Let me tell you a story… There was this man who failed in business at the age of 21; He was defeated in a legislative race at 22 and then failed again in business at 24. At 26, he had to overcome the death of his sweetheart.
At the age of 27 he had a nervous breakdown; lost the congressional race at age 34; lost a senatorial election at the age of 45; failed to become vice-president at age 47; lost a senatorial race at age 49, and finally was elected President of the United States at age 52.
For most business owners the only goal is to make enough money to survive the current month and move on to the next month.
The mentality of expecting instant gratification and the fear of setting goals or projections is one of the top reasons that make business owners struggle and adds to their stress.
Focussing on instant outcomes is natural. It’s because our brain naturally craves for instant gratification. Imagine this: I’m overweight, but I couldn’t resist eating two scoops of ice cream every day, yet I want to lose weight. In fact, I’m on a weight-loss program.
Yes, eating two scoops of Baskin Robbins Dulce de Leche is fun for me. Yeah, I’ll be instantly happy. But, my overall goal is to lose weight. That’s not going to happen soon if I keep eating those two scoops of ice cream.
Like the story about how curiosity killed the cat, here instant gratification will kill my overall goal. Back in 2015, I was overweight. It took me six months to lose 31 pounds (17 kilos), and it took a lot of hard work, persistence, and loads of patience.
Nothing in life is easy… If you have been a business owner, you would’ve understood that by now. Everything that is worthy requires hard work, a tonne of persistence, loads of patience, saying no to many things.
So, if you are one of the many business owners who decided to give up on online marketing; Keep working for another 31 years like the man in my story above did until you succeed. (I’m just kidding!)
My goal is not just to tell you what you are doing wrong. I also want to equip you with the right tools and actionable information to move forward and see results far quicker than if you tried to do it all by yourself.
Onwards…
The situation and the mindset of an entrepreneur who’s just starting out would be different. Their priority would be to figure out a way to bring in sales.
So they join networking groups, attend trade shows, they cold call, knock doors, etc.; they hustle. All the guessing, hoping, and tactics could work. It could work in the beginning when they are focused only on customer acquisition.
But to make it work in the long term and bring it to a consistent revenue while managing all of the fulfillment, customer service, changing government regulations, and taxes is an entirely another thing on its own.
When you want to scale your business, you need to learn to take a step back and think strategically and adapt proven ways to move forward. Also, you need to add more resources such as people, ads, and systems.
It’s called working on your business; instead of working in your business.
When you scale your business, you would have to create training, systems, checklists, and standard operating procedures that would help you effectively delegate the tasks to your employees. So that they won’t fail at the functions, they are supposed to do.
An essential aspect of the delegation process that many business owners miss out on is the need to have metrics, analytics, and tracking.
The third most significant reason why online marketing fails is that business owners don’t set up proper success objectives, i.e. they don’t track, understand, and set up the right metrics.
It’s unfortunate how often business owners and even some marketing consultants move forward and end up disappointed with their results because they ran online marketing campaigns without setting proper success objectives.
Now, I want to introduce you to five metrics that every business owner should track to set objectives for marketing campaigns, as well as have a pulse on their business growth and to spot problems instantly and to act on them before getting into chaotic situations.
With these five metrics, you can devise your marketing plan effectively. You will have articulated goals and a strategy for action. You’ll be able to track all the aspects that affect your business growth.
I created the Business Growth Metrics Pentagon for Tracking and Measuring Small Business Online Marketing. It’s adapted from a proven framework by Dave McLure from the Tech Startup world. Dave is the founder of the business accelerator 500 Startups and a popular angel investor in the San Francisco Bay Area.
One of Dan Kennedy’s rules to transforming your business into a marketing powerhouse is to track, measure, and account for every marketing effort.
When you track and measure your marketing objectives; even if you fail in a campaign, you’ll be able to learn and improve your next campaign.
A popular quote from Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, says, “No wind blows in favor of a ship without a destination”.
So set yourself up for success in online marketing by setting up the right objectives, and then tracking and measuring them.
So what are these “objectives”?
For you to understand the objectives, you need to understand the five metrics that are part of the Business Growth Metrics Pentagon. They are:
Attention
Acquisition
Revenue
Retention
Referral
Attention defines the number of unique people reached by your message, website, or advertising.
