but it's a little bit out of date. it's not very detailed and we think it could be spruced up a little bit. Now, we can fix this up by making it longer, adding more detail, bringing it up to date, maybe adding some graphics much quicker than we can writing a whole new post from

7:23:10scratch. And because this old post might have links, ranking, and traffic already, we'll tend to see results much faster. Boom. Tip number five is supplier testimonials. This is killer. Here's the strategy in 20 seconds. Go and give all of your suppliers a great testimonial. When they add it to their website, they'll include a link back to your site. Particularly if the testimonial you've given them is fantastic. They'll really want to show it off. And there you have it. What if I told you you could see into your competitor's souls their every marketing

7:23:38want and desire? Well, you can't. But you can analyze their PPC which will show you how much they're spending, what their top priority products and services are, what they consider to be their most important USPS and benefits, and where they're finding their most valuable traffic. So that is what So that's exactly what we're going to be doing today. So today we're going to be analyzing your competitor's Google ads in three key areas. Firstly, their targeting. So what are the keywords that they're targeting to make their ads show up? Secondly, the ad copy that they're using. How are they making people click? And what features are they prioritizing? And then thirdly,

7:24:10how much are they spending in total over time? And how are they breaking down that spend between the different areas that they're advertising for? To the Ninja mobile, that means laptop. Now for many businesses, their Google search ads or their shopping ads will be a top marketing priority. So actually analysis of this era can give us a really good picture of their overall digital marketing. Now the main analysis tool

7:24:29I'm going to be using today is Semrush. Semrush is a paid tool but you can get a free trial at thankyouninjas.com. And we're going to be looking at a couple of different businesses today. We're going to be looking at one that's B2B, pretty hardcore B2B and one that's pretty hardcore B TOC. The B2B one is going to be lead generation focused around software and the B2C is going to be e-commerce. So we've got two very different types of businesses here. And I've chosen these two because they're very different. But you'll see that the way that we're analyzing these campaigns is basically the same. Now, the first

7:24:52thing I do when I'm analyzing someone's PPC is I'll just open up Semrush. I'll throw their URL in, and I'll go down to advertising research, and that's going to open this table here. So, this shows us the different keywords that are triggering their ads. We can see the positions on Google that these ads are showing. We can see how many times this

7:25:07phrase is searched per month on average. And we can see the cost per click, so how much advertisers are willing to spend to get those clicks. We can also see the landing page, the URL that this traffic is being driven to. And then, if we hover over the little ad button, we can see the ad copy that's being used. So, the three areas that we're looking at are targeting, ad creative, and spend. Let's start with targeting first of all. And by the way, today we're going to be analyzing HubSpot. HubSpot's a B2B CRM software company. I've chosen the US because it's the area that they spend the most advertising budget in,

7:25:33and I've chosen desktop device because that's where a lot of their traffic is going to be coming from. So, when you're analyzing your competitor's target keywords, what you're looking for are themes. For example, I can see they're targeting their brand name and that they're spending quite a lot of money to do this. So, for example, I can see they're spending about 124K a month on

7:25:48targeting people searching for HubSpot. Now, in reality, it's not quite going to be that much because they're going to have a much higher ad quality score than some of their competitors, but they're estimated to be bringing around 24% of their total Google ad traffic coming through the word HubSpot. So, clearly, one of their big priorities is targeting branded search. But other than that, we can see some other categories of targeting they've got going on here. For

7:26:07example, they have some free tools here. Here we can see they're targeting the phrase email signature and they're bidding to drive people through to an email signature generator that they've built on their website. Now, they're spending more than $4,000 a month to drive people to a free email signature generator. So, that's kind of interesting. We'll come back to it in a second. In fact, we can see that they're running ads to this email signature generator from loads of different keywords. Email signature generator, email signature, email signatures, professional email signature, email signature template, professional signature email. Hm. We can also see they're running ads for content calendars, and they've built a free

7:26:36social media content calendar template that you can download. So, what's going on here? Well, HubSpot has built these free lead generators to collect email addresses of people that may potentially be HubSpot customers later down the line. And if you're thinking, well, free email signature generator doesn't necessarily mean I'm about to sign up for a CRM software. Well, let me show you something clever that they've done later on. Now, the next category of keywords that they're targeting are what I'm calling tripwire features. So, there are features of HubSpot software like the meetinguler or the email tracking software. So, there are enough people searching for meeting schedulers and

7:27:04email trackers that HubSpot will drive that traffic to feature pages for its CRM software. So, you can go to the meetinguler page, click get started free, and that will get you signed up for a trial of HubSpot so you can use their meetinguler. The final category of keywords that HubSpot is targeting is what I'm calling commercial terms. These are phrases like CRM, free CRM, as well as the brands of some of their competitors like Zoho CRM, even Wix.com, the website builder, and Squarespace. So just from looking at this for like four minutes, we can see HubSpot's entire search strategy. It's basically broken into four groups. We've got their

7:27:34branded search traffic. We've got these free tools like the content calendar template and the email signature generator. Then we've got these tripwire features of HubSpot's own product like the meetinguler and the email tracker. And then we've got these commercial terms around CRM, free CRM, and competitors just from looking at the keywords that ads are running against. Now, once we've analyzed their targeting, we want to take a look at the ad creative. So remember that we can hover over the little green button here to see what sort of ad copy they're using. So the main things we're looking for here are what are the USPS and the

7:27:59features that they're pushing in these ads knowing that they're going to get customers. So for example in this CRM ad we can see they say organize track and sell with ease. Best for teams of 10 or more get it today. No credit card required. No contract needed. These are objection handling. They're trying to remove the sense of risk from the potential purchaser. Best for teams of 10 or more is really interesting because something like CRM or free CRM is potentially a really broad keyword and not everyone who searches for that is going to be a relevant customer for HubSpot. So, I think it's really interesting that what they're doing is

7:28:25they're casting quite a wide net with these keywords, but then they're disqualifying people who aren't going to be a good fit for HubSpot. We see a very similar thing for email signature generator. For example, this ad says, "Use this free tool to build a remarkable email signature for your team." And that for your team is important because some of the people searching for an email signature generator. It might be your mom and she wants to put your face in her email signature to send to her church friends, right? Well, that's fine, but that's not a customer for HubSpot. HubSpot doesn't want to spend almost $4 to get your mom

7:28:51on their website when she's never going to buy HubSpot. So, they're using this as disqualification copy. We see the same thing with the email signature keyword. Build a free branded email signature for your business. For your business is really important cuz it disqualifies the people that want to do this for personal reasons. The next thing that we want to analyze as part of the ad creative is where the traffic is being driven to the landing page. For example, for the Zoho CRM page. Now, we would normally expect a SAS business targeting their competitor's brand name to drive that traffic to a page which compares the benefits of their CRM

7:29:19versus that competitor, i.e. HubSpot versus Zoho. And it would show a table of the different features show why people would choose HubSpot over Zoho for example. But that's not what they do here. So, that's kind of interesting. Either they've tested it and it hasn't worked or they've made a decision not to pick fights or they haven't tested it and this is an opportunity for you if you're competing against something like this. Now, when you're analyzing your PPC competitors landing page, it's also a good idea to check whether the intent of the landing page matches the intent of the search. For example, if this page was all about what a CRM is and what it

7:29:49does, that wouldn't necessarily match the intent of someone searching for CRM. Okay, that's targeting, that's ad creative. So, what about spend? So, obviously at the top here, so much will show us how much HubSpot has been spending on their advertising over time. This can be really useful when you're analyzing your competitors. If you see, for example, that their spend has been consistently increasing over time, you can make an assessment that overall Google search seems to be working for them if they're willing to continue reinvesting. Stuff like this can be kind

7:30:11of interesting where you see a big dip. Either it can be an indication that they've discovered there's some seasonality and they don't want to advertise during that seasonality. Or sometimes you'll see a big increase in spend and then a huge drop. And often this can be because, you know, they've tested a particular strategy for 6 months or so, decided that it hasn't worked and then they've cut it out. So you can then go back to the start just before that dip and see what are the strategies they've ditched and what are they now running with. You can therefore learn from their mistakes so you don't have to make those same mistakes

7:30:36yourself. But you can also see how much they're spending on each keyword. For example, we can see that on average HubSpot might be spending around $14 to advertise for the phrase CRM whereas they might be spending around $1.73 to advertise for email signature. This explains why they might have spent the money to build this email signature generator. Let's say this thing cost them $50,000. Well, if it means that they can get cheaper clicks and somehow convert those to HubSpot CRM customers more cheaply than they can through advertising through the HubSpot CRM keyword, then that $50,000 development cost to build out the signature generator might be well worth it. Now,

7:31:08obviously, this is a B2B example, but exactly the same principles apply for B2C. So, let's take a look at Cult Beauty, which is a B2C beauty e-commerce from the UK to see how we do the PPC competitor analysis there. So, same as before, I've just thrown their URL into Seamrush. I've gone to advertising research. I've chosen the country that's most relevant to this research, which is the UK, so UK business. And I've chosen mobile because they're going to be spending a lot more on mobile than they are on desktop. So, what can we tell from their targeting when we start with the targeting? Well, I can see they're

7:31:34bidding on their brand name, which is totally as you would expect, but they're also being extremely aggressive with customer acquisition. I can see their entire sort of strategy just from the targeting here. They're bidding on branded terms like Olipex, The Ordinary, Charlotte Tilbury, Paula's Choice, and they are bidding heavily on these. These are some of these are brands that sell direct to consumer. They are advertising heavily themselves. They're bidding on their own brand names. And Cult Beauty is beating Paul's Choice in position one, The Ordinary, position one, Nars, position one, Nars Foundation, position one. So, this is a business that's advertising very heavily in customer acquisition, which tells us one of two

7:32:09things. Either they are totally crazy and they are shoveling their cash into the sea, or they have a very robust backend, which means they can monetize this traffic very effectively. They're willing to massively overspend for customer acquisition. They're willing to lose money on the first purchase knowing that they can monetize that visitor over

7:32:24time because THG owns many properties. Maybe they're able to monetize that person across multiple properties. Maybe they're able to share that data between their brands. We don't know. But clearly, they are able to make more money from this customer than just a first purchase. Otherwise, a lot of this stuff just wouldn't make sense. Now, if we analyze their ad creative, particularly on desktop, we can see their strategy here for luring customers onto the site. We can see there's lots of voucher codes being used. A lot of these have voucher codes, money off almost everything. 15% off your order with this voucher code. Like their strategy is pretty obvious. They just

7:32:52want to buy customers. We do see them using USPS in this branded search ad where it says over 300 brands from around the world does something for absolutely everyone. So they're using their range as a USP also over 90,000 reviews also USP and then free delivery, but you have to use a voucher code. So it's clear that they feel that value is really their main USP. Well, the most interesting thing for me is how their spend has changed over time. For example, if we look at all time on desktop, we can see they only really

7:33:14started heavily with their PPC in 2016. This grew to a high in 2020 on desktop. If we contrast this with mobile, though, what we see is that while desktop traffic has dropped significantly, mobile traffic has not dropped as much, it's quite clear that they are prioritizing or putting more budget behind mobile today. And we can see that their spend is higher on mobile than it is on desktop. Then we can see how much they're spending on each brand. So, for example, they are spending the most on their own branded terms, but they're also willing to spend fairly heavily on some of the brands that they stock. And

7:33:43of course, we can see the landing pages that they're driving to. So, basically, all of these branded terms that they're targeting, they're just driving to the category pages on their site. So, if you search Charlotte Tilbury, you see the Charlotte Tilbury ad, then you see the Charlotte Tilbury landing page, which [music] has info, bestsellers at the top, then categories, then a range of

7:34:00products with a search and filter. Pretty simple. Now, obviously, Google Shopping targeting is based on the product feed and Google's targeting algorithms, although of course you can use negative keywords. So, you don't get so much info about targeting, but there's still plenty that we can learn from this. For example, which products are being triggered for these branded searches? How aggressive is their budget? For example, we can see that some of these ads are in like position eight, which means that they're not being as aggressive with their product listing ad budgets as they are with their search ad budgets. All right, let me guess. Your competitors are running

7:34:27Facebook and Instagram ads. really want to know exactly how well they're doing and how much they're spending, but you can't get that info from Facebook. Well, today I'm going to show you how to analyze a competitor's Facebook ads, including how to read between the lines to get some indication of stuff that Facebook just won't give you. Let's get devious. When we're analyzing a competitor's PPC campaigns, we're

7:34:44normally looking at three areas. Firstly, the targeting. Who are these ads being shown to? Now, Facebook and Instagram won't give us that info. So, we have to kind of deduce it from various sources. I'll explain a bit more later on. Secondly, we're looking at the creative that's being used. So, how are these companies getting in front of people? What sort of images, copy, and video are they using? And how successful actually are they? And then thirdly, how much are they spending? Again, Facebook doesn't give us this info all of the

7:35:09time. So, we have to kind of deduce it. Again, I'll show you how. All righty. So, you probably know that Facebook has this ad library which we can use to analyze uh the ads that any advertiser is running. So, just go to facebook.com/ads/ library and you'll see this screen. So you can choose your location, you can choose your ad category, whether you're looking at political ads, properties, employment, credit. We just normally go for all ads. And then you can put in

7:35:31whatever advertiser you want to look at. Now, we're going to look at a couple of different examples today. One is HubSpot. That's B2B selling software. And the other is Cult Beauty. So that's B TOC selling e-commerce. So I've chosen these because they're kind of at the ends of the spectrum of different businesses. And whatever you're selling and whoever your audience is, you're likely going to resonate with one or the other of these. So let's take a look at the cult beauty ads first of all remember those three areas that we're analyzing the targeting. Who are these ads being shown to the ad creative and how much are they spending? So cult

7:36:00beauty first of all we can see these ads are in the UK. That's where Cult Beauty is based. Targeting first of all. Now whilst Facebook doesn't show us the audiences that these ads are being shown to we can kind of deduce the audiences that these ads are being shown to based on the copy and the creative that's being used. For example in this ad we

7:36:14can see it's focused on the brand Nars. But the copy doesn't talk about a specific product. It talks about the range of different products that they sell. So, we might deduce that this ad is a retargeting ad being shown to people who have been on NAS pages or who like Nars on Facebook. Whereas the creative in these ads isn't specific at all. So, it could be that they're using dynamic ad generation to test loads of different types of ad or they could just be using this copy across a whole bunch of different retargeting ads. Notice how the copy in this ad says these attention

7:36:41holders are destined for your next haul. So we can assume that this is some sort of retargeting and presumably to people who have previously purchased on cult. So we might call this restock retargeting because it might be designed for people who have bought a certain number of days ago and the goal is to get them back on the site to purchase again. Let's say for example that we know that the average purchase cycle is every 60 days. We might start running restock retargeting after say 50 days to get people back onto our site rather than a competitor's site when it's time to restock. Now, if we go all the way

7:37:08down to the bottom here, we can see an ad with the copy, "Enjoy 15% off your first hall with this voucher code." So, this is either going to be a retargeting ad to people who've been on the site and don't already have an account, right? Because you wouldn't want to show this to someone who already had an account and who'd already made a purchase. So, this is either a new account person who'd been on the website and a retargeting ad, or it could be a cold prospecting ad to people who haven't bought before, but whom Facebook thinks might be interested in purchasing beauty products. Now, [music] I'm recording

7:37:33this video in late June, and this ad was launched in April and is the only ad from April that is still running. So, we can assume that this ad actually is performing. So, if I'm a competitor to this, I might be adopting this strategy for my business given that it seems to be working. Okay, so that's the targeting side of things. What about the ad creative? Well, the main things we're looking at is what type of ad creative is being used? Is it like userenerated content like front-facing camera style designed to look like the stuff that people would be scrolling through on Facebook and Instagram anyway? Well,

7:37:59here it is. Not is product shots. This is sort of Google shopping ad type things. We've also got these product feature videos which I know Cult Beauty THG has an in-house product shop place that they can do this type of stuff. But they're not spending a huge amount of time and energy on this creative. It doesn't look like they're working particularly hard on it, which is kind of interesting. And if I'm a competitor, I'm probably testing some UGC against this stuff to see if it would outperform. When you're analyzing ad creative, you can also look for what are

7:38:23the key messages that are being used. I.e. what does Cult Beauty think is really important to make people buy from them rather than a competitor. And honestly, I see none of that. All I see here is this is a price sale. This is value sales. This is money off. This is discounts. It's your favorite brands at discounts. That seems to be their positioning. That seems to be the proposition that they're taking to their customers. So again, if I'm competing against this, I'm thinking, what are the key messages? What are the USPS that can make me stand out against this? Okay, so that's the ad creative. The next thing

7:38:49is spend. Now, there's no way to tell how much this brand is spending on Facebook ads. Sometimes when you go on the Facebook ad library, you will see that data, but for Cold Beauty, we don't see that data. So, what we have to do instead is deduce how much they're going to be spending based on some little telltale signs. Now, the first thing is the number of ads. This isn't a brand

7:39:06that's running a huge volume of ads. There are some ads here and it's clear that, you know, they're testing lots of different ad types, but there aren't dozens and dozens of different types of ad copy here. They're basically choosing a few different types of ad copy and then they're running variations of those ads. We can also see they haven't spent a huge amount on the ad creative and they haven't really even tested lots of different types. Spending lots of money doesn't mean that you have to have a fancy studio. It can be just testing lots of different types of UGC style creative for example and they're not

7:39:31doing that. So we can deduce that maybe they're not spending as much as some other brands on their Facebook ads. Now by the way if you're a charity or a political cause you can see exactly how much your competitors are spending on Facebook. If you go to the Meta ad library report you'll get loads of stuff in this area. So we can see that WWF has spent about £65,000 in the last day uh across 104 different ads. So you get loads of really granular data about the spend and the ad copies for charities and political causes. But for businesses, not so much. Let's take a look at a B2B example. Obviously, the

7:40:00cult beauty is very B TOC. It's e-commerce. Let's see how these same principles apply and the same analysis of these three areas works for a B2B brand. So, we're looking at HubSpot, which is a CRM software. They sell software to businesses. Basically, their target audience is, sales teams, marketing teams, that type of thing.

7:40:15Normally, companies of 10 people plus. So, remember our three areas: targeting. Who are these ads being targeted to? Ad creative, and spend. So, first up with the targeting. How do we think these ads are being targeted? Well, we can see that some of the ad creative is things like specific features, link it up with your LinkedIn account, and that's for running ads. So, this might be people who have been running LinkedIn ads or maybe have expressed some interest in running LinkedIn ads elsewhere. We've got general sort of CRM type ads, but interestingly, there's no call to action on this ad. Uh, here's another ad for the free CRM, but again, there's not

7:40:44much description. So, I would expect that these are retargeting ads that have been run to people who have already been on the HubSpot CRM pages. We've seen in a previous video that HubSpot is investing quite heavily in their Google ads and it's likely that they're going to be retargeting people that have landed on those CRM feature pages in Facebook. We can also see they're running some lead genen campaigns with

7:41:01stuff like this state of service report. They've got these free reports and they're testing different captions here to see what works. And then they've got ads featuring someone speaking at event and it could be that they're running ads to this person's audience on Facebook. But overall, we can see that the targeting seems to be retargeting for

7:41:15people who've been on their website. Then we've got these bio personas, these templates, these downloadable guides, and then we've got this stuff about coming to the event, which we can assume is localized to near the event venue. Now, one kind of interesting thing here is that they've got some ads here that have been running for more than a year. The free social media calendar, the free Instagram cheat sheet, and how to build a brand book. These ads have been running at the time of filming this video for 13 months, which we can assume means that they are working and whatever targeting is being used is working

7:41:41pretty well. So, if we're a competitor to this, we might want to piggy back on this sort of strategy and create our own sort of lead genen assets which we can run these sorts of ads to. Notice how these are pretty broad topics. Loads of different business types of different sizes are going to be interested in this type of stuff. So, that gives us an indication that HubSpot's casting quite a wide audience net and bringing people in to generate leads which they can then sell the CRM later on. Okay, so what about the ad creative? Well, we can see they're not using a huge amount of

7:42:06video. There are some videos here, but mostly it's just these images. The images are actually fairly textheavy, meaning that the captions are sort of redundant. They're quite eye-catching with the colors that they use, but they very much definitely look like ads. If you're scrolling through Insta and you see this, you are not thinking, "Oh, my friends posted a picture of their breakfast." You are definitely thinking this is an ad. Now, the fact that they have used this sort of creative in their longest running controls indicates that actually it seems to be working for them. So, again, if I'm a competitor, I'm noticing that. Okay, so how much are

7:42:32they spending on these ads? Well, it's kind of difficult to tell. They've got some really unique ad creative which involves like actors and a studio and film crews and all this type of stuff. So that's going to be relatively high cost to produce. But then a lot of this stuff is really image based and honestly could just be bosched out in Canberra in a few minutes. So it's difficult to work out how much they're spending. But what we can tell is they're putting a lot of work into creating these different lead magnets. They're even running conferences as a way of generating leads. So it's unlikely that they're not

7:42:58going to be spending heavily to promote these things. They've got this 2022 marketing trend report data from a thousand plus global marketers. Like these things aren't that cheap to produce, so they're going to be spending a reasonable amount to promote these assets. Otherwise, the whole exercise is pointless. Boring articles pitched to junk websites by tragic emails with lame follow-ups to get spammy links. Shatter Dreams Parkway. And that is why most guest posting doesn't work. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Actually, writing for other websites, i.e. guest posting, can be a pretty good idea, particularly if your business likes rankings, credibility, and money. Not to

7:43:32mention that getting your content published on the sort of websites the audience is already reading is a great way to impress them with your wit and intelligence. All right, well never mind, but at least you might get a backlink. But when most people try guest posting, they sort of poke at it with a stick for 10 minutes, get nowhere, give up, and then just go back to scrolling

7:43:49Tik Tok on their phones. But not you. Not today. Got it? Today, we're going to go through a guest posting formula that you can use to get your business and your content featured. We use a variation of this formula at Exposure Ninja with our clients all around the world. Oh, and by the way, if you're still wondering, does guest posting work for SEO? Stick around to the end to find out. Ready? Step one, ideation. Ideation just means thinking. But marketing agencies can't sell you thinking. So, we call it ideation. If you're going to get your content published, you need to have a good angle. You need to have something

7:44:17that people actually going to be interested in. This is the main reason that guest posting usually fails, because boring gets nowhere. When coming up for ideas for guest posts, imagine your perfect customer scrolling through their phone. What sort of content angle could you put in front of them which would stop them from scrolling, catch them in their tracks? That's the sort of thing that you're after. Luckily, we have some tools that can help us in this task. Let's do an example to see how they work. All right, we're going to do

7:44:40a quick example with a madeup business. And this business is going to have created a device that waters house plants automatically. You can do it from your phone. It's smart. All that type of stuff. Uh why house plants? Well, I've got one here that has seen better days. That's where I keep the dead leaves. Anyway, so we've got a clear need. So, how do we find a good guest posting topic? Well, the first tool that we're going to check out is Exploding Topics at explodingtopics.com. So, Exploding Topics allows us to look at any topic and see how interest is trending over time and whether this topic has already

7:45:07peaked. Obviously, you want to be posting about something that's getting more popular than getting less popular. Another great tool you can use to find guest posting topics is answerthepub.com. Just go to answer the public, stick in your topic, and it'll give you all of the questions that people are asking about that topic. Some of these might make good guest post topics. For example, uh, can house plants survive outside? Can house plants live forever? Now, my watering device is obviously designed to help plants live

7:45:30longer or live full stop or just live. So, this could be a good topic for me to guest post about because it ties in a common problem with a solution that I have created. Another great tool for guest posting is Buzz Sumo. Stick in any topic and you'll be able to see related content ideas. When you click on these, you'll see the posts that have been shared in this area. So you can see are things on this topic getting lots of shares. Is there lots of interest in

7:45:53this topic or again is it trending down. This can also give you some insight into the sort of content that people are most likely to share with and engage on social media. Now as well as talking directly about your topic, in this case house plants, you can also piggyback on other topics that are popular. For example, let's say I wanted to talk about mental health and I wanted to talk about the links between mental health and house plants. That would allow me to go after publications that talk about mental health and use mental health trending topics to get coverage for my business. I could also do a similar

7:46:21thing about climate change, something else which is really current and in the news at the moment. How can I link house plants to climate change in order to get coverage for my business? Maybe something like are house plants good for the climate or which house plants suck out the most carbon dioxide. If you're a specialist business talking about specialist niche topics, then don't worry if these tools tell you that there's not much volume. You're going to find your publications first and then write based on what those publications are talking about. Okay, so you got your topic. Now it's time to find some

7:46:47publications to get some coverage in. Few good ways to do this. Firstly, just Google it. I've got to talk about my house plants. So I might go on to Google and just search for houseplant blogs. This is going to give me a whole bunch of blogs about house plants. So I know that they're going to be topically

7:47:00relevant because Google's ranking them. And I also know they're going to have reasonable authority if Google is ranking them. And I want to get my content featured on reasonable authority blogs because I don't want to be wasting my time writing for spammy blogs. And if I'm going to get links, I want them to be from decent websites. You can also search for houseplant magazines. This is going to tend to give you larger websites. So here I've got things like gardeners. They're like a UK gardening institution. They would be so proud of this. But they've got books, radio, TV,

