Marketing Made Simple – Book Summary, Review and Guide

Marketing Made Simple – Businesses lose sales everyday because it lacks a clear strategy for attracting new customers.

This book reveals a 5-part checklist, which is based on tried-and-true ideas from “Building a StoryBrand“, for marketing experts and business owners to create a sales funnel that connects with important customer touchpoints and successfully develop, strengthen, and tell their brand’s story to the public.

The three stages of relationship-building to earn customer’s trust.

To win over customers’ trust, you must understand the three phases of relationship building.

Instead of wasting money on marketing, stick to this straightforward five-step plan:

• Clarify your message or write a “BrandScript”
• Condense it into a single sentence
• Support it with a compelling website.
• Produce shareable content or a lead generation strategy
• Launch an email campaign

This strategy forges connections and establishes your brand as trustworthy. Relationships will go through the following three stages as customers move through your sales funnel:

1. Curiosity – In this beginning phrase, a customer comes into contact with a product or brand and develops an interest in learning more about it. The feeling is not very well thought out. Make your product seem vital to the customer’s survival to pique interest. At this point, customers want someone to solve their problems, not to hear your story. Brands can pique interest with their catchphrases and websites. 
2. Enlightenment – A this stage, you need to describe how your product will help customers succeed by resolving their problems. Your marketing content should clear up any uncertainty customers may have regarding what you can do for them. To educate customers about your product, use lead generators and nurturing email campaigns.
3. Commitment: Don’t pressure customers into buying something. Recognize that before purchasing, customers typically require eight “touchpoints” or points of contact with your brand, such as hearing an advertisement or visiting your website. Create commitment using sales email campaigns.

Design a powerful one-liner to grow your brand

Recognize how words can influence how customers perceive you. Brands like Geico, for instance, employ mnemonic devices to aid customers in remembering their message: Repeating the slogan “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance” helps customers remember this message. If your message is clear and easy for customers to repeat, it will spread like wildfire.

Create a succinct one-liner, or single sentence, to pique the interest of potential customers. Describe the issue your brand solves in detail; this will serve as your hook for attracting customers. Then describe how you intend to solve the problem. Avoid being overly wordy, clever, or cute; instead, make sure the link between the problem and the solution is obvious. Your each liner’s line should evoke a feeling of tension and/or relief. Place your one-liner all over the place, from your email signature to the wall in your store, to ensure that your team memorizes it.

Build a compelling website

When launching websites, people frequently commit unnecessary mistakes like relying on insider jargons, using slideshows with too-rapidly changing images, failing to boost your lead generator, and employing images unrelated to your product. When working with a designer, make a wireframe, which is a lengthy digital page or piece of paper with a mock-up of how you want your website to appear.

The following nine sections is needed on your website:

1. Header – Use a few words to briefly describe your offering at the top of your website.
2. Stakes – Describe the unpleasant situation that your product will help customers avoid.
3. Value proposition – Describe how your service or product will add value by listing its advantages. Compare scenes of satisfied customers using your product with daily life without it.
4. Guide- Present your company as the response to consumer issues. You should speak with a firm yet sympathetic tone.
5. Plan – Outline the steps the client will take to collaborate with you to address their issue. Reduce the plan to three easy steps to keep it simple.
6. Explanatory paragraph – Tell an engaging, SEO-friendly story that ties your target audience to your company. Find out what your customers want to establish a stronger connection with them. Who do they hope to develop into?
7. Video – You can optionally include a branded video to give your message more life. Your video serves as a sales pitch to win over potential clients.
8. Price Choices- Indicate the cost of your goods or services, as applicable.
9. “Junk drawer” – Move links to additional information, such as your contact or legal details, to the bottom of the page rather than crowding the top.

Lead Generation Strategy for your business

With the help of a lead generation campaign, you can request email addresses from potential customers by promising to send them more information on a topic that interests them. People are more likely to develop trusting relationships with you if you provide free value first. In order to stand out from the competition and establish your brand as an authority or resource in your market, a lead generator should have a fascinating title, target a particular audience, solve the problems of your target customers to earn their trust, and elicit feelings of reciprocity. Your lead generator could include anything, like an interview with a specialist in your field or a practical checklist. Create targeted events, like free Webinars that provide information or training, to share your content. You can follow-up with offers via email marketing and launching ads on relevant platforms like LinkedIn.

