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Hey there - it's Brian 👋

It’s scary to choose your digital channel.

You invest a ton of time with no guarantee that it’ll pay off.

How do you choose which digital marketing channel to start in?

Ads. Socials. SEO. etc

It’s a lot.

So today I’ll help you take your first step in digital marketing.

You’ll hear:
• Which digital channels to choose from?
• Where to find your customers?
• How fast will you get customers?
• How do you get their attention?

You’ll have the confidence to know where to start your digital marketing.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

Where do you start?

It’s overwhelming at first.

But we’ll make it simple.

The only 3 things to think about:

• Where can you find your customers?

• How long will it take you to get those customers?

• How many can you get?

So let’s start with finding your customers.

Where can you find your customers online?

In this article we’ll focus on the 4 popular digital channels:

• Social platforms

• Ads

• Outreach

• Search engines

There’s a bunch of others (email, text, affiliates etc) but these are the most common so we’ll focus on these 4.

How do you choose?

Well. Each of these 4 are wildly different in terms of:
1) How long it takes to get your customers
2) How many customers you get

We’ll take advantage of these differences when we design your marketing.

Summary:
Use the fast channel first to get initial customers in the door. And in the background, you’ll build the “slower” channels (that get you more customers).

So how do you get customers quickly (while building the scalable channels)?

Where is it easiest to find your customers?

I’ll help you choose the platform that your customers are actually on.

So who is your customer?

B2B? B2C? Enterprise?

Let’s start with socials.

I made you an infographic to show you which platforms have your customers on them (below).

Which social platform has your customers?

Keep in mind which social platforms your customers hang out on.

In the next section, we’ll narrow down your decision by factoring in WHEN you get customers.

Which ad platform has your customers?

Luckily ads are easier to decide!

The only two ad platforms to worry about are Facebook and Google.

Google Ads:
Best if you have a B2B business and customers know about your solution. (Something someone would Google)

More expensive, but higher conversions.

Facebook Ads:
Best for B2C and solutions people wouldn’t know to put into Google.

Cheaper, but lower conversions.

Can’t decide on Google vs Facebook? Reply “Ads” and I’ll send you a checklist comparing the two.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

I didn’t explain which SEO and outreach platforms to choose.

Here’s why:

SEO:
There’s no platform to choose. You write articles. Every customer type can see it.

Outreach:
You reach out to people on social platforms.

Deciding which social platform to reach out to people is the same decision process as which social platform to create content on.

How long will it take you to find customers?

So the dream is that you get a ton of customers with little effort, right?

You can get there eventually (note: “little effort” is relative), but not today.

I think about digital channels in two types:

1) “Quick channels”
You could get customers today. But doesn’t get you a ton of customers.

2) “Scale channels”
Takes 6 - 9 months to build. Gets you a ton of customers.

So where do our channels lay on this spectrum?

1) Outreach
🏎️ Speed: Fast (you can get customers today).
📈 Scale: No scale. It’s a manual process.

2) Ads
🏎️ Speed: Slower than outreach. Ads take 2 - 3 months to be profitable.
📈 Scale: Mid-scale. Margins go down as you grow faster.

3) Socials
🏎️ Speed: Slowest. Takes 6 - 9 months to get customers.
📈 Scale: Biggest. Potential to reach unlimited people.

4) SEO
🏎️ Speed: Slowest. Takes 6 - 9 months to get customers.
📈 Scale: Biggest. Potential to reach unlimited people.

So when we design marketing plans, we start with quick channels.

While quick channels get you customers, you then build the scale channels in the background.

So here’s the decision point:

Are you struggling to get customers so you need a fast channel?

Or are you okay with customers are want to focus on getting this business to the moon and scale?

1) If you need customers today: Do outreach.

2) If you need customers fast-ish, but need more scale: Do ads.

3) If you can wait and want to focus entirely on scale: Do SEO or socials.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
If you want to scale, should you do SEO or socials?

I’m biased towards socials because I love the immediate feedback and community you create.

It depends on your style. If you want to manage a community and build superfans, go with socials.

SEO also works best for highly technical topics.

I go far more in depth in these blogs than I do on socials.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
Are you fighting hard for attention?

This time my side rant made its own section!

Here’s a troubleshooting section if you find it hard to get customer attention on these channels.

If you're not getting traction, it may be because they’ve seen offers like your 100s of times online. So they’re numb to it.

No worries.

It’s likely a highly competitive space and adjusting your positioning will fix the problem.

I specialized in positioning at Deloitte so I have plenty to share here.

I took the positioning frameworks we used with Fortune 500 executives and made them simple:
1) Who’s the customer?
2) What’s their pain?
3) How do you solve that pain better than anyone?

If you can’t get traction because there’s too many others saying the same thing, just take any of those 3 levers, and get more specific (or try a different target).

It makes your messaging resonate online in a sea of noise. And creates a moat around you that makes it hard to compete with.

If you need help crafting your positioning let’s chat.

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See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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P.S. Whenever you’re ready, there’s 3 ways I can help you:

1) Over $3M in revenue and want your own marketing plan (for free)?
At $3M+ you need marketing systems. All your marketing needs to come together or it eats too much of your time (and doesn’t scale).

I’ll give you actionable feedback on your SEO, ads, socials, & landing pages.

Then, I’ll explain your new marketing plan to actually get customers online.

2) Want 1:1 coaching to learn strategy & marketing?
Are you a product founder/business owner and need to understand growth?

I’ll teach you: positioning, business strategy, and digital marketing.

3) Want your Google ads run for you?
If you’re not getting the results you want from Google Ads or want to explore ads to grow your business, get your ads done for you.

This team has managed $85M+ in ad spend for over 200 customers.

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