7:47:25magazines. They're all over the place. So getting some coverage on a site like this would be fantastic for my plant device. Another great way to find publications to target is to find your competitors and analyze their backlinks. So, let's say for my plant business, water irrigation.co.uk is a competitor. So, I might head over to semrush free trial at thankthankninjas.com and do a little bit of backlink analysis. So, I stick them in here and I can see what sort of sites they're getting links from. I can then work out, are any of these sites that I might want to target with my guest posting? In this case,

7:47:52perhaps not. Maybe this one. Which leads us onto a very common question and a bit of a stumbling block with guest posting. You might find some sites where you think actually they look kind of junky. Do I really want to include them in my guest post outreach? Well, here's how to tell. You want to think like Google. So ask yourself firstly, is this site mobile friendly? Any site that's not mobile friendly in 2022 needs to have a serious word with itself? Secondly, are they secure? Is it using SSL HTTPS at the start of the domain? Again, if they're not in 2022 and onwards, what is going on? Thirdly, is the subject matter

7:48:21on this site a fairly close match? If they're posting about all sorts of stuff, it might not even be a decent site that actual humans ever go and visit. Fourthly, do they have a good backlink profile? Do they have other websites linking to them? Fifthly, do they have good domain authority? And you can use Moz's link research tool to find out what domain authority a site is. And

7:48:38finally, do they have a good spam score? We're usually aiming for a spam score of less than 10%. How many publications do you need to research? We typically allow maybe 20 publications that we'll reach out to to get one or two articles placed. So, you need to build up a good database of publications that you want

7:48:51to target. Messi, Ronaldo, goals, pitch. Speaking of goals, let's talk about your pitch. Now, once you found the publications that you want to contact, you need to find someone who you can actually talk to at these publications. Usually, you don't just want to go to their contact page and fill in a form. Usually, you want to find an actual person to talk to, either an editor or a writer. Now, on a lot of websites, you can click on their link to go to their author page, which will sometimes have a direct contact for them. If it doesn't, then you can often research their name and find them on Twitter and they'll

7:49:18often have an email address in their bio because they actually want people to give them ideas for articles. Well, you want to be friendly, but you also want to be straight to the point because these people get a lot of pictures. They know the deal. So, I'd write them a personal message something like, "Hi, Tony. Loving [music] your article about how to propagate orchids. A cutting from my mother-in-law's mother orchid is still going strong in my lounge 15 years later. Would your readers be interested in an article I've written? It's called the five most effective ways to relum orchids. I've tested a whole bunch of methods and found that these five things

7:49:45work the best. I'd love to send it over if you think it might be suitable for plantmonthly.com. tim plantwwateringinja.com. Now, don't be waiting up for Tony's reply. You want to reach out to all the writers and editors at the other publications that you've researched too. And then you want to get stuck in with follow-up. You know the saying, great

7:50:03books aren't written, they're rewritten. Trust me, first version of this was rubbish. We're on about rewrite number six now, and half of it is about 35% good. So I here, by the way, you can get a free copy of How to Get to the Top of Google by clicking the link in the description. I've never been any good at winking. Just like great books aren't written, they're rewritten. Great guest post opportunities aren't pitched, they are repitched. These journalists and writers and editors, they are super busy. So you're going to follow up with them usually 2 to 3 days later. There's no particular art to this. You're just

7:50:31going to reply to your first email with a gentle message. Hi, Tony. Just following up to see if this was of interest. Okay, writing. So when a publication says they're interested in publishing your content, now it's time to write. Now, you're not going to write as if you're the marketing manager for the business that you're working for. You're going to write as if you are a journalist. Yes, you are now a journalist. Good journalists write to interest their audience. They write to match the publication style. And when they mention a product, service, or business, they do so in a natural way that makes sense for a reader. Now, of

7:50:59course, you're going to want to talk about your business in your guest post. That's kind of the point. But you don't want to do it in an avitorial or over-the-top way. That's ironically going to give you less credibility in your article. Back to my plant watering guest post, I might write something like, "One of the keys to keeping your orchid relooming over and over is to make sure it's adequately watered. Any serious house plant owner knows the ice cube trick, leaving an ice cube or three to melt, gradually watering the orchid without soaking the roots. There's also a range of more technical solutions, including smart plant watering systems

7:51:26like Plant Water Ninja, allowing green fingered geeks to control their plant's hydration using an app. When you send over your article to the publication, you're going to include your author bio and your website link. And of course, you're going to be linking from in the body of your article, too. And because we've been well raised, once your article is published, reach out to the

7:51:43editor and thank them for publishing it. Also, let them know that you've sent it out to your audience as well. We've just won a global search award using this exact playbook with a client of ours. And I don't want to sound arrogant, but I'm not entirely surprised because this playbook is the most effective digital marketing strategy that certainly this client has ever seen and possibly their industry as well. We used this to triple their organic traffic in a year and reduce their Google Ads cost per lead by 73%. Do you want to know the really weird bit though? To do it, we had to market to people who don't actually want

7:52:17what our client sells or at least they don't think they want it. And it turns out that that's a subtle but important difference. Um um by the way, little disclaimer though, the stuff I'm going to show you today is a lot of work. When we're doing this with clients, it can take from 6 to 18 months. I mean, this is a content playbook that you can use to dominate virtually any industry online. And if you want dominance, you've got to put the work in. But this

7:52:38stuff really is only for the fearless. So, if that's you, come on in. This is a buyer journey or a buyer funnel. And you've probably seen it before. We're using the standard ADA model here, awareness, interest, desire, action, but there are other models as well. Now, just there you've been through this process on a macro level. You've gone from identifying that you have a problem all the way through to purchase. But this also happens at a micro level for an individual ice cream retailer. Let's say for example, you're at the beach and you want an ice cream. You're walking along the prominard. You spot an ice

7:53:08cream stand. Awareness. You have a look. Hm, they look pretty good. Interest. You see one that you really like the look of desire and you make the purchase. Action. Now, in that example, you can go through this whole process in about 30 seconds. When you're buying a house, you go through exactly the same process, but hopefully it takes you a little bit longer. Now, the team here at Exposure Ninja, we've worked with hundreds of clients and analyzed over 20,000 websites over the last decade. And you want to know one of the main reasons that so many websites underperform. It's because they only cater to one small

7:53:38group of customers, namely the people down here. Those people who have already made a decision to purchase or who are so close to making a purchase that you can just nudge them over the line with a bit of copy. Most websites exist entirely for this group of customer. All of their copy is written for this customer. All of their pages are targeted at these customers. Don't believe me? It's not just failing websites. Even well-established, successful websites do this, too. Let's look at some examples. This is the Curve website where you have an app that combines all of your cards into one place and you can see where all your

7:54:09spending is. So, have a look at how this website is designed. The only thing that this site does is convince you to use Curve. The calls to action are all download the app. Now, if you're still in the desire phase, but you haven't yet moved ready to take action, it explains some of the benefits of using Curve. if you haven't quite decided which one to get yet. There's some explanation about the different offerings and then a final CTA at the end. Now, they do have a content section on their website called stacked, but this content is almost entirely designed for existing Curve users. All right, so you might be

7:54:37thinking, what's wrong with this Tim? Nothing's wrong with it. There's just opportunity to go way bigger. I'll show you in a minute. Okay, our next example. This is The Ordinary. We've looked at them before. They are causing a ruckus in the beauty and skincare world. And this is a great e-commerce site. It explains the benefits of The Ordinary range. They're clear on their USPS. They

7:54:54sell you on what you're supposed to do. You can even build your regimen to find out which products are best for you. These sites are great if you're already aware of the problem that they solve. You're interested in their solution and you just need to find out a bit more information about their business in order to take the action. But what if you're not aware of them? Sorry, can't I help you? What if you don't know enough about them to trust them yet? Websites like these are waiting for the perfect visitor to arrive. someone who's already done the research, evaluated their options, and has decided to make a

7:55:24purchase. Anybody else is just going to bounce. Of course, we all want more of these visitors. They're the most profitable, and they convert really quickly into customers. But in any market, it's those visitors at the bottom of the funnel that are the most expensive to attract because they are the ones that all the businesses are fighting over. It's where you'll see the highest cost per click in Google Ads and the most competitive SEO. This traffic,

7:55:46it's great, but it's really expensive. This traffic virtually nobody is targeting and there's loads of it. Can I explain something quickly about hearing aids? See, we've got a few clients that sell hearing aids. One in particular, they have lots of hearing aid clinics around the country. And people go to these clinics, they have a hearing test, and then the client sells them hearing aids if they need one. Let's think about the buyer journey for hearing aids. Most of the time it goes like this. [music] Awareness stage. Somebody thinks ah my hearing isn't perfect. They then move into the interest stage where they realize that actually a hearing aid

7:56:19might help me if I've got hearing loss. They do some research. They identify that actually yes a hearing aid is going to be good. They move into desire. Then they finally take action and get a hearing aid. Now most hearing aid companies or aiologists focus on the desire and action stage. They only sell

7:56:35to people who want to buy hearing aids. This is why cost per click for hearing aid keywords is so high and most of them put the majority of their click budget into keywords like hearing aids or they'll bid on particular hearing aid brands and models. This is why so many of them focus all of their attention on ranking for and advertising against the hearing aids keyword. The smart ones will bid on particular brands and models of hearing aids, but everybody is focused on this section here. You know what's coming, right? What about this top section? But from talking to the client, we realized that actually there

7:57:08are a lot of people at the top of this buyer journey who didn't realize that hearing aids were going to be the right solution to the problem that they have. For example, there's a big group of people out there who just think that their ears are blocked. They don't think that they've got hearing loss, but actually they do and they need a hearing aid. Now, most of our clients, local competitors, weren't interested in targeting these people because on the surface of it, they're not searching for a hearing aid. They don't think that they need that thing. Whereas we realized we could advertise to these people quite cheaply, get them into the

7:57:37store, clean out their ears, and help them to realize that actually it's not your blocked ears that were a problem, it's your hearing loss. And our client could then upsell them on the hearing aid that they really needed. So going from narrowly targeting people at the bottom of the funnel to targeting the full funnel, we were able to triple our client's traffic in a year and decrease their cost per lead from Google Ads by 73%. Now, I really want to show you some more examples of this in practice, but first, let's get this playbook working for you. So, here's what you're going to do. On the left hand side, you're going

7:58:04to draw out your funnel stages. A I D A. Next to each stage, you're going to map out a few things. The first thing is the topics that people in this stage are going to be interested in. The next thing is going to be the objections that they're going to have. And then the final thing is the calls to action that

7:58:21they're going to be most receptive to. All right. This first example, we're going to use a personal injury solicister client of ours. So, what sort of topics might one of their potential customers in the awareness stage be looking for? Well, they might be researching stuff like whiplash after a car accident. At this stage, they might not be thinking about using a personal injury solister. They may have just had a car accident. Their neck feels a bit sore. They go on to Google that evening and they type in whiplash after car accident. Now, what about the objections? What would stop that person from buying from our client, the

7:58:48personal injury solister? First objection they might have is that they might not have even thought about making a claim. It might not have even crossed their mind that this could turn into something legal. So, what sort of call to action is going to work best for this person? Well, it's no good us trying to get this visitor to book a free consultation because they're just not ready yet. They didn't even think they had an issue two minutes ago. They're not going to be ready to call a solister and talk about making a claim. So, we need to go to them with something much softer, a much lower commitment call to

7:59:15action. Maybe some sort of downloadable guide which gives them a bit of information on what to do after a car accident. What about people at the interest stage? Well, someone at the interest stage might have searched for something like car accident with uninsured driver. the fact that they are even searching for this type of thing. This person knows that they have a problem and they're more likely to be looking for a legal solution. Their objections to doing business with our client might be that they don't even know they have a case. In which case, the right call to action for them might

7:59:40be something like a case evaluation. Now, notice how this is a higher commitment call to action than for the awareness traffic. Now, notice how a case evaluation is still a pretty low commitment call to action. We're just evaluating your case. you're not yet ready to go ahead, but it's still a higher commitment call to action than

7:59:56something for the awareness traffic. Once someone's reached a desire stage and they actually do want to hire a personal injury solistister, they might be searching for things like personal injury court procedure. So, this stage are actually visualizing themselves going through this process. So, we know they're ready to make a purchase. What are their objections to going forward? Well, they might be thinking that the whole thing seems a little bit stressful. So, the right call to action for someone like this might just be a general free consultation. So, we got another client. This client sells performance management software. We help them grow from just a glint in the

8:00:22founders's eye all the way through to a£26 million cash exit and they sell performance management software. Now, performance management software is one of those things where this sort of approach is really important because the people who need it don't necessarily know that they need it. Basically, it's software that helps a company to continually manage the performance of its team. So, using exactly the same playbook as before, what are the topics that someone in the awareness stage might be looking for? Well, remember these people might not know that they have a problem. So, they're not going to be searching for performance management software. They might be searching for

8:00:51something like reduce employee turnover because they know that they've got an employee turnover problem, but they don't yet realize that this is connected to performance management. What would their objection to buying the software at this stage be? Well, they don't think that they've got a problem yet. So, there's no point us trying to sell them the software. The right call to action for them will be something like a downloadable guide to reduce staff turnover. Now, someone at the interest stage might be starting to look for performance management information. They might be looking for templates on how to have great one-on- ones with your team, for example. So, they know that they

8:01:19have a performance management problem and they're interested in finding a solution to that problem. Their main objection to signing up for the software at this stage will be that they think that this is an easy problem to solve. I.e., we just need a new meeting template. We don't need a whole performance management system. Now, right call to action for them might be a white paper on effective performance management in your company. something that's a bit higher commitment than just a quick downloadable checklist, but something that is lower commitment than sign up or request a demo of the software. Of course, when they sign up for each of these, they're going to be

8:01:49going into an email automation sequence that's been set up, which will take that person through the gradual realization that actually they do have a performance management issue. It needs to be resolved by this software. And that's the beauty of this model is that you can automate moving people through the stages of this funnel. But we'll come back to that later. All right. Now,

8:02:05someone's ready at the desire stage. They know they want performance management software. What are the topics that they might be looking for? Well, they might be researching the top features in performance management software if they've never bought this before. How they know what they need? Well, they might be doing some research on that topic. What are their objections

8:02:19from getting the software at this stage? It could be things like cost. So, the right call to action is to book a demo or to get a quote. All right. So, now it's your turn. You've got your buyer journey stages down the left. You've got three headings on the right. Topics, objections, and calls to action. So, starting with traffic at the awareness stage. What are people looking for? What are they researching before they even know that you might be a solution for them? You may have noticed the commonality amongst the businesses we've been talking about today is people don't often realize they have a problem or

8:02:47they might be misdiagnosing their problem as something else. So often the topics that people search for in the awareness stage might on the surface seem to be unrelated to the thing that you sell, but actually the thing that you sell solves the underlying issue. Often the objections at this stage will be around denial. people just don't know they've got a problem or they don't know their problem is serious enough. So the call to action that you want to offer them is something very low commitment, something that has high perceived value and very low risk. Downloadable guides, further information, get them in an indoctrination sequence so that you can

8:03:16explain the issue that they've got to them and show how you've helped other people get through that same issue. In the interest stage, the topics that you want to identify are what are the things that people start searching for as they begin to research possible solutions to their problem. When you're thinking about the objections people might have, think about what are the common mistakes people make when they're choosing different options in your space. Now, sometimes you can get people in the interest stage to request some sort of free consultation like we do with the Exposure Ninja free website and marketing review. But notice how we add

8:03:44value to this. So, we don't just say contact us if you need digital marketing help because that's too high commitment. Instead, what we say to people is if you want to improve the volume of leads and sales that you're generating through your website, request a review and we'll show you how to do this. We'll send you a video with no commitment, no obligation. This has higher perceived value and lower perceived risk, which means that we can get more people from the interest stage requesting the review, increasing the number of leads that we get through our funnel. Not just a pretty face. Okay. The desire stage, the topics that you're targeting are the

8:04:15questions that people have as they are about to buy. This might be your business versus competitor if people are weighing up their options. The objections that you want to answer in your content are what stops people from buying from you. As for call to action, people might be willing to buy a product if you're e-commerce, uh, book a demo, request a consultation. Generally, people are willing to tolerate a higher

8:04:34commitment request at this stage. Sweet. So, now you've got your playbook. Now comes the hard part. Turning all of this content, objection handling, and calls to action into content on your website and on your social media. So, your commercially focused content, the stuff in the desire and action stages, this is going to be the stuff that's typically on your product pages, your service

8:04:55pages, your e-commerce category pages. The awareness and the interest content, this is usually the stuff that's going to be on your blog or in your knowledge base. And don't be scared of coming up with loads of ideas for each of these funnel stages. We've just done an exercise like this at Exposure Ninja, planning, our knowledge base, and we're up to 600 topics that we're going to be writing about. When we do this with clients, it's not uncommon for us to spend 6 months to 18 months building this out for them. But the good news is that once it is built out, these pages will rank. You can drive traffic through

8:05:26ads to it. You can repost this stuff on social. You can post it through your email marketing and your automated streams. This is content that can work hard for you for years. I know, I know, technically there's no such thing as boring businesses, but you clicked on it, so somebody might be feeling a little bit self-conscious. But here's the thing. Not every business can get links from fancy influencer campaigns, getting front page stories published all over the place. But if you're a business that's selling something industrial, you're a little bit more B2B, you sell generic products or whatever, you're just a little bit less sexy. How do you

8:06:03get back links? Well, today I'm going to show you six ways. I'm assuming that you know why we're getting links, right? To help your website's ranking in search. That's the purpose of all of this. So the more links we get from better quality websites, the more that search engines like Google reward your site with ranking, which is incredibly profitable. So that's why we're doing this. We've blown up the rankings in a good way of our clients in lots and lots

8:06:30of different boring [music] industries. We absolutely love working B2B and industrial sites. We win awards with this stuff and we make these clients millions. So, I can tell you categorically that being in a boring business does not mean that you cannot do excellent digital marketing. You absolutely can. Now, we've got six tips for you today. And we wanted to find a boring business to illustrate and show examples with. We didn't want to use a client. Firstly, because then we'd have to label one of our clients as boring, which isn't that nice. Uh but secondly, because we'd then be showing all of their competitors exactly what we do for

8:07:09them, which they probably wouldn't be too happy with. So, we found an arbitrary business online and we've chosen Trellborg. If you're watching from Trellborg, please don't take offense, but you are the most boring business that we could find that is doing excellent marketing. So, Trellborg creates polymer materials that seal, damp, and protect. They basically make

8:07:31polymer seals. No, think more boring. So, quick SEO quiz. The best type. How many websites do you think are going to link to a manufacturer of polymer seals? Few hundred? Couple thousand? Try 2 million back links from a total of 8,700 referring domains. They've got links from suppliers, from tech firms, from events. They've got stuff from Wikipedia,

8:08:01multiple publications, the list goes on. Like I say, boring businesses can do excellent marketing, particularly using these six strategies. Okay, just like couples therapy, strategy one starts with you and particularly the content that you have on your website. One of the main reasons that boring businesses find it difficult to get links is the

8:08:23content on their website is boring, too. Just because you're in a boring industry doesn't mean you have to have boring website content. You're not going to get links if you don't have something that is linkw worthy. If there's something interesting or useful enough for people to actually link to. If you're not sure where to start with creating awesome linkworthy content, then boom, check out this video. But let's talk about an example. So our friends over at

8:08:48Trellleborg are creating polymer seals. How might they create some interesting content on their site? Well, they could think about this in a few different ways. Firstly, they could think about the types of questions that their audience might be asking, comparing the different types of sealant, for example. They could also think even more broadly about some of the topics that the general public would be searching for about sealant. For example, they might be searching for types of sealant. So, this is quite an entry-level phrase and doesn't necessarily reflect the

8:09:22customers of a company like Trellborg. So, why would they be interested in writing content on this topic? Well, because when people write about Sealant, which they sometimes do, they will often need to link to an article which is an authority on the topic. And when they need to link to an article that is an authority on the topic, where do they go? They go to Google. So, we've done this many times for clients where we've got an article ranking for something that is maybe a little bit less niche, a little bit less specific than the topic

8:09:53their customer might be searching for. But we're doing this because it gets picked up by other authors who are then going to link to it when they need a reference. So, if we have a look for example at a phrase like types of sealant, we can see that this is anformational search, right? The sites that are coming up, it's all information that's ranking. That's good. we know that we can compete in this space. Then if we have a look at this first link for example, we can see that this is a fairly boring article. We can see that they've got bullets here and that's what's being pulled through into this

8:10:24featured snippet. So if we're going to write something like this, we would also want to use bullets. But what could we do to make this better? Well, we could make it longer. We could break it down by industry to give it more specific and useful information. We can include rich media like pictures, videos, gifts, memes to actually make this fun and interesting to read. Simple. This isn't just about blog and article content though. This is also about product page content. If your products are being sold by distributors or retailers, you want to make sure that the information on

8:10:59your product pages is really good. Sometimes distributors will link to a product page rather than creating their own content if that product page is really awesome. But if yours is rubbish with hardly any info on, they ain't linking to it. Now, just by writing this content, you're going to pick up some links. But really, this is just the first step, and you don't want to rely

8:11:21on just picking up links accidentally. You can be a bit more aggressive with this. How? Well, let's say that we've written a better piece than this piece here, and now we want to start going to steal some links from it. This feels a bit horrible, but let's do it anyway. Um, so what we're going to do is we're going to throw this URL into Semrush, and we're going to have a look at the different websites which are linking to it. We can see the context of these links and we can see the types of sites that are linking. We can then reach out to these websites and ask if they would

8:11:51like to link to us instead. For example, here we can see an article on seven DIY tips to soundproof your home on soundproof ideida.com. So, if we were going to make this article better, what we might do is talk about some of the uses of these different sealants and when they were better than others. One of the considerations that we might make is soundproofing. That would mean that we could then go to this website and say, "Hey, we noticed that you've linked to this other article, but this doesn't have much information about soundproofing. R1 does. Would you like to link to it instead? H snazzy. Of

8:12:28course, you're not going to have 100% hit rate, but you never are with link building. The key is persistence. Relentless persistence in the face of constant rejection. Sounds like my teenage dating years. Next up, guest posting. If you're in a boring industry, you will have trade journals in your industry. Okay? It's just something that happens in boring industries. There are trade journals, trade magazines that talk about these boring industries and all of the boring things that are going on. By the way, I'm not asterisking or inverting commas on boring anymore, but know that there is really no boring industry. Every industry is extremely interesting once you're in it. Um,

8:13:09anyway, trade publications. These trade publications need content and this is your moment to shine. You've got this. I believe in you. So, we head over to the old googs and we type in sealant industry publication. I know you can feel your pulse raising. Breathe deeply. If we click on the first one, adhesivesmag.com, we find an entire world of adhesives and sealant. Now, I want you to put yourself in the minds of the editor or the

8:13:37writers of adhesivesmag.com. I don't know them. But what I do know is every month or every week or every day they have to fill this website and sometimes a physical publication with interesting information. And in some industries that is not always easy. Now this is where you come in. If you have a take, if you have an angle, if you have an interesting voice in your industry, you can provide content for sites

8:14:05exactly like this. Here's how you do it. Firstly, you make a list of all of the publications in your industry. Then you have a look at the types of topic they cover. For example, we can see this publication is talking about war in Ukraine. We can see that they're talking about some acquisition stuff. We can see about search charges. We can scan through this website and see the sort of

8:14:27types of topic that they're covering. And if we go back over time, we can see the recurring themes, the stuff that they're always talking about. The next thing you want to do is think about what you can add to this space. What's your voice? What's your take on things which is slightly different? Now, when you're doing this, don't necessarily think about how you can work your product or service in there. How you could turn

8:14:48this into a big advertising opportunity. That's not the approach to take here. The approach to take here is almost to treat yourself as a freelance journalist writing for this publication at no charge. What you're going to do is you're going to write for them interesting content which their audience is going to be interested in reading about. You're going to then link to your business. You're going to get a link in your author by line in your bio. That's fine. But your focus should be on how you can add value to this publication and the readers rather than thinking how can I work my product in so this thing

8:15:20reads like an advert. He he the next thing you're going to do is reach out to each of the publications. You can either do this through the contact page and contact the publication itself or you can find the writers who are writing for it, particularly if that writer has written about your topics in the past and contact them directly. It's best when you're pitching ideas to have a few different topics which you could pitch on. If you just reach out and say, "Hey, I'd love to be featured in your magazine. Have you got any suggestions of things I should write about?" That's a bit of a turnoff really. You want to

8:15:50go to them and say, "Hey, I've been a longtime reader. I know this industry inside and out and I've got some ideas for some really interesting things which I think your audience could be interested in and then list a few so that they can pick the one that they think is going to get the most traction. By the way, if you're stuck for topics, this video should help. And don't forget when you're pitching your ideas, explain why you specifically are the person to write about this topic. Let's say, for example, that you are a a lawyer or a solicitor specializing in small business claims. Well, that specialism makes you

8:16:20an authority in that topic. So you could then reach out to small business publications with legal advice because you are a specialist in small business claims. Cool. All right. Tip four, unlin brand mentions. So an unlin brand mention is sometimes somebody has written about your business online, but they haven't linked to your website. So it's a brand mention, but they haven't linked it. Unlin brand mentions. These are gold for an SEO perspective because you've essentially already done the hard work in that somebody is already talking about you. You just need to pick up the link. Now, they can be quite difficult to find. They're quite difficult to just

