What is Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy is quite simple to understand. It is a plan you use to be able to generate profits based on the wants and the needs of the market. There are mainly 3 steps to follow before you start copywriting.

First, there is segmenting. That means that you get to know the kind of person that would be interested in buying what you have to offer. You want to include everything from age, gender, the countries they live in, etc. That gives you a global idea of your potential customer.

In second comes targeting. Here, you want to get more specific about who will buy the product. As an affiliate, most companies will provide you with this information. Thats is the fun part where you decide how you will target different segment of your audience and try different approaches targeting, for example, men, age 30 to 45 living in the tier one countries.

Thirdly there is positioning. Thats is very important since this is the part where you explain to your audience how different the product, service or program you promote is different from the other that are already available on the market. Thats is the part where you will have a role to play as an affiliate using different marketing strategies. Thats is also where things can get ugly.

Ads are everywhere. Information is everywhere. It’s getting harder to make yourself a place in this ocean of advertising and information. There are different ways to make sure your message will reach your target audience. The most common one is the regular marketing way.

It basically consists of screaming louder than the others using not so right marketing strategies. The marketers telling you to use these techniques won’t tell you that they are not the best one to use. Since these methods work, that’s what you most likely will be using. Let me explain what I mean.

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What is Wrong With Regular Marketing Strategies?

Most companies will use these strategies, without calling them by their name. They tell you they work and you can get up to 5% conversion rate. Often, you can expect a 2% or 3% of people that click the link, get in the funnel and end up buying whatever you are promoting.

For most marketers, that’s good enough since some are able to make multi-million dollars businesses using these strategies.

In comparison, for brick and mortar stores, the average conversion rate is around 22%. If people are spending more time online and are buying more and ore online, why is the 2% conversion rate a good thing? Let’s take a look at the strategies used in marketing.

White Lies

Omitting details, exaggerating claims. They show you all the people who are having success with their product. What about the people that didn’t get the expected results? Why don’t we hear their stories?

Often, when you are in the make money online niche and you watch ads and webinars, they talk about the fact that their product is for everyone.

They say how easy it will be: just working 30 minutes per day will help you build your online business using their training and tools.

They rarely talk about the other tools you will have to pay for or the real amount of time you will have to invest to get started. It’s often more than what they claim.

And why are they always saying that you will make a 6-figure income easily, in less than a year? How about a way to build another stream of income? No claims, just telling you about everything you will have to do to make sure the offer is suitable for you.

Click Baits

Thats is “the Art” of grabbing someone’s attention. What they do is they create a headline that is beyond realistic. As a result, people get disappointed when reading the article because they had high expectations related to the headline.

Can you think of these headlines? “Lose 30 pounds in 30 days”, “Change your life doing these 3 things”, “Meet your soulmate in 14 days doing this”, “Discover the super secret to…that got discovered only 100 years ago and kept secret by…”etc. You get what I mean.

The problem with these is that they talk about the ONE exception that made it to these results using their product or service. They don’t talk about other’s results, or non-results. You usually don’t learn much from these articles or sales pages. It’s often a waste of time. They wanted you to click and it worked.

Negative emotions

Thats is the part where they play with your fear, your guilt, your pains, your fear of missing out, they create a scarcity for the product when it’s an evergreen product (that’s a big lie, not even a white lie). They make you feel guilty for not making a decision. Making you feel ashamed for not choosing their product. They are using your griefs against you so you hurt more and you make the decision to buy so it doesn’t hurt anymore.

Too many people, even big names, are using the fear of missing out (F.O.M.O). Easy to use. They talk about their product, how awesome it is, how much value you get for you money, how wonderful your life will be when you use that, etc.

At the end, this is where FOMO is used. “If you don’t act now, this offer is gone forever.” “Thats is your chance NOW to change your life”. “Thats is a once in a lifetime opportunity”. There are many other ways to create FOMO. These are just a few examples I’ve heard recently.

FOMO is often combined with scarcity to make you believe that you won’t see any better deals ever and you have 10 minutes to make you decision or the product is gone forever. That’s a big fat lie used to make you buy right now and regret it later.

Persuasion

It’s a manipulation technique to make you buy a product, no matter what. It’s all about the sale, not about the client. You only have one option to buy even though you would like to take a look around and see what else is out there.

Have you ever been in a situation where you where manipulated into buying something more expensive than what you needed, with options that you will never use?

