Abe Lincoln famously said:
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and
I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
As entrepreneurs, however, we often do things backwards.
Working 16-hour days…
Feeling overworked…
And never getting everything done we had hoped.
Yet, it’s not your fault.
You see, I was there too. I’d set my alarm at 3:30am so I wouldn’t “oversleep” and worked every waking hour of the day.
Why?
Because like many children, we’re taught:
“The secret to success is to work hard.”
But what if Abe Lincoln was actually onto something?
What if there as a way, as marketers, for sharpening our “axe” so we could work smarter instead of harder?
Lo-and-behold, there is a way…
A way reserved for those daring enough to think like 8 and 9-figure entrepreneurs…
Subtle (yet critical) distinctions that separate the elite entrepreneurs from everyone else…
Here they are:
Smarter Marketing Tip #1: Eliminate The Guesswork
What if I could prove to you that you could earn $3.80 for every $1.00 you invested? How much money would you be willing to invest?
It’s not a trick question.
Ultimately, if you knew this to be true (as was the case with my client), you would likely increase your investment because of the predictable return.
Yet, when I talk with business owners and ask them questions like:
- Where are you getting your clients?
- What is your cost of customer acquisition?
- What is the lifetime value of your customers?
- What’s the average purchase price per transaction?
- What’s the attrition rate?
- What percentage of your clients are active versus disengaged?
- What’s the average purchase frequency per client?
- What’s the return for each traffic source?
- What’s your cart abandonment rate?
- What’s your conversion rates per initiative?
…95% of business owners can’t answer them.
That’s a problem if you really want to scale your business.
You see, if you want to work “smarter,” you need to know what’s working and what’s not.
Without this information, you’re operating in the dark.
And once you figure this out, the math is simple:
Do more of what IS working…
And less of what is NOT working…
That way, if you figure out most of your leads are coming from a particular blog post (for example), you can leverage this information to generate a sponsored post or maybe some native advertising to increase the number of leads that are possible for you.
This is the sort of information that – once we could see what was working – allowed us to benefit from a marketing campaign to COLD prospects yielding an 81% open rate and 21.5% reply rate.
Imagine that…
Look, if you’re “in-it-to-win-it,” eliminate the guesswork and know your metrics.
It’s another way to sharpen that proverbial axe Abe Lincoln was talking about…
Smarter Marketing Tip #2: Systemize Your Business
“First you work your system. Then your systems do the work.”
– Sam Carpenter, Author of Work the System
You can walk into any McDonalds across the country and know, with absolute certainty, what to expect…
McDonald’s has legendary marketing systems generating billions of dollars in sales for them.
If you order a burger, the attendant will ask: “Would you like fries with that?”
…If you order a regular size meal, the attendant will ask: “Would you like to SuperSize your meal?”
And lastly, “Would you like an apple pie?”
This is an upsell and cross-sell system that’s tracked and followed by thousands of employees – and results astonishing revenues for the company.
The good news is that you can do the same thing yourself.
For example, in the Customer Re-Engagement Strategy (exclusively available to Predictable Profits Academy members) when properly implemented in your business would detail:
- When a client becomes inactive
- What communication is sent
- How often the communication is sent
- The offer being made
- How the success of this marketing campaign is tracked
And while this strategy achieved 100% month-to-month sales for a business owner, don’t assume that just because it works great, it’ll continue to be followed without a process in place.
Why? We’re busy entrepreneurs – often juggling a million balls at once. Unless we have a structured system in place, we’re bound to forget it.
When you have a system, you have the ability to:
- Optimize – It’s easy to improve a process that’s executed with consistency
- Create Leverage – Systems give you the opportunity to hand your process to any qualified member on your team and get them up and running quickly
- Get More Done – Entrepreneurs are busy, yet having a system will indicate when to execute the strategy exactly when as it’s designed
Aside from the usual channels, take time to check out a few other alternative digital marketing networks that could boost your advertising campaigns (while costing you a lot less.)
Smarter Marketing Tip #3: Automate
“Not implementing a marketing automation solution may be the ultimate career limiting move for today’s marketers. If you haven’t gotten started, you’re already behind the 8-ball” – IDC Group
When you have the metrics supporting what’s working (and what’s not)… And you build that into a system… The next step is to automate.
And this really is when the “cha-ching” happens – bigger and with greater frequency.
Zapier, IFTTT, and Infusionsoft are just a small sampling of what tools are available for this purpose…
Automation tools allow you to make rules that create custom audiences for Facebook (and automatically load them into our ad platform)…
Rules that automatically send an email and CSV file to a fulfillment house…
Rules that monitor engagement to ensure clients are getting the best result possible…
Rules that instantly trigger new marketing campaigns to get their customers to show up for appointments… Buy with greater frequency… Upsell/downsell/cross-sell… And the list goes on.
Marketing automation is the ultimate leverage in your business. It allows you to instantly expand your output so that your business has the potential to grow… 24×7… Even when you’re not working.
Isn’t that what you hoped to achieve as an entrepreneur? More freedom and making money while you sleep?
And so it begins…
It’s not about working harder.
The road to working smarter starts with “sharpening your axe” so you’re able to do more and earn more – faster and easier – using the secrets of 8 and 9-figure entrepreneurs (and some wisdom from Abe Lincoln).
With gratitude,
Charlie