8:17:00happen upon because being unlin means that you don't tend to see them. But there's a couple of tools that can help. First is Google Alerts. With Google Alerts, you can just set up an alert so that anytime somebody publishes something online with your brand name in, you get notified. You can then check the content and make sure you've got the link. If you haven't, reach out to them and say, "Hey, you've talked about us, but you haven't linked to us." Please do. Another useful tool is Semrush's brand monitoring tool. This allows you to dig through the internet archives and find times that your brand has been

8:17:32mentioned but not linked. Boring business link building strategy five, digital PR. Digital PR for boring companies. Are you nuts, Tim? Yes, but it still works. In fact, some of the best digital PR is done by boring businesses, particularly ones that have their own data. But even if you don't have your own data, you can find data that's already out there and turn it into interesting digital PR. Let me show you a killer example. This is Clario and they're a cyber security company. Now, cyber security is really boring until you need it or if you needed it but you didn't have it. Cyber security is super boring. But what Clario have done is

8:18:16instead of thinking about who is our customers, they've thought what is the general public interested in which we have expertise in. Now all Clario has done is they've spent some time looking at which of these different technology platforms uses our personal data and which personal data they use. This isn't a particularly difficult thing to do. This is all publicly available information. and somebody has just spent like a decent afternoon going through and collecting it all, putting it in an infographic, but all of a sudden it takes something that is potentially niche, cyber security, and turns it into something which has relevance to all of us. They've presented it in a really

8:18:55good way, particularly making Facebook, everyone's favorite pantoime villain of the moment, the worst offender and highlighting it at number one. Results, well, they did some outreach on this. They've had 6,000 back links and it's estimated that this page alone is bringing 288,000 visitors to their website every month. Now, that's not qualified traffic. That's not people coming to Clario to sign up. Let's be 100% clear here. But what is happening is those links will be building the credibility and the authority of this website so that it ranks better for the commercial terms that it's targeting. Okay? And of course, you can use the classic publicity stunt. Our friends over at

8:19:39Trello Board have a Guinness World Record for the largest O-ring ever produced. They built a 364 m circumference O-ring and laid it all around Chuksbury Abbey. They've even got some behindthe-scenes videos of the incredible achievement. What's the point of making a 364 m circumference O-ring, you may ask? Well, I don't know, but they did get a link from Wikipedia. Here you can see the world's largest O-ring was produced in a successful Guinness World Record attempt. They've got an unlin brand mention, but it's okay because down here in the citations, they have the link that they so richly

8:20:18deserve for this fantastic achievement. Boring business link building strategy numero is supplier, distributor, and retailer links. This one is really simple. Who are you supplying? Who are you working with? Who do you partner with? Think of all of the different businesses that you have business relationships with. Often these businesses will mention you or their suppliers or the companies that they work with, the manufacturers that they use on their website, and they will often use the logos of these manufacturers, but they won't always link to the manufacturer or to the business. If this sounds like a bit of you, then you can chase those companies and you can say, "Hey, fantastic. Thanks

8:21:01for using our logo on your site. Is there any chance that you would link it so that people can find us if they want to? Going back to our friends in Trellorg, if we look at the dealer locator, we can see that there are lots and lots of different dealers of their products. So, one thing that we could do would be to reach out to all of these and if they're using the Trellogorg logo or they mention Trellborg on their website, say it's now our policy to ask people to link back to our website, open it in a new tab if they want so that you're not stealing that traffic. Now,

8:21:30you'll find that people are more open to this if you're not selling direct, so you're not actually directly competing with them. But, it's a great way of picking up links. Now, even if you can't do that, you can use one of my favorite neatest tricks in the book here. If you think about all the software companies, the marketing companies, wink wink, that you use, you can then reach out to these companies and offer them a killer testimonial. We've been working with Exposure Ninja for 2 years now. They have transformed our business. We are completely unrecognizable thanks to fantastic work that they're doing and the volume of leads and sales that

8:22:03they're generating. Now, when you send this testimonial over to your software providers, your uh marketing company, your cyber security companies, your training companies, you're going to say, "When you use this on your website, please include a link back to our site." If you've given them a killer testimonial, they won't be able to resist using it in not only on their website, but in their marketing materials. And each time they do, at worst, you're going to get an unlin brand mention. At best, though, you're going to get a juicy backlink to your

8:22:30site. You probably already know that you should be writing blogs for your website because they're a great way of getting informational searches onto your site so you can generate leads and sales from them. But as we saw in a previous video, not many people know how to find the blog topics that are most likely to drive traffic. And that's a big issue because it means they spend their time creating blogs that do absolutely nothing. Well, the content marketing team here at Exposure Ninja, the award-winning content marketing team here at Exposure Ninja, spend their time doing exactly this, finding blog topics to write about for our clients, which

8:23:09are going to drive traffic and sales. So, in this video, I'm going to show you how to find the best blog topics to write about to drive traffic and sales to the Ninja, otherwise known as a computer. First thing that we need to do is find out what's working well already. which topics are getting the most traction both for you and your competitors. There's a really simple way of doing this for your own website. What you're going to do is log into Google Analytics. Under behavior, you're going to expand to site content and then click on landing pages. Then you're going to create a segment. You're going to turn

8:23:41off all users and you're going to create a segment of organic traffic. This is going to show you all the organic visitors to your site and which pages they are landing on. So, here we can see all of the pages on our site that are driving traffic. What we want to do though is we only really want to look at the blog posts cuz we want to see which blog posts are driving us the most traffic and conversions. So, we're going to go over to this filter. We're going to click on advance and then we're going to have a search term that says we want to include any landing pages containing

8:24:10blog. When I hit apply, we're now going to see all of the blogs that are driving the most organic traffic to our site. So you can immediately start looking through this to see both which blogs are driving the most traffic but also which blogs are driving the most conversions for you. This will give you a bit of an indication about what's already working well. So for example on our website we can see that we've got some blogs here which are converting at 8% so generating

8:24:35eight leads out of every 100 visits. We've got some blogs that are driving much more traffic but have a lower conversion rate. So, this might give us some ideas about the sort of topics that we want to write about. In this example, for one of our clients, we've already got the advanced filter on, so we're just looking at the blogs that are driving organic traffic to them. Again, we can see the ones that are bringing in the most traffic, and we can see the ones that are bringing in the most conversions at the highest conversion rate. And again, this allows us to see what's working for them already. This

8:25:03might give us ideas of more blog topics, but it also might give us ideas of blogs that we could help improve. So, that's how to analyze your own website. But what about if you want to analyze which blogs are working best for your competitors? Well, that's where we go over to Semrush. By the way, you can get a free

8:25:19trial at thankyouninjas.com. All we're going to do is we're going to stick our competitor in here. We're just going to use blinds.com as the example and we're going to head down to organic research. We're then going to click on pages and this is going to show us the top ranking pages that are bringing traffic to their site. We can do a similar sort of thing with the filtering here. So if we click on advanced filters, we can make sure that we include URLs which include blog, which is what you can see here. You can see uh their blog posts include the word blog. If we wanted to

8:25:51have a look at their buyers guides, then we could also include a filter that said buying guides and they're also kind of blog topics. So that might be something that we might want to do. Anyway, we're going to stick with blogs for now and I'm going to hit apply. So we've now got a list of all of their highest performing blogs. If we want to get a bit more detail about the keywords that these blogs are ranking for, we can click on the keywords tab. Then going to show us the phrases that these are ranking for. This can also give us ideas

8:26:14for good blog topics to write about. Now, one outcome from this analysis is that you might actually have found a blog post on your site which isn't performing as well as it could do, and it might make more sense to improve that one than write a new one. For example, let's say that you've got a blog post which is driving a lot of traffic, but it's not driving many leads, like one of these ones here. So, we might go through one of these and we might say, well, it's driving a lot of traffic, but it's not driving many leads. Can we improve that post to make it generate more

8:26:42leads? Or we might look at a post like this one, which has a high conversion rate and drives a lot of leads, and say, can we make this even longer to make it rank even more prominently for the phrases that it's targeting? So, by now you might have started to pick up some ideas based on what's working for blog post topics. Next, we're going to have a look at pain points. Often the best performing blog posts help with some sort of pain. How can I do this? What's the difference between these two? How do I choose the best one of these? You can find these pain points both on your

8:27:12website and your competitor's sites by looking through things like FAQ sections. Now, this website sells blinds. And if I was competing against them and I wanted to do some blog topic research, I might look in these help sections to see what sort of problems people were stuck with. For example, I can see here they've got some content about repairing blinds. I can see they've got some content about child safety. So that might give me some ideas. Maybe I might write a guide on

8:27:37how to repair different types of blinds. knowing that if people see that and they can't repair their blinds because they are fundamentally just broken. Sometimes a blind is just broken, they might need to buy new ones and they could do so from me. Another thing that I would look at is the FAQ section on this site. So the FAQ section on this site is right down at the bottom here. So if I click on this, this will show me all the questions that they think their customers are going to have. Some of these questions are pretty interesting and indicate that somebody might be already in the buying process. For

8:28:09example, what's the difference between inside mount and outside mount? That might make a good blog post to write about because that's somebody who's searching for a topic. They're trying to decide between different types of blinds. So, they're already in that buying process. How do I measure my windows? Also a good question and indicative of someone who is about to order some blinds. They're trying to measure their windows ready for those blinds. So, I might decide to write a post on how to measure windows for fitting blinds. While we're on the topic of competitor research, you can also use your competitor's reviews to identify

8:28:43pain points that their customers have. For example, I'm on the blinds.com trust pilot here and I can see that this person has had an issue with measurements. So again, this might indicate to me that actually people measuring their windows is something that I need to write about because that's going to be a painoint which I can help solve. Another fantastic tool that we use here at Exposure Ninja is answer the public. All you need to do is put in a topic. So, for example, here

8:29:06I've just searched for Venetian blinds. And it will give you all of the questions that people are asking based on their searches on Google about Venetian blinds. So, how to remove Venetian blinds, how to clean Venetian blinds, how are they fitted, how do they work, what Venetian blinds to buy. These are all good potential blog topics for you to add to your ideas list. If you want even more ways of researching pain points that your customers have, you can check subreddits as well. For example,

8:29:33here I am on the Reddit page for Hule. Let's say that I was marketing a competitor to Hule. I might want some ideas about blog topics to write in the world of meal replacement. Now, as I'm scrolling through here, I'm noticing that some people are complaining about Hule's packaging and they're storing it in their own little storage solutions like this. That's potentially interesting for me. So if I was marketing a Hu competitor which actually had a different packaging which may be suited being stored in cupboards all stacked up neatly, I might write a blog topic about how to store meal replacement shakes like hule and I might

8:30:08tie into that blog the fact that my product actually stacks already or it's really easy to store or whatever. So have a good dig through your competitor's websites, their reviews, answer the public, and subreddits, Facebook groups, and forums to identify what sort of problems and pain points people have. Now, here's a quick tip. Usually, they fall into one of four buckets. The first bucket is the versus bucket. So, people will search for things like private healthcare versus NHS when they're trying to decide which one to go for. And here we have one of our clients ranking position one for

8:30:43this term. They are a private hospital. So obviously our angle in this article is that we're going to compare private health care, which is the thing our client is selling, versus NHS, which is the free alternative, and help people make a choice. So in your blog post, you might be helping people choose between different options and using your expertise and knowledge to help steer them to the right one for them. Here we

8:31:05have another example of a versus pain. In this case, Salesforce versus Zoho, two CRM. Now what's really interesting about this is that the top ranking site here is HubSpot who is neither Zoho or Salesforce. They have hijacked this term by getting their own comparison article ranked for this term. Why would they do that? Well, because HubSpot actually wants you to buy their CRM system. So they've hijacked this comparison term to actually say, well, actually neither of them are as good as HubSpot. So why have HubSpot done this? Well, they know that anybody visiting this page is now in the market for a CRM. So, they can then

8:31:45retarget to them. They can advertise to those people after they've been pixelled to sell them their own CRM solution. If they were going to be a little bit more aggressive, they could even add in a comparison to HubSpot CRM so that people can make the choice between the three and obviously they can nudge you towards their solution. The second painoint bucket that people fall into is around costs, pricing, and fees. So, for example, a search like payroll accountant fees might be a great search to rank for if you offer accounting services or you offer a service to people who are searching for payroll accounting. Let's say that you're a

8:32:25payroll processing software, for example. This might be a great term to target. So, if your audience has questions about pricing or fees, targeting searches like this can be a great way of getting people who are in the consideration phase of the buying journey. Another type of painoint people have is how to they want to learn how to do something. For example, how to measure employee engagement. So, what would this search tell you about the searcher? Well, it tells you that they are probably either in HR or management and they are looking for help with this particular topic. So if we were marketing an HR or performance

8:32:59management software, which we do, then we might be targeting a phrase like this. And you can see that it's that sort of business as well as software solutions like contact monkey that are ranking for these terms. The final bucket that these problem terms fall into is best X for Y. For example, best to-do list app for. And then you've got all of these different types of categories. So, if you had a to-do list app that you wanted to market or you had a different productivity system, let's say like a a written journal type thing, you might want to write a post around best to-do list apps for say students,

8:33:37knowing that people who are into that might also be into a sort of written journal type thing. Okay, so by now you've probably got loads of ideas. You've already had a look at what's working for you and competitors and you've done loads of analysis about pain points to understand in what ways your audience is in pain. Now, we need to validate any ideas before you start writing cuz the last thing we want to do is start writing a post which is actually never going to work for you, never going to bring you any traffic. To do this, we're going to use Semrush or any sort of SEO type tool. So, what

8:34:10we're going to do here is we're going to put in our target keyword. So, for example, let's say I wanted to write a blog post about this Salesforce versus Zoho topic because I'm selling a CRM. I would stick that keyword into Semrush. I'd go into the keyword overview, making sure that I'm targeting the right location for my business. And I'm then going to get some data. And the data

8:34:31I've got is stuff like search volume. So, I can see from this that there's around 390 searches for this phrase per month. We're going to take that with a pinch of salt because that's not exact data. is estimated by Seamrush, but still it's a good indication that it's going to be in that sort of region. I can also see that the keyword difficulty is 47%. That means it's competitive but not impossible. Now, if I'm going to write a really detailed piece on this, I think I could potentially win. I saw that HubSpot piece earlier and it was quite detailed, but I'm going to go into loads more detail. I'm going to include

8:35:06video reviews of each one. gonna interview people that use each one and find out what they like and what they don't like. I'm going to analyze reviews for each of them to grade them and I'm going to compare them against my solution. So, actually, I'm feeling pretty confident that I could get some visibility for this. But, is it even a good term to target? Is it going to be

8:35:24something that's going to make me money? Well, I think it is because if we look at the cost per click over here, we can see that advertisers are willing to spend $6.85 85 per click to advertise for this term. Again, pinch of salt, but that shows us that there is commercial intent. People are spending money after making this search. Otherwise, those advertisers wouldn't be willing to bid on the keyword. Now, I can also see some keyword variations. Let's say that this keyword difficulty was really high. It looked like a great keyword to target, but actually it was so competitive and if my site is a bit smaller, I might

8:35:59struggle to rank for that. Well, I can have a look at the keyword variations and maybe pick a different flavor of this keyword which might be less competitive. So, Zoho versus Salesforce for small business, for example. Much lower search volume, but maybe that might be easier for me to rank for. But let's compare this keyword against something like best to-do list app for students. What we can see here is that the search volume is only 20 per month in the US. So, really, really low. The keyword difficulty is hard. This means we're going to have to work really hard to rank for this sort of term. There is

8:36:35cost per click there, so there is some commercial intent, but given the relatively low volume of searches and the difficulty, I might want to choose a different topic, which is going to give me some easier wins. Here at Exposure Ninja, we have written hundreds, if not thousands of pages of content that we have ranked at the top of Google for our clients, including in some of the

8:36:57world's most competitive industries. Yep. Today, I'm sharing the process. Before we get started, let's think about when you're actually going to use this. There are four times that you would want to write content that ranks at the top of Google. Let me get my sleeves rolled up. First up, you're going to want to rank your website's homepage for the broadest head terms that are relevant to your business. Second, you're going to want to rank your subpages. So, if you're a service business, the pages for each of your individual services, these will be your subpages, and you'll want to get them ranked for the services that you offer. If you're an e-commerce

8:37:32company, your subpages are going to be your product category pages. So, for example, the red shoes page that shows all of the red shoes that you sell. Now, ranking your homepage and your subpages is incredibly profitable because the traffic that comes through these sorts of keywords has very high commercial intent. I.e. they are ready to buy. They're searching for what you sell. The third type of page that you'll want to rank on Google are your pure content pages. So, your blog, your knowledge base, your content hub, basically the articles on your site. These can be great pages to rank for questions that your audience might have or search terms

8:38:10that are further up the funnel. Now, the fourth type of page that you might want to rank would actually be pages on other people's websites. Let's say, for example, that you blog on Medium or you have an article that gets featured on a different publication and you want to get that ranked because that brings you credibility. Now, the good news is that this process we're going to run through today works exactly the same for all four different types of pages, but with some important tweaks and nuances, which we'll cover as we go to the rankings mobile. So, if we want to write content that ranks position one on Google, we

8:38:46need to understand which keywords we want that content to rank for. Ping. Now, obviously, your keywords need to firstly be relevant to your business. Second thing we need to make sure is that there is enough search volume for these keywords that if you do get your page ranked, you're going to bring in enough traffic to actually make money from these searches. The third thing that we need to make sure for each keyword is that the commercial intent is right. I.e., are these people looking to

8:39:11buy? Are they looking for information? We want to make sure that we're giving them the right sort of page of content for their intent. This can feel a little bit confusing. So, let's do an example together. Now, let's imagine that I've just joined a company as the marketing manager and this business sells outsourced HR support. So, they sell a range of HR consultancy and support services. The website ranking sucks and the directors of the business have

8:39:37tasked me with get this website ranking. Now, just to make things fun, the CEO of the business who obviously knows nothing about digital marketing has said that because they're an HR firm, they want to rank position one for the term HR. Well, the first thing that we need to do is go and open a tool. So we can start doing some keyword research. Now here I'm using Seamrush. You can get a free trial of Semrush at Thank you ninjas. Now the first thing that we want to do is not even look at the data. We want to think about who is searching for HR. If we're

8:40:04offering HR support service to businesses, are those businesses just going to be going into Google and typing the really basic keyword HR? Probably not. This is going to be really entry level. This is going to be information gatherers, right? This is going to be people who are very new to the concept of HR. Not usually people who are looking to outsource their HR. Of course, there will be some of those folk in this group, but mainly this is going to be a very basic keyword searched by people that are looking for foundational information. So, we can see this in the data. So, whilst there's a decent search

8:40:38volume for HR in the UK, 22,200 searches per month, and I'm looking in the UK because my imaginary business is in the UK. If I was in the US, I would obviously go to the US and so on. Thanks, Captain Obvious. But the thing that tells me that there's not a huge amount of commercial intent in this is the cost per click. Now, for such a high volume keyword, the fact that advertisers are really only willing to bid $180, which is about $230, tells me that there's not a huge amount of money to be made. Yes, of course, there will be some people who are advertising for

8:41:13this term, either cuz they've figured something out or they're completely crazy, but on the whole, this indicates to me that it's not a high commercial intent keyword. I can also see it's going to be a very difficult keyword to rank for. So, if I accept my boss's suggestion and try to rank our website for HR, I'm likely to spend a huge amount of time, get very frustrated, probably get nowhere, and even if I did win this race, we would get lots of traffic, but it would tend to have very low commercial intent and not make us much money. Maybe we might want to rank for outsourced HR support because that

8:41:47is exactly what our business does. Let's have a look. So, again, I've searched in the UK cuz we're a UK business. The search volume here is only 10 searches per month. Now, this is unlikely to be completely accurate, but we can assume that the search volume is probably between zero and 100 searches per month. It's going to be low. In other words, now, if this phrase is really relevant to my business, I might be completely okay with targeting it, but in reality, I'm probably going to be able to rank for this phrase anyway, even if it's not my main target keyword. One encouraging piece of information is the cost per

8:42:24click over here. So, I can see that advertisers are willing to spend around $25 to bid for this keyword, which tells me that there is money in this phrase, or at least advertisers think there is money in this phrase. So, if I can get ranking for it, I might only get a small amount of traffic, but that traffic is likely to be profitable. However, this search volume is too small for me, particularly if we're targeting a main page on my website. So, I'm going to keep looking. What if we make our search terms slightly broader than outsourced HR support but less broad than HR? Maybe something like just outsourced HR. Well,

8:42:59this looks like a potentially winning term. We can see search volume is 590. Not massive, but we can see that there is good commercial intent there. We have a high CPC, so advertisers are willing to spend money for this traffic. The keyword difficulty is difficult, but I'm a beast, so we're going to be absolutely fine. Now, while I'm doing my keyword research, I'm also having a look at other related keywords which I might add into my list of things that I want to target with my page of content. Okay, so we've got our target keyword for the page that we're going to write. The next thing we want to do is do a little bit

8:43:33of SER analysis, search engine results page analysis. So, I'm just going to throw in the new keyword that we're going to be targeting into Google and I'm just going to have a look and see what I'm noticing. The first thing I'm noticing is that we've got four ads at the top and they're all using HR outsourcing outsourced HR HR outsourcing outsourced HR. This tells me that other businesses in my industry consider this term to be a good one to advertise against, right? They're all using this phrase. Now, if I wanted to, I could have a look to make sure that these were

8:44:04actually competitor businesses of mine. I I'm actually playing in the right ballpark and I'm not playing against a whole bunch of competitors that don't do what I do. Obviously, what I'm most interested in is the organic search results here. The websites that are organically ranking for this term. The first thing I'm noticing is that we have businesses here. That sounds pretty basic, but if I was seeing the first result being Wikipedia, then I might be thinking this is more of anformational term, even if the cost per click is relatively high. But I'm not. I'm seeing actual businesses and business competitors of mine here. So, that's great. Uh, we can see some of these

8:44:40websites are the homepage. That looks to be the homepage. This looks to be a subpage, possibly a pure content page, one of their toolkit pages. This one, we have what looks like an information page. This is a homepage. This is a subpage. Um, this is a potentially a subpage or an information page. So, I'm beginning to get a feel for what sort of websites are ranking and what sort of

8:45:02pages on those websites are ranking. Now, as I'm looking through these pages, what I'm really thinking is, how can I crush this into the ground? How can I write something and make a page that is so much better than this that Google has no choice but to rank my page ahead of this? Okay, so with that delightful context, let's take a look at some of these pages. So, the first one that we've got here is actually a pretty decent laidout page. We've got a call to action here. Now, I don't know what's going to happen when I click this. It feels very high commitment to me, but

8:45:30it's great that we've got this credibility above the fold and that builds a huge amount of trust. Let's have a look at the rest of the content on this page. So, remember that the search term that we've targeted here is outsourced HR. Now, I'm not seeing them use this keyword too much above the fold, if anywhere. So, immediately I'm thinking, well, if I want to beat this, I'll probably use outsourced HR in my main page heading as well as maybe some of the subheadings as well. The fact that they haven't got this and they're still ranking tells me it's not going to be impossible to write a better

8:46:00optimized page of content than this. Now, I'm looking at the amount of content on this page and how well optimized it is. Um, we've got some testimonials. We've got some basic info here, but actually this isn't a particularly long page. And what could be happening here is that this page is ranking despite the content on the page rather than because of it. So, that's

8:46:18useful to know, but let's keep going. This is clearly an information page and a boringlooking one at that. So if I'm going to try and rank an information page higher than this, for example, let's say I've got a blog post on outsourcing HR, I could definitely make something that is more interesting. However, this is a good article in that it seems to be very detailed and it seems to be coming from a place of expertise, which is awesome. Now, what would I do if I was trying to rank a pure content page like a blog page or a knowledgebased page and I was coming up against this? Well, I would make my

8:46:51piece even longer. I would have a linked table of contents. I would embed videos and images, and I would try and make my piece even better than this. It would be possible. Now, next up, we have another example of a pure content page. This has a linked table of contents. We do have the keyword in the heading. It hasn't been updated at the time of writing this for a few months. So, if I was going to do mine, I might update it more frequently. And I will probably have these already expanded. Again, I'll be adding some images and videos in here to break it up a little bit to make it feel

8:47:22a little easier to consume. There is no call to action on this page. It's basically just free information with no attempt to monetize the traffic. Shame for them. Great for me. The next page up on our competitor list. This is another homepage. This is relatively poorly laid out. This page appears to be about health and safety. They're certainly not

8:47:42using outsourced HR in their headings. Interesting. Uh they do have HR consultancy, health and safety consultancy, but I'm not actually seeing the phrase outsourced HR too many times. If we just have a quick look, I can see they do use it twice. Once in the body copy and once in their menu. But it's interesting that it's the homepage

8:48:02that's ranking rather than this subpage. If I click on the subpage, they actually have a subpage called outsourced HR, but ha, it has no content, which is why it's not ranking. Now, whatever competitor analysis you do, you're going to see a range of websites just like these. And remember, the thing that you're trying to work out is how would I beat each of these pages? Now, when I'm looking at these pages in this specific example, I'm thinking that a dedicated page all about outsourced HR would be my strategy here. We're seeing a mixture of homepages with a small amount of content andformational pages with much more

8:48:37content ranking. So I would make a subpage which targets this phrase but with as much information on as theseformational long- form pages that I can see that are ranking. I would then use my target keyword in the heading in lots of subheadings and throughout the copy but in a natural way. I'm going to include pictures and I'm going to include videos to break it up a bit and make it a bit more interesting. The next thing that we want to do before we even start planning our article is think about our target audience. Now, it's all too easy to dismiss this step as, "Yeah, yeah, I know my target audience, but

