The answer to creating winning marketing

The answer to creating winning marketing is actually fairly obvious if you really think about it. 

(By the way, a lot of the best advice you're going to get is fairly obvious in hindsight.)

Here it is in all it’s glory:

When you're selling a product, you want to make sure you have a winning product/service. 

(Duh)

But what does a winning product/service look like?

We’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s first flesh this out a bit...

I can sit here and tell you how to do VSLs, sales letters, emails, ad angles, landing page copy, headlines... all of those skills are very useful, no doubt about it, but the issue is that if you're doing them for a losing product/service, it doesn't matter how good your work is.

Even if your marketing is so good that you convince someone to buy the product, if it's a bad product, they'll just return the product, ask for a refund, or worse - issue a chargeback. 

If you pick losing products/services, you're wasting your time, you're wasting your energy, and you're wasting money as well. 

I talked about this on our Friday call this week, where we discussed the four different traits of winning products/services…

Those are:

1. Innovation - There needs to be some form of innovation/newness attached to the product. It should be different from everything else out there.

2. Margin - There's the ability to sell this product for four to five times your cost.

3. Audiences - There are multiple segments of audiences that you can sell to, or multiple cohorts of customers. It's very unlikely your product only appeals to one type of person. It probably appeals to multiple different types of people and your marketing needs to reflect that. (More on that in a second)

4. Story - People buy stories. People love buying a product that has a good story attached to it that aligns with their own story. 

Now, most of the time, you can't really change whether a product has innovation or margin. 

But what you can do, if you're providing a marketing service to someone to help them market their stuff, or if you’re selling your own shit, is focus on improving your marketing for different audience segments. 

Or you can focus on telling a better story for these people. (Another email for another time.)

If you're not checking those boxes, all you're doing is putting a glass ceiling on how much money you're going to make. 

I can't say what your ceiling is because it's reflective on you and who you are. 

I've seen people with Google Ads agencies for local business PPC making $100K a month, but they're stuck at that level. 

They can't go further because they've tapped out their market. And on top of that, there's not that much difference between them and everyone else. There's no innovation, there aren't multiple audiences they can go towards. No one really knows who they are, because there's no story behind the person selling the service.

So if you just make an INTENTIONAL decision to focus on products with those four traits, especially audience and story which you have more control over, you'll crush it. 

Now, let’s focus on audiences. 

If there are multiple audiences, we’re able to market the product more effectively because we have different “cohorts” of customers that we’re speaking to which means we’re able to take up more space across a few different markets.

See, most marketers go "oh, my audience is 18-25 year old men". 

Do you understand how many different types of 18-25 year old men there are? 

I am in no way the same as some of my friends from high school, yet we're the same age. 

The right way to think about this is that there are more specific markets or “cohorts” that are going to be based around things those markets can be accustomed to or that are part of their life. 

18-25 year old men who are college dropouts building a business.

18-25 year old men who are trying to find a wife in an urban city. 

18-25 year old men who love sports and collect Jordans.

Those are proper cohorts.

For instance, one of my cohorts is service providers dealing with difficult clients. 

When I wrote some content for them earlier this week, I was just testing the messaging and boom - I'm getting good engagement on my shit. 

When I hit around 40-50 likes, I know we got something people relate with that I should use to further market my products.

But then I tried talking to marketers who want to further their copywriting education and better understand how to think about markets…

That post only has 25 likes. Literally a difference of almost double the engagement. 

Getting specific is what helps you figure out what the right marketing message should be for your product or service.

I test this with social media, but you can test this with any form of message distribution like ads, emails, cold emails, etc.

I think the whole “18-25 year old male US” demographic is a byproduct of the classic facebook ads algorithm targeting.

However, it's not “human” to think about things in large compartmentalizations.

This is the problem with statistics, metrics, anything related to “data”. We can read data but we also should be able to be smart enough to ZOOM IN on data and start asking the right questions.

Here’s the mic drop: Sometimes it’s useful to think like a machine, other times it’s useful to think more like a human.

For any product, you have to think about who's going to buy that product, who's ACTUALLY going to be the person considering making that purchase, and who’s going to get value from it. 

4Creators is a great example.

We're creating a curated platform of proven experts with experience in a specific domain of expertise that helps you become a better creator in the digital creator economy. 

Who's this going to appeal to? 

Well, there's the freelancer who's trying to build a personal brand to attract more clients. 

There's the agency owner who wants to consult his clients better on their personal brands. 

There's the coach or consultant trying to sell more and wanting to learn from experts who are also selling their expertise.

There's people who sell courses and want to learn how to sell more through their own personal brand.

I could sit here for 20-30 minutes at a time and come up with a ton of these. 

And then I want to test which one seems to resonate the most, which one gets the most engagement, which one my audience most consists of. 

The way I test this is by asking myself “What message does this person need to hear in order to shift their beliefs from where they're at to where they want to be?”

And then all my content revolves around that.

I simply push that content in front of them and see which one hits. 

Now, the reason you stay in this game long enough is because it gets easier and easier the more content you've put out and the bigger brand you've built. 

It's really difficult when you have no one following you. 

You can still follow this approach, it just takes more time. You probably need to put some paid media behind it if you want to accelerate things.

So that's my thoughts, guys. 

If you want to create winning marketing campaigns, this is how you do it. 

Get maniacal about selecting the right products, and then obsess over identifying and serving the different audience segments and cohorts that product appeals to. 

Nail the product and the audience, and craft the rest of your marketing to serve them. 

That's the key.

It's so simple, yet so powerful. 

Master this, and you can dominate in any market, with any product. 

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