To kick things off.
We're going to condense this entire course into this one lesson.
And by knowing and understanding the principles of basic digital marketing, which we're going to cover
here, you'll be on your way to success.
So first, let's understand what a basic marketing funnel looks like.
We can't talk about a marketing funnel without the AIDA model.
AIDA stands for awareness, interest, desire and Action and we'll add an R to the end of that iita.
R r is for retention because that's so important to awareness is all about building your brand, building
your identity, using tools like social media so that people can get to know you.
Interest means having a content strategy to get people interested in your brand or in a product or service
of yours.
Desire means moving that person from liking what you provide to actually wanting it.
This means creating that personal and emotional connection with your audience so that you're not just
another brand.
They're starting to become loyal followers of yours and then for taking action.
This is different depending on the stage of your customer.
Initially, this could just mean subscribing to your YouTube channel, taking the action to like your
Facebook page, or to join a Facebook group subscribing to your email newsletter.
And for a different person, this could mean actually purchasing your product or service.
And then of course, we've added R for retention because we know that it's a lot cheaper to retain a
customer who's purchased a product from us, then to find a new customer.
The customers who have purchased already are much more likely to buy again.
So how do we build that loyalty?
Through email campaigns, through exclusive content on our website, through a YouTube series, just
providing consistent content that people love and engage with.
We can break down the ways that you get attention into two buckets content marketing and paid marketing.
This means doing things like putting out YouTube videos, writing blog articles, doing a podcast,
creating content that serves your audience.
You can also create content on social media.
I bucket social media marketing underneath content marketing, even though it's a little different.
Social media is great for sharing your content that you put on other platforms, but you can even host
content on social media.
For example, video on Facebook is huge now and then there's paid marketing and there's two ways that
we're going to cover this.
One is through just traditional ads.
So putting up your Google ad, your Facebook ad that directs people either to some sort of product or
service of yours or to maybe a landing page or even just to a piece of content of yours or even to one
of your social media profiles.
There's also this idea of promoting posts or videos.
It's not necessarily an ad, it could be, but you could put up any sort of YouTube video.
It could be one of your content marketing videos and you can boost it so that more people see it.
Now you know what a marketing funnel looks like.
You know the different types of marketing.
Now let's dive into the steps to actually growing your audience.
Step one is to create your online identity.
First, this means creating a website.
Your website is your home base.
It's where you control your story, your messaging.
It's where you can sell your products and services.
It's where you can give a lot of free content, a way to grow loyal fans.
So you need a website.
In the modern world, your online identity must include social media profiles as well.
We're talking about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest.
These are the places where your potential customers live.
They spend most of their time, and that's how we attract them to our own business.
When starting out, it will be easier to grow quickly if you focus your attention on one of these platforms.
But there's also modern tools that make it super easy to schedule posts and also to send those posts
and our content to all of these platforms at the same time.
This is your online identity.
The next step is figuring out how you create that content.
The best way to find ideas for content to create is to just serve your audience, figure out what problem
do they have?
How do you solve their problem?
This is all about understanding your target audience, which we're going to dive deeper into in the
next section of this course.
Consistency is one of the most important parts of your content marketing strategy.
This means posting regularly.
There's no rule whether it should be once a week, twice a week, every day of the week, once a month,
but be consistent so that your audience learns to expect when you come out with new content.
But there is this balance between quality and quantity.
I would argue that if you can't.
Put out high quality content, then you need to decrease the amount or the quantity of it.
My best advice is just to stick with it.
Have a plan to do a weekly podcast for at least one year.
Stick with a YouTube series for at least a few months to see if it catches on right.
Weekly articles and don't stop.
Sometimes just being there for a long time creates your own success.
So that's the second step about creating content.
The third step is figuring out how you capture that audience into your world.
And what this typically means for a modern business is growing an email list.
So sending traffic from your content, from your blog articles, from your videos, from your podcast,
from even your social media pages to your website to a landing page to anywhere that has an opt in form
where you can capture that person's information.
Email marketing is still consistently the highest converting way to make a sale.
These are the three steps to growing your fan base.
Once you're growing your loyal fan base, you have the opportunity to actually sell your product to
them.
So I break this down into two types of marketing or types of selling a direct sell or more of a soft
sell.
Direct marketing in the online world looks like a sales page, a sales video, a webinar or training
where you're selling at the end of that video, an email that is pitching your product to them.
The softer form of marketing includes having a blog article that solves a person's need, but then also
provides more answers to them if they want to pay.
Or perhaps it's an email sequence that someone gets when they go to your website for the first time.
They sign up for you in a newsletter and you're sending them weekly emails, helping them solve the
most asked questions and problems that your target audience needs.
But through that and on those emails, you're giving them the option to take it to the next level.
So this is all great, but where does paid marketing come in?
Because in this course we're going to learn a lot about Facebook, Google ads and also retargeting.
So first, you have the option of sending traffic directly to your product or service, putting an ad
up for your product and just sending them to that Web page where you're trying to sell that sometimes
can work, but a lot of times you're sending paid ads to cold traffic people who might not even be in
that awareness stage of the AIDA model.
Ideally, you're sending ads to people who are in that D that desire step of the model and you can do
this through Facebook retargeting.
This literally means that you can send ads to people who have been on your sales page for people who
have clicked a specific link in an email of yours, for people who have added your product to their
cart but they never completed the checkout.
Retargeting is super powerful and has a much higher conversion rate, but instead of actually sending
people directly to a product, we can also drive people to the beginning of a funnel, for example,
a landing page with an opt in form where there's much less of a barrier to entry to join.
They don't have to actually make a purchase.
And from there we can start to warm up our audience and then do the selling later on.
Now you know more about how the marketing system works, but what is your goal with all of this?
There's so much.
My goal with my business, which might be similar to you, is to grow enough organic traffic, organic
awareness of my brand so that I'm getting those organic sales.
So I'm not having to always be pitching all the time.
I never consider myself a great salesperson, but in the modern world, that doesn't mean you can't
have a six figure business of your own.
So I use content marketing to drive people to my website and to my business.
I use social media marketing to turn the casual observer into a fan by building trust with people who
follow me.
And lastly, I use paid marketing as a lever that I can pull to intelligently boost traffic and sales.
By understanding this digital marketing system, you have what it takes to succeed.
Now I'll just take doing hopefully this helps you.
If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the Q&A and we'll see you in the next
lesson.