8:49:09actually, this is a really important part of the process. Now, before you start writing for your audience, you need to think about what level of expertise they're at. Are they really detailed, technical people that need to see loads of jargon in order to build credibility, or are they complete beginners in your field who need the basic terms explained because they are new to this space? And if you go all in with your jargon, they're just going to shut down completely and raise the white flag. Now, for my target audience of businesses that are looking to outsource their HR, I'm going to guess that there's probably a minimal level of HR

8:49:44expertise. Otherwise, they might have someone internally already. This is probably a business that is starting to grow and needs HR support, but doesn't yet have the size that warrants a full-time HR person. So, if I'm going to write for this audience, I'm going to make sure I'm using plain English and I'm not going to technical jargon. We also need to think about what are the pain points in your audience. Why are they looking for a solution? Why are they reaching out? What are their motivations? What's the goal that they're striving towards? You need to use these in your copy in order to elicit an emotional response from people

8:50:19and actually get them to buy. And on the topic of getting them to buy, what would a good call to action be for them? How could you take them to the next step in their relationship with your business? Whether it's becoming a lead or buying a product from you, your call to action shouldn't be an afterthought. You want to build your call to action into the copy in your website and be constantly referencing it, focusing people, and telling them to become a lead or buy whatever it is that you're selling. The final step before we start writing is to create an outline. Now, I wanted to show

8:50:51you an example outline. So, I'm going to show you one from the Exposure Ninja website. So when we create a new page, here's how we do it. The first thing that we do is we identify the target keywords that we want this page to rank for. We stick them at the top to remind us of the keywords that we want to be seeding throughout our content. The next thing that we do is we create an outline based on H1, H2, and H3 headings. So here you can see we're creating a page of copy for the phrase Microsoft ads or Microsoft advertising, paid Microsoft ads, PPC, paid media, paid search, Bing

8:51:24Ad. So, we've got this H1 heading at the top, which is the main phrase that we want this page to rank for. We've then created a subheading, which is a little bit more descriptive and includes some variation type keywords as well. We've then got headings underneath this, which basically guide us down the content that

8:51:41we're going to be creating in the page. It's a good idea to design your headings and subheadings first so you can think through the logical flow of the page and imagine how a visitor on your site would scan that page to find the info that's most relevant for them. Now you'll notice we've got subheadings under subheadings here. So how we handle Microsoft ads management. Now it can be quite difficult to write in depth about a particular topic. So for example you'll notice here how we've got subheadings under subheadings. So, how we handle Microsoft ads management is one heading and then we've got subheadings underneath that which take

8:52:15you through the process that we use when we're handling Microsoft ad management for a client. This allows us to write loads of information for those really detailoriented website visitors, but also to show Google that this page is really useful and informative as well by including lots of content. You can do exactly the same with your business. So for my outsourced HR service page, I might struggle to write loads of information about this topic. But if I think about what does outsourced HR actually look like? What does it include? What's the process? Well, actually, I can write a little bit of information about all of these different

8:52:50things. And then added together, that's going to create a really detailed and useful page. You'll notice in the same vein, we also created a frequently asked questions section on the page. This can be a great way to use your audience's language and then answer each of those questions that they have. So, whatever questions or problems or objections your audience might have, you can put them in your FAQs on this page and then answer them in detail. Fantastic. Again, it allows you to create more information on the page. And there's even a chance that these can get ranked in featured snippets as well. You might also notice

8:53:24that we've written a page title and meta description at the top of this guide as well. The page title and the meta description are what's collectively known as your metadata. And they are really, really important for ranking your pages at the top of Google. If we have a look at a Google search results page, we see these purple links or blue links before you've clicked them. These are usually the page titles. Now, Google looks at the content in the page title to work out which keywords you should be ranking for. So, for example, this page title is HR solutions, outsourced HR, health and safety advice. That's a

8:53:58reasonably good page title because it includes our target keyword. Here's another good one because it includes our target keyword, but this time at the start of the page title. Love it. The metad description is the description of the site that you're asking Google to show in search results. Google won't always show the metad description that you want it to show. Sometimes it will just pull some text from your page randomly and you've got no control over it. Welcome to SEO. But it's a good idea to write a compelling meta description which attracts people onto your site because this is basically an advert that's going to convince them whether or

8:54:29not to visit your page in the first place. Now, we tend to write our page titles and metad descriptions very early on in the process of writing a page because this focuses us on what the searcher is going to want from that page. It's like when you write the ad before designing the product. [music] This is a really good way of designing products because it means that you're building something that people actually want and you're focusing on the things that are most important to them. Once you've created your outline, it's time to start writing finally. So, some tips for writing

8:55:01content that ranks at the top of Google. Now, because of all the keyword research, competitor analysis, target audience stuff that you've already done, you should have a pretty good idea of the information that you want to include on your page and you've got your outline. So, all you need to do is go through each section and flesh it out. Now, some quick tips here. Be mindful of your brand's tone of voice. Sometimes when people are writing for SEO, they write in a really robotic and kind of structured way that feels completely alien and totally unhuman. This is generally a bad idea because you are still writing for a human even though

8:55:35you want to get that page ranked on Google. If people don't stay on your page and actually read what you've written, the whole exercise is totally pointless. Anyway, one of the questions that people often have is how much should I write? And there is no single right answer here, but what I would say is imagine your best salesperson talking to your best customer. Imagine the amount of information that your best

8:55:57salesperson gives your best customer. They don't give so much information that your customer gets really bored and tired and starts thinking about how hungry they are, but they don't give so little information that the target customer still has loads of questions. You might notice as you look through this copy that we've included internal links that go to other pages on our website in the copy. This is a good idea because if somebody wants a bit more information about that particular service or that particular phrase, they can click through and go and find that information. And if you do ever include external links, i.e. links to other

8:56:30people's websites on your service or subpages. For goodness sake, make sure they open in a new tab rather than closing your website down to go and take your visitor on a journey somewhere else. Once you've written your copy, you're of course going to want to get it edited and proofed. We run everything that we write at Exposure Ninja through our editorial department, and we would not live without them. Trust me, I've written five books, and I can tell you

8:56:54it is impossible to proof your own work. And of course, Google is unlikely to rank poorly written copy with spelling or grammar errors, and people just don't trust that stuff anyway. Once you've written your copy, it's time to add in the images and videos as relevant. Of course, it's always best if you can use your own unique images. Stock photos mostly look like stock photos. So, if you can get your own images shot, then that is so much better. And it's the same with video. Now, you might have dismissed the idea of embedding a video in your page as too much work or too annoying to do. But can you create a

8:57:29video of each of your pages? We do this at Exposure Ninja and we find it works really well for two important reasons. Firstly, it gives people another way of consuming the information on the page. If you have a very long page, some people find it more useful to either watch or listen to a talk through version of that page. But the second thing it does is it allows you to not

8:57:51only rank on Google with your text page. Sometimes you can get your video ranked on Google and you can get your video ranked on YouTube for those same search terms as well. Increasingly people are going to YouTube to start theirformational searches and their research. And it's a good idea to start getting videos ranked on YouTube in your

8:58:10space before it gets more competitive. And if you have the facilities to make video in your business, it can be a good idea to start getting videos ranked on YouTube for these sorts of search terms that your customers might be looking for before YouTube gets even more competitive. Now it's time to publish your page. The easy bit. Once you've published your page, now it's time to go and create internal links from other pages on your website. So let's say for my outsourced HR service page, for example, we have a blog on our site which is all about outsourcing HR versus in-house HR. Well, I'm going to go into

8:58:43that and when I start talking about outsourced HR, I'm going to link to my new service page. That's going to show Google that this page is relevant for that term. But it's also going to help visitors. If someone has come onto my site because they've searched outsourced HR versus in-house HR, they're in the early stages of the funnel. They're in the research phase, but maybe they've made up their mind that actually outsourced HR is the right choice for them. Well, they'll be able to click on that link, come through to my outsourced HR service page, and convert to become a lead for me. You'll also want to think

8:59:14about how you can get links from other websites pointing at your new page. This is a really powerful way to increase the ranking of your page. But for a B2B service company like the HR outsourcing firm that we're using in our example, the sort of links that are going to be most powerful are links on trade journals, trade type sites, trade magazine sites all about HR, people management and that type of thing. We might also go to top tier business focused publications like Forbes and see if we can get some links from those as well. Now, there is one more step in this process and it's one that nobody

8:59:49ever does. So, if you want massive brownie points, check this out. Even once your page is live, the process is not really complete because you can always improve your page's performance. Now, once your page is live, you're going to want to measure its performance. There's a couple of good ways that you can do this. The first is in Search Console. In Google Search Console, you can enter the URL of your page and see how its performance changes over time. You'll be able to see how many clicks it's getting, how many impressions it's getting, what the average click-through rate from search

9:00:21is, and the average position on Google. For example, this page here has seen a bit of an increase in ranking since we refresh the content. That is a sort of pattern that you are looking for. You can also see the specific queries that people are searching for and where you're ranking on average for these searches. If you see a term that actually you're not ranking that well for, what you might want to do is increase its prominence on the page. For example, by adding a new subsection on the page, adding another heading or just reviewing how many times you're using that particular phrase. Of course, getting your pages ranked on Google and

9:00:54getting people on your pages in the first place is only half the game. All of this comes to nothing if you're not actually turning these people into leads and sales. So the other way that you want to measure your content's performance is in Google Analytics. So here you'll be able to see the exact traffic coming through to the site and how it's performing. You're looking at things like bounce rate. What percentage of people are landing on the page and leaving without taking any further action? How many pages per session are they viewing? So in this case, people are only viewing 1.27 pages per session, meaning that most people don't actually

9:01:29go on to view a second page. So maybe I want to review the number of internal links I'm using or maybe I want to create a related article which I could link to people halfway down the page so if they're getting a bit bored they can go and look at this other piece. My average session duration at 5 minutes is not too bad. So that shows that people are reading through the info on the page. If this was really short what I might be doing is reviewing how boring does my page look? Are people landing on this page and thinking I just cannot face reading this stuff and they're

9:02:00leaving? then you might want to add some more subheadings, some images, some videos to make it a little bit more sticky. But really, where you're going to make money from your content is in the conversions. What percentage of visitors are landing on this page and turning into leads or sales? This conversion rate here at 0.58% I would say is on the low side of typical for anformational page. Of course, ranking your pages and getting traffic onto your pages is pointless if you're not actually turning that traffic into money for your business. So, the most important metric is how many conversions you are generating from each of these

9:02:36pages. This is obviously going to depend on what you're asking people to do. If you're giving them some free information, you should have a higher conversion rate. If you're trying to sell them something expensive and you're not doing risk reversal and all the stuff that we talk about in our conversion rate optimization videos, then you're going to have a much lower conversion rate. My final piece of advice is to set a date in your calendar 12 to 18 months in the future where you're going to revisit this entire process for your page. It's worth re-checking everything from keyword research to competitor analysis every year or so depending on your market

9:03:10because these things are often changing. the terminology that people use changes. Your competitors are being a bit more aggressive and you want to make sure that you are always one step ahead of the rest. Your competitors might be outranking you in search, but the good news is you can see virtually everything that they're doing and how well it's working if you know how. In this video, I'm going to share with you a simple five-step SEO competitor analysis process that you can use to crush your competitors into the ground and steal all of their traffic. If that sounds

9:03:41like a bit of you, then let's go.

9:03:48Many businesses find SEO traffic to be the most profitable traffic or some of the most profitable traffic to their website. And this makes a lot of sense because if someone's searching for exactly what it is that you offer, then the likelihood is they have some commercial intent. We've used this process and variations of it to help businesses of all shapes and sizes around the world. We've worked with hundreds of businesses directly doing their SEO for them. We've had some ridiculous successes turning businesses from five figures to eight figures in revenue and we've helped grow client companies to help them get to exits in the tens of millions of pounds. So, this

9:04:24process works. It's really simple. There are five steps. Step one in our five-step process is to identify your target keywords. Now, people often ask, Tim, are keywords really still important in SEO? Yes, we have other videos talking about how to identify your target keyword. So, I'm not going to go into too much detail here. I also want to say that this process works so long as you have at least one target keyword. So, even if you only know one keyword that you want to target, this process will work and actually you'll find new keywords as you go through this process. We're going to use an example today and I'm a romantic

9:05:00guy. So, we are going to use the example of buying flowers online. So, I'm going to imagine that I'm running Ninja Flowers. We're an online flower delivery company and our USP is that all our flowers are black and dead or just black. Anyway, we've got our target keyword by flowers online. Step two in our SEO competitor analysis process is to identify our competitors. You have two types of competitors. You have business competitors. These are other companies that are selling the same thing as you. the ones that you wake up in the night thinking about and what our ex army ninja Joe would call the ones on

9:05:38your kill list and you have search competitors. So your search competitors may or may not be selling the same thing as you, but they are the websites that are ranking prominently for the phrases that you want to target. For the purpose of this task, we want to analyze both business and search competitors. So make

9:05:58a list of your top business competitors. Make a list of your top search competitors. For example, the ones that show up when you type in buy flowers online. So, if I was doing this for myself, and by the way, look at all these purple links. Of course, I'm such a romantic. Um, if I was doing this for myself, my search competitors and my business competitors, Interfaal would definitely be both cuz they do the same thing as me and they're ranking well. E florist, same thing. Both. Uh, those would be the same as well. Then good

9:06:28housekeeping. They are not a florist. They don't sell flowers, but they are competing with me in the search results. So, I'm going to add them to my search competitors. So, how many business and search competitors do you need to add? There is no clear answer here. You can go as indepth or not as you like. But the one thing I would say is in general with this sort of thing, you can

9:06:48disappear down a massive rabbit hole. Now, you don't need to make a list of a hundred of each type of competitors because the process that I'm going to show you, you'll need to run with each of your different competitors. So, if you want to go super in-depth, then you could have maybe five search competitors and five business competitors, or you might just want to choose a couple of each. In general, though, you want to model your activity on the best in the market. So, choose your strongest search competitors if you're going to copy anybody. Okay, so you've got your list of competitors. Some of them are search,

9:07:19some of them business. What do you do with them now? Is to throw them into an SEO tool. Now, I'm going to be using Semrush. Semrush is an SEO tool. It happens to be my favorite. We've done other videos comparing the accuracy of stats from different SEO tools. And we found that Semrush tended to be amongst the best. Remember, I'm going to be doing this for Buy Flowers online for my imaginary ninja florist that sells only black flowers, but you'll be doing this for your business. So, today I'm going to be picking on this website here. I'm going to be analyzing this site as a competitor. So, I'm going to go over to

9:07:52domain overview and I'm going to whack in their website. If you're new to SEO tools, this sort of thing can feel really overwhelming, but don't worry, it's really not that bad. A lot of this stuff we can safely ignore. The first thing that we want to do is we want to choose our location. So, Ninja Flowers only delivers in the UK, so we're going to choose UK. You might look at this organic search traffic and think, "Wow, they're getting a lot of traffic." And yes, they probably are. But this number here is entirely estimated. Anytime you see a website estimating someone else's traffic, you have to take that with a

9:08:24pinch of salt because that is estimated traffic, not measured traffic. Okay. Right. The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to get a broad picture of where this site is ranking, what sort of phrases it's ranking for, which pages are ranking. So, we're going to go down here to organic research and under top organic keywords, we're going to click on view details. This is going to show us all the different phrases that this particular site is ranking for. We can also see the general shape of their visibility over the years. So,

9:08:51we can see this is a fairly old site. It's been competing and it's been ranking fairly well for 7 years now. So, this is an aged site. We would expect its SEO to be pretty in order if it's kept some good visibility around that time. We can see that they've been at it a while. So, we're not going to beat this site overnight is the first thing I'm getting from this immediately. This table shows us all of the different keywords that they're ranking for. It shows us their position on Google. So, one is obviously top of Google, top of

9:09:20page one. Seven is seventh on page one. Uh, position 12 is position two on page two and so on. We can see the number of times these keywords are searched every month in this location. Now, remember this is an estimate. This is not exact. And really importantly, we can see the URL, the page that is ranking for that term. So what do we learn when we look at e- florist here? First thing that we learn is that most of their traffic is branded. I.e. it's people searching for e- florist. This shows that they have a good brand visibility with almost 50,000 searches per month. Estimated they're

9:09:58picking up estimated 18% of their traffic for this term. But what else are they ranking for? They're ranking for flower delivery in position seven, but it's still bringing them in a decent amount of traffic. We can also see the page that is ranking for flower delivery. If that's a keyword that I want to rank Ninja Flowers for, I need to have a look at this page. So, I'm going to open it in a new tab and we're going to have a look at it in a bit. I'm also going to have a look at some of the

9:10:25other keywords that they're ranking for. So, Valentine's Flowers, they're ranking position one. That is a really, really competitive key term in this market. So, I want to have a look at that page as well to understand exactly how they're doing that. Now, as I'm looking through these URLs, I'm also noticing the general shape of the sort of pages that are ranking. So, most of these seem to be e florist.co.uk forward slash and then some sort of product category. So, it's mostly their

9:10:53product category pages that are ranking. We can see the homepage ranking for a few different terms and these tend to be the most general terms, but it's really these subpages that are ranking most prominently. I'm not seeing a huge number of content pages ranking here with the exception of this type of stuff where it looks like they've set up separate pages for phrases like July birth flower, September birth flower, August birth flower. These are potentiallyformational searches. People want to know what type of flower to buy a baby that's born in September or something. If you buy flowers for babies, I don't know. Please

9:11:31don't buy me any flowers for my baby. So, let's have a look at the pages that are ranking for those in case that looks like a strategy that I might want to adopt. Finding this useful so far, you might love our channel. We share digital marketing videos every single week showing you how to improve the visibility and sales that your website generates. Subscribe. All right. So, we've had a general look at the phrases that they're ranking for. We've had a general look at the volume of those phrases and the [music] pages that are ranking. What we're going to do next is analyze the content on these pages. This

9:12:03is step four. So, here we've got their homepage. The first thing that we're going to do is get an overall vibe for how much content they've got on this page and what sort of phrases this page is targeting. We can see straight away they've got some target keywords here. Send flowers online. Boom. That must be

9:12:20the main phrase that they're targeting. We can also see them using it in their page title up here. Send flowers online. Same day flower delivery. That gives us an indication that these are two of their highest priority keywords. By the way, we're using flower delivery. This is one of the most competitive spaces ever. I hope that you are not doing your own competitor research for something as competitive as flower delivery. If you are, request a free website and marketing review from Exposure Ninja ASAP. Okay. The rest of this page, we can see that they've got bestselling products here. Obviously designed to capture people's attention. And then

9:12:53we've got what we would safely categorize as SEO content at the bottom of the page. The only reason this stuff is here is for SEO. So, we've got variation keywords here. And then we've got some reasonably poorly written copy, which is designed to help them rank for these phrases. We've also got links through to some of their main category pages. Obviously, these sorts of internal links, they're also designed to boost the authority of those category pages. One day people won't be doing this, but at the moment everyone still is. I mean, let's be honest, as long as Google's still rewarding it, we're going to keep doing it, folks. So, I'm

9:13:31thinking for Ninja Flowers, I'm going to need a decent amount of content if I'm going to compete with a page like this. One of the things I might be thinking, though, is how would I make this page 10 times better? Well, I might have a flower selector. I might have some sort of tool which is really engaging and fun and gets lots of people clicking through. This page feels quite static and a little bit passive. Yes, it's fairly standard, but I think on Ninja Flowers actually, we can make something a little bit more current. Up next, let's have a look at one of these other product or category pages that was

9:14:04ranking. So, this was the page that was ranking for flower delivery, which is interesting, right? Because this page actually isn't necessarily optimized for flower delivery. Why is it ranking over the homepage? That might be something that we'll find out. So, flowers under30 is the main heading here. We can see this is also the page title. They do have flower delivery UK in their page title. So, that could be contributing to ranking as well. Then we've got some

9:14:32text at the top noted. We've got lots and lots of products here. And then we've got some text at the bottom noted. But on the whole, this page, I'm not seeing it as being massively relevant to flower delivery. Yes, people might be clicking it because it's flowers under £30. I know that on ninjaf flowers.com, I might want a page targeting different price ranges because they might be the ones that people click on. But I think I could build a better optimized page for the term flower delivery talking about how our flowers are delivered, how they're packaged, ready for delivery, how we take care of them, what happens if a delivery goes

9:15:12wrong, where we can deliver, the different locations that we can deliver to, and all of that type of stuff. I think we can make a better optimized page for that search term if we really tried. So logged, and this is what you're doing when you're going through step four and you're analyzing the content that's ranking. You're thinking, what's good about this page? What can I copy? What can I adapt? What can I take and implement for my business? But you're also thinking, how would I take this to the next level? What are the holes? Where is it slightly weak? How can I exploit? How can I dig my finger

9:15:43into the saw? So brutal. Valentine's flower is one of the most competitive terms in the world. Let's see how they're doing it. So, we've got Valentine's here. Obviously, that's not going to be readable cuz it's an image. We've got this, which is going to be readable. Guaranteed delivery on Valentine's Day. We've got Valentine's Day flowers as their heading here. We've got some more stuff here. We've got Valentine's gift guide. That might be interesting. See if it gives us another content angle to attack. Then we've got

9:16:11loads and loads and loads of flowers. Then, have we got any content? Yes, we've got some SEO content at the bottom of this page. As long as Google's rewarding it, we're going to keep doing it. So, how would I beat this page? I'm just going to go super heavy on content. I'm going to give people the Valentine's Day flower selection tool. I'm going to give, you know, different ideas for Valentine's Day flowers. I'm going to have a seal to guarantee delivery. I'm going to have testimonials from people who've had their Valentine's Day flowers from Ninja Flowers. All that type of stuff. Let's head over to the

9:16:43Valentine's Day gift guide. This they might be trying to rank for things like Valentine's Day gift guide. Obviously, what are they going to include in their Valentine's Day gift guide? Oh, roses. You're joking. But this is a bit weird because I don't really understand what this is here for. I can't click on any of these. Doesn't seem to be any call to action. Not really too sure what this is. But for Ninja Flowers, I'm adding a Valentine's Day gift guide. And I'm going to make it really awesome. Way better than this. Okay. Final type of page that we're going to have a look at is this one, which is the August birth

9:17:15flower. So, this is a content thing designed to rank for anformational search term. As you're doing your competitor analysis, you might find that some of your competitors are targetingformational searches like this where someone's searching for August birthflower may or may not be in the market to actually buy one. They're probably just looking for information. But this sort of content can be a great way of picking up links. And in some cases, the searcher might have commercial intent. You might be able to convince them to buy something if the information is good enough and it's presented in a nice way. So, the information here, um, pretty straightforward. We've got spelling

9:17:51mistakes in the first two words. We don't have links through to the products, so I can't buy these. So, I might adopt this strategy. I might take this content, make it 100 times better, link through to the products on my site where people can actually buy these flowers, and I might just spank them into oblivion and beat them for these

9:18:10terms because this is not very good. Okay, quick recap. From our target keywords, we identified our business and search competitors. We threw them into Semrush to see what they're ranking for, how well they're ranking, and the pages that are ranking. We then had a look at the content on those pages, the different types of pages that they're ranking, how good those pages are, what we can learn positively from them, where we would improve those pages to make them better. Step five out of five is to have a look at the links that are pointing to our competitor's sites. This can give us loads of insight into the

9:18:43link building strategies that they're using which we can then adopt adapt for ourselves. Back in Seamrush, we're going to open backlink analytics. We're going to stick in our competitor sites and let's see what we've got. Remember, this is an old website, so we're going to expect a huge volume of links. We're going to get a real sense of what sort of promotion they've done to this site over the years. Now, straight away, we

9:19:08can see they've got 1.5 million links. If you're a brand new website competing with this, [laughter] you're going to have to be really, really good and you're going to need to have a lot of money. Okay, so the first thing is if you're seeing competitors that are just huge volumes of links, loads of referring domains, you might want to consider targeting a niche inside the space rather than going for buy flowers online. Ninja flowers might want to start off by going for black flowers or buy black flowers online instead because that's going to be easier to rank for. I'm probably not going to be competing against megalodons

9:19:46like efllores.co.uk. Anyway, we're going to have a look though. So, first thing we're going to do is click on the referring domains. Now, one metric that all of these SEO tools have a variation of is this authority score. And I want to talk about this quickly. Back in the day, Google published a metric called page rank. You could see this in a page rank toolbar for every single website and every single page on every single website. And what page rank was was a score based on the number of links and the page rank of those websites that were linking to every single page on the internet. Page rank was part of their

9:20:24search visibility algorithm. So basically, the higher the page rank, the easier it was to get a page ranked for a search term. Now, Google took away page rank or stopped showing us SEO's page rank a long time ago. And that's where all of the SEO tools stepped in and created their own metrics. So, Moz has domain authority, Majestic has its own score, HFS has its own score, and Seamrush has authority score. Normally, these scores go from 0 to 100. and they are designed to be a representation of how easy it is to get a particular page ranked based on the authority and the

9:21:03number of links coming to that page. Does that make sense? Basically, more authority equals good. Whilst we want to take all of these scores with a pinch of salt, they are useful as we will see when we're looking through here. Now, the first thing that we're going to do is we can see that they've got a lot of links. Great. Once we've set aside the intimidation of 1.5 back links, we're going to scroll down the page, but we're going to scroll down, have a look at how many domains are referring to them from each authority score band. Basically, how good are the links that they're getting. Here we can see they've got

