Welcome back to the Marketing Alchemist. In this episode we're talking about "The Formula of Truth: What Marketing Really Is and What It's Not". Today we're crafting the formula of truth, the blueprint for marketing that actually makes money.

The essence of today's discourse revolves around the formulation of truth in marketing, a concept that underscores the pivotal nature of profitability in our endeavors. We shall elucidate the blueprint for a marketing strategy that not only garners attention but also converts that attention into tangible financial gain. At the heart of this dialogue lies the imperative to comprehend the intricacies of revenue generation, including the cost of client acquisition and the dynamics of buyer behavior. By systematically analyzing these elements, we establish a foundation for designing marketing initiatives that prioritize conversion over mere awareness. Ultimately, our objective is to shift the narrative from a pursuit of visibility to a concerted effort in being chosen by potential clients, thereby ensuring that our marketing efforts yield substantial returns. The discourse delves into the conceptual framework of marketing and elucidates its quintessential purpose: the generation of revenue. The conversation is anchored on the premise that effective marketing transcends mere visibility; it must culminate in tangible financial outcomes. I posited that the essence of marketing lies in the ability to attract and convert attention into paying clients, thereby reframing our understanding of marketing as a quest for 'profitable attention.' This paradigm shift invites entrepreneurs to scrutinize their marketing strategies, ensuring they are not just garnering views but are also cultivating a clientele that contributes to their financial success. I embarked on elucidating the 'formula of truth' in marketing, urging practitioners to commence their strategies with a clear definition of their financial objectives. It is imperative for marketers to comprehend the cost of client acquisition and to align their goals with revenue generation. By employing mathematical principles to assess profitability and marketing expenditure, businesses can better strategize their marketing efforts. The discussion further highlights the necessity of designing marketing materials with a conversion-centric mindset, ensuring that every action taken leads to sales rather than mere awareness. Thus, the conversation encapsulates the critical nature of understanding one's audience, recognizing buyer behavior, and consistently measuring outcomes to refine and adjust strategies for maximum effectiveness.

Takeaways:

1. The podcast emphasizes that marketing must be reframed as a pursuit of profitable attention, focusing on converting views into paying clients.
2. Understanding the cost of client acquisition is crucial for marketers to design effective strategies that yield a favorable return on investment.
3. The conversation around money and profit margins is essential for marketers to discover opportunities that can significantly enhance their revenue.
4. A successful marketing strategy necessitates a shift from just raising awareness to ensuring that awareness leads directly to conversion and sales.
5. It is imperative to track and analyze the performance of marketing efforts, adjusting strategies based on data rather than preferences.
6. Ultimately, effective marketing is not about being known, but rather about being chosen by consumers who recognize the value and solutions offered.

Welcome back to the Marketing Alchemist.

I'm your alchemist, Alex Haynes.

And we turn noise and chaos into clarity and marketing gold.

So today we're talking about the formula of truth, what marketing really is and what it's not.

Today we're crafting the formula of truth, the blueprint for marketing that actually makes money.

And at the end of the day, day, that's what marketing is for, making more money.

It's about getting your information in front of people and converting them into paying clients.

That is the essence of what we're talking about today.

So let's reframe marketing as a pursuit of profitable attention.

I like that, a profitable attention where when you get views and you do get those followers, you actually turn them into paying clients.

So what I do with my business all the time.

So I'm going to break it down to you, how to do that.

When you're honest about your goal, making income, you can actually build everything else backwards from that truth.

Understanding the truth, this elixir is the start of making real money.

So let's talk about the formula for this truth, the formula to make money and a practical structure for income driven marketing.

That's what we're talking about, right?

So we need to start with the goal.

Define the revenue and profit.

Clearly you need to understand what your cost of acquisition is, what it costs to actually get a client to pay for your product or service, or even if you want them to describe how you make your money.

You need to understand the art of making money.

You need to know what makes money, what makes the most money, how you're most profitable, what it costs to produce that product.

Everything about it comes down to a number.

You need to understand that the goal has to be derived from, from making revenue because that's gonna set everything else up for success.

Let's use the candy bar as an example.

Let's say you buy candy bars for $10 and you turn around and sell it for $40.

You do this one time, your profit margin is a total of $30.

That means if you spent $30 on marketing, you will have made $0.

Well, not a big budget to spend.

We need to know this because if you only have $30 to spend, well, you're probably not running ads.

You're probably doing everything you can to do it for free.

Free marketing, because you only have $30 to play with.

Now let's use that same example, but let's scale that up.

Let's say you do only make $30 per sale, but let's say you Found a way to reach 100,000 people and 10% of them.

