5 Truths About Online Marketing in 2018 (And Beyond)

Transcription:

Hey guys, Yuri here. Welcome back to the show. Today, we’re going to be walking you through five truths about online marketing in 2018 and beyond.

This is an important one, okay? I’ve been online since 2006. I’ve seen a lot of things come and go, and I’ve seen a lot of things change.  I want to share five important truths that I want you to understand if you want to succeed in business.

This is important because I don’t want you to struggle. I don’t want you to have subpar results, because I really believe that you have an amazing ability to help the people you serve. And it’s my goal, my mission, to help other Healthpreneurs like you succeed. Because in doing so, two things happen. Number one, you get to help people at a very deep level, and really transform their life, which is great. Second is you get to live the life you desire. Earn the money you want. You enjoy a lot more freedom. You can travel, you can spend more time with your family, whatever is important to you.

And those are the two big reasons why I do what I do. Because I want you to be able to enjoy life and enjoy your business and not have to struggle.

I continue to see so many health experts struggle and suffer because they’re doing stuff that simply doesn’t work any longer. So, let’s look at what these are, okay?

What you need to know to succeed and the importance of marketing

Let’s talk about online marketing for a quick second. What is marketing?

Here’s my definition of marketing. Marketing is simply the process of building a relationship with people who don’t know you to the point where they know they can trust you so that selling becomes unnecessary.

That’s what marketing is. It’s a bridge between where your clients are and you. And the bridge is helping them to get closer to the result that they want. Marketing is also sharing your beliefs, and we’ll save that for another episode. But marketing is not evil. Marketing is necessary, marketing is education in most respects. With that said, let’s look at the first truth.

Number one is build it and they will come, does not exist online.

The good old Field of Dreams movie, that was a great movie, I loved it, very inspiring. And that might work if you have a physical location on busy streets. You set up shop, people walk by, they see, oh, cool, new shop, new restaurant they pop in. That does not happen on the internet. You set up a website and nobody will know about it, no one. The likelihood of your website being found on Google is slim to zero.

So, you have to understand that just because you’ve got a pretty website nobody even cares about that first of all.

Second, they’re not going to find it unless you put a massive amount of work into SEO, which is going to cost you a lot of time and money. Believe me, my blog gets a million unique visitors a month. So, I can talk from experience on that.

Paid advertising is a must and email marketing is dying

What do we do instead? Well, instead of build it, and they will come, you have to build it and then you have to put stuff out there that’ll get in front of people. That basically means paid advertising.

The only way I believe to really succeed in business in a way that you control is by paying to acquire your perfect clients or prospects; Facebook ads, YouTube ads, whatever.

Just understand the consequences of not doing so. If you don’t master that process, you will be at the mercy of any kind of Google algorithm changes. Well, we saw this with Facebook, right? We saw this with Facebook even a year ago. Facebook was favoring live video. So, it’s like Facebook Live this, Facebook Live that. And now, Facebook Live gets zero traction.

Even before that when Facebook was a thing let’s say five or six years ago, you could post something on your wall, on your Facebook fan page, not your personal profile, on your fan page. And let’s say close to 100% of your followers or fans would actually see that post organically.

Now, because Facebook understands in order to play you need to pay, organic reach on Facebook is less than 2%, which means that if you put up with some cool quote or image on your Facebook fan page, and you’ve got 10000 followers, excuse me, less than 200 people are going to see that. So, if you don’t understand how to advertise, and when I say advertise, I’m basically saying putting together a message or a piece of communication that’s going to be valuable to your ideal audience. If you don’t know how to do that in a way where you can spend $1 and make $2, you’re going to have a very hard time growing your business.

I say that with as much love and empathy and sincerity as possible. Because I’ve done both. I’ve built at the organic content way, and its taken 10 years. So, if you’ve got 10 years and a lot of runway, go for it. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have results yesterday, right?

For Healthpreneur, 90% of our revenue comes from paid traffic. And we’ve got a really good ROI from the money we do spend on Facebook ads and YouTube ads. We do have this podcast, we have Instagram, but a very small percentage of our business is generated from these activities at least in this current day and age, where we are right now.

So, it’s the first thing, build it and they will not come, okay? That’s essentially what I want you to understand.

Number two, email marketing is dying. Email Marketing is dying. If you were to say to me, “Okay Yuri, I’ve got 100,000 people on my email list or 100,000 followers on Instagram that are obviously relevant and engaged, which would you rather have?” I would definitely take the hundred thousand followers on Instagram.

The reason for that is because, I don’t know about you, but when I look at my email metrics, it’s downright depressing. Sure, open rates are decent, but click through rates are tanking. We’re seeing click through is like less than 2%, where maybe two years ago, when we started to see a major shift happen, it was close to 20% click through rates. Which means when someone opens an email, what is the likelihood of them clicking on the link to the eventual destination page?