We’ve written more ideas on lead generation here and a deep dive into lead scoring and more here.

Your lead generator should have a fascinating title, such as “Building your dream home: Ten things to get right before you build” or “Cocktail club: Learn to make one new cocktail each month.”

The following components should be present in your PDF text’s content:

• The issue that your ideal customers are facing.
• A sentence demonstrating your understanding of their suffering, followed by sentences describing your accomplishments and establishing your brand as an authority who can help them with their problem.
• A paragraph that goes into more detail and may mention the customers’ frustration.
• A paragraph outlining your straightforward solution to your customer’s issue, followed by a straightforward, step-by-step guide, like five tips or professional advice.
• A section outlining the risks to your clients if they ignore your advice and the advantages they stand to gain if they do.
• A final sentence urging your readers to take the desired action. And why they should take action now.

Here are more lead generation ad examples you may get inspiration

Use email marketing to nurture your audiences

Your emails should be conversational, have eye-catching subject lines, concentrate on issues you can sympathetically resolve for your potential clients, and position your business as an authority. Avoid the temptation to rely on big words or insider jargon, be succinct, and use active language.

To maintain contact and build trust with your prospective customers, use nurture email campaigns. A nurture email campaign keeps you in people’s minds because they make purchases on their own timelines, not when you want them to. To ensure that you are only contacting those who want to hear from you, include an unsubscribe link.

Your weekly nurture emails could include news, advice, or alerts about sales, new arrivals, recipes, or how-to videos. Create a few effective emails that you can automate to gain momentum gradually.

Create a sales follow-up email sequence

Create sales email campaigns to increase desired customers’ commitment. Individuals are offered something by your sales campaigns that they can accept or reject. When you concentrate on selling a single service or product, explain how it will help people solve a problem, call the reader to action, and, if possible, include a limited-time offer. 

Create a campaign structure using six distinct emails:

1. The first email should only share the content or lead-generator you promised, not make an attempt to close any deals.
2. Three days later, you should send your second email, which provides readers with solutions to their problems and makes a pitch for your product or service. At this point, don’t expect to close many sales.
3. An endorsement from a customer appears in your third email.
4. Your fourth email helps prospective clients get past any objections.
5. Your fifth email introduces a paradigm shift, or a fresh perspective on an issue your potential customer assumed they were familiar with.
6. In your sixth email, you make a direct request for the sale and mention any limited-time offers.

Key meetings you need to have with your sales and marketing team

You’ll need to schedule these five meetings with your team in advance to ensure marketing success and strategy alignment:

1. Hold a goal meeting to clarify your company’s goals and objectives during a full-day strategy session. Think about the best course of action. What is the most lucrative line of business? Do you plan to transition? Do you have a department you’d like to expand?
2. Website meeting – With the help of a whiteboard or other visual aid, wireframe the sections of your website’s landing page with your team. As people become more enthusiastic about the product, this meeting usually ends up being upbeat and enjoyable.
3. Meet with your copywriting team to discuss the language you’ll use in your email sequence and lead generator. Include designers and photographers in this meeting. These two areas can occasionally overlap, and any lead generator concepts you drop can be reused in nurture email campaigns. Your campaign should ideally consist of a powerful lead generator, a sales sequence, and a comprehensive nurture email campaign.
4. Content meeting – Have a team member print out all campaign materials and tape them to the wall. People can visualize the entire campaign by using Post-it notes as visual cues for color coding. Plan when you’ll launch each piece after considering whether the content uses consistent messaging and produces the desired results.
5. Results meeting – Examine your findings and revise your message while considering which elements of your campaign succeed and which fail. Examine any data you have and think about replacing underperforming emails with something new. For example, look at how many emails people open.

Conclusion

According to Donald Miller and Dr. J.J. Peterson, marketing shouldn’t be expensive or difficult, regardless of what you’re selling. You can develop a successful sales funnel in five easy steps, as well as relationships based on reciprocity and trust. Discover how using the right words to establish your brand as knowledgeable and sympathetic can help clients see you as a solution to their issues. You can learn from Miller and Peterson how to ask for money, show confidence in your product, and execute a marketing campaign. For further reading, I recommend checking out Free Prize Inside and How Brands Grow book summaries.