The Single Most Important Thing In Your Business You're Ignoring!
Are you investing way more on tactics than you are on marketing?
Oh good, welcome to the 90 percent.
The problem in online business right now is there are so many people making promises about how amazing ads are and the amazing things that ads can do for you. We end up getting invested in tactics and think tactics are going to get us sales. But they are just tactics.
You can't just have tactics and not marketing.
What is Marketing?
It’s super important for me to break this down.
Marketing is the idea of getting people from Point A to Point B. For example with marketing I’m talking about people that are in a current situation in their lives and they're trying to move to a desired result; the gap between those two things is marketing.
Closing that gap, getting that person to Indiana Jones style swing across the chasm and take that bold leap into the future, that's marketing. If you just have tactics, you're dropping the rope or just giving them a ladder, building a bridge; that’s not marketing. Without marketing you're not going to get any sales. You need to have tactics and marketing working together.
You may think “if I just build a Shopify store my problems will be solved” or “if I just put up some Facebook ads my problems will be solved” but if you are not pairing them with a sales mechanism you are going to lose.
You need to have a sales mechanism.
What is a sales mechanism?
The sales mechanism takes people from a cold audience to a super hot audience. It is something you build into your marketing strategy that is designed to close the aforementioned gap; to take a cold audience (people who have no idea who you are and no idea what your product is) and make them to customers.
Saying “hey, buy my program” is not a sales mechanism.
A sales mechanism could be a webinar. If you want to sell people into your course or program, the webinar would be designed to build “like, know and trust” and ultimately make an offer to work with you. That does all the things necessary, in theory, if you do it well.
Making a sales call is the earliest, simplest mechanism. Getting on the phone with somebody and building a rapport, that “like, know and trust”, before you make you an offer, that's a sales mechanism.
Another sales mechanism is a great sales page. One that is very offer driven, describes the problem right on top then starts to build desire and empathy with testimonials sprinkled in and finally makes an offer that is too good to refuse.
All of these are designed to take a cold audience and turn it into a hot audience. Find out more about communication with a cold audience, here.
Building a Sales Mechanism
To build a sales mechanism first consider where most of your traffic is coming from, that will help you understand the psychology.
Chances are you are going after a cold audience so you're bringing in these people that have no idea who you are. You need to ask yourself “how problem aware and how solution aware is my avatar (or ideal target customer)?” This will help you figure out where people are at on the problem and solution scale. Your avatar may definitely know they have a problem and think about it all the time, they are nine or a 10 on that scale. But on the solution scale they could be something more like a two. They know they have a problem but they have no idea that there's a solution out there.
So what do you do? You build a sales mechanism that doesn't spend a ton of time talking about the problem. They understand the problem, what they don't understand is that there's a better way. Your sales mechanism needs to be more geared towards helping understand that there's a better way to it.
That’s how you create a blue ocean, that is how you differentiate yourself from the competition, you create content around that.
If you're a coach, you could use a webinar. It’s easy to get people in and then you highlight the unique solution you have for their problem.
If you're an online store your sales mechanism could be a landing page. But your landing page doesn't focus on problem mode, it focuses on empathy mode. Your landing page says “we understand what you're going through” and moves relatively quickly to how new, interesting, unique and different what you have to offer is.
You need this sales mechanism in your store and then you can sprinkle all the tactics about. You run ads to get a certain type of audience and you have your sales mechanism ready to receive that audience and turn them into customers.
I would go as far as to say no business in the world should exist without a sales mechanism built into their online marketing strategy. Don’t make the mistake of just using tactics. SMS is just a tactic and email marketing is a tactic; they are not strategies. Running ads without any marketing strategy is a really bad idea. Having an online store without a sales strategy is a really bad idea. Having a lead magnet that is not being used in any strategic way to move people through the funnel is not a sales mechanism.
Move people through. Where are they coming from? Where do they want to get to? What do they want to be?
And that is the power of a sales mechanism.
If you have an online store here's a video that will show you how to use one of my great strategies to create a sales mechanism inside your store that's iOS 14 proof.
If you want to know how to create a video that has the potential to go viral, my HERO system is the best framework for this.
Full video at the top of this article! Subscribe to my YouTube.
For more, subscribe to my podcast and join my email list!