Scaling a business. Growing sales 101

In business it’s best to decide one one way of promoting it, become expert at this one method and generate significant, predictable revenue with it. When the business is working properly, brand awareness is growing, amount of leads is growing, sales process becomes easier and easier (due to happy customers, great reviews and testimonials) that’s the moment when businesses want to scale and explore more options to bring in more customers. You can either scale the one method that you use so far- if it’s ads, it’s ramping up ad spend or creating new angles, finding new audiences, creating new creatives, if it’s working with influencers, is getting more influencers on board. But that is still in the end keeping all your eggs in one basket. Which isn’t necessarily a safe option. Having an ad account suspended or a platform go down can seriously impact your cashflow. Another way of scaling is adding additional, independent source of traffic. And doing the same thing, getting better and better, increase conversions with this method and move on to the next.

There are 3 main ways of driving traffic – paid advertising, organic advertising and using search engines.

Paid advertising

requires time to set up, but after the set up is completed it only requires to constantly spend money and monitoring

paid upfront:

• FB, IG ads
• YouTube ads
• Google ads
• Pinterest ads
• Snapchat ads
• TikTok ads

paid after sale is made:

• affiliates

Organic advertising

visibility of content is very restricted, organic reach is a mere 5% on most platforms and within 24h content is no longer visible, need to constantly creating new content to stay relevant (time consuming)

• blog (traffic comes from Google, Pinterest, email marketing, affiliates- if it doesn’t end up in sale it still grows brand awareness and can convert at a later time)
• fb content
• ig content
• youtube content
• jv (joint venture) partnerships, leveraging other person/brand audience- interviews, trainings

Search engines

require time to set up, content visible for years, amount of time or money to keep it working is minimal, close to zero, ideal for long term strategy

• Google seo
• Youtube seo
• Pinterest seo

Retention

require time to set up, content visible for years, amount of time or money to keep it working is minimal, close to zero, ideal for long term strategy

• Pinterest seo
• email marketing
• youtube seo

*this content shows up in peoples feed, mailbox regardless if they search for information, use social media. Paid advertising is not going to show up here.

With paid advertising you only get people see your content when you spend money, moment you stop spending money, it’s like the content never existed.

With organic advertising: FB and IG posts, they disappear within 24h

Only YouTube and Pinterest content is searchable and can come up in the recommended feed (Google does not recommend you to check out any content, only showing you the results for the desired keywords)

One of the most important part of marketing is retention marketing.

Ice cold leads, who don’t know and trust the brand are a very tough market to sell too. The more content users see from the brand, they start building trust, in order to do it you can either keep spending on ads, influencers or send email marketing, or keep showing up in front of your customer on Pinterest.

Pinterest is unique in this way that people come there to get inspiration, find things they want to buy, find information they are interested in.

Pinterest and Google are the only 2 platforms that want you to leave their platform. Every other platform does what it can to keep you on they platform for as long as possible.

Pinterest allows you to promote every piece of content you have online. For instance a fb post or a lead magnet page. Google does not show you fb posts in search result, getting your blog posts on top of the results is a very time consuming process and popular niches have no way to compete, only very very narrow stand a chance with long tail keywords.

Pinterest on the other hand can show your content to 100k of users, even if you have been using the platform for 1 month, and generate 5k visitors to your content, not necessarily website, like i said earlier, works well with promoting fb posts and all other social content as well.

3 of the most popular ways brands promote are as follows

1 – Fb ads

2 – influencers

3 – Fb organic marketing

As much as 1 and 2 are pretty straightforward, no 3 has lots and lots of ways people use Fb to promote their businesses.

1. creating content on personal profile that’s going to resonate with their target market. Engaging with people who like, comment the post as well as those who message directly
2. creating a FB group, fb group allows more than 5k friends like personal profile does, but it also requires daily posting and high engagement in order to sale. Without engagement group will be dead and won’t make any money
3. Messenger marketing = directly pitching services (most annoying and time consuming way, yet business coaches still keep advising it)

Once your business generates money on clock worth with this methods the fastest way to scale is by adding retention marketing: Pinterest seo and email marketing and promote existing content to a new audience that is not actively using FB to find information, products, courses and services.