Acquisition defines the number of visitors who got converted into a lead.
Revenue defines the % sales conversion, the number of sales made from the acquired leads.
Retention defines the engagement level of the existing leads, and repeat sales made from existing customers.
Referral metric defines the number of leads referred by existing leads and customers.
To have a working online marketing system that pulls leads and sales, you need to pay attention to all these metrics. You need to create systems that improve each of these aspects of your business.
It is a very logical and predictable approach to take when you define these metrics for your business.
Example Scenario: Your lead acquisition rate is 10%, it means that for every 100 visitors to your landing page you’ll have 10 leads. And you have a 20% sales conversion rate. i.e. For every 10 leads, you’ll have 2 sales made.
Example Objective: Get 100 Sales
Now that you have these metrics available at your disposal, you could set an objective to get 100 sales.
And then reverse engineer that number of sales to the number of visitors you’d need to produce that amount of sales.
Since your sales conversion rate is 20%, you’ll need 500 leads to get 100 sales. And since your lead acquisition rate is 10%, you’ll need 5000 visitors to get 500 leads.
Then create a Facebook Ad, Google Ad, or any other form of advertising to get those 5000 visitors.
Without this level of clarity, you’d never get anywhere. That’s why tracking these numbers and being on top of them is very important for your business growth.
Example Objective: Increase Conversion Rate
You could hire a copywriter to improve the sales conversion rate and the lead acquisition rate; So that you can get the same amount of sales with fewer visitors.
Once you define these metrics, these metrics would take the heavy lifting and drive your business while you can sit back and lead your business as an entrepreneur and not as a business owner.
You’ll know where you should spend your money on and you’ll know what is broke and when it broke. And, you’ll also be able to figure out what kind of help you’d need to solve what’s broken.
What I’ve been teaching you is to do online marketing the most effective way without wasting your marketing dollars and without getting overwhelmed by the information and technology overload that most gurus and the tool marketers are selling you.
I almost forgot to tell you who’s the man from the story… It was Abraham Lincoln. Would you dare call him a failure?
He could have quit anywhere along the line. But to Lincoln, his failures were a deviation, a learning, and not a dead end.
So, again if you failed with online marketing before. I empathize with you.
Coz I’ve been there and I have failed before in not one but 5 different businesses because I didn’t know the right way to get leads and sales online. But then I figured it out. It worked out for me. It worked out for my clients who implemented the system.
What I’ve been teaching you is the lessons I learned from my failures, and the frameworks that I created for myself and my clients to succeed in their online marketing.
All you need to become a market leader and to get a ton of leads and sales online is to have these three things in place for your business:
Create your Market Positioning Pentagon (Read Mistake #1 to learn more. Link is below…)
Create your Marketing Funnel (Read Mistake #2 to learn more.)
Set Campaign Goals, Track, Measure using the Business Growth Metrics Pentagon
Most entrepreneurs don’t understand the 3 Fundamental Pillars of the Internet Marketing Funnel.
One of the most painful mistakes that entrepreneurs make is that they try to re-invent the wheel and innovate their own marketing funnel.
Not because there is a need to, it’s because their ego tells them to do so.
Entrepreneurs crave for significance and sometimes their need to feel significant can get in the way of having certainty in business and in their life.
This is kinda similar to the number 1 mistake which is not getting professional help. (If you didn’t read it yet, then check my profile)
It is much smarter to model your marketing based on proven frameworks and other successful campaigns from your competitors and similar industries.
“If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do, and you’ll achieve the same results”, says Tony Robbins, New York Times Best-Selling Author, and World Renowned Business Strategist.
You might have heard the term “funnel hacking” from Russell Brunson, the founder of ClickFunnels.
Funnel hacking is a tactical process to learn and build marketing funnels based on your competitor’s funnels.
But…
There is something that these so-called “funnel hackers” miss. I’ll tell you more about that shortly…
Read on…
We live in a more comfortable world now, with tools like ClickFunnels to quickly build websites, funnels, and landing pages…
And with advertising platforms like Facebook Ads to laser target and attract the relevant people to our websites, funnels, and landing pages.