9:21:37nine different websites linking to them that are in the 81 to 90 authority score, 34 from the 71 to 80, 60 from 61 to 70, and so on and so on. This is a fairly common split. these sorts of ratios, it's these higher authority links that can be the most powerful. So, those are the ones that we really want to analyze first. Of course, that's not to say that there can't be value in lower authority links, but it's really these higher authority ones that we want to study first. So, let's go back up to the top. We're going to click on referring domains, and we're going to

9:22:11order the links by authority score. This is then going to show us the highest authority domains that are linking to efllor.co.uk. From this, we can begin to piece together what their link building strategy has been over the years. Now, I'm not going to bother about Bing cuz obviously that's going to be a link from search. I'm not going to bother about AWS either. Trip Advisor also not going to worry too much. Let's have a look at Trade Doubler and see what sorts of links they're getting from Trade Doubler. Uh, so we're going to open that and have a look at that in a minute. Uh, we're going to keep going. We're going

9:22:48to have a look at this one as well. They've got a lot of links from this. This looks to be not sure. Let's have a look and see what that's all about. Let's keep going. We've got links from newspapers. So, anytime we see links from, you know, the Mirror, The Sun, The Express, that type of thing, that's usually an indication that some sort of journalist relationship exists. they've done some PR or whatever. So, let's have

9:23:13a look at some of those as well. We're going to have a look at a couple of different ones of those from the mirror. Basically, we're looking for trends. We're looking for patterns here. And we're looking for strategies that we can adopt. So, here we can see they've got links from different areas on the Sun's website. So, Sun Selects money and usually there are different journalists or writers writing for each of these different sections. Often these links

9:23:39can be in a different context as well. So, we're going to open these and have a look at some of those, too. Well, I'm going to leave it there for now because that'll probably be enough links to help us see some patterns. But with your competitors, obviously, you want to have a look through their highest authority links to see if you can basically copy that strategy to get those sorts of

9:23:58links for your business, too. Okay. Trade doubler. This looks like a case study. These essentially look like they're a partner. Uh, Trade Doubler is probably the affiliate network that um, EF Florist uses. Great. So, now I'm thinking for Ninja Flowers. Okay, this could be a strategy that I could use. I could go out to my suppliers and the businesses that I work with. I could see who's got really high authority websites and I could offer them case studies. I could offer them interviews to publish on their website. I'd be happy to big them up if they give me a mention, if they give me a link. Strategy number one

9:24:32in the bank. Now, let's have a look at this. They had a few links from this site. My Chinese has got a little bit rusty in the last few days. So, I'm not going to disgrace myself by attempting to translate this live, but I'm not sure that Ninja Flowers is going to be able to duplicate this strategy. So, I'm going to close it. Uh, let's have a look at this link from the mirror. So, first thing that we want to do is find the link to our website. So we can see the link here is actually referencing a study on another publication and it's basically a publication that has scored

9:25:05the quality of our bouquets. So right now I'm thinking, okay, great. I want to be in that next Good Housekeeping magazine study. So I'll go back and find that find the person that put that together. Say, hey, when do you publish this thing? How can I be involved? It's a long shot, but it's better than noshot. This doesn't necessarily look like a link that they would have contacted the mirror or spoken to the mirror to get potentially. This is a real natural organic link on a really high authority site, which is great, but it's one of those things that you pick up once you're big, once you have

9:25:36visibility elsewhere. Let's have a look at this one. Again, this is a very old link. This is from way back in 2016 when I was like five or something. Uh we're going to have a look and see where the link is here. Okay, so this has clearly been a review. So, what I might do, I probably wouldn't in this case because Amanda might no longer work with the mirror, but what I would do is I would find her on Twitter, see if she's got an email address, drop her an email asking if she's going to be doing a Valentine's Day roundup. Now, in this case, she did

9:26:05this one like 6 years ago, so probably not. But if it was more recent, I would definitely be doing that. The other thing I'll be doing is following Amanda on Twitter and monitoring in case she uses hashtag Jonah request PR request to reach out for opinions on the sorts of topics that she's writing about knowing that she writes for the mirror and

9:26:23knowing that she writes in my space. Strategies number two and three in the bank. [music] Here we have a more recent one. This is Jennifer Barton. So I would do exactly that. I would have a look and see where Jennifer's hanging out online. Here she is. She's a writer for all sorts of publications. Great. I think she needs to be a connection for me for Ninja Flowers. So, I'm going to follow her. I'm going to keep an eye on what sort of stuff she's posting. If she ever posts anything about Flowers, I'm going to be in there and saying, "Hey, Jen, you know, love your articles. Been

9:26:52following you for ages. Huge fan. Let's talk now." I've also noticed this link here on the studentroom.co.uk. Um, this looks like best Mother's Day gifts 2019. The best cheap but beautiful flowers. Now, obviously value is going to be important to students. Now, I might be really cunning and use this as a bit of a strategy for my link building. I might make a list of all the student publications and just before Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, uh, Father's Day, I might reach out to them with articles or offers of articles about cheap Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day gifts for students, knowing that they're publishing this sort of stuff. And then, of course, I

9:27:29would include a link to my site there as well. So, as you can see, there is a wealth of information in this SEO competitor research, particularly in the link building section. You can build a really strong picture of the sort of link acquisition that your competitors have done, and then you can adapt, copy, steal their strategies for your business, too. One final thing before I leave you. Now, we've looked at links to the entire site, but another way that you might want to look at this is if there's a particular page on their site which is doing really well. Let's say, for example, that this Valentine's Day

9:28:00gift guide for some reason was doing really well on their site. You could drop that in and you could check the exact URL. And then what that's going to do is show you the links pointing at that specific URL. If you've got a particular page on your site that you want to improve the ranking to and it's for a competitive search term, you might want to drive links to that page specifically. In this case, this URL doesn't have very many links. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as it doesn't really look like it's finished. It It's not particularly good. You wouldn't drive links to this page because you wouldn't want this page to rank. But if they did,

9:28:34and it was ranking well, as part of my competitor analysis, I would be looking at this in more detail, knowing that this is one of the strategies I want to build into my SEO arsenal. Welcome to module five, progression. Now, for me, this is one of the most exciting modules and it's one of the most exciting areas of digital marketing because what we're talking about is how we take a lead or a customer and we turn that person into something more. We turn that person, we we build a long-term relationship with them. And we do this in a really smart way. We do this mainly through

9:29:09automation. Um, so it's the last stage and we use the predictable profit repeater framework. So, what does this look like when it's going well? Very few businesses have this sort of thing in place, but what does it look like when it's going well? Well, we turn new contacts and customers into high lifetime value customers, fans, and advocates at scale. And this is largely automated. Okay, high lifetime value means that we are we're creating or we're um we're kind of triggering repeat purchases. fans means that these people

9:29:46are sharing. They're talking about us. They're becoming uh you know influencers if you like in some cases affiliates and partners for us and advocates. They're referring their friends as well. So that's really what we're all about today. That is um doing this in an automated way so that you don't have to manually put in work every single time following up with people. All of the stuff that we're going to be looking at

9:30:10today is about automation. So what are the components of this? Well, we're going to start talking about priming. Uh this is about any leads that coming into your business. What's the sequence of emails or texts that they get which prime them ready to buy from you. Then we're going to look at review collection. How you can be increasing the number of reviews that your business is getting on things like Google My Business um just automatically. So having uh email sequences timed to go and collect reviews from customers at the time that they are most likely to be leaving a review for you. We then talk about offers and the different types of

9:30:50offers that we can make to our lists and when to make them and how to make them. We then talk about triggering follow-ups um which is also loyalty as well. If you've got a consultative sales process, let's say you're a consultancy firm or you're selling some sort of um you know training component where you have a sales team that talks to your prospects, then you can automate a lot of the follow-up sequence there. So, you don't have to rely on your sales team doing it. When I started doing this with Exposion Ninja back in 2014, we went from a sales team of three to a sales

9:31:24team of one and we sold significantly more because I realized that most of our people were spending their time doing follow-ups which could be automated. That would allow us to optimize the frequency at which people followed up. It mean we could make the follow-up much more consistent. We could work out what worked and then just template that and that would obviously free people's time up. So it allowed us to get much better leverage from our sales team. If you're an e-commerce business, we're going to use the same process to build loyalty and repeat custom uh influence and advocacy as well. So how we can turn these people into

9:32:02influencers and advocates and send you referral business. And then finally, how we're going to be able to use all of this to perform testing and research. So that for example when you want to roll out new products or you want to uh bring in new features or services to your business you can test it with your list in a a very lowrisk way without having to go through all the effort of building something only to find that actually guess what our audience doesn't even want it anyway. Okay, ask me how I know

9:32:29about that. So that's [laughter] the predictable profit repeater. Those are the six elements that we're going to be going through today. In this uh module, there'll also be an interview with Abby um who is our fantastic head of email marketing. And Abby has been doing some incredible work with the email marketing team here at Exposure Ninja and building a lot of this stuff out for clients. So, we're going to get her take on a lot of this as well. So, I think you'll find that really, really useful. Abby is phenomenal. Okay. So, what are the key metrics? How do we know if we have an opportunity or if we have a problem in

9:33:00this sort of area? Well, firstly, your audience size and your list growth. So, by list growth, we're talking about your email or your text list. So, if you're using some sort of CRM or mailing list platform like Mailchimp, Aweber, Infusionoft, Clavio, you know, things like this, how fast is your list growing? If you're honest, how fast is it growing? And how large is your

9:33:23audience in that um in that software? Obviously the larger the audience we have the more we can um throw into say you know Facebook if we want to build a custom audience. If we can upload a lot of customer details into Facebook it can find the commonalities and it can profile our customers much more effectively than if we're just uploading a few customer details and that'll give us a much better more targeted audience to drive ads to. So this stuff is really important and it's only going to become more and more important over time. uh your email click-through rate. So, when you're sending emails, we're going to

9:33:58talk about some tips for things like email subject lines and email copy styles as well. So, how do you write emails to your audience? What sort of style should you adopt? If you're getting a very low click-through rate from your emails, or if you're not even measuring your click-through rate at all, then we're going to cover some ways to fix that because you need people not just reading your emails, but actually taking action on what they see and clicking through. Uh the number of reviews that your business is collecting. If you are relying on a sort of manual approach to collecting reviews from your customers or even your leads,

9:34:30that's really going to limit the number of reviews that you're collecting. You need to be doing this automated, which means that you can scale your review collection much more effectively. So, we'll talk about how and when to do that. Uh customer lifetime value. So, customer lifetime value is a function of the size of each purchase that people are making. Also, the frequency of each purchase. So, how often people are purchasing from you and the length of time of which they purchase. So, you know, if you're selling something to someone every year, well, you can

9:34:59increase that customer lifetime value. If you keep them for more years, you increase the frequency. So, you're selling them to you're selling to them more than once per year. Uh, and you increase the size of those purchases. So, this is a really um, you know, it can be a way to scale a business quite quickly and quite dramatically if we can significantly increase our customer lifetime value. Most people, and I'm guilty of this too, most of most marketers, most business owners, we love focusing on getting the new customers, right? Because that's the exciting stuff. You want to see how many leads

9:35:31you've got coming in. This is great. Yeah, we've hit huge lead numbers. Awesome. And then where are the leads going? Oh, they're all just going into some email platform somewhere, but you know, we don't really need to worry about that. Well, there's a huge amount of money in that list. Huge amount of money in that list. We'll take on clients and we say, "Have you got an email list?" system. Some people say, "Yeah, we got, you know, 10,000, 20,000." Like, "How often you emailing

9:35:52them?" "Nah, yeah, we're not." Right? [laughter] And what they want to do is they want to spend like5 a click getting new people into their system whilst they've got a whole bunch of people in there that they spent tens or hundreds of thousands of pound getting into their into their system and they're not doing anything with them. So, customer lifetime value is key and that's a lot of what we're looking at today. Also, are you collecting referrals? Are you doing this in a systemized, scalable way? You'll hear me talking a lot in this module about systemized and scalable because all of this stuff, you know, you can do it when you're a very

9:36:24small business. You can ask your customers for referrals, but once you start scaling beyond just you and you've got 10, 15, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500,000 people working for you, you're going to need a way to collect referrals, which doesn't mean that you're calling up your customers asking who else they know who will buy from you.

9:36:44An affiliate partner commission as well. So you can be selling other people's products and you can be earning money from that and you don't have to do it personally. You can set it up in an automation and it can run in the background for you. So that's what we're going to be looking at today. Now the main principle with priming uh priming is what we're going to be talking about first is that not everyone is ready to buy when you are ready to sell. Okay, my wife tells me this. Not everyone is ready to buy when you are ready to sell. You are always ready to

9:37:14sell. Okay. But when your customers come onto your website for the first time, whether you're e-commerce or lead genen, they are not always in that moment ready to say, "Great, let's do this." This is where what we're talking about today really comes in. So, let's start with priming. This is the first aspect. Um, and this is all about where's it gone? Uh, this is all about getting your customers ready to buy from you. This is we call this in Exposure Ninja sequence. So, your priming sequence is going to be an indoctrination sequence of emails that people get when they come into your world, when they sign up for

9:37:51something with you, whether it's to become a lead, where they fill in your lead capture form, or an e-commerce where they fill in your form to get a first customer voucher code or whatever. This is what happens once they've done that. So we go through a priming sequence, an indoctrination sequence, which will tell them your story, which will sell them on why they should be doing business with you. So it's a way of getting your values into that person, showing that you're really good at what you do. So some of the things that you can use in this priming sequence, case studies presented as how to. So in the

9:38:29process section of this course, we looked at how the before and after case study can be incredibly powerful. We can use these case studies, whether you're ecom, lead genen, software, we can use these case studies as part of our indoctrination sequence that we are sending new customers when they sign up for whatever. And by signing up, I mean they're putting our their details in a form, right? Putting their details in a form. What happens when they fill in that form? Yes. Of course, you're going to reach out to them to book the consultation or whatever. It's a if it's a lead capture, but what's the automated

9:39:04sequence of emails that they get on the back of that? Well, we can send them things like case studies, but we want to present these in a very particular way. Here's how most people present their case studies. Uh, this is case study one, commercial client. We've been working with this particular client since 2005, during which time they've grown from very small company with less than 10 staff in total to an award-winning property maintenance company with approximately 50 office

9:39:29space staff plus 60 on call engineers. Right? Who cares? Okay, who cares at this point? Nobody cares unless you're a property maintenance company and you're thinking, "Oh yeah, this sounds interesting. This is exactly my business." Nothing about this is of any interest to you whatsoever. Okay? It's very dry. There's no benefit to reading this whatsoever. You might read it if you're really considering purchasing from this company, but on the whole, this is going to get very low engagement. It's so boring. I'm not even

9:39:59going to read the rest of it to you. Here's another example. Arendine MFG is a metals trading house forming part of the MFG metals group. They provide metals and materials for consumption in primary and secondary industries. The challenges. Aaron Dean first contacted Cheeky Monkey a number of years ago when they encountered many problems with their IT systems and required expert technical support as well as new computer equipment. Okay,

9:40:23again who cares? Nobody cares, right? That first paragraph is just telling you about this metals trading house. If in a case study, all that's doing is telling you this case study is not about your business, right? This case study is about someone else completely and they've got very little to do with your business. So immediately that's disqualifying people who aren't a metals trading company because they think well what's the relevance to me. I want to find case studies of people who are just like me. Okay remember the before and after pictures. So this is how most people present their case studies. It's boring. It's [snorts] a complete waste

9:40:57of time and honestly nobody is interested. So here's an approach that you can take instead. Rather than presenting here's what we did, you know, like in your school science project. here's my my proposal. Here's what I'm expecting to find. Right? You don't need to approach it in a scientific way. Instead, you can make content around your case studies. Want to see behind the scenes of four gamechanging SEO campaigns? One website went from $500 a week in sales to $232,000 a week. Another went from 35 leads per month to over a 100 leads per day. A brand new business dominated its

9:41:32competition online within four months. Are you interested in that? You're probably significantly more interested in that than you would be and if we said case study number one, e-commerce, case study number two, lead genen, case study number three, software. That's really boring, but we didn't do that. So, what we did instead is we talked about the result that people got because remember the before and after, we want to show

9:41:56people a result that they really want. So, when you're creating case studies and when you're going to be creating case studies for your email sequences that you're going to send people as an indoctrination sequence once they sign up with you, you want to present your results in a way that is exciting to every person who's getting that email if you possibly can. So this helps people see themselves in the case studies even if the business is completely, you know, I would say with these other case studies like this one, I would forget explaining that they're a metals trading house. That's complete rubbish. Instead, I would talk

9:42:34about whatever they're trying to do. What are they trying to do? They're they're trying to improve the performance of their IT systems. They're usually trying to save cost, increase productivity, or I don't know, um, yeah, pretty much save cost or increase productivity, reduce the amount of time their their team is wasting on it. So, I would say how this company half their IT, you know, how they how they reduce the amount of time their team spend on

9:43:00it by 50%. Right? That's exciting to me. And then I'd say, by the way, this is a metals trading house, but it really doesn't matter because the approach that we take with them is the same approach we take with all of our clients. So, we're not going to focus on the fact they're a metals trading house. Instead, what we're going to focus on is the main ways that you can reduce the cost and effort that you have to put into your IT system following our process, right? And

9:43:23then you talk them through the process. This is how you save money with your IT system. That's how you present your case study, not we did this, then we did that because that's really boring. Nobody cares about you. They care about themselves. So that's what we're presenting it as. Does this make sense? So that's the first thing. Case studies presented as how-tos. That's the first type of email that you can include in your sequence. So when you're designing your sequence, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be crafting a number of emails to go out with maybe a few days or a week in between. And these

9:43:57are going to be received by your target customers once they sign up for you. So, we've got to think about the types of content that we're going to be sending them because we can't just be sending them a pitch. Hey, have you bought a thing yet? Hey, have you bought a thing yet? Hey, what about now? Have you bought it yet? What we need to be doing instead is sending them a whole bunch of useful and interesting stuff that helps get them closer to their goals. But remember, it's an indoctrination sequence. So, it's designed to make them fall in love with us and to see the

9:44:26value in what we're doing. Okay? So, that's why we're sending them a case study, but we're not sending them a case study. We're saying how this business did this or how to reduce the cost of your IT system by 50%. That's the sort of thing that people will read, not how we reduce the IT support load of a metals trading house. Kill it. That's

9:44:46not being read by anyone. Okay. Um, you want to mix up the formats that you're sending these as well. So not everyone is going to just read text. If you can, you can also include things like video descriptions. So we'll make presentations. We'll build webinars out of our case studies because we're not saying, "Hey, come to this case study webinar." We're saying, "Look, we'll show you behind the scenes of these SEO campaigns up to $242,000 a week. This

9:45:11business went to $4 million a month. We're going to show you how they did it with SEO." You're interested in that, aren't you? You wouldn't be interested to say how this US e-commerce retailer optimized their metas. Nobody cares, right? It's all about the result. So, you want to mix up the format. Some of them are going to be text because some people like to read text. Some of them might be videos. If you want to run it as a podcast, you can run it as a podcast. We've done case studies as

9:45:33podcasts as well. Um, you also want to use your case studies to handle common objections. Okay? So, we talked in the closer uh stage about handling objections on your website, but you also want to think about, you remember that list of 20 reasons why somebody wouldn't purchase from you. We also want to think about how we can answer those objections in our case studies. So let's say for example that um the IT support company let's say that one of the common objections that they might get from their target customers is it's going to be really difficult for us to change IT support company we have to go through

9:46:12all this rigomearroll it took ages last time nobody ever understands us there's this huge on boarding process the whole thing's really painful even if I want to change IT support companies I'm unlikely to do it because of all that pain so what we want to do in our case studies is we want to handle those objections. So here's how this company reduced the amount of time their team spends on IT including with onboarding or even though they were terrified of switching IT companies or even though last time they switched IT companies it was really painful this time it was completely seamless. So we can handle those

9:46:47objections by showing how other people have how we've overcome those objections for other people. Right? If you are selling uh let's say you're selling e-commerce products, it's exactly the same thing. So why you know how this person managed to whatever this person hasn't washed their water bottle for 3 months even though they're an absolute clean freak clean freak, right? Or because the thing cleans itself. Okay? So it was about handling the objections in the case studies. The next type of content that

9:47:18we can send out is tutorials or guides. Now, when we're sending out tutorials or guides, we're not doing this with any sort of ulterior motive. Now, of course, we are doing it with an ulterior motive, but we can do it in a very uh friendly and helpful way. So, I'm going to show you some examples. Here's a master of this, by the way, Ryan Dice from digitalmarketer.com. Well worth following. Subscribe if anything just to

9:47:46see the emails that they send out. Really, really good emails. So you can see in this email it's the headline is open this if you're not running paid ads. Okay. And then what they've done is they've written a blog post uh when they should start about when people should start their paid traffic campaigns. Okay. So where's the pitch here? There is no pitch. They've written something useful and they're sending you something useful to read. Now, of course, when you get on the page, there might be a call to action for like some, you know, PPC implementation guide or something like

9:48:21that, but there's no pitch in the email. It's incredibly soft. Now, the impression that you get from getting receiving these is that they really want to help, right? They really want to share their expertise. We take exactly this approach with Exposure Ninja. You'll see very rarely will we pitch you in an email. What we're often doing is sharing stuff that we've learned. We're sharing new videos. We're sharing new podcasts. We're sharing new blog posts that we've written because to be frank, we want to show you that we're good at what we do. We want to help you get results. Basically, we want to demonstrate that we can be really useful

9:48:56to you by being really useful to you. Okay? So, sending them tutorials or guides can be a great way to build trust with your customers. Here's an example from an e-commerce store. Um this is uh Survival Life, a fantastic business run by uh Perry Belchure, who is an incredible marketer, one of these really unique people if you if you uh if you know Perry. Um but it it's another you know this is another angle on the tutorials. So what survival life is, it's basically a community of um survivalists. So, these are typically um you know, Americans that live in Texas and have lots of guns and they're

9:49:35terrified about some sort of apocalypse where Obama comes and steals all their guns and stuff like this. So, they sell um information. They sell like a membership to this club and they sell products through their e-commerce store. So, they've got their own like knives and stuff that they sell. And um you see this guide here is have you ever wondered how people make paracord

9:49:56bracelets like this? Probably not, but if you're in this group, you may have. Or maybe a homemade pool ball monkey fist for self-defense. No idea what that is, but it doesn't sound very nice. Um but anyway, there's a tutorial and guide about how to make these things and then you can just click to buy the products and they sell the products really cheaply because then they want to pitch you to join their membership club. Okay, that's the goal there. So, another angle here is like we we did this for a client actually um one of the award-winning campaigns over there. So, we have a client that sells

9:50:30like the ingredients for beauty products. So, like organic ingredients to make your own beauty products. So, the one of their marketing strategies is we put together these recipes for people to build their own, you know, bath bombs or conditioners or whatever and then we sell them the product components to make those things. So whether people are searching for them or whether they get them through the email or whatever, then they go to the guide, they say, "Oh, we need to buy these things." And then they

9:50:55can go and buy them through the store. So sending over these tutorials and guides can also be a way to drive commerce to a store. Uh here's a version that we run. Um if you're confused by Google Analytics, I've recorded a short series of videos for you. Hi, how to run a five-step Google Analytics. It shows how to analyze your website's performance and explains some of the

9:51:15most important metrics in plain English. Enjoy, Tim. Right, really simple. All we're trying to do here is build a relationship with our audience. Remember, we're priming. This is the indoctrination sequence that convinces your audience that you know what you're talking about and that you're there to help. And over the course of months, years, you build up a really strong fan base by doing this stuff. Okay? And it's also fantastic for SEO because you're creating these guides for your website

9:51:42as well. So, that is um creating guides and tutorials, another type of email that you can be sending out to your list. So, as we're going through these, I really want you to be thinking about the types of emails that you can be sending out to your list. What sort of guides would you want to be running? What sort of uh tutorials and helpful things could you create for your email list that you could send out to build the relationship? And if there's an opportunity for a sale, then it doesn't hurt to add a call to action in there, a commercial call to action. But you know,

9:52:13your main goal really is just to build the relationship. Okay. The next type of priming email that you can send out is interviews and features with successful customers or industry thought leaders. Okay. So, we've done this a few times uh when we do a podcast interview with someone who's well known like a copywriter like John Carlton who's one of the most, you know, respected copywriters in the world. One of the reasons that we reach out to people like John Carlton or people reach out to us and we say yes to have them on our podcast is because that association gives us credibility if you like people like all right exposure

9:52:46ninja you know Tim's interviewing John Carlton awesome Tim's interviewing like top people in digital marketing great right that's how we built our visibility in the first place is by kind of aligning ourselves with people that had a lot of credibility in the industry when we didn't have any yet because no one knew who we were you can do this as Uh you can also interview successful customers. So another thing that we've done is we've interviewed some of our most successful clients and we've had them on the podcast to talk about their strategy and of course they're also saying you know exposure has been amazing for us helped us grow loads then

9:53:18that's great credibility for us too and people love to hear success stories. So, if you've got clients that have done really well and you know that they've got a story which your audience will be interested in, bring them in, do an interview with them, like case study, behind the scenes, let's get their thoughts on where the industry is going, that type of stuff. Your customers might

9:53:39be really interested in that. Okay. Um, this gives you third party proof. It also allows you to kind of borrow credibility, right? So, that's priming. Um, one approach that or one thing that we need to talk about when we're talking about automated email sequences is how often we're emailing people and thinking about the state that people are in when they're receiving their our email. So, I want to introduce two concepts to you or kind of talk about two concepts to you. Firstly, inbox zero, which you will have heard of. This is a fairly common thing where people like to get to the end of their inbox

9:54:18each day. They like to have zero emails in the end of their inbox by the end of the day. Right? That's one approach that people take. I've coined the term notification numbness because this represents my reality. Right? Uh we have um I've got 785,646 unread emails currently in my email inbox. Uh 105 messages on LinkedIn. I'm totally numb to new messages. So most

9:54:48people fit into one of these two camps. You're either trying to get to zero or you've long given up on the idea of zero. And the only things that get your attention are, you know, the really good stuff. Either way, this is how most people imagine their customers receive their emails. Oh, I've had an inbox. I've had an email through this IT company. Let me just uh let me just grab a coffee. Let me just go in my all-white kitchen and settle down to give this email my full attention. Guess what? It really doesn't happen like that. A lot of the time this is a more uh you know

9:55:26representative reality of how people are reading your emails. They are in pure deletion mode, right? People in this situation aren't thinking, "Oh great, an email from the IT company. Can't wait to dig into this. Oh, amazing. Another bunch of promotions from this e-commerce company that I signed up for a couple of weeks ago. Awesome. Can't wait to dig into this. What these people are

9:55:50thinking is, what can I safely ignore? They are in completely deletion mode. Whether they're in inbox zero mode, if they're in inbox zero, they're just trying to clear. They're just trying to delete anything that they don't have to respond to or interact with. If they're in notification numbness, they don't care. it's just sweeping past their eyes, you know, and they've long given up and getting to the bottom of the heap. So, they're just not going to interact with it. So, we need to make sure that we are in this mode. We are, you know, we're recognizing how people are reading our emails, how they're receiving our emails, and we need to

9:56:29tailor our email content for this reality. This is how we we've got to try and cut through this, not this. We don't have to cut through this. This is completely imaginary. This hasn't existed since the early 2000s. We are living with this, right? This is what we're getting. People's email inbox is like a Twitter feed. It's unless it's great, it's not cutting through. So, what happens is people send stuff like this um from a fantastic restaurant at the top of Trenbridge. Love it. But we are award winners. Who is going to read

9:57:03that? Really? Who is going to read that? Now, you might think that sending an email like this, we are award winners. Well, good for you. But what do I care? You might think that sending this sort of stuff, yeah, but it doesn't do any harm, does it? I can assure you it does do harm because most of our email systems now have relevance algorithms

9:57:26and they're watching our behavior. They're learning about the sort of emails we read and the sort of emails that we don't read. So, if they send me five of these and I don't open any of them, where's the sixth one going? Is it going into my emails? Is it getting a little tag next to it to say important? Doubtful. Is it going automatically into the promotions tab or the spam tab? It may well do. And if everyone who gets this email doesn't read it, what does Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail think about this business? They send crappy emails that nobody cares about and nobody reads. So, this isn't neutral. This is

9:58:05negative. We have to make emails that people actually want to read. So, a little while ago, what I did is I looked through all of the emails that we'd sent to customers and leads over the years. And what I wanted to do was identify the [snorts] email headlines, the email subject lines that had the best open rates to find out what their commonality was. Are you ready to see them? It's

9:58:29really interesting. Here they are. So, there's a few things going on here. What do you Oh, firstly, what do you notice about all of these?