If you’re running a business that’s solely depend on email marketing, every single person I know who has a list, big list, whether they’re multiple seven figure eight figure businesses, they’ve all said the same thing. Two years ago, something happened and I don’t know if it was a technology thing, or if it was just the market in general just stopped paying attention to email, but things have changed.

There’s so much clutter in our emails nowadays. And there’s a huge opportunity which is called your mailbox by the way. So sending stuff to people in the mail is a great opportunity. We talked about this with … Well, we’ll definitely talk about it in the future, for sure.

Anyways, there’s a lot of clutter, so people pay less attention to it.

Instagram right now I think is a great platform for engaging with your audience. Right now, organic reach is still pretty good. But again, because Facebook owns Instagram, they’re going to want to monetize the platform to the nth degree. So organic reach is only going to go down, which means you’re going to have to learn how to pay to play. So, that’s the second thing.

Email Marketing is dying.

You have to be using Instagram messenger, right? Facebook Messenger. These are the platforms; instant notifications, instant messengers types of platforms that is where mostly communications are going to happen, and that should ideally be moving people towards getting on the phone with you if you’re offering a higher end coaching program.

Sharing your beliefs and creating content for your tribe

Okay, third truth, share what you believe more than what you know.

I talked earlier about marketing is sharing your beliefs. I really believe this to be true. If you’re going to do any kind of content, you’ve got two options, okay? You can do the SEO game, and you can create content that someone has a blog post about 101 ways to use coconut oil. You’re going to create a better blog post that’s going to be 121 ways to use coconut oil, and it’s going to be 10,000 words with beautiful pictures, and then you’re going to drive a ton of back links to that blog post, and it’s going to cost you a lot of money to do that.

And then if people land on the blog, hopefully they’ll spend maybe more than a minute reading your article because most people don’t. And then they’re done.

So, that’s one way you could do the content marketing game. The other way is saying, who cares about SEO? I’m going to create content for my existing tribe, which is growing as a result of my paid traffic, okay? And you create content around what you believe. Yes, there’s obviously some helpful stuff in there, but you have to share what you stand for, what you stand against, because that is how you’re going to start to really polarize people and tracking the right people into your world, who are like, yes I believe this, I totally drive with that, let’s make this happen. Let’s do this. You have to share what you believe more than what you know.

This is not going to be a blog post that’s going to get a lot of SEO traffic. Who’s typing in five truths about online marketing? No one. People might be typing online marketing, but in order for this to get found as a blog post with the keyword online marketing, good luck, right? That’s massively competitive. I don’t care. I don’t even care how many people listen to this episode. Because I’m only speaking to the few who are already in our community who are drinking our Kool-Aid, who are resonating with this.

And if the people that are listening to this, or there are certain people that resonate with this and others don’t, that’s fine as well. But I’m sharing in this, and a lot of different solo episodes, a lot of stuff that I believe to be true not necessarily the five ways to get better email open rates. Some of that stuff can be helpful. But in all honesty, that’s information, it’s not transformational.

Okay, so share what you believe more than what, you know.

Spending time offline to build your presence online

Number four, is spend more time offline to build your online presence. I know, how does that make sense? How does that make sense? It makes all the sense in the world. And we actually had a previous episode, and I can’t remember which episode it was, but it was several weeks ago, we talked about how to build your online business by spending more time offline. What this means is, hey, get away from a computer, meet up with people for lunch, start going to events, get around other human beings. It’s the single fastest way other than paid traffic that you can not only build your mindset and really expand your thinking, but getting around other people who are doing long business is the potential for collaborations there, and partnerships and whatever else is infinite. That’s one of the reasons why we have our annual Healthpreneur live events because we want to bring together amazing people in the health and fitness space, and collectively things can happen that we don’t even know might ensue.

From last year’s events in 2017, I didn’t even know half of the stuff that went down in casual conversations over dinner. Business partnerships were created, amazing collaborations we’re developed, all sorts of cool stuff happened because these people were in the same room together. It’s the single biggest decision I made that moved my business forward, back at the end of 2009 after having been online for three years, and really not getting any traction. I said, “Listen, I got to start going to some events and meet and hang out with people.” That was the single biggest hockey stick inflection point in my business. And if you’re not going out to events, you’re missing out big time. So, that’s important, okay?

Mastering the fundamentals of direct response

Number five is, you have to master the fundamentals of direct response. We’ve talked about how the online world is changing, email marketing is dying, social’s becoming huge, already is huge.