A thousand people buy at a time.

Well, now you made $30,000.

Well now you actually have a bigger marketing budget.

You can spend $10,000 and, and make 20,000.

Right.

That's how math works.

That's how marketing and understanding the algorithm works.

You have to really understand where the money is and how much you're making so you can understand whether you can afford to do marketing or not.

Next, we need to design from conversion backwards.

So usually when you look at the funnel, the biggest top of the funnel is awareness and it leads to conversion.

So everyone starts with awareness and they really focus on getting out there and being heard.

Let people know what you are and who you are.

And that's not necessarily wrong.

But we prefer to focus first on conversion and work backwards.

We define exactly what leads to a sale and awareness must lead to that sale, not just a visibility.

We design our stuff with the purpose of selling, which gives you different parameters than just getting your name out there.

The difference is like knowing that Apple exists and is a phone versus Apple is a great phone and you need to buy one for whatever reason.

Awareness versus awareness driven by conversion.

Conversion says why you need to have that product, not just to be aware of it.

Then we need to know the numbers, understand the cost of acquisition.

I mentioned this.

This is huge.

Understanding what it costs to get someone to buy.

Understand your profit margins and your audience size, know where they are, who they are, what they can afford.

All this is key to really setting up what type of marketing you should have.

Clarify your ideal client profile, really understand who they are, their psychology of why they buy, where they buy, what they look like, where they go, where they live, what they do.

And make sure you really understand your unique selling offer market what makes you money and resonate with buyers.

Don't just market your product, market the products that make money because not all your products will make money.

And we'll get into this later, but really understand what makes you money and resonates with the buyers.

That's why we really have to understand your ideal client and understand your unique offer.

Okay, then lastly, we want to measure and adjust.

Just because you made a marketing material, just because you put an ad out doesn't mean you can set it and forget it.

You have to keep refining.

You have to look at the results, not preferences, and decide what stays and what goes.

You may love the video you made, but it may have zero results.

And then you may put up another video that looks awful and you Absolutely hate it.

But.

But it's got the best results.

You keep the one that drives results, not the ones you like.

You gotta learn to like what makes you money.

Now let's talk about the operation.

When I sit down with clients, I always have the money conversation.

It's a hard conversation to have.

And most people don't like it because they feel guilty that they charge people money for what they do, service or product.

They always feel like, I can't tell you.

I don't want to give up my secrets.

But.

But that real numbers helps marketers like me really understand what we should be marketing and where opportunity is.

We have clients we sat down with, We've gone through all the numbers, and we'll realize huge pockets of potential just because we looked at the numbers and we said, hey, this has a bigger profit margin.

Why aren't you talking about this?

Oh, we never thought this would be interesting to people.

Well, it makes you more money.

Let's try it and come to find out.

Becomes one of the biggest sales items and they make more money and their clients are happier.

It's really understanding where those pockets of money are and how much money something can make.

You have to have that conversation.

It's a hard conversation.

And if you're having it with yourself, you need to be real honest about where that money's at.

Look at those numbers.

Understanding the cost.

Write it down.

Do that math.

Okay?

Have that money conversation.

It's not about guesses.

It's about real numbers.

Real numbers drive profit.

This is called alchemy for a reason.

It's alchemy, math and science, not guesswork and wishes.

Understand buyer behavior.

You have to understand how buyers interact with you, because it's going to decide how you actually make that money, what you actually market.

I'll give you a great example of this.

We've all gone to that big blue store with a giant W in front of it.

I'm not saying it, so I don't get shut down.

We both know what that store is called.

Well, when you first walk in there, they have products that they sell for at cost or really cheap.

They're called loss leaders that get you physically to come into the store.

That foot traffic will actually become profitable.

Because when you go into the store, sometimes they put them all the way in the back.

Okay.

If they make you walk in the store and go somewhere specific, that means they want to get you deep into the store.

Because by the time you walk to the front of the store, you will have picked up more than the first item you walked in for.

This is a buyer behavior.

We know.

We have this joke that if you go to Target, right.

My dad likes to call it Target, the big store worth at tee, right.

If you go into that store, women will go in for one thing and men and walk out full carts and spend hundreds of dollars.

Why?

Because of buyer behavior.

You went in for one, bought way more because you saw it, went, oh, I need this.

Oh, I need this.

Or as I like to say, oh, a piece of candy.

Ooh, a piece of candy, right.

You just are drawn to buy more.

So you can actually create a marketing piece of content that promotes something you're not going to make money off of, knowing that the buyer behavior is going to actually lead to increased sales.

And you can do this digitally too.

You just have to understand that buyer behavior.

And that's a deep conversation and psychological profile you have to build.