9:58:46The first thing I notice is they're all about curiosity, right? Some of these are borderline, you know, borderline impossible to ignore. I would say if someone sends you an email with a subject line, an idea, you're probably going to open that just in case it's a personal email, right? I sent I sent out like 40,000 of each of these, so it wasn't a personal email, but it might feel like a personal email to the person who's receiving them. Same with regarding video, asking for your advice. you going to ignore that? Um, please don't lie to my wife. One of my

9:59:25favorite ones. So, all of these are based on curiosity. And you could say that they're clickbait. With emails, we don't really have Well, I suppose you're clickbait as in that you're clicking to open it, but they're kind of open bait if you like. So, what we don't want to do is we don't want to send with a subject line like this, which is really catchy and impossible to ignore, and then they open it and it's just generic crap inside, right? We've got to make the content of the email consistent with whatever we're sending them in the subject line. But how I like to think about this is the goal of your

9:59:59well okay Gary Halbert fantastic marketer um from the world of um direct mail. So when people sent out stuff in the mail, remember that stuff? And a lot of marketers use direct mail in the way that we marketers use email today. So they use it as a way of reaching out to people. They used it as a way of communicating with their customers. And Gary Halbbert had this concept of an A pile and a B pile. So when you get your post, you've got this A pile, which is

10:00:25the stuff that you really need to read. And then you've got the B pile, which is the stuff that you can safely ignore. Remember the question, what can I safely ignore? What can I safely delete? And Gary always used to say, people open their mail over the waste paper basket. Right? So they're opening it or they're looking at it. Can I put this in the bin? if it looks like a bill or if it looks like some, you know, circular or it looks like some corporate boring

10:00:49communication, it's going in the bin. I'm not even opening it. Whereas the a pile was like handwritten or it evokes some sort of curiosity. That's the stuff that gets opened and then if it's presented in a nice way, then it gets read. Okay? But unless it does that, it's in the B pile, it's going in the bin. And it's exactly the same with our email. So, we want to make sure that we're going into the A pile. We're actually getting people's attention in the first place. Remember, the goal of your subject line is to get your email opened. That's the only goal of the subject line. We're not actually looking

10:01:24to sell the product. We're not looking to even get people to click on the link from the email in the subject line. All you're looking to do is get the email open. Then, it's a job of the body copy, the text in your email to get people to click on the link. then it's the job of your landing page to get them to buy the thing, right? So, all we're looking to do with our subject line is get the email opened. If it doesn't do that, it has failed. Okay? So, email subject lines really, really important. We're going to talk later on about the personality that you use actually in the

10:01:54email copy as well. But for now, email subject lines really important. Have a play with yours and make sure where possible that you're triggering curiosity in people so they find it very difficult to ignore your subject lines. Okay. Uh, so that's priming. So this is the email sequence that we're going to be sending out to people when they first come into our world. You might space these emails out three, five, seven days apart. But you're building a sequence of these. We have one at Exposure Ninja. I think it's about a year long, might be about a year long where we're just sending them fairly regular emails, but

10:02:30we've got all of these sequences built on which are basically just sharing our best stuff with them in a way that makes them want to engage with it. and we're just looking to build a relationship, demonstrate credibility. Okay, let's talk about review collection. So, you should be automating the collection of your reviews. And here

10:02:46is how to do it. Um, if you're an e-commerce business, you can send out uh an email requesting reviews for the product. Normally, completed order plus 3 days if you've got really fast shipping. If you've got slower shipping, like if your products are taking, you know, a day to be fulfilled and two days to arrive, then obviously you want to do it from three days from when they're actually going to be receiving it. But we want to send out review request emails to people who have completed their order, usually pretty quickly. We want to get them while they're still, you know, they've opened

10:03:21the thing that, oh, this looks great. Get them to leave a review. Uh if you're a service or software company, obviously it depends on your sales process, how long it takes to get the sale and how often people are using the software. So you know if it's like a one month onboarding process with the software and you know people take on average a month to start filling their stuff in, you don't want to start asking them for reviews very early on. You might want to delay that for a month or a month and a half until they've had a good chance to

10:03:48play with it. Okay. Uh you also want to offer people a range of review methods. Now, where do you ask for reviews is quite a common question. Should we be using Google reviews? Should we be using um you know, should we be using FIFO, Trust Pilot? The answer is yes. Yes, you should. Yes to all basically. But when you're starting out, you really want to get reviews in two places. You usually want reviews in Google My Business. So this is uh if I just show you here if you just Google your business name as long as you manage this um in uh on you know as long as you

10:04:28manage it on Google then when you Google your own business name you'll see your Google My Business listing here where you want to request reviews from people all you need to do is get go down to get more reviews and then you will get a link that you can copy. Just click that and it copies the link. And then in your automation sequence after someone's purchased from you or after they've been a customer for a week or a month, however long makes sense for your, you know, product usage cycle. You want to say, "Hey, um, hope you've been enjoying working with us so far. Just to let you

10:05:02know, we really value our customer reviews. They make a huge difference." And lots of customers tell us that that one of the reasons they purchase from us is from the fantastic reviews. So, we really appreciate this. we would love to ask if you would be willing to leave us a review. Here is the link to do it. And then you just give them that link. That shortcuts their process to leaving a review on your Google page. Okay? And this is one of the main places that you want to collect reviews because then you see it right up here or in your Google listing if you're showing up in a map

10:05:33pack. If you're a local business, you'll see that right in the map pack and you want to have more reviews than your competitors. So, get your reviews on uh on Google My Business. We also um get reviews on Facebook as well. So, you'll see that we've got lots of reviews on our Facebook page. Uh we also use reviews.io, but whether you use reviews or FIFO or Trustpilot, you know, all of these are basically around the same thing. If you notice that customers are starting to leave reviews for you on one of these platforms, then it can be a good idea to sign up for that platform

10:06:06and collect more reviews from them as well. But we'd recommend choosing one third-party review thing like Trustpilot, FIFO, reviews.io and then use Google as well because really important that you've got some good reviews on Google. And we are not afraid of asking customers or leads or people who've worked with us to leave us a review on multiple locations. We're not afraid to do that because some people won't have a Google account. Some people will have, you know, they've been locked out of Trust Pilot or whatever because they signed up with a wrong email, you know, all this type of stuff. So, if you ask a different uh different places, that can

10:06:42really help. Okay, so automate review collection and you want to time that as part of your indoctrination sequence or probably more likely if you're automating your sales process and your follow-up. um when you know when someone has become a customer of yours, you want to time that review collection email to go out a period of

10:07:03time after they've become a customer. Okay, so that's review collection. And next, we're going to talk about offers and the sorts of offers that you can make to your list. Now, I want to introduce you to a a concept which was taught to me by a guy called Nick James, who is he's a very good marketer. He runs lots of big events with lots of different speakers and um he's used this process like getting people to go to a

10:07:30live event is hard work. It really is. So if you're going to market to get people to go and buy a ticket for a live event, you've got to know what you're doing. And here's how Nick does it. Most pe and by the way, often he's driving cold traffic to these events. So he's getting people who are new to his world to come to London for like two or three days. They got to get a hotel. They got to get travel. They got to buy a fairly high cost ticket. So it might be500,000 for a ticket like $700, $1,200, $1,500 for a ticket to this two or three day

10:08:05event. And they've got to sort out all the logistics around it. So it's a pretty difficult sale if I'm honest. And he's driving cold traffic to these ticket pages to sell. So it's quite a difficult gig. Now he uses email in a really savvy way to do this. Whereas most people will run an ad and they'll run an ad to a product page to an offer, right? Buy

10:08:29this thing. The advert talks about the thing. They go on the page. We're going to try and sell you the thing. The trouble is if they don't buy, they're gone, right? You might be have pixelled them so you can follow up and you can retarget to them, but you don't have their contact details. you can't follow up with that

10:08:49person. So, that's a bit of an issue. So, what Nick does instead is he will run ads to an early bird to a waiting list. Okay? So, this is what that sequence looks like. So, he'll run an ad to an early bird waiting list, sign up for the email list to be the first to be notified about when these tickets go on sale. He'll then have a dripfed sequence of emails that people receive. So once they sign up, once they've given their contact details, they go into an automated sequence or they go into an email list where he sends out broadcasts to them. And there's usually four steps

10:09:26in this sequence. Okay? So the pitch in the initial ad, this bit is there's going to be this incredible event. You want to come to this because there's going to be these amazing people. It's not available yet. Sign up for the early bird list and we'll let you know when it's available. Now, of course, this is a much easier pitch to make than pay a,000 pound for a ticket and find a hotel in London and stay here for three days. Much easier pitch to make. Just we'll let you know when it's going to be available and how much it's going to cost. So, this means the conversion rate

10:10:01on those ads is much higher and they're collecting a lot of emails which they can market to. And of course, if someone's not available for this particular event, they can then, you know, sell them the next event next time there's an event that because they've got that email address or whatever. So, the sequence of emails is this. The first email or the first group of emails will be like, right, this early bird launch is coming. Here's what you're going to get if you sign up during the early bird sequence. So, there's going to be some sort of offers. there's going to be some sort of discount because

10:10:35you're early bird because you've signed up early. Right? That's the first group of emails. The next group of emails is right, the early bird launch has happened. The early bird is live. You need to come and sign up to get these discounts. So, this is the second batch of emails that they're sending and they'll get a whole bunch of people that sign up through that process. The third group is more information about what the thing is going to include. It's more information about the different speakers, uh, some testimonials from people who've been here before. There's a bit more of an in-depth sales piece to try and pick up the people that haven't

10:11:10already been converted. And then finally, there's going to be a public launch, which is when the tickets go on general sale, and they'll promote that as well. So, we've got this kind of sequential process where people, if you're really slow to make a decision about these things, you get this nice sequence of emails that feels relatively low pressure and gives you lots of different opportunities to buy based on how ready you are to take a decision. So, it's a really good way of running offers to people. And of course, the conversion rate of the whole system outperforms the conversion rate of just trying to get

10:11:47someone straight from an ad to purchase. So, you can use this approach if you have, you know, launch sequences. Let's say that you've got uh you're an e-commerce. I I had this today from an e-commerce direct consumer brand. Am I going to see the email? No. Um I had this today from a direct to consumer uh fitness brand or clothing brand and they had their new range coming in, right? So

10:12:11they was announcing their new range. Come and shop now. Early bird discount, you get exclusive access, blah blah blah. Fantastic way of doing it. Uh so you can use it if that's your approach. You can also do it even if you're a service company like we've used this as exposure ninja when we're testing out a new service or a new course or a new training product that we've got that we're going to have an early bird where it's a beta version where we're looking for people to test it out to come and give us some testimonials to help us build some case studies for our later

10:12:42marketing. So we need people to sign up and come in and play with it now. You can join the early bird list. You're going to get some sort of discount as an incentive for doing that. So, it's a really effective thing to do. So, some more tips for running offers to your private list. So, this is running offers to your email list rather than just running offers say on your website or running offers through ads. Lots of advantages to running offers to your private list because it means all of these things. So, firstly, uh you can add non-public incentives to upgrade. So, what that means, let's say

10:13:17that you've got a new product or a new service that you want to promote, you want to launch, and you want to incentivize people to purchase, maybe by offering a discount or some sort of free gift. You might not want to put this on your website, but you might want to give this to your email list subscribers to reward them for your loyalty. If you put it on your website, it's going to be indexed. you know, everyone is going to be getting that even if they didn't need

10:13:43that to incentivize them to purchase. Whereas, if you keep it private, you don't have to give that away to people that were going to purchase from your website anyway. Um, you can reduce offer fatigue. So, if you're constantly just running promotions on your website, people can get very tired of that and you can build up a reputation with your brand of just being a discounter. We had a client that was chronic for this. So, luxury fashion retailer, but um every time on their website, there's some huge banner like discount, discount, sale, sale sale. And their goal was to make more full price purchases. But the trouble is they're

10:14:24not going to do this because they're constantly banging on about this sale. Now, when we spoke to [snorts] them, we found out it's because at the end of each season, they've got a whole bunch of stock that they need to clear. But rather than, you know, promoting on their website, they've got all this

10:14:37stock that they need to get rid of. Well, let's keep that stuff private. Let's keep that stuff to a private email group where we can send out emails promoting this clearance stock, but we don't soil the rest of the traffic coming to the site that would have been happy to buy the full price products from this season instead. Right? So, we can reduce this sense of offer fatigue and reduce this um kind of discount

10:15:01reputation if you like. Uh, we can also behaviorally behaviorally target people based on their activity. If you're running a few different offers to people via email, you can see which ones they're clicking on and you can use this to segment them in different lists according to their interests. Okay, let me say that again. Let's say that you're running um let's say that you're running some offers to your email list and you're saying uh we've got discounts on men's clothes and women's clothes or uh we are offering some discounts on our VAT tax accounting firm or tax accounting service or we have a free IT audit for IT managers

10:15:47that are feeling stressed or if you're feeling really good but you're expanding then we've got a free expansion guide so you and click that. So you can click here. Now when people click on any of those links in your email system, you can tag them, right? So if I'm clicking on discounts for men's clothes, I I might get tagged as interested in men's clothes. What that means that is that they can put me in a separate email list where the offers they're showing me, the products they're showing me are men's clothing. Okay? That means that they can tailor the content specifically to what

10:16:21the audience is interested in. We do this a lot. We want to segment our list based on their interests and their behaviors, what they're actually interested in. Because, you know, if I'm a female buying clothes for myself, it doesn't matter how good the offers are. If you're sending me men's clothing, I'm not going to be interested in that. Whereas, if I can somehow identify through my behavior, through the links I'm clicking that I'm female, then you can tailor the content to me and I'm going to get you're going to get much better resonance with me. So, um here's one example of that that we did uh when

10:16:55we were running a physical workshop, right? A physical workshop a few years back in London. Really a huge amount of effort running physical workshops. Um and one of the things that we did was we surveyed people to find out the location. We surveyed using behavioral targeting, right? So we surveyed people to find out the location based on how many people clicked on links for different locations. That allowed us to choose where we were going to host this thing. We surveyed them based on ticket cost or more specifically we asked them what their priority was. Was it, you know, in a luxury venue which would cost more or

10:17:33was it saving money or was it somewhere in between? That allowed us to set the price at a range that we thought people would buy. And then we also chose the uh the topic based on people's event based on people's interests. So we basically created this event by looking at how people were clicking on different links to see which was going to be the most popular event that we could run because we'd never run anything before. Once we'd done that, we started doing promotion for it and we started selling tickets and it was going well. But then we thought, what if we could take this to the to the to another level and what

10:18:10actually we're going to do is find out what people's main objections are. So, we ran this to people who hadn't bought the ticket but had signed up to the early bird list. So, if you hadn't bought your ticket, but you had signed up to the early bird list, you got this. As you registered your interest for the workshop, I wanted to ask what your primary reason was for not booking the ticket. And then we said, is it because you're not available on that date? Is it because of the ticket cost? Or is it because of the topic? Is it because of the event location? Or, I do want to

10:18:44come, I just haven't booked yet. Now, based on what people clicked, they then got a different email sequence. So, the people that weren't available on the date or the event location wasn't right, they got promotion offers for the event recordings because if you're not available on the date, doesn't matter how we objection handle you, you're not available, right? I'm going to my brother's wedding, right? I'm not coming to your event, Tim. doesn't matter what how what you well I might be able to convince you but it's probably a bad idea for you to come to the event. So instead we'd sell them the event

10:19:19recordings which you can watch forever. If people were complaining about the ticket cost, I can't remember what we did here, but we probably talked about everything that they were getting for that money and then somehow anchored that price against something else. Like, if you were working with us, it would have cost, you know, £15,000 for this information, but you know, £149 for the ticket and, you know, we're going to be there and stuff. The topic doesn't interest me. Well, we're not going to try and resell you. If you're not interested, you're not interested. So, I'm not going to try and objection handle that. Um, or I do want to come. I

10:19:51just haven't booked yet. We would then send you a sequence which kind of prodded you and made sure that we were saying right we've only got five tickets left or 15 tickets left or however many tickets left so that you were incentivized to come. So this was a way of people basically you know those story books where you choose your ending. Well this is a way of you choosing your objection handling right? So you get a a sequence which is targeted to the particular objection that you have. So think about how you can use this. Don't just look at this and go, "Oh, that's

10:20:20cool. The ninja's had a good idea. Great." Think about how you can use this. How can you use this behavioral targeting to work out what your audience is most interested in, the aspects of your product or the features that you're selling? How can you work out what they're most interested in so that you can run targeted offers to them? And how can you also use that same behavioral targeting to overcome their objections by allowing them to flag, ah, it's a

10:20:47price objection, right? Boom. All right. Automated sequence. Here comes your voucher code. Or it's a delivery problem. Okay, great. How can we make this? How can we fix this for you? Or, you know, uh, my business is too small. Okay, right. Well, here's a partner that we work with which we can refer you to who works with smaller businesses and they're giving us an affiliate commission. So, this is all about helping us to kind of chunk down your main email list into smaller segments that you can then run targeted messages to. So that is the offers component. So so far we've looked at priming. This is your automated

10:21:22indoctrination sequence which sends people a range of stuff like um how-to guides. It sends them case studies positioned as how to it sends them general help. We've also looked at collecting reviews automatically and how to do this on Google and also using a third party review system as well. And then we've looked at offers and how you can send different offers to your list

10:21:45based on their interests. Now, let's talk about follow-ups. So, for conservative or consultative sales like Exposure Ninja, like a service business, if you have a sales process where you one of your team is going to be talking to the customer, figuring out their needs, putting together a proposal, you can use this process that we're going to look at now to automate the follow-up in that sequence, allowing you to scale your sales operations

10:22:14significantly. If you're an e-commerce business, this is all about inactive user re-engagement. Okay? So, someone signs up for your, you know, your first uh shop voucher code, but then they go quiet. This follow-up process is what you activate to get them back in, to get them thinking about you again. So, I'm going to talk you through the how we use this at Exposure Ninja in our sales process. So our sales process has

10:22:46four elements before the sign up. Okay. So request the free marketing review. This is how everyone comes in. We have a very standardized pitch. All of our marketing focuses on request your free review. So once we've done the review, if we think that we might be able to help the business, if we think that we might be a good fit, we will arrange a call with them and we'll talk through their goals. We'll talk through how we can help. We'll give them an indication of price. If it sounds like it might be a good fit, we will then put together a plan for them. This is our proposal. We

10:23:13don't call it a proposal because that's purely sales. We call it a plan um because this is the plan of the work that we're going to be doing together. If they like that, we have a call to talk through, answer any questions they might have, and then we get them signed up. Okay, so that's the process. Really,

10:23:27really straightforward. So, this process has basically always been the same since I started the company. Um, the free marketing review has really helped us because it means all of our marketing can focus on one call to action. No matter the size of business, the type, the service that we're offering, really clean, really simple, standardized the delivery of the review. We can train people on the review. We can get them from zero to review beast in about 50 reviews. It's

10:23:53just a case of doing reps. So, how do we fix the followup? How do we do the followup? Because we're doing a lot of these reviews, right? we get, I don't know, 150, 110, 150 requests for reviews a week. If we're trying to follow up all of those, like we can do a review fairly quickly. We can do a review in 20 to 30 minutes, but if we're then trying to follow up all of those that we've done, that's an incredibly timeintensive process. So, what we do instead is we

10:24:24follow up with them automatically. So, here's how this process works. Once someone has received the review from us, so our sales team or our consultants team will will do the review then they'll put the review in our email marketing system infusionoft. Once they've put that the review link in the email marketing system they'll mark that the review has been done and everything from there is automated. So, what happens is the email goes out automatically to the review recipient

10:24:55with a link to book the follow-up call. That all happens automatically. We've templated that. If the person doesn't book a link, they then get an email a couple of days later to say, "Oh, um, here's a review again. Just wanted to make sure that you'd seen it." Right? Happens automatically. If they haven't, well, they get another one which says, "Oh, by the way, if you had any questions following the review, you know, you can book the call with us." So, what we're doing here is we're gently nudging them. We've put the time in to get the review. We want to make sure they've actually seen it. After

10:25:28that, we send them another email that's like, "Hey, um, just checking everything's okay. So, you requested your review. We haven't heard from them." So, all of that is automated. And the goal of all of it is to get someone to book the call, right? Once they book the call, this sequence stops. So, we're not just constantly, you know, pounding

10:25:45them. Well, I've already booked my call. Why are you why do you keep asking me? So, that's the review follow-up sequence. Now, once we've had the call with them, we then might put together a plan for them. And then we do exactly the same thing with the plan. So, when we've built the plan for them, we send it out. That goes out automatically. And

10:26:04then there's another follow-up sequence. Hey, have you checked out the plan yet? Um, hey, have you booked the call following the plan yet? So, this is like two or three days between each of these emails. And then again at the end, hey, just wanted to check to see if you're okay. And what this does is it nudges your customers for you, right? You don't have to put that work in. Imagine in a typical sale, we might have three, four emails. We might have some calls going out. If all of this is being done manually by your team, it's bogging them down. It's reducing the number of leads

10:26:37that they can process. And basically a lot of this should be standardized anyway because if your sales team is busy they might not be following up properly you know yada yada yada. Now I wanted to touch a little bit more on this you okay email because we use okay emails a lot at exposure ninja and there's lots of different flavors of these you okay emails. So we check that people are okay. We kind of prod the body um after the review and after the plan, but we also do it at various times in our marketing sequence. So, for example, if someone hasn't if someone's been through our sales process, let's

10:27:16say they've requested a review from us, I might follow up with them or I might follow them. There's an automated sequence which follows up with them on my behalf after, you know, a few weeks or something and it'll say an email like this. Hi, mind me asking for any additional candid feedback about why you decided not to explore working with us further and if there's anything that we could have done differently. Honest feedback is great, isn't it? So, this is an

10:27:45automated email that goes out to people. Gosh, I look young in that photo. Um, this is an automated email that goes out to people, very, very open. Um, it's very personal, so it's quite difficult to ignore. And it gets a lot of responses. This gets a lot of responses and it allows me to start talking to people. Now, I'm not just, you know, talking to them for the sake of having a conversation because the stuff that comes back here is really interesting. So, sometimes people will