Here’s the thing that’s never going to change, human beings. Human beings, human psychology is never going to change in the foreseeable future, right? Its been the same for thousands of years, maybe in a million years it would become more evolved AI, who knows? But anyways, for now, the drivers that drive us now are going to drive us next year; scarcity, urgency exclusivity. Different markers of what makes us do what we do is always going to be true.

So, you need to master the fundamentals of direct response. What is direct response? Direct response marketing is essentially putting together a message where you can track the outcome. Let me give you an example of what direct response is not. You’re driving down the highway and you see a billboard on the side of the road, that’s not a direct response ad, unless the billboard says call this number and use this promotion code. Where they can now directly track, oh, this came from this billboard on this highway. Facebook ads are an example of direct response. You pay $1 for Facebook ads, it’s put in front of a specific audience, you have pixels and tracking codes, and you know exactly that this lead or this customer came from that ad. That is direct response.

So, that’s the kind of mathematical side of it. But you have to understand the psychological side of it, which is how do you craft messages that are going to move people to action? Understanding the frustrations and fears that they’re going through, and being able to put together a communication where your prospects are like, “Wow, this person completely gets me. Oh, they’ve got this cool thing, all right, maybe I should check this out.” So, you have to study, and I say master the fundamentals, I didn’t say dabble with the fundamentals. This is, whether you want to call it copywriting or direct response, they’re very similar. You have to spend time developing this skill. It’s the single biggest asset you can develop very much like public speaking. Again, a public speaker, there’s two different types of speakers. You’ve got a keynote speaker who gets paid tens of thousands, $120000, whatever it is to go speak for an hour, and they just give you free content. Great, awesome.

But for most speakers who have to make a living outside of their keynote fee, because they’re not the clouts to command that type of keynote fee, they have to be making some type of offer. So, how do you put together a really valuable talk that motivates people to jump out of their seats, run to the back of the room and you know the whole thing, right? I can’t stand that stuff, but you have to be able to captivate people to take action. And if you don’t understand how to do that, you will always have challenges in business. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling hot dogs on the side of the road or you’ve got a physical gym or you’re seeing patients in person, or you’re building out a coaching business online. The fundamentals are the fundamentals. Humans are humans and you have to understand that.

What to do if you need help predictably bringing clients into your business

So, those are the five truths about online marketing in 2018 and beyond.

Here’s what I can say, is if you want to help with this stuff, and specifically I’m going to talk about number five.

If you want to help understanding, and not just understanding but deploying successfully direct response marketing, that is extremely valuable for your audience. And as a result is able to predictably bring clients into your business like clockwork, then we can help you.

What I’d like you to start off with is attend our free training called The Seven Figure Health Business Blueprints. You can do so at Healthpreneurgroup.com/training. It’s a 70 minute presentation, I’m going to walk you through the old way of building a business online, which is dead, and the new way of doing things that are going to help you just get such better results moving forward.

If you enjoy the presentation, if you jive with what I’m talking about, and if you resonate with it, then we’ll basically give you the opportunity to book a call with our team and we’ll jump on the phone with you and we’ll really figure out the best path for you in your business.

Now, the reason that I’m not suggesting you book a call with us directly is because I don’t recommend our clients do that either. And the reason for that is because we need to make sure that anybody we speak to is qualified and is a good fit for us to speak to. So, that’s the reason why we have a webinar on online presentation there to give you that content, that priming to see if you’re even a good fit for us to have a chat.

Just so we’re clear, the phone call is not a sales pitch. It’s a coaching call. That’s essentially what it is. It’s about helping you get to where you’re at, towards where you want to get to and crafting a plan together. And yes, obviously, if you’re interested in having us help you, we can talk about that. But it’s very important for myself and my team that we only spend time talking with people who are really on the same page as us. So, that’s why we have you attend the free online webinar first.

Again, that’s over at Healthpreneurgroup.com/training, and that’s what I’d like you to do right now if you need help to move forward with your business. If you’re sick and tired of not getting the results. If you’re sick and tired of spinning your wheels, posting 1000 times on social media and nothing’s happening. If you’re sick and tired of hoping that some of your clients will give you a word of mouth referrals. If you’re sick and tired of not knowing how much income you’re going to make next month. If you want more predictability, more stability and a lot more profitability as a result, a lot more freedom in your life, then let’s start now. Why wait? If not now, when? How much longer can you allow yourself to not enjoy the results that you say you want?

So, it all starts with the free training. Go through it at Healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Do that now while this is top of mind.

In the meantime, if you have not yet subscribed to the podcast, you can do so on iTunes, Healthpreneur Podcast is the name of the show.

Thank you once again for joining me, Yuri Elkaim here signing off. Continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode.