So I want to talk about marketing responsibly. And no we’re not talking about marketing questionable companies. We’re talking about spending your advertising budget in a responsible and sustainable manner.

You should always remember that marketing is like petrol. It’s expensive, it burns quickly and it’s completely useless without an efficient engine to put it into.

Marketing should be thought of as scale, not solution. And before you start spending money on marketing, you should first test your engine to make sure it works. And then when it’s working, you need to keep testing it, servicing it and tuning it.

So that means, testing your offer, your ads, and your funnel organically first. You can do that through the methods we teach you within this training. And also by simply asking experienced members of the community to watch your ads, sign up to your landing page, test your funnel. Check that everything is working.

As you go through this process, be mindful not to take any one opinion too much to heart. You shouldn’t be testing these things with 2 or 3 people. You should be testing it with many more than that. As sometimes people’s opinions can be extreme and can be taken out of context. It’s only by getting a broad range of feedback that you will truly have a clear picture of what’s happening. And even then, the real truth will only be discovered when you are actively marketing.

Your organic promotion should never stop. Because it’s a very effective way to market yourself and to increase your profit margins and reduce your costs. Often the quality of leads that come through those organic channels with one-to-one engagement tend to be the better quality people.

So once you have thoroughly tested everything organically, then you’re ready to take your first tentative steps into paid promotion. And they really should be tentative.

Firstly consider your budget, both for the near, medium and far future.

All being well, you should start to generate some kind of revenue within a few months of starting your marketing. But wherever possible, you should try to reinvest this revenue back into your business to enable you to scale more quickly. But as I mentioned before, please don’t rely on this happening.

Once you have launched your first campaigns, your first goal is to achieve a reasonable lead cost of somewhere around £5 or $7 per lead or cost per click cost of around £1 or $1.20. Bear in mind that this is an average over a few days or even a week at least. Not over your first few hours! The ad platforms will take time to balance and optimise your campaigns. So please leave them well alone and allow them to do that.

There are many factors that can affect your lead cost. The main one is the quality of your content. How good are your ads? This will be 80% of your success. So make sure you get those absolutely spot on. The next thing is who those ads are targeted at. This is why your ideal client avatar is so important and why you need so much depth of understanding with it. Your targeting is always changing and evolving. You should constantly be testing and adapting your targeting.

Next, is your landing page. You should be shooting for 30% of the people who land on your landing page to become leads. If it’s a lot lower than that, then there’s likely a problem somewhere. The main pitfalls we see are landing pages that are too slow to load, which is why platforms such as LeadPages are more effective. Poor landing page layouts that don’t look 100% professional and a lack of reasons for people to sign up displayed.

So as you can see, there’s a lot of numbers to keep on top of on a continual basis. And you really should be keeping on top of them at all times. Make sure you make it as easy as possible for you to do that, by keeping everything in an easy to understand spreadsheet.

Remember, if any of these numbers start drifting too far from the expected norms, get us to look at your setup. And if necessary, pause any activity while you do that.

Whatever you do, don’t keep spending money, hoping that things will turn around. Yes you do need to give it a short amount of time to stabilise, but don’t stay in that state.

So go ahead, build that engine, test it thoroughly, and start tentatively. Good luck!