Today I want to share with you seven marketing secrets or marketing hacks or marketing tricks. Essentially things that nobody’s really talking about, not even me, that often. And it’s because they’re a little more complicated and a little more nuanced than the quick hits that we often get when it comes to social media. Things like posting at this time or adapting your content for this algorithm, tweaking or using this kind of font or this kind of color, or all of those things.
What I’d rather do is get to the core of why your marketing may not be working as well as you want. And even if it is working okay, understanding the seven things I’m going to be walking you through here today will allow you to immediately upgrade all of it, and get better results, more clicks, more traffic, and more sales from everything you do. And not only that, but probably the most important thing that I could ever give you is to show you how to think about your marketing, how to process different marketing strategies, and the crazy stuff that goes on inside my head when I’m evaluating different marketing tactics and tools and resources and all of that. So my goal here today is, as ambitious as it is, is to try to pack seven secrets and seven hacks into a very short period so that you’re going to be able to watch this and you’re going to be able to extract these little golden nuggets and apply them to your business, to your clients business, to whatever it is that you’re doing. And it starts right now.
So the very first thing that we need to talk about is kind of what ends up happening when someone says, hey, my marketing is just not working. Nothing’s happening. No one’s clicking. No one’s watching my stuff. The algorithm isn’t pushing it or promoting it to people. Nothing’s working. It’s something that I hear all the time. I see it in the comments below. Very common. 90% of the time, it’s because they’re just not doing enough marketing.
It’s just a question of volume. It’s a question of quantity, not so much quality. So let me explain. I don’t know who’s to blame for this one. Maybe it’s the get-rich-quick things. Maybe it’s all of the courses and the programs that promise that you can become a millionaire in 30 days with no work or whatever it is. But for some reason, when people think about marketing, they think that all they need to do is make a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad or post one video on YouTube and they’ll just blow up and become the next viral sensation and everything will just work out miraculously well. And seriously, I wish this was the case. That’d be amazing. But it’s not right.
It’s like marketing is just a business function. I’m going to make this sound boring, but it’s like accounting or finance or legal aspects of a business or HR or sales or whatever it is. They’re all just different business functions, which means that they require time, they require energy, they require money, and investment in them to get them to work. Now, what ends up happening is most people will make one post on social media, it won’t get traction and then they’ll swear off that platform. So they’ll hop over here, try out Twitter now and make a couple of tweets.
Nobody engages. So they say, well, Twitter doesn’t work and they’ll make a YouTube video and then that won’t take off. And they get frustrated and they get angry because it’s just not working when the reality is they probably just haven’t done enough. And that’s why the first concept, the first sort of hack or secret is identifying the marketing sweet spot. So in the most rudimentary art drawing class ever, let me show you exactly what I mean by marketing sweet spot.
And you can see where you fall and where the vast majority of businesses fall. And if you find yourself in this position, you know that the answer is to keep on pushing through. It’s not to dial back, it’s not to pivot, it’s not to do anything like that. It’s just to keep going forward. So let me show you what that looks like.
So I want you to imagine for a second a bell curve, kind of like the traditional bell curve. Of course, that’ll be there we go. We’ll get some ink flowing here. So this is our bell curve, our ugly, ugly bell curve, and it’s going to have three different sections. Now over here on the left, this is what you’re going to call the minimum effective dose.
So the med, the minimum effective dose. Essentially what ends up happening here is until you’re in this range, nothing you do matters. It’s about sort of making that one post on social media that someone sees one time and then that’s it. And then you wonder why it’s not working. It’s about spending $5 on Facebook ads or Instagram ads and not getting immediate sales and then sort of swearing off the entire online advertising system.
And that but the reality is we just haven’t hit the minimum effective dose. There’s not enough momentum, there are not enough touchpoints, there are not enough exposure and reach and engagement with the audience that you’re trying to reach. And we’re going to talk about that one in just a second. But this is where 90% of businesses fall as they sit around here in this minimum effective dose, kind of half committing to different strategies and then wondering why nothing’s working. And the answer here, the solution is, again, you’ve got to push through, you’ve got to move up here and this is the sweet spot.
This is where you’re going to find sort of the saturation of your market. You’re going to be hitting the number of touchpoints that are required. Again, we’ll talk about that in just a second. You’re going to be making sure that the people that you want to reach are seeing your content. You’re going to make sure that you’ve essentially saturated everything that you can.
