Introduction & Hack 1: Strategy

Hi. Welcome to my online class. Thank you for watching and thank you for taking the class. I promise you a lot of value 'cause I spent 10 years working in digital strategy and made a lot of money with it and a lot of success, thank God, and it's because a simple fact I understood that everybody's going online. And technology is dragging everybody down into using it. So, if I told you five, 10 years ago that your mom's gonna be on Facebook, you might have thought I'm crazy, but now everybody is online and what's happening is people have not understood yet how to start leveraging that online presence to make money and keep and stay in business. So throughout this class, I'm gonna present for you 10 hacks on how to build and how to leverage online presence to grow your business or make more money for yourself, or even resell the digital strategy and resell the marketing for potential clients that you're gonna have.

I want you to understand the mindset, alright? Let's think about mindset and let's understand what's happening in the media landscape. So over the past 10 years, the internet was supposed to be connecting us. In reality, what happens is it broke us down into buckets of interests, of different kind of things for different kind of people. So those who like Red Hats, now they fall to the Red Hat group. And those who like sports, it's not about sports anymore. It's about basketball, those who like basketball they're out on a group about basketball. And Facebook is the new internet these days. Because what's going on is it's the escape of people. They open up their phone, they go on Facebook, they're trying to consume content. So if you're not understanding that in your thinking as a business you're missing out on a lot of opportunities, alright? And then what's happening is Facebook knows more about you than you know about yourself.

And here's why. Ready? When you're browsing, if you like a certain content, if you like certain videos, if you watch certain animation or video, or if you like certain photos or if you subscribe to different groups or different pages, what's happening, they're collecting this data about you as a user and they're constructing your behaviors. They know that you went on this location, you're on that location, you're liking that restaurant and they're using this into what? Into advertising. So the advertising has shifted from mass to become more personalized and around certain subject, certain interests, certain people and very localized hypermarket. But what I mean by that is just, you have the ability right now, if you go on Facebook advertising to open up the ads, create an advertising just for certain zip code, for certain age, and for certain, even like a job. You can just retry now, all the nurses, all the doctors in DC area between that X age and whatever age.

What does that mean? It means that instead of you just trying to sell in a store for everybody, what's happening, if you take that store, transform it to a digital store, and then figure out who's your customer and find it online where they're spending time, you could do a lot, you can make way more money than what you're making by just exposing your content for everybody. Am I making sense? So, that thinking, that's the kind of mindset I want you to walk with. And people use the word strategy a lot. What is strategy in reality is just being intentional and thoughtful about the steps that you're gonna do online because you wanna try to measure the success from it. And we'll talk about breaking down the strategy into different buckets, this way throughout the second or third or fourth hack, I can't remember right now, you will understand how to start utilizing those hacks, that framework I'm gonna give you to pretty much do it for your own business or for whatever business you're trying to help, or even for opening up your own agency for your own self.

In this class, there's one recommendation I wanna give you that I wish someone told me that 10 years ago. Because it could have saved me so much time and so much energy trying to figure out how to get further in life. You gotta know yourself. Whatever you are, whoever you are, there's no such thing as I know myself. You gotta go deeper in yourself. Figure out what you're good at, what you're bad at. What's your shortcomings, where do you excel and where you don't excel. And it's not that hard because there's a lot of tools out there that could help you figure out your personality. So this way you can understand when you're meeting with a client, when you're meeting with a job, how you can help that job further with what you do well. I recommend using a tool called StrengthsFinder or CliftonStrengths. It's pretty much an assessment of about 45 questions. Those questions help you with a report that gives your personality.

So, I'll give you an example. My number one is communication and strategy and activation and maximizing, which means my brain keeps thinking about wording and messaging, and what if strategies and activation and how to maximize and get to excellence. So for you, as an advice before taking this entire hack, go online. It's about 20, 30 minutes test, take it. Have the report in front of you so you can understand how you can use the next couple of hacks we're gonna talk about to help you get further and win online.

Let's talk about the word 'strategy' and what is a digital strategy. A digital strategy is pretty much a very fancy word people use. In reality, what they're talking about is to be intentional and thoughtful about what you're gonna do online so you can measure the outcome of it. And when it comes to digital strategy, there's multiple element. And let's understand what's inside of digital strategy. First, there's multiple aspect of media. We're gonna go through them in the class later on in different sessions. There's your website, there's your social, there's your Facebook, Instagram, email list, landing pages, all those are part of a digital strategy. And then the question's gonna happen is which one to use when, and why to use one versus the other. We'll go in depth into those other sessions. It's gonna be depending on your customers, where are they online and we're gonna be figuring out how to find out where are they online to help you build that.