During the times of direct-response back in the 1970s, a typical marketing campaign takes months of planning and thousands of dollars to mail out.
And another few months to reconcile the results from the campaign and assess the profitability.
Now with the power of the internet and these tools, it costs ZERO dollars or a few hundred dollars to test a marketing campaign and only a few hours or days to see the results to roll in.
Living in this era also has its cons…
We tend to ignore the fundamentals easily…
This is what these funnel hackers miss as well. They don’t consider the fundamentals of market positioning and messaging when funnel hacking.
Thus, even though they modeled a competitor’s funnel, they still won’t see similar results.
They don’t see similar success like their competitors… I’ll tell you why, but let’s go back in time again…
During the direct response times, marketers and copywriters spent many months in market research and testing the profit-market fit.
They had to understand their prospective customer’s emotional needs, worldviews, and validate their messaging before they sent the mass postal mails out or before they advertised it in a magazine or newspaper.
They spent months on research because the cost of failure could be in hundreds if not millions of dollars. So they had to be damn sure.
Thankfully, the cost of failure is not in the hundreds of thousands or millions in the online marketing world.
But, it does cost enough to sting a small business owner with limited funds. Apart from money it also requires energy and tests the resilience of entrepreneurs.
Loss of energy and mental resilience is one of the reasons entrepreneurs and small business owners give up online marketing and go back to focus on hustling. Some even give up on their business being unable to make it work.
Funnel hacking could give the funnel hackers a similar funnel, like their competitors…
But it doesn’t guarantee success…
Because, if the message in those pages is not relevant and doesn’t resonate to the prospective customers, if the copy does not convey the uniqueness, and if the message is not compelling for the prospects to take action, then the campaign will fail.
But you are in a better place because that’s what you will work on when you define your own Market Positioning Pentagon.
You gather the resources to create compelling marketing messages and sales copy. You collect the resources to be relevant to your leads and prospects. You will learn your customer’s emotions and world-view so that you can empathize with them.
There are three fundamental pillars of an online marketing funnel. They are:
Attract
Connect
Convert
First, You need a medium to reach and ATTRACT the attention of your ideal customers.
Second, You need a strategic process to build a relationship, the know-like-trust factor through engaging and educating, and CONNECT with the prospect.
Third, you need a method to CONVERT them into a paying customer or client.
Almost all of the online marketing tactics that you have heard of fall into one of these three fundamental pieces.
Example Attraction Tactics:
* Facebook Ads
* Adwords
* SEO
* Website
* Landing Pages
* Blog
* Medium
* LinkedIn
* Facebook
* Twitter
* Pinterest
* Solo Ads
* JVs
* Influencers
Example Connection Tactics:
* Lead Magnets
* Product Launch Formula ™️
* Email Marketing
* Soap Opera Sequence ™️
* Facebook / Messenger Bots
Doing all or any of the above and spending money on marketing before you have the Market Positioning Pentagon defined and before understanding the fundamentals of a marketing funnel is as if throwing that money down the drain.
The Market Positioning Pentagon is a critical framework for your business and marketing. It’s the heart of your business.
The Market Positioning Pentagon lets you focus on the right things that appeal to your Customer and lets you have the unfair advantage over your competition.
If you have already done any of the tactics without understanding the fundamentals and not seen a profit yet, then I don’t blame you.
I blame the fake gurus or the slimy salespeople who didn’t ensure that you understood the fundamentals before selling you the courses, or ad campaigns.
But, let’s forget and forgive. And not get stuck in the past. Shall we?
Let us focus on the future of your business…
The only thing you need to build up now is hope.
Hope that you can be a market leader, Hope that you will be successful, Hope that you too can have a marketing system that works,
Hope that it’s not the end of the tunnel if you have failed before.
Effective Marketing is not complicated when you learn the fundamentals I teach in the Market Positioning Pentagon and define your Market Positioning Pentagon.
I have taken the responsibility to make it easy and simplify it for you. So that you don’t get overwhelmed.
Also, I am putting together a workbook to go along with the Market Positioning Pentagon so that you can immediately take action to define this for your business.