Now, the reality is, this sweet spot is huge. Massive, massively, huge. Like when we’re thinking about your business, your market, or your industry, these are huge, huge industries. Billions and billions of dollars. So unless your business is doing a billion dollars a year or more, there’s more that you can do.
It’s crazy when I hear about someone that thinks that, well, look, I’m already posting once a day on Instagram, or I’m already making one YouTube video a week, or I’ve got a podcast, I’m pretty much maxed out. There’s nothing else I can do. And they’re sitting at, say, a million bucks a year, and they’re in. Let’s use health and fitness. So if you’re in, let’s say, the health and fitness industry, this massive multibillion-dollar industry, and your business is doing a million a year, 2 million a year, 100 grand a year, whatever it is, you haven’t even scratched the surface for what you’re capable of doing and for the number of people that you could reach.
So you could go from one post a day to five posts a day. You could make one video on YouTube, a week, to one video a day. You could do two videos a day. You could start other channels, you could have other podcasts. There’s so much that you can do.
Now, of course, at some point, you’re going to reach this third area, which is diminishing returns. Diminishing returns. There we go. D for diminishing. Diminishing returns. There’s going to be some point where eventually more money, more effort, and more time isn’t going to pay off. But I can’t even begin to tell you of all of the businesses I’ve worked with over the last ten years, the tiniest fraction falls in here, and typically it’s when they’re spending like a million dollars a month on ads and they simply can’t get in front of more people with their ads. So they’re doing blogging, they’re doing podcasting, they’re doing SEO, they’re running Google Ads and Facebook ads and Instagram ads and all that. The biggest example here is if you’re running some kind of search-based PPC pay-per-click advertising, like a Google search ad, at the end of the day, you can’t make people search for more stuff so you can max out. But again, you can make that broader.
You can go for discovery ad platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where you can put things in front of people that may potentially be interested. There are a lot of ways. So the reality is, let’s find a bright, happy, colorful marker. This is where we’re going for this sweet spot here. Like, everybody is down here in this sort of minimum effective dose they haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible and then they’re wondering why their marketing is not working.
The best piece of advice on everything that I could give you here is you just have to do more. Now of course you need to be strategic, you need to think through it. That’s what the rest of is going to be about. But more is your answer. So on that note, how much more? And that leads me to the marketing rule of seven. Now, depending on your business or market or your industry, depending on if you’re selling something for a low dollar value or high dollar value, it’s kind of universally agreed that for somebody to make a purchase decision, for someone to take action and buy from you, they need around seven touch points, which means seven engagements, seven interactions with your brand. You can’t simply put something in front of them one time, expect them to buy it, and then call it a day. You’re going to have to do this multiple times seven. Now, if it’s expensive, it’s going to be seven to 14.
If it’s significantly cheaper, like you’re selling a pack of gum for $0.99 or something, you probably don’t need seven touchpoints. One should be sufficient. But that rule of seven is important because it forces you to not give up too early. It’s just like when you’re looking at the statistics around sales and you realize that most conversions, most closes for sales happen after like five rejections or five follow-ups, five emails, five extra calls. It’s rarely if pretty much never, the first time.
The same thing goes for marketing. Bit of a side note here, but marketing is kind of selling one-to-many sales, one-to-one marketing, one-to-many. So we use the same concepts, the same strategies, all of that with sales. But I like to think of marketing as a little more exciting and a little more challenging even. Because instead of trying to convince one person at a time and overcome their objections and their fears and their concerns, we have to do this en masse.
And we have to do it without really getting much feedback from our market. So the rule of seven, that’s important. Now, how do we do this? Well, we do this by showing up in front of our ideal target market where they’re present and active, which means that we need to be selective about what social media platforms we’re going to, about what kind of content we’re creating, about where we’re putting that. We need to make sure that it’s in alignment not only with you and your content style and what you like and hate doing but also with where your people are.
That’s the most important element. There’s no point in being on Twitter or Pinterest or TikTok or Instagram or YouTube if your people aren’t there. So you’ve got to find out where they’re present and active online and then you’ve got to make it your mission to follow up and to make sure that you’re consistently showing up in front of them with value, with content, and with offers. So that’s the marketing rule of seven. Now, the next point is more of a psychological phenomenon, more of a mental hack that you can use.
I’ve talked about this a ton on this channel here, but it’s called the mirror exposure effect. And what the mirror exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon that says we as people, as humans, associate a frequency with trust. So the more often that.