10:28:14say things like, "Oh, do you know what? I didn't receive the emails." Okay, great. So, we've got a deliverability issue on one of the consultants email addresses. Great. Let's go and fix that. Or someone might say, "Yeah, do you know, I love the review, but uh you know, this person made an assumption about my business which wasn't quite accurate, and it made me think that, you

10:28:32know, you don't really know us at all." Okay, great. So, that's a training thing that we can, you know, bed into the consultancy process. Sometimes people say things like, "I just haven't got around to it, but I fully intend to work with you, by the way. Love the videos, love the podcast, love the book." In which case, I'll say, "Great. Thank you

10:28:47so much. Glad you like those things. Have you left us a review? So, this allows you to kind of have conversations. And whether these emails come out from you or whe they come out from, you know, someone else in the business, another character in the business, it can be a good idea to have like a third party, a separate person to just drop them an email. If they haven't responded to the, you know, the main person that they were talking to, then this can be useful to have them coming from a separate person. Now, I used to run a very high ticket mastermind and I ran the numbers on this email in

10:29:19preparation for that mastermind one week and in the last seven days before presenting at the mastermind, I'd had 12 responses to this particular email. One person offered me free accounting for myself and Exposure Ninja. Uh, two people said they had missed the email, right? So, they were interested, but they'd missed the original email. so I

10:29:41could just get the person to resend it. Uh, three times there was an opportunity for a downell. So, the thing that we'd um, you know, pitched or suggested to them was good, but it was a little bit more advanced than they were ready for. Uh, three people gave us testimonials saying how amazing the review was. And three people said, "It's good. It's just not right for us yet." Right? That's just in one week. Okay. From these automated emails. Now, if these automated you okay emails hadn't gone out, all of that feedback, all of that stuff would have just been lost. So, it's a great way of triggering people

10:30:20to, you know, take an action or whatever. Uh, but also, you can get some good stuff out of it, too. Now, if you're an e-commerce business, I love this approach because very few e-commerce businesses have an automated email from like the founder or someone high up in the business that says, "Hey, by the way, just wanted to ask why you hadn't purchased from us. Is there anything about our range that you're not fancying? Is there anything that you're not digging?" Or when a product has gone out to someone, hey, I noticed you hadn't left us a review yet. You know, if they haven't clicked the review link,

10:30:50is there anything that you didn't like about the product? Is there anything that you would change? like if you were me, what would you do differently for this business? By running these sorts of things, you can just collect this qualitative feedback. It keeps you in the loop as business owner because you can get kind of lost. You can get uh distance from the front line. But getting these you okay emails and having them come from your voice gives you maybe five, six, 10, 20 little nudges per day, which just allows you to keep in touch with how your customers are

10:31:20feeling. really really powerful technique. Okay, so that is automated follow-up. Um, if you're an e-commerce business or even if you're a service company, you might also want to consider re-engagement sequences to inactives. So, what does this mean? This sounds like jargon, Tim. Yeah, I'm it's jargon, but we're going to talk about it. So, re-engagement means if someone has been in your let's say that you've had someone in your email list for like 90 days and they've done nothing, right? they haven't opened an email, they haven't clicked on anything, they haven't been on your website for 90 days, we would call them an inactive subscriber. So, what we need to do is we

10:32:01need to re-engage that person. We need to get them active again. We need to get them opening the emails, clicking on stuff, remembering why they were interested in the first place. So, win backs are a way of doing this. And win backs are typically like stupidly lowpriced stuff, okay? Like you're basically proddding a dead body here. This person is as good as dead. If they haven't engaged with you in 90 days by any means, they're probably basically dead. So what you might do is you might send them a stupidly lowpriced offer like, you know, we might send an offer for one of our books for like a pound or

10:32:38something, right? And all we're trying to do is prod this body and get them back to life. This is the CPR just to get them back to life, to get them engaged with us so that we can have another shot at building a relationship with them. If you're e-commerce, you might send them a crazy voucher code or you might try and shift some of your old dead stock to them at a ridiculously low price. You're just looking for a sign of life so that you can then put them back in your main sequence and you can start

10:33:06talking to them again. You might also want to send them uh like uh surveys or quizzes, lapse, customer reactivation. So, let's say someone's bought from you, but they haven't bought from you again for another 180 days. Well, this might be someone that you kind of want to re-engage again. They basically might be inactive if 180 days, you know, you would have expected them to purchase from you again. If they're lapsed, you might want to prod them again. So, you can again send them stupidly low priced

10:33:38offers. You're proddding the dead body. You might also want to send them like a survey or a quiz. Um, you know, a quiz can be great. You know, what type of athlete are you or what type of business owner are you or something like that where it's just like a fun thing just to get them clicking and engaging on your email. Find out what type of, you know, whatever you are. And then you've got some quiz with a scoring system. Just a great way of getting them re-engaged so they're reading your emails again. Um, you might also want to send them content, too. So, you might want to send

10:34:07them guides or tutorials, stuff that doesn't have a pitch. You're just sending them stuff to benefit them so that they start thinking about you again. Also, for people who haven't engaged with your website after 180 days. So, lots of different times when you might categorize someone as inactive. But what you don't want to do is just ignore these people or keep sending them the same old same old stuff because if they're not reading it, if they're not opening and engaging with it, then worst case that might impact your spam score if you're sending out a lot of stuff that's not being engaged with. So you really need to either get

10:34:42those people engaged or maybe even put them on a different list where you email them much more infrequently. Um because, you know, otherwise you're going to you're going to impact your email deliverability. So, that is the offers component. We talked about priming, review collection, offers, uh follow-ups. That was the follow-ups and loyalty as well. Sorry. Um and now we're going to talk about

10:35:04influence and advocacy. So, influence and advocacy. Um, once someone has purchased from you, one of the things that you can run to them in your automated sequence once they've triggered that, you know, they've made a purchase is what we call a UGC sequence or a userenerated content sequence. And what this is all about, this is particularly popular in e-commerce is let's say that you you know you're selling these water bottles and um a week after I get this uh in the post and I'm you know I've I've been using it. I get an email from the company that says we're running a contest. um people who show who send us

10:35:45a picture or post a picture on social with this particular hashtag. Every month we send uh the best picture, you know, £100 in gift vouchers or we send them a, you know, the latest edition of the bottle or whatever. We send them a free skin or, you know, whatever. And what you're really trying to do is you're trying to get people to post what's called userenerated content. So content which is generated by the users rather than you. You're trying to get them to basically be an advocate or be an influencer for your product on social

10:36:16media. Don't just think that this only applies to e-commerce, right? If you're B2B, if you're selling software, why not test this on LinkedIn? We're looking for people who are going to, you know, give us amazing case studies about how this software has improved their business productivity. If you share this on LinkedIn, use the hashtag. Every month we pick the most incredible case study to promote on our website and we give them a free month of software or we give them extra user licenses or we give them access to our beta program or we give them a free implementation consultation or something. Right? So, you're offering an incentive and it can be quite a

10:36:58powerful incentive because you're only offering it once, but you want to spur lots of people to post about it because you you've then got basically lots of influencers for your product. So, this is called a UGC sequence and you can run it as a follow-up once someone has purchased or once someone has signed up

10:37:14for your service. You can also ask for referrals too. Now you can use um you know referral softwares but honestly one of the best ways of doing this is just to have an automated email coming from the founder or someone senior in the business. Just looks like a personal email that says hey hope you've been enjoying working with us. Really love to know who are three people who you think might benefit from this. Forward this email and we'll give you both a free month of our

10:37:43service. Right? Really really simple. Doesn't need to be anything fancy. Just make it easy for them to refer people. Don't force them to jump through hoops. Just allow them to just forward the email and then if that person replies, then both people, you can see the email address that has come from, both people get the free month or the whatever the incentive is. So, ask for referrals on automation. Um, if you are an e-commerce business, then if you have an affiliate or partner program, you can potentially give people their own voucher codes which they can use or you can say to, you know, follow up with people and say,

10:38:17"Hey, you know, if you really love this product, we actually offer an affiliate program where we'll give our customers commission." You know, my protein, this is one of the things that they did in the very early days to grow. Um, if you don't know my protein, e-commerce direct to consumer, I think in the early, you know, 2008, I want to say 2008 to 2012 was a time period where they would send out a voucher code with their products and the voucher code when you gave it to someone else, that person used the voucher code to get a discount, but that gave you points as well. So, it's an

10:38:54affiliate program, but you didn't have to sign up. You were automatically enrolled. So once that person used the voucher code, they would then get a discount on their products, but you would get a discount because you get these points in your account. And what this meant was you'd get people like sticking their affiliate codes to the machines in gyms, right? All of a sudden, they turned all of their customers into affiliates. It's freaking

10:39:21brilliant. And they grew the business. They sold to the hut or the hut group as it then became which then became THG and now it's a cornerstone property of THG and it was built primarily through this voucher code thing because honestly that business you know the word of mouth component of it was significant. So you can build that sort of thing. Obviously you know teaching you how to do that is beyond the scope of this but if you're on Shopify there are like plugins and extensions that allow you to do it. Same

10:39:49with Woo Commerce um if you've got that. So you can have a play with that. So you can follow up with people automatically giving them these voucher codes or um if you're on a partner program, you know, you might have a a much more kind of bespoke partner program like at Exposure Ninja, we have a partner program where we'll sign up agencies and consultants and we will work with their clients and allow them to add their consultant fee on top as long as it's being communicated to the client. So we'll have that partner program. will have an email sequence which says, "Oh, by the way, if you're an agency or you're a

10:40:23marketer and you want to sell Exposure Ninja services to your clients, we have this partner program. Just hit reply if you're interested and we'll send you the details." Okay, so in that sense, it's a bit more automated than the automated voucher code, but then the volume is much lower. So, that makes total sense. So, that's influence and advocacy, and you can build that into your follow-up

10:40:44sequence as well. Okay, the final element in the profit uh model is testing and research. Pretty straightforward here. So, with your email list, you don't need to go out to the general public to test new ideas for products or services or features that you want to include. You can test this to your email list. And by using the behavioral targeting triggers like people clicking on links and being tagged, you can then see how popular certain options will be if you were to add them to your products. So a few things that you can do uh running net promoter score. This is a really important component of uh kind of

10:41:24customer research. So, we'll set an automated email sequence that goes out every month to clients which says on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend Exposure Ninja? And that is automated. So, it goes out every month. And then we get the survey results and we can see, okay, how are we trending over time? Which clients do we need to check in on? Which clients are really happy? Where might there be some opportunities for upselles? That type of thing. So automating your MPS collection is a really good idea and making sure it doesn't just happen once. It needs to happen on a regular basis if that's

10:42:01relevant for your business. But really powerful. If you don't know about net promoter score, the idea is basically that you can um measure someone's customer satisfaction by just asking them the one question. How likely would you be to recommend us to a friend or colleague? Right? And then it's a scale of 1 to 10. I think 8 to 10 is that they're a promoter. Maybe six and seven is that they're neutral and then

10:42:23anything less than that is a detractor. So if they score you a seven, that's not good, right? That's neutral at best or maybe even bad. You really want people scoring 8 to 10. Uh the next thing you can do is run surveys about products or service features. So think about the seminar that we ran. We designed every aspect of that from the price point, the subject, the location based on our customers feedback. We weren't going to design a really high-end seminar in, you know, Edinburgh only to find out that actually, you know what, all of our customers were in the USA and they wanted something that was really cheap

10:42:58and they didn't want to they weren't interested in the topic that we design that we'd planned to talk about. That would be a complete waste of time, right? So, we weren't going to do anything until we knew that what we were going to pitch was going to land well, that this was going to be popular with people. So you can survey about product or service features. If you're thinking about adding something new to your business, you know, if you're working on the next generation of your product and you want to know what people really care about, well, why go through all the product development only to find out

10:43:26that actually the thing you've been building they don't really care about? What they really want is they want it to be cheaper, right? Well, let's find out information out through surveys first. Uh you can run split tests. We do this um at EN. We will do things like split test different thumbnails for YouTube videos. So, we'll send out variations of emails and we'll see which one people click on. Um, or we'll ask people's

10:43:50advice, which thumbnail do you prefer? And then we'll use that to make our thumbnail. Right? Really, really straightforward. Uh, or you can test this with different headlines. So, most email marketing platforms, you can split test different headlines. You send the same email out, but you can change different components like the text in the email or the headline in the email. And that allows you to work out which one is kind of sitting best with your audience. And then what you might do is you might we might test we might AB test a certain headline to a small section of the audience. We'll pick the winner and

10:44:25then use that to the rest of the audience. Okay? So we know that email is going to get read because we've already tested the two headlines. we've worked out which is the winner. We'll then use that winner for the rest of the emails. And then in the follow-up emails that we send, later emails, we'll use the same principles for the winner obviously

10:44:42rather than the loser. Okay. Uh let's talk about some email marketing tools. Um now, when we talk with Abby in the interview video, we're going to talk in more detail about when you would use some of these tools. But the main tools that we use on a daily basis for email marketing, firstly, Clavio, really great email marketing and SMS marketing for e-commerce. So, integrates nicely with Shopify. If you're an e-commerce business, Clavio is a really good option. It allows you to do things like, you know, the product reviewed C catchups. It allows you to run uh basket um basket abandonment. So if someone has put product in their basket but they

10:45:23haven't purchased then you can run the basket abandonment through Clavio browse abandonment as well. So if they've been browsing for products but they haven't purchased then you can run browse abandonment where you run emails to pitch the products that they've been looking at even if they didn't add it to basket. So Clavio is great. Also integrates with text SMS really nicely

10:45:42as well. Active campaign is a great platform. I love active campaign. We would be using Active Campaign if it wasn't for some stuff which I'll talk to you about in a minute. But Active Campaign is great. It allows you to do lots of the behavioral targeting stuff that we're talking about. So if people click this link, then this happens. If people click this link, then this other stuff happens. It allows you to segment your list. It allows you to do loads of different automations and build rules and basically program stuff in. Okay, really, really cool tool. Mailchimp uh used to be really simple, has added a

10:46:18lot of functionality, allows you to do a lot of this sort of sequence and automation targeting as well. So, we never used to recommend Mailchimp. We now recommend it a lot more because it's added a lot of stuff in. Uh Infusionoft is the one that we use. Now, infusionoft, I have to be honest. Uh they sent me a they sent me an MPS thing actually. How likely would you be to recommend Infusionoft? And I said I think I said a three. So I wouldn't recommend Infusionoft except if you need CRM and automation built-in one. So with Exposure Ninja, we use Infusionoft as

10:46:53our our kind of lead processing thing. So we use it to process all our leads and we use it to do all the automation and all the follow-ups for our leads. So if we move a lead to a different stage in the pipeline that will trigger a whole sequence of automations and all marketing follow-up. So we need something that integrates the sales piece and the marketing automation which is why we use infusionoft because none of these do that. Okay? None of them allow you to have uh like a sales CRM

10:47:24and the marketing automation. Infusionoft does. Trouble is other than that pretty much it sucks. deliverability isn't great. The interface is horrible. It hasn't been updated for years and it's just a bit of a mess, also known as confusionoft, but it's incredibly powerful. It allows you to do pretty much whatever you want, which is why we are still using it. So, if you don't already have a tool, the

10:47:47question is which one should you use? Really simple answers. If you're e-commerce, I'd have a look at Clavio. Have a play with that. If you're not e-commerce, I would have a play with Active Campaign. It's the one that we find ourselves recommending most often. If you need sales and marketing integration, I would have a look at Infusionoft. It's a little bit similar to, you know, Salesforce and Parardot, but without the ridiculous, just insane cost. Okay, Infusionoft is relatively lowcost option. So, those are my kind of golden rules, but as with all of these things, I would have a play with them yourself. get to know them first because

10:48:26it's whatever suits you. Whatever you get on with is the thing that you're going to actually use. If you don't get on with it, you're not going to use it. So, it doesn't matter what how powerful the tool is if you're not using it. So, those are the elements of the uh the uh the predictable profit repeater. We have priming. This is your indoctrination sequence which um basically pitches your business to people but in a way that doesn't feel salesy. it doesn't feel a bit, you know, OTT. We've got automating the review collection. We've got running offers to people. And remember, we talked about the the kind of pre-launch

10:49:01sequence there as well. We've got follow-ups and getting loyalty from people. So, if you've got a consultive sales process, this is automating the follow-up at each stage of that sales process. If you're an e-commerce business, you can use exactly the same process to re-engage people that are like lost and dead. Uh, we've got influence and advocacy. So, this is the user generated content sequence and um asking for referrals and affiliate and partner programs. And then we've got testing and research, which can be testing things like headlines, um subjects, images, uh thumbnails, that type of stuff as well. And of course, product and service features. That

10:49:40ladies and gents is your star system. So, I'm going to take you through the worksheet for progression and then uh the final video in this is going to be the interview with Abby where she is going to uh talk to us about some of her experience working directly on client campaigns with email marketing and all of this marketing automation. So, I'll see you there. Okay. So, in your star system worksheet, you will see that there is a progression tab and this is a checklist. So, it's a checklist to kind of remind you of all of the things in each of these different sections. So, you see we've got priming, we've got

10:50:15review collection, we've got the offers and launches, follow-up, influence, advocacy, and testing and research. Okay? Now, not all of these will be relevant for you. So, if you answer no to some of them, that is completely okay, right? But this is designed to make sure that you're not necessarily forgetting anything that we've covered in the course. For example, we have an indoctrinction sequence for new leads or customers to introduce them to our business. Basically, every company needs this. If you've got any sort of email list, if you're building a list at all,

10:50:46you need something that does this. Okay? When people fill in a form to request a download or whether they're filling in a form to become a lead or they're filling in a form to get a voucher code, something needs to happen on the back end, which is your indoctrination sequence. And then here are some of the different things that you might want to

10:51:04include in your indoctrination sequence. We've got some tips about uh subject lines. And then we've got tips about email copy being written in an engaging and entertaining way rather than being dry and boring. Uh review collection. We got a couple of things here. So we're automating this and we're giving customers a range of different places to leave us a review. Uh then we've got offers and launches. So these are segmented between ecom and you know others so service companies software businesses and the this idea of building a launch email list uh before you launch something so you can collect all the people that are interested in

10:51:42potentially signing up as an early bird so that you can run offers to them without scorching the rest of your list. We've got some follow-up steps in here as well. We've got influencer and advocacy. So are we using UGC nurture? Um, do we have uh customer and client referral requests going out automatically? Do we have affiliate partner program as well? And then we've got some testing and research. So, fill all of this stuff in. And of course, you don't need to get implementing this stuff immediately. Many of it, much of it may go into the um the to-do list and prioritization. You can add email marketing stuff in here as well. You can

10:52:20give it a priority and you can track who it's assigned to, when it's going to be done, and when it's completed. Question, how many sales are you getting each day from your email list? All right, that was a pretty tough question to start with. Do me a favor, then head to analytics, open up the acquisition all traffic channels panel, and order your traffic sources by the number of goal completions. See where

10:52:47email is on that list. probably not high, right? Do you know what that is? That's lowhanging fruit. But if you think about it, your email list should be really predisposed to buy from you. After all, you've ended up with their contact details, presumably consensually, i.e. your email list has handed you their email address and said,

10:53:07"You seem to be all right. Pitch me." And yet, most businesses with email lists either chronically underuse them or really overuse them, but without any commercial success. Well, today this appalling travesty ends for you at least. I'm going to show you how to turn your email list into automated sales consistently. Now, the stuff I'm going to share in this video is based on our own email marketing work at Exposure Ninja, both for ourselves and for our

10:53:35clients that we do email marketing for. So, buckle up. We're going to look at some real life examples. So, let's do this. Let's start with some facts about email marketing. You want some facts? According to Kinsta, 4.03 03 billion people use email. Only 2.2 billion people use Facebook. Fact question. According to Adobe, which

10:53:58age group uses email the most? Wrong. It's millennials. According to a 2018 study by Adobe, millennials use email for an average of 6.4 4 hours per day with 41% of them checking work emails in bed. Whilst those older than millennials only used email a mere 5 hours a day. Wait, 6.4 hours a day. Have they definitely got their facts right? Okay, I think that's enough facts. Um, you know, email is important. It might not be as sexy as social media, but it probably should be in your top five marketing priorities. Now, I know what

10:54:35you're thinking. But Tim, we've tried email. We've sent out broadcasts. We've just seen declining open rates over the years. It just doesn't work for us. Yeah, I know. Here's the thing. Most email broadcasts that get sent out are really email broadcasts. So, let's break down some tips that you can use to take a radically different approach to your emails. Tip number one is to remember that email marketing is a personal communication method, or at least it should be. Think about it. When your boss or your team member or your family member emails you, what's the open rate on those emails? Well, it's 100%. The reality is that people read emails that

10:55:11matter and are personal. So why is the open rate for your mass broadcasts only 10%. Well, it's because they aren't personal and they don't matter to the recipients. So whether you've got an email list of 50, 5,000, or 500,000, how do you make something personal to a big group of people? Well, the key is segmentation. By breaking your email list into different sublists, you can categorize your email subscribers by things like the products that they're interested in, the actions that they've taken, maybe some characteristics or demographic information. This allows you to tailor the message to each different segment to be much more relevant to them than if you just broadcast to the entire

10:55:52list as a whole. So, let's say that you run, for example, an e-commerce store selling luxury clothing. You might have a whole bunch of new clothing that you want to send out to your email list. Well, you could either send all of your clothing out to everyone on the email list knowing that, for example, a lot of the females aren't going to be interested in the men's clothing and vice versa. Or what you could do is you could break your email list down into segments. For example, if you segment the purchases by brand, let's say these people here have bought Isa Miyaki clothing. Well, you might run a message

10:56:22to them saying, "Hey, we notice you really into Isaiah. Well, here's the new season. and here's the new collection for you to check out. Now, all of a sudden, that has much more relevance with that audience than if you just send out a mass broadcast to everyone. Or let's say that you're selling business insurance. That's the most boring thing I could come up with on the spot. So, by instead of sending your entire list a whole bunch of stuff, which is going to be really irrelevant and boring once you've bought business insurance, you really don't want to have to think about insurance until it's time to renew. What

10:56:50you could do instead is segment your list by renewal date. This would then allow you to run sequences up to the dates that people renew with things like top tips on how to lower their premium, how to make sure that they're covered for particular situations. So, you can see that personalization doesn't have to

10:57:05mean, oh, how are the kids? Personalization just means that you're timely and relevant to that individual. And segmentation makes that achievable at scale. Okay, so you're going to segment your list and you're going to send out more relevant and personal emails to each different segment of your list. What next? Well, it's time to think relationship first. Now, I would insert the kind of generic metaphor about you need to go on a first date before you ask someone to marry you, but it's all boring. We know this stuff, right? But here's the thing that every

10:57:34single one of your emails should do. Make the recipient fall in love with you more. Ew, that's a big statement. Let me explain. So, what makes you love someone? I don't know. Well, it's usually because of how they make you feel. They make you feel special, valued, hopeful, and you feel like your bond or connection matters. Now, you can and should replicate this in email. At Exposure Ninja, we favor a very personal style of email. And in fact, hundreds of thousands of emails go out every single month from us with my name on. And they're written in a very personal way. They're very friendly, informal in style, and they're giving

10:58:17without much expectation of something in return. I'm usually sharing things that we've learned about marketing and about how to grow a business through digital marketing. Here's an example. Hey Tim, hope you've had a good week so far. This is technically a bad email because there are multiple calls to action. Sorry, email gods. While we're here, that's

10:58:36probably a suboptimal opening line, too. Anyway, I've got two things that might be of interest to you. Nothing for sale. Thing number one, my YouTube channel. Did you know I have my own YouTube channel outside of the Exposure Ninja videos? Blah blah blah blah blah, etc., etc., etc. That's it. Have a smashing Wednesday heart. Tim CK. Now, this is not what you would call a professional email style, but we use it intentionally. [music]

10:59:01Why? Well, because I want to be helpful and because I want to be personal. That's why often when I'll have a call with someone the first time, they'll say, "Wow, this feels really surreal. It feels like I've known you for years and you have known me for years because we have had a relationship. I've been talking to you like we have a personal

10:59:19relationship and that builds a bond. Now, I know that this sort of personal email style isn't right for every business. It's definitely right for more businesses than you would think, but it isn't right for every business. For example, if you don't have a personal figurehead that you can write from, then I get it. You can't replicate this. But it's really important that you do take the approach of giving your business some sort of personality that people can identify with. It's very difficult to build a relationship with an inanimate object. Sure, some people manage it, but most of the time we build a relationship with something that has feelings and

10:59:57thoughts and values. And it's really important to replicate these in your communication. Remember, email is a personal communication style. So you need to think about that relationship and be personal in your communication. And you might say, "Yeah, but Tim, people build relationships with sports teams. These are entities." Yes, but people typically build a relationship with a sports team because they have built some sort of allegiance to the people inside that sports team. Now, here's a really interesting email which does a fantastic job of this from the Honest Beauty Company, Jessica Alba's business. Now, of course, this email uses plain English. It's very conversational. why these clean beauty

11:00:36faves are next level. Well, faves isn't the word. It means favorite, but her audience, their audience would use fave. So, that's perfect. It works. But the other thing that's really great about this email is it uses the voice of the audience. They clearly know who they're selling to and they're using voices from this group to communicate in the email. So, you'll see that each of these little snippets is a testimonial from someone and they're very plain English. They're using phrases like game changer. I'm not sure what witchcraft. Well, that's technically incorrect. We've got double exclamation marks. We've got I love this face wash. This is informal

11:01:13communication and it really works. Now, it doesn't make the business look unprofessional because the design and everything is slick. The product, whatever you're selling, has to be good and your audience has to be able to get that perception through your email. But the style of the communication can be more personal than you might imagine. And by the way, we'll come back to the strategy of using testimonials in your email a little later on. So, we've spoken in previous videos about the concept of indoctrination sequences. So,

11:01:39after this video, go and watch those. But for now, an indoctrination sequence is what is that? A timed series of emails designed to take your visitor on a journey. Now, along this journey, they pass through a series of way points designed to remove any fears or objections that they have about buying from you. whilst building the desire for exactly what it is that you sell. Adding desire, removing fear, adding more desire, generating the purchase. Yeah. All right. So, let's go through an example indoctrination sequence for a client of ours that sells

11:02:15designer glasses. So, this is the new subscriber indoctrination sequence.