Unfortunately, these situations are everywhere. It’s very common marketing strategy to use those tactics to generate sales.

Are the customers happy? Do these tactics attract the right people with the right mindset for your product? What we don’t always know is the refund ratio.

Do you feel good when you buy after that kind of experience? I don’t. It’s horrible. I don’t feel like I took the right decision. I don’t like having second thoughts about something I bought online because I didn’t have the time to do my research.

Do you remember I talked about the 2% conversion rate? What happens to the 98% of people that don’t buy? Well, they regular marketers don’t care about them because they are making money from the 2% to 5% who choose to buy the product.

The problem is that fear and negative emotions that are triggered in the ads of sales page, webinars, etc. work on the short term. They are not a sustainable way to do marketing on the long term. If people don’t feel like they had a good experience using your funnel, do you think they will recommend to others your link?

These techniques are use to eliminate procrastination. Often, people don’t buy because of procrastination or because of a lack of self-confidence.

I’m in a category of people who don’t like these techniques. I won’t be using them and they make me sick when they are being used by big names to make you buy their program, product or service. I run away!

I don’t like these techniques because I don’t feel like people are being honest about whatever they are promoting. The thing is, it’s easy to fall for it when you don’t have any knowledge in the niche the product or service is.

Is there another way to do things?

The good news is that there is another way to do marketing. It’s very simple. The first thing to do it is to be authentic and tell the truth. Simple enough, right?

Get to know the product or service you want to promote. Think about what the person interested in the product would need in addition to what you are promoting. Thats is when being an affiliate can be fun. You can be promoting everything someone would need to maximize the benefits of the product or service.

For example, if you have a BBQ niche, you are promoting BBQs. What are all the other products people would need related to the use of their BBQ? Some utensils, an apron, silicon mitts, the propane, etc. Many things are related to that. You’re job here is to tell the people about all these things, explain why they need it and maybe find a company that offers a great bundle including everything you need to BBQ.

That’s a great way to build your website, no? I didn’t talk about all the other things related to BBQ that you already have 5 topics to write about.

Think about the human that will buy the product or service you promote. Don’t focus about the sale you want to get from that person.

You want to get them where they are at this moment and lift them up, educate and empower them. Stay away from fear, grief and guilt.

Try to make a positive impact on people that will get in contact with the information you provide them. Thats is when creating a website comes in handy. You can gather all the information someone needs to make the best decision regarding a certain niche product.

Thats is when an email list can be a good thing when it is use to educate your followers. Don’t try to sale them tons of things, they won’t buy.

The only one thing I have heard from regular marketers is to build a relation with your audience and build trust. You can’t build trust if you make them feel miserable, if you use white lies and if you create click baits.

I know there are different ways to do affiliate marketing. New ways are being created once in a while to try to include people who don’t want to spend countless hours creating content. That’s OK. I have reviewed some of these programs. You can check them out in the webinars section.

Ultimately, the goal is not all about money. It’s about making a difference and helping people make the best choice available for them at this moment.

Thats is why, as an affiliate, it is important to keep learning about what is going on in your niche. What are people looking for when searching Google? Are there any questions you could answer, whether in a blog post or in an ad? What are the new products? Are they better than the ones you are promoting right now?

With a website, when you are creating reviews, make them as objective as possible. You love a product, tell me why and let me know about the things that may not be suitable for everyone. That’s how you build trust, when you can talk about the good AND the bad, for every product you review.

Do your research and see if you can find anything bad on the products you are promoting. You can check with the BBB if there where any complaints and why. Sometimes it’s something small that won’t change your mind on a product, sometimes it can be something big that you didn’t expect and then you can warn your audience about that.

There is also Trustpilot where people go to make reviews and talk about scams they are aware of on the internet.

When only running Facebook ads, take some time to build your business page and post relevant article for your niche. Create or share informative posts as often as possible, ideally once a day, so your page feed is not all about ads and promoting products or services.

I talked about it in my How to Facebook Ads article.

Tell me, which path are you going to take? Are you going with the flow and using regular marketing strategies or are you going to try to do something different? Let me know in the comments.

No matter what you choose, know what you are getting in. I will choose the second option since it suits my personality more than the regular marketing strategies.

I will write another article on how to use the second option. Stay tuned!

Get to work!

Best wishes,

Cynthia