That's something we talk about in a later episode.

But like, understanding the buyer behavior is key and critical to knowing how you make money.

A digital freebie versus like that loss leader might be like a freebie funnel or like irresistible tripwires.

These are things that you've probably seen people make videos on, like how to make the best freebie funnel, how to make the most irresistible tripwire.

These are key to actually making your money.

But if you don't understand once I, like I said again, what makes you that real money?

You can't make those freebies work unless you know what it leads to.

Right?

Then we have have to track and tune and adjust, right?

Monitor those clicks, those calls and the conversions.

If views are really high, people are seeing your ads because you can track that, or you're seeing new, new views to your website, but you're not converting, you're not actually getting sales.

There's a problem somewhere in the funnel and you got to isolate that problem and fix it because otherwise this whole thing doesn't work.

Marketing goes beyond a fun creative ad or a fun video.

It's about getting that buyer to buy.

And if they're not buying and they're not converting, something is broken in your marketing.

And it's important for you to figure that out.

You got to go through each thing, look at where the hang up is.

If you got a lot of views but no one's clicking on a call or no one's putting something in your cart, then that's where the problem is.

If things are going into the cart but they're abandoning it, okay, well what are you doing to get them back to that Cart, Are you sending them a reminder?

Okay, they've called you, but for whatever reason, you just lose the sale every time.

Well, that sales pitch needs to change how something in that sales pitch is going wrong and you need to address that.

Maybe that person shouldn't be doing sales anymore.

Just the reality of the situation.

You have to figure out what the problem is and fix it.

Okay.

Then you got to see what's working.

Whatever's working.

Do more of that.

Double down, triple down.

If you got something, you're like this funnel I don't like, but it works and I'm making a ton of money on it.

Double, triple that effort and do more of that.

Make all the ads like that, make all the posts like that, make that funnel duplicatable so you can keep doing that thing over and over and over again and making more money.

Algorithms Alchemy is about repeatable things you can do to help increase your marketing and increase the bottom line.

Just remember, this whole thing is about making the numbers work.

They have to work.

Marketing is alchemy.

It's a science.

It's not wishes.

You can't make $10 into $100 just because you wish you could make more money.

If you have a product you wish you could make more money on, change the price.

That's how it works.

You have to increase the price.

Now, there are tactics we will talk about in other episodes about how to do that and provide value.

It's about value driven propositioning, not about dollar propositioning.

It's a whole nother topic.

But you can increase the price to get that ROI so you can afford marketing.

Maybe that's what you have to do.

But you have to be honest with yourself and really understand.

It's about numbers.

It's not about wishes.

It's about real results.

What is working, what can you measure, what do you need to adjust and what do you have to align so every dollar has a purpose.

I love doing marketing and being creative, but at the end of the day, it's not about having fun.

It's about delivering results.

Stop chasing followers, stop chasing big views just because you got a lot of views.

It's about converting every follower and view you get.

That's the most important thing.

I'd rather have 10 people look at my stuff and all of them buy than a thousand people look and I get no sales.

The reality has to be about the purpose and the purpose for us, for marketing.

Why you're coming here, why you're watching this episode is to tell you it's all about that bottom dollar.

It's not about making more money.

Okay?

Now lastly, real marketing isn't about being known.

It's about being chosen.

This is a huge shift for a lot of people.

And everyone gets lied to and believes the lie that if I can go viral, if I can just be known, people will.

Will.

Because people know me, they'll buy from me.

No, it's not about being known.

It's about being chosen.

You have to give them the reason of why they should spend money with you.

You have to tell them about how you're solving that problem better, faster, cheaper than everybody else.

Look, you can be known and have $0, or you could be known and be rich.

Just because people know who you are doesn't guarantee they're gonna buy from you.

Marketing helps changes people's mind.

When you set it up correctly, you gotta understand that's the goal.

So your marketing aligns with that.

This is the formula of truth.

This is where you start.

You have to have that honest conversation with yourself to build out the conversion backwards.

Okay?

If this episode helped you see to understand marketing a little bit differently, share with someone you know who owns a business, another business owner who might be stuck with this, or a friend who's thinking about starting a business.

Start correctly.

Of course, tag us to tell us how your marketing needs have changed and you know, you're actually starting making money again because that would be huge.

That would be a huge encouragement to us that you actually took this, worked this program, looked at the numbers and said, hey, we found out this is what we can cost.

This is what our marketing dollars.

But we still need help because we don't know where to start from that that will help me help you even more.

Well, till next time, like Share Comment Like I asked you, I am your marketing alchemist, Alex Haynes, and I'll see you in the next video.