If you need just a website like a business card, to show off that you have a business to your friends, colleagues, and while networking. You are better off using a free website editor such as Wix.comSquarespace.com or strikingly.com to put up information about your business online. They are free or come for a meagre cost.
If you are an entrepreneur who thinks in the bigger picture, You should understand that a website is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to online marketing which can get leads and sales for a business. I’ve been building websites and coding for the past 18+ years. I know how to do it right.
What I focus on is to get some quick returns on the investment that you make in online marketing. Most entrepreneurs don’t understand the fundamentals of online marketing and end up spending a lot of money on a website or SEO or on Facebook Ads for example.
Which probably ends up as flushing money down the drain. You need a website that implements a strategic marketing funnel that can turn visitors into qualified leads and produce sales for your business. Such websites don’t cost an arm and leg. In fact, these are to be considered an investment instead of a cost.
If you want a strategic marketing funnel that can position you as a market leader, and pull in leads and sales through online marketing, then you are at the right place. Apply to work with me here: https://ahmedmuzammil.com/apply
Do you know why Apple fans stand in the queue over night like this:
It’s called demand generation by limiting supply. People die to have something that is limited in supply…. the psychology of it…
The reason why Apple limits their supply when a new iPhone gets released… People feel proud to have the first lot phones, and the others queue up to buy…
Not because Apple can’t produce enough to address demand, it’s because Apple wants it so. And they train people to observe this as a ritual, they release a new iPhone every year around the same date. They build the anticipation for the whole year.
Really clever marketing! How can you do it for your business? Discuss…
Thought leaders and influencers although would’ve built their tribe through organic marketing on Instagram, LinkedIn or some other platform, overtime the engagement could tank and fewer people will like, comment, and buy from you. That’s why you should learn paid marketing as well.
All this while it’s your message that got you here, your personality, it’s your ability to empathize with your market, their futuristic vision, and your ability to give hope and to help others to get to the future that they want. Although you were able to get exposure to your message, overtime your posts would become throttled by Facebook or Instagram.
Coz they somehow learn that you have the money to pay to play. These social media platforms are able to operate because influencers, and thought leaders with large audiences are paying to use their platform. So the only way you can continue to bring in sales, and have the engagement that you once had is to pay to play.
Finally, being a thought leader is one thing, and the other side of the coin is their ability to encash their reach, exposure, thoughts, etc. That’s the difficult part. If they don’t pay to play, it’s hard chance that they will achieve their financial goals.
If you haven’t sold anything to your audience yet, then you should learn to create products or services which your audience want. This is what I teach in my Business Kickstart program. Apply to work with me here and let’s talk about your audience and let’s talk how you can monetize your audience: https://ahmedmuzammil.com/apply
There is no BEST way. There is only one way that is your way. Everyone has a different path to a million, each and everyone has their own strengths that they can cash out as a million.
Speaking of which, only for eCommerce you wouldn’t need that huge credibility to start with. The profit margins would be around 10% to 30% normally. So if you have some ad budget and you know how to whip up an eCommerce funnel – with some persistence and patience you can do a million in sales and take home about $50k to $200k in profit.
The second best way to make some quick cash is to be a consultant. And that doesn’t need any investment at all. Almost whatever you make would be pure profits, but you need to build credibility and need to have the credentials to be trusted as a consultant.
Many of the online millionaires are sales rich but profit poor. i.e. they sold a million worth of goods and probably made $50k or maybe even $300k. (There are exceptions of course, very few may have made higher profits than what I’m talking about here)
The common false perception these boasting online millionaires give is that it was too easy, they never talk about the failures they’ve had in the past, the chargebacks, the refunds they had from the $1 million they made, how much did they pay out to affiliates, and how much did their ads cost, how much was the affiliate manager’s commission. etc.
All they speak about is the million dollar sales they made.
You better come up with your own financial freedom number, which includes the amount required for you to pay-off your outstanding debt and live comfortably (with your current living conditions) for the next 5-10 years.
Then make it an aim to hit that in the next 90 days…
Then slowly move towards a million or $10 million.
President Obama just received a $350k paycheck every year for being the President of The United States… Not a million.
I’m not discouraging you in any way to not dream about the million. You should. But plan your path. And your path is unique, you can never be another person and make that kind of money. Be yourself.