I'm gonna give you the five steps, that I use, that helps you to create a strategy. Step number one is, your goal. Step number two, your audience. Number three, your brand promise, competition. And the last one is, what? Measure. Here's what's happening. Whenever you start thinking about a strategy, you gotta understand where you're going. For instance, are you trying to get more customers? Are you trying to bring more brand awareness? Are you looking to collect more leads, collect emails? Are you looking for likes on Facebook? This could be infinite number of goals, alright? But if you don't have that written down, what's gonna happen, you don't have a route to work with, you don't have a lane to work with and then you're gonna be lost doing activities that's not measurable that's not impactful. So setting the goal could be, what? Leads, email, awareness.

Leads means a bunch of people giving you their emails. This way you could use their emails to sell something later on with it. 'Cause every single company should be thinking about email collection. You're in the business of building a tribe for yourself. So if you're a business owner and you're not thinking about collecting emails, collecting touch points, you're missing out on the opportunity of building a good digital strategy. Right? So keep thinking. The mindset that I want you to walk with, you're in the business of collecting information and you're gonna be reusing this information over and over to get more business.

So this is what leads means, and it could be emails. And let's think about awareness. Awareness is, if you think about... It's all about awareness, helps you with the positioning. Let's understand that. When you think about positioning, if I told you right now, think about fast food. Who are you gonna think about? McDonald's, right? If I told you to think about the coffee, who are you gonna think about? Starbucks? Those companies own a place in your head and they're able to leverage that to get you to come into the store and build that relationship with them. You might sometimes, your goal would be building awareness. So you can measure it by how many people talked about you and build a brand around you. That's kind of the goal.

Now, when you talk about the audiences, you gotta understand where they spend time online. Because you define the goals, the second step you gotta think about the people you're trying to reach. Where are they online? Are they on Facebook? Are they on Instagram? Are they on Pinterest? And you're gonna understand that once you figure out their buyer persona, which means constructing a person, imagining them every single step and putting them in front of you. So this way you target them specifically 'cause remember once you understand where someone is going, and you help them get there faster, they're doing business with you. You're making money because you helped them get there faster. So don't obsess so much about being everything for everyone. You gotta be one thing for one single target audience. Is that making sense? When you think about this person, is it a mom trying to get baby food? Is it a bride trying to get a booking, trying to find a photographer. Correct? So understanding your audience is a big component of a successful strategy.

And that the second thing is, once you understand where they are, you gotta figure out your brand promise, which means, what makes you special and why I should buy from you?

And that's the brand promise that we will be unfolding further and further in the process. Is that promise? You need to be the guide in that mom. You need to be the guide in that bride trying to find a photographer. You should be helping her life get easier, 'cause she's gonna buy from you if you are able to have a message, online, that's gonna help her get where she's trying to go. And then, the second step you gotta understand is the competition. Because once you understand the competition, you're able to break down their process so you can utilize it and build something better for them. And don't obsess so much about being the first. Doing something is always about doing something better. And when I think about online for the past 10 years, what I've been working on is, it doesn't matter if you have the great product. It matters if you have the best message. 'Cause the best message and the clearest message is the one mostly remembered.

And that message has to fit in the life of your audience to help them get further. Making sense? No? Cool. And then, the last step is what? Measure. Because what's happening if you build those steps in the right correct way, you can measure the impact you're doing and you can adjust and move around. For instance, once you know that you're trying to reach those people through Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest. Let's say Pinterest was not working for you, Instagram was working better. You adjust your strategy to be more focused on Pinterest. Those are the five steps. You gotta set a goal, your audience, set a brand promise, think about the competition and measure what you're doing to know if it's working or not.

So if you're trying to... Once you walk in a business, I recommend the first thing to do is ask the owner, ask that business a lot of questions. Because once you understand where they fit, you can pretty much start helping them get further. Does that make sense? Once you ask them a bunch of questions, in my mind if they told you what their problem is it's super easy because they identified it for you. All you have to do is figure out the solution for them. So, ask a lot of questions. Asking those questions have to be fitting into this audience, and most of businesses don't understand this part and they don't understand that the reason why you do personas and audiences is because guess what, on Facebook you can reach that specific person who just moved in town she's trying to find a photographer. You don't have to go all over to find that person.

So, asking those questions and building on their answers to help them get further, it's a big step and you're defining a successful strategy. Making sense? Keep watching. What we've discussed in this hack, is we measured how the media's changing and that we've moved into what's in it for you today, what you need to understand, and help other people understand so they can build a good successful strategy. Once you understand how to take them further with this process, you're able to apply those five steps whenever you walk into a business, a client, a new job, someone ask you to build a strategy you now have framework. A good framework for yourself that you could use in constructing a strategy for a client.

Lets move to hack number two. Hack number two is about understanding the media landscape conversions so you can build a better goal for yourself.


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