11:02:29So the first email that they send you in this indoctrination sequence introduces the business. It tells you the story about the business and gives you a bit of background information. Then it takes you through the USPS, the reason that that business exists and their positioning statement. For example, the fact that they have a huge range of glasses in stock. They only stock designer brands. Their lenses are all manufactured in the UK. There's also a voucher code at the end as well, giving you an incentive to purchase now. So, by the time you've read this email, that business has differentiated themselves from their competitors. You're feeling pretty good about them, and you have

11:03:04some justification for purchasing from them against their competitors. But we don't stop there. The second email introduces their virtual try-on service. Now, this is really important because one of the key objections that people have about buying glasses online is the fit. How do I know they're going to look any good on me and

11:03:22I'm not going to look like H Blumenile? Well, the virtual try- on service actually answers that objection and it's actually better than going into store because it's so good and there are such a huge volume of glasses to try on. The third email in the sequence gives you some tips about eye health. This is really important and this is positioning. Yes, of course there's some value to the reader and by giving them tips on eye health, we are maybe nudging them towards purchase if they've been having headaches or whatever, but we're also showing that this business isn't purely about just making the sale. We're actually there to look out for the

11:03:56customers as well. There's also specific info on why the range of glasses that this business sells is designed to prevent eye health issues in the first place. So again, tying back to USPS and reason for purchasing, this email does that. The fourth email in the sequence gives you some tips on how to buy glasses. Also explaining why people choose designer glasses over cheaper options and taking you through some of the initiatives that the designer brands have built in to their glasses. Again, this is helping you to make a purchase through them. And it also gives the purchaser some ammunition to use against their logical brain when their logical

11:04:34brain says, "Why are you going to buy these glasses when you can get other ones cheaper?" This helps to position the designer glasses purchase as an investment. The fifth email in the sequence restates their USPS again, restates the voucher code, and nudges the recipient towards the purchase. So, here we've got a five-step process that positions the business, tells you their story, gives you USPS, helps you find the right pair of glasses for you with their try-on service, gives you tips about eye health, showing that they actually care about you, helps you make a purchase that you'll absolutely love, whilst also giving you some logical justification for making that purchase. And then

11:05:12finally, restates the USPS and asks for the sale. So all of this has been about building desire and removing fear. Answering those objections that people would have either for doing business with you or for buying the particular product or service that you're selling. Now another great way to remove objections is through the use of testimonials. And we saw the example earlier with the honest beauty company using their customers testimonials in their email body copy. Well here's an example from Kora again using their customers testimonial to remove one of the key objections that people have about their product. And of course, if you're B2B, then you can use your

11:05:47customer case studies or customer stories in the email copy of your website. Just don't forget to make them generic enough that they apply to the readers of your email. Nothing turns people off more than reading an email by someone about something that feels completely irrelevant to them. So, if for example, you sell business insurance, don't start by saying, "Here's some business insurance for this particular tiny little flower shop in this country." If you sell business insurance, for example, don't start your email by saying, "Business insurance for this flower shop." Because anyone who's not a flower shop is going to see that and think, "So what? Who cares?" So make

11:06:23your case studies and success stories generic enough, but be specific about the benefits that people got from working with you. And we have other videos that cover this in more depth. Tip number four is to make an offer. Now, obviously, making an offer is pretty essential for conversion optimization. And if you don't tell people what they are supposed to do next, they probably won't do it. So, it's a good idea to make an offer in your email marketing specific, relevant, and preferably with some sort of deadline. Here's an example from a business that has no affiliation with Exposure Ninja Patterson Papers. Now, you can see that this email has a

11:06:58picture of the sun at the top and then it has some information about the different products that you can buy with some pricing info. What are you supposed to do with this? I don't know. Where are you supposed to go? Who knows? Now, I didn't say this was a good example, and it's not. It's rubbish. It lacks all of the elements of a compelling offer. Now, the ultimate example of a compelling offer is the Exposure Ninja free website and marketing review. You know where this is going. If you need some help with your digital marketing, request a free website and digital marketing review from the team here at Exposure

11:07:34Ninja. Just fill in a short questionnaire on exposuringinja.com and we'll record a 15-minute video which shows you how to generate more leads and sales through your website. It's completely free of charge and totally awesome. So, what's in there? So, we have a specific offer which makes sense for people. It helps take them to the next step in our sales process and it's beneficial. It's actually attractive to them as well. So, this is the makings of

11:07:57a decent offer for your business. Remember, the thing that you offer has to be compelling. It has to be interesting for people. Sending people offers which aren't relevant for them is a good way to reduce your future open rate. So, don't do that. Okay. The final tip today is automation. If you want scale, you have to automate. Think about it. You might end up with different indoctrination sequences for these segments time to happen at certain intervals after someone has visited a page or purchase the product or not purchased the product. To run that manually is clearly not possible. So it's important that you automate as much

11:08:32of this as possible. And most email marketing platforms like Active Campaign, Keep or Infusionoft, Mailchimp give you the ability to set up automations. Now, let's talk about three basic automations that you can get set up for your business, whatever you sell. Firstly, your welcome sequence. So, this is the indoctrination sequence of emails that goes out to people when they first sign up with you. Now, this doesn't have to be the making a purchase. This might be them signing up through some email form on your website to download more information, get in contact, or whatever. So, this is what we looked at earlier where you're presenting the

11:09:08USPS, you're positioning the business, and you're giving them a reason to make a purchase from you. The second example is a restock or renewal sequence. So, this for example might be, let's say that you're selling a product and you know that someone is going to be repurchasing that product. Well, you can work out how often people on average repurchase that product and set up an automated renewal sequence that's time to go out to people when they are about to run out. We have a client that sells supplements and we know exactly how often people tend to repurchase. So, we've set up a renewal sequence which goes out to people when they're starting

11:09:46to run out that says, "Hey, you might be about to run out. It's time to make a repurchase." Now, if someone has stopped using the product, this can also nudge them back into reusing. The third basic automation that you can set up is a review request automation. So once someone has purchased from you or once someone has talked to you or consulted with you or whatever your initial offering is, you can then request them to leave a review on whatever review platform that you use. Now it's a great idea to automate this because usually asking people to leave a review gets a pretty low response rate and whoever's

11:10:20asking for the reviews can feel quite low motivation if they notice that for example only 10% of people are actually leaving a review. So by automating the asking that person never gets demotivated and it means the request always goes out. Okay then actionable steps time. The first thing that you're going to do is you're going to segment your audience. Now you can do this according to their behaviors, their interest, their product purchases, their purchase history, their service interest. Whatever segmentation you choose is going to depend on your business and how it best makes sense to segment and break up your list. But remember that the goal is that you can

11:10:58give much more tailored and personal email streams to each of these different groups. The second thing that you're going to do is think relationship first. If you can have all of your emails coming from a central persona, then that's great because your email subscribers will build a relationship with that person. If you can't do that, then it doesn't matter too much as long as you have a clear personality to the business. Make sure that you're talking in your customers language and that the persona the business has is something that people can actually identify with and like. Next, you're going to build desire and remove fear by setting up

11:11:36indoctrination sequences. Remember, these are a series of emails designed to take someone on a journey towards purchasing from you, even if they are cold. Then, you're going to present offers to your audience that are compelling, interesting, and if possible, have a reason for purchasing. Now, finally, you're going to automate all of this. This is the sort of thing that you want to build once, tweak a little bit once you're tracking and measuring and seeing what sort of conversion rates you're getting, and then formalize it all into an automated thing that you don't have to touch all the time. The goal of email marketing really is to run a massive section of

11:12:12your customer relationship building essentially on autopilot because this allows you to get on with the other things inside your business. Now, of course, you're going to be revisiting it. You're going to be tuning it. You're going to be adding new broadcasts. You're going to be making new promotions, but you always take the best of these and put them into your automated sequences so that you build up eventually a huge long stream of emails that might cover weeks, months, even years of someone coming into your business through your email capture forms. Today's video is dedicated to those things in life that aren't sexy, but are really important. You know,

11:12:50stuff like law, not sexy, but imagine a world without law or your internal organs. Pretty important for keeping you alive. But sorry to tell you, they're not particularly sexy. Well, today's video topic is another one of these things. And in fact, for a business is one of the most important metrics. But so few marketing managers ever focus on customer lifetime value or how much revenue you generate from each of your customers over their lifetime. Well, ends today. Let's go. Yeah, that was a pretty weird intro, but you catch my drift. Customer lifetime value is super important. In fact, it's one of the most important metrics of any business. And

11:13:33yet so few businesses and marketers ever focus on customer lifetime value. I totally get it, by the way, because I'm exactly the same. There's an attraction. There's something exciting and fun about going after new customers, about the idea of all these new marketing channels that we could be using, all this new traffic we could be getting. That buzz when you see someone purchase for the first time, or you see a whole bunch of new subscribers, existing customers, past customers. Yeah, sure. They're in there somewhere. They're in a list or on they're on my website somewhere. Maybe they'll repurchase again. That would be

11:14:07nice, I guess. But new customers. [laughter] Well, want to know who does take customer lifetime value really seriously? You don't care, do you? But if you did, drum roll. All of our fastest growing clients without exception. Because here's the thing. As digital marketing gets more competitive and businesses are willing to invest more in acquiring each customer, the onus becomes on how we can maximize the revenue from each of those

11:14:40customers, i.e. customer lifetime value. All it takes is for a few really aggressive [music] private equity funded businesses to move into any industry and massively overspend on customer acquisition. And pretty soon, the businesses that are just relying on first sale to make their profit cannot afford to compete any longer. And from there, it's down to

11:15:04maximizing customer lifetime value. Generating more revenue from each of the customers that comes into your business is a great way to insulate yourself against this risk. Not to mention that selling to existing customers is generally much cheaper, often free, compared to selling to new customers. So, in this video, we're going to look at some ways to increase your customer lifetime value. These are based on our analysis of some of the world's fastest growing companies, as well as our client work with some pretty sick beasts. And by the way, in today's video, we're going to be using examples from B2B and B TOC. I'm going to be showing you some

11:15:40live examples, but where possible, we're going to zoom out and look at the principles in play here. Because what I really want you to do is when you're looking at something in maybe a completely different market to yours, think, how can I apply this principle to my business? Cuz that's really where the value comes from any of this. [music]

11:15:58Ready? Wish I could do that. Let's go. So, when it comes to increasing customer lifetime value, we really have two levers to play with. The first lever that we can pull is increasing the number of purchases that each customer makes. say by selling subscriptions or by reactivating expired customers. The second lever that we have to pull is increasing the order value of each of those purchases. Say by offering additional add-ons or upsells or premium options. Of course, as with all of these things, the best results come to businesses that are able to increase the frequency or the number of purchases that people are making as well as

11:16:38increasing the value of each of those purchases. Now, we're going to look at examples of each. And firstly, we're going to start by breaking down the different ways that you can increase the number of purchases that customers make with you. One of the most popular ways of increasing the number of purchases that customers make with you is to bump them into some sort of subscription. One example of a business that's nudging customers into subscription in order to increase their lifetime value is Athletic Greens. Now, Athetic Greens sells this kind of uh this green powder stuff with all these minerals in and things like that. So, on their website,

11:17:12you can either buy a one-time purchase of the bag for £97, or you can see that they're really trying to nudge you into one of their subscription options, and we have two. We have the single subscription, which is £79, and notice how they're specifying the cost per serving to really highlight the benefit of subscribing. Or you can get the double subscription, which includes a bit more of an incentive. They also incentivize you with this shaker and this starter kit as well. Now, it's a smart move and it really makes sense, right? Because of course, if you're subscribing, then you're more likely to buy more product than if they're relying

11:17:46on you to take the initiative to repurchase every time. All this needs to do to make financial sense for them to offer is for them to get one more purchase out of you than they would have otherwise if they were just relying on your initiative to come back and make another purchase. Another way of nudging people into subscriptions is to actually offer the subscription as the default purchase method. So for example on Together we see how by default they're selling you into the subscription

11:18:11offering which adds this 10% discount. If you want to buy one time only you actually have to take an action to do that. But really the thing that I love most about this is that they allow you to choose the volume and the frequency of your subscription. essentially customizing your subscription according to your usage needs. This makes a ton of sense because it means that you don't end up with too much stock, which might nudge you into canceling the subscription altogether, but also allows you to increase your usage if that suits your lifestyle. I mean, subscriptions are everywhere, right? They're one of the trends in ecommerce. You can get

11:18:48subscriptions for everything, literally. Whether you want a baking kit for your children or you want to buy apocalypse survival items by subscription. I mean, what do you get for the person who has everything? Well, everything other than confidence about humanity's future hopes of survival. Now, subscriptions can be so valuable that we've even started seeing businesses that maybe wouldn't have previously relied on subscriptions moving into the subscription world. For example, GoPro, whose revenue always used to come from the sales of their devices, now has a subscription offering, giving you access to their cloud backups and a discount in their store. Aura Ring, which is like a health fitness tracker, like that one

11:19:34now has a membership, allowing you to optionally pay monthly for basically functionality that used to come from a one-time purchase. And it goes without saying, the reason that these companies are so keen to add subscription revenue to their business is because it is so high margin and it allows them to increase their lifetime value without investing anymore in marketing. Once you've got that customer, selling them into a subscription means that you continue to milk them forever without having to ever resell them. B2B companies can use subscriptions for things like maintenance packages and support. Notice here how software company Teleream has a premium support offering for their B2B software

11:20:15products, Screenflow. This gets you things like priority support through their ticket system and phone support. So think about what your business can offer on subscription. It might not be your core product. It might be a support product. It might be additional services or some sort of community features. The next way of increasing the number of purchases that your customers make is if you're selling something which is either consumed or needs to be renewed to run marketing campaigns that are about to enter this crucial renewal or repurchase cycle. One example of a B2B client that we work with sells an accreditation and this accreditation expires every year or

11:20:58two. So we did some work to help them increase the percentage of their members that renew their subscription. We set up automated email marketing campaigns that activated just before people were due to renew. This resold them on the benefits of this particular accreditation and encouraged them to take the steps to renew. But we didn't just leave it there. We also fed the user data of the people that were about to come up for renewal to Google and Facebook in order to run targeted ads to these people both on Google Display Network and through Facebook and Instagram. We also set up an automated workflow that fed the user

11:21:34data of the people that were about to come up for renewal to Google and Facebook so that we could run targeted marketing to them on Google Display Network, Facebook and Instagram, running display ads to emphasize again the benefits of renewing their subscription. This means that when people came up for renewal, they started getting emails about renewal and they started seeing ads about renewal. By covering our bases and not relying on any one marketing channel to start this renewal conversation, it means that if somebody for example doesn't see the email or doesn't see the display ads, we've still got a fallback method of contacting them. So this works well for any

11:22:12business where there is a defined period of membership, i.e. something needs to be renewed or it's a consumable product. Let's say for example that you're selling moisturizer. The first step you would want to take with this is to identify the average repurchase frequency. Now, if you're selling a year's membership to something, the repurchase is obvious. It's a year. But if you're selling something like a moisturizer, you would want to know how often people on average repurchase that product. What you then want to do is start the promotion for the repurchase or renewal before people are due to run out. What you don't want is for that

11:22:49person to run out of moisturizer, go online and start shopping for new replacement moisturizer. You want a chance to get them before they enter that new customer journey and start shopping. The same with the renewal. You want to start targeting people before they come up for renewal so that they already have in their mind and can begin selling themselves on the prospect of renewal. If you're a business that sells something where customers can upgrade, for example, you release a new version, then you can increase the purchase frequency by running promotions to your existing customers, advising them of the upgrade. This is an Aura ring. It basically tracks stats and gives me

11:23:31information. I think this is version two of the ring and late last year, Aura came out with version three. Now, they could have just hoped that I saw all the hype around the new version and decided to upgrade. But what they did instead was they ran a promotion to existing owners of the Aura Ring, explaining what the new version

11:23:51did and incentivizing them to upgrade. They offered a discount and free lifetime membership to their new subscription, which they added, which is a smart move because it would have cost them very little to get me to repurchase as opposed to getting someone new who started researching fitness trackers to purchase an Aura Ring for the first time. They passed some of that saving on to me as an incentive to make another purchase. Now, one of the great things about this strategy is that when Aura reached out, they didn't need to sell me on the overall benefits of owning an Aura ring. I already

11:24:26understand what it is and what it does. [music] So, they could tailor their marketing specifically to telling me what was new about the new version versus the one I had. Now, if we go back to Teleream and their product ScreenFlow, they do exactly the same thing. When you purchase a ScreenFlow license, every time they upgrade the product, you have to buy a new license, but you don't have to go back to the start and pay full price for it. They reach out with an offer to encourage you to upgrade. They also tailor their message specifically telling you what's new about the version that they're selling now versus the one that you've

11:25:02got. This makes the marketing much more effective because they're not talking about all the basics of ScreenFlow that I already understand. They're focusing on why you specifically you should upgrade. So, there are some ways to increase the number of purchases that each of your customers make. Now, we're going to talk about how to increase the value of each of those orders. The first way to do this is through add-ons and upselles. I'm going to show you two particular examples which I freaking love. The first example is our good friends over at GoDaddy. If you've tried to buy a domain from them recently, you

11:25:37will know they are masters of upselles. What you do is you put your domain in that you want to buy and you click on add to cart. Before we do that though, notice how they're already selling me on a 2-year registration, not the one-year registration that domains used to be purchased on. Oh no, now their default is 2 years. Why? Increased average order value. So anyway, we click on add to cart and we've got our domain name in here. We click on looks good. Keep going. And then the fun stars. We now have to battle our way through various upsells, some of which are default ticked. Now, I've bought hundreds of

11:26:12domains through GoDaddy over the years, and every time I do it, I have to keep my wits about me, otherwise I end up with all sorts of additional add-ons and stuff that I never really wanted. So, for example, just on this page here, we're given some stats about how every year millions of people are being abused and criminal stuff is happening with domains. So, we're going to need the full domain protection at $6.99 per year because at GoDaddy, everything is a subscription. There's a new tagline for you. Or, of course, we can upgrade this to ultimate domain protection. And by the way, notice how all of these things

11:26:47is discounted in the first year, meaning that your renewal bill is going to be significantly higher. But by then, they'll have your card details already. So, then that's just an auto rebuild. So, doesn't really matter, right? Anyway, also notice how you have to activate no thanks in order to be saved from this additional cost. Then you've

11:27:06got start your new website for free. This is the entry point of a whole new world of upsells because then they want to sell you all sorts of hosting and different add-ons and bits and bobs for that. And of course, they're trying to sell you email addresses and they've got different packages for different needs going up to $6.99 and then eventually $12.99 per month. Now, from a user point of view, pretty annoying. But from a business point of view, fantastic. Great job, GoDaddy. Another champion hall of famer in the upsell category is Vistar Print. Everyone's favorite business card printer. Now, if you've ever tried to buy something from Vistar Print, you'll

11:27:43know that you're going to need a big old sword to whack your way through all of the upsells, which are going to be flying at you from every possible direction. Let's just buy some business cards, for example. Look at this product page. Firstly, we're sold an upgrade on the thickness. Notice how the premium version is recommended. Then we've got all of these different finishes to choose from. You can choose matte if you're like a cheapo scumbag, but if you're really impressive, then you're going to want foil accent or embossed gloss. Then, of course, corners. I mean, who wants the standard spiky corners of a business card? That's great if you

11:28:18hate your contacts and want to give them paper cuts. Of course, every modern professional has rounded corners on their business cards, all for an additional fee. Then, of course, you've got to choose the quantity. If you're going to be signing up for BNI, you're going to need a few business cards. Better be safe and order 10,000. Now, of course, all of the additional quantities come with discounts to incentivize you to ascend. It's genius. And if you've ever bought something from Vista Print, you'll know that buying the thing is actually only the start of the fun as you collapse defeated into a chair thinking you finally escaped all of the

11:28:51upsells. [laughter] Not so fast, me amigo. The fun has only just begun as you are forced to then choose between different monogrammed products from office tripods to your face on a hot air balloon. Everything that they're throwing at you before and after checkout is focused on one thing. Increasing your average order value and therefore increasing the customer lifetime value. Why? Because they are competing in a very competitive and price sensitive space. If they want to maximize their new customer acquisition, they need to maximize the value of every

11:29:27customer that they get through the door. This then allows them to invest more in the marketing which helps them to build market share without having to increase the price of their core product. Another example, my wife just bought me a GoPro. Now, I've always wanted a GoPro, but what I didn't realize about GoPro is that getting a GoPro requires a similar level of additional investment as say having a child because once you've got the GoPro, you're going to need all sorts. You're going to need cases, tripods, additional battery, cold weather battery. I don't even know what this is. Goose neck. Goose neck with a

11:30:04clamp. In fact, GoPro is a In fact, it turns out that GoPro is an absolute master of the add-ons. By the time you've finished souping up your GoPro, it's going to resemble a small village. Now, I'm being silly cuz this is what I do. But really, the lessons for all us marketers are super clear. How can we maximize the value of each of our customers by offering add-ons, upsells, and premium options? In fact, let's talk a little bit more about premium versions. You may remember our recent deep dive of Simba mattress company. One of the things I absolutely love about Simba's proposition is the three different mattress products they

11:30:47have. They've got the core. They've got the hybrid pro for professional sleepers. And then they've got the Lux for people that just want the best. Now, I'm an idiot, so I bought the Lux because I'll always just default to wanting the best of things. But think about what Simbra are doing here. They're trying to make sure that any money that you have available for mattress purchase, they get. They want every spare penny that you've got by selling you the best possible thing. So, having these three options allows them to cater for a wide range of different budgets. And of course, they'll also sell you pillows, duvys, and mattress

11:31:26protectors. Another thing that you'll notice about Simba is they offer monthly payments. Monthly payments are a fantastic way to increase average order value because they reduce price sensitivity. For example, £1,279 one-off payment is going to trigger price sensitivity for some people who don't want to invest all of that in one go, whereas £100 a month feels much more affordable. Now, split pay is absolutely everywhere and is another massive trend

11:31:53of e-commerce over the last few years. And in fact, one of the biggest players in the split pay market, Cler claims to increase average order value by up to 58%. You can split pay everything. If you want, you could go on Pretty Little Thing and order this bralette for two pound and then split that two pound payment into six. If you're a B2B company watching all of this thinking, ah, this is all great for these

11:32:21e-commerce brands and direct consumer. Well, I assure you, you can absolutely have premium versions of what you sell as well. Just today, I was exposed to a genius upsell strategy from best companies. Now, I was super stoked to wake up today to find out that Exposure Ninja has been awarded outstanding in the best companies to work for. If you're not familiar with it, they carry out surveys of your employees and rank your company as a great place to work against all the other businesses in your industry. We were awarded outstanding and of course, we all headed straight to our dashboard to dig into the feedback

11:32:57that had been provided by our employees. What's the first thing that we saw when we entered our dashboard? [laughter] upgrade to pro. Now, you'll notice that some of the things in here are grayed out cuz we don't have access to them because we don't have access to pro. But the one thing that is going to make me upgrade this more than anything is this piece here. Notice how 152 comments have been collected from our employees. We don't have access to any of them because we don't have pro yet. [music] This to me is absolute genius because it demonstrates how well best companies understand their upsell process. Even

11:33:36though we didn't even know this workplace insights pro existed prior to signing up, they added these comment sections to every questionnaire that we sent to our 110 employees knowing that we wouldn't even have access to the answers unless we then upgraded. I just love it. I mean, it drives me mad, but I absolutely love it. So there you have it. How to increase

11:34:01your customer lifetime value. You want a checklist, don't you? [laughter] Okay. So here goes. Remember the two levers that we have to pull. Firstly, increasing the number of orders that we get from each customer. So we can do this through things like offering subscriptions and nudging customers into them either by offering them a discount or some kind of bonus that they don't get for a single purchase. We can also reactivate customers that are either expired or that are coming up for renewal or should be considering repurchasing. Remember that we want to start the promotion for this before they are due to run out to make sure that

11:34:40they don't reenter the research and shopping phases of the buyer journey. We can also run campaigns to existing customers, encouraging them to upgrade if you're a business that releases something every so often. By focusing on encouraging people to upgrade, we can tailor our marketing message explaining why they need to upgrade based on the thing that they already have. The other lever that we have to increase LTV is increasing the value of each of the purchases that people make. [music] Loads of different ways of doing this that we've covered. For example, add-ons, think Godaddy. Upselles, think Vista Print. We can offer premium options. And of course, we can offer

11:35:19flexible payment terms, including split pay. I hope you've enjoyed this video.