Any Marketing Exists Within A Wider Context
Occasionally, I’ll see someone asking questions like;
- “What is the best platform to use to make money?”
- “Which is the best social media site for marketing?”
- “How do you turn YouTube traffic into sales?”
- “Should I concentrate on SEO or social media?”
Some people say “There are no stupid questions” and I disagree.
There aren’t stupid questioners: the people asking these are rarely stupid people with no hope of success ever in their life. But they are asking the wrong questions, without a doubt.
The problem is that the above questions are taking a tactics first approach.
With any marketing, you have to realise it exists within a wider context that just getting the right action.
You have to know the “why” before you work out the “how.”
The Wider Context Is Driven By Where You Want Your Customer To Go
Here’s why low-priced SEO services and other cut-rate business ideas fail.
You can go to Fiverr and hire a guy who’ll write your blog post for $10. Or you can get an SEO package that’ll give you fifty backlinks to your site.
But what is the point with either of those things?
The whole goal with marketing is to take your customer from not-a-customer through to lifetime-customer.
Marketing is a holistic experience. At any given time, you’re teaching people about your products and services, encouraging them to buy, encouraging them to tell their friends, encouraging them to sample your product before buying and later upgrade.
All of those things happen at the same time. So the cost in any marketing and the trick to any marketing is working out the bigger picture and then filtering it down.
Example: SEO & Ranking Factors
Let’s take SEO.
There are some good guides out there that’ll help you with SEO. If you get Easy Money and install the Yoast for SEO plugin, then you’ll be able to implement a lot of SEO stuff without much trouble.
But people make SEO incredibly complicated – and really, it can be incredibly complicated. There are about 200 ranking factors for Google’s search algorithm, so far as anybody seems to know.
That’s a lot and if you take each ranking factor seriously, then you’ll spend months and potentially thousands of dollars getting things right, only to find the world has shifted in the time that’s taken and you’re back to square one.
Instead, it’s a better idea to look at the ranking factors for SEO and see what they’re trying to tell you about marketing as a whole.
Namely, most of those SEO ranking factors are concerned with delivering the right result to users of the search engine as a priority, and then determining whether the user experience was positive after the searcher leaves Google (or wherever.)
So, instead of concentrating on Google ranking factors or hacking Bing search results, think about how to deliver those meta-principles.
- Improve your site structure for better user-experience
- Create better titles and meta-descriptions for more search result click-throughs
- Build more pages so you appear more in the SERPS
So on and so forth.
Direct Marketing Frameworks Show The Way
In any marketing, you have a set of rules to follow.
It starts with the product and you work backwards. You answer questions and provide solutions which funnel your customers towards the product, and later into a retention cycle.
If you don’t have a product yet, then you have a service. It might not be a paid service, but even a simple blog is about delivering answers to your audience’s questions.
Your goal in that instance is to get a person to implement your solution and fix their problem. Your secondary goal is to have them invested in further solutions you can provide down the road.
When you take this approach, you have answers to the questions above, so even if you’re asking the exact questions, you’re asking them totally differently.
“What’s the best platform for marketing?”
Becomes:
“What’s the best platform for targeting people who need help with fat loss?”
Or something similar.
Final Thoughts
Before you ask how to do something, ask why you’re doing it and to what end. Your marketing should all stem from the simple process of finding people to provide solutions to and allowing them to get invested in your solutions.
Once you’ve worked that out, it becomes a set of processes which you can improve upon over time.