An online marketing mentor can help you build your own existing business, or even build an online business from scratch. Before I found an online marketing mentor I bought several courses promising to teach me how to make money online.
Unfortunately most of them failed in this promise, or at least, I failed to make money from their advice. But, I did learn a number of strategies which proved useful. However, it wasn’t until 2014 when I found an online affiliate marketing mentorship program that things really turned around for me. At the time I was running a failing Kung Fu school and I used the education to learn about how to market my school.
Online Marketing Mentor – Struggling Business
I used Facebook targeting, Google Places for business and a few other strategies to advertise my school. Within a year I had more than doubled my class! An online marketing mentor is not only there to show you the strategies to advertise a business, but they will also remind you how your thinking affects your business.
Most businesses will fall short because a business can never outgrow the thinking of the owner. So, unless you’re growing personally and changing the way you think into your business, chances are it could be massively improved. I had some serious limited thinking which I brought to my Kung Fu school.
Firstly I was expecting people to come to my class without even advertising it. Word of mouth advertising is all well and good if it works. But unfortunately you can’t control it apart from being good at what you do and offering a great service. But if no one knows about your service they won’t come running just because you think you’re awesome!
Secondly I was running my business how I used to train while learning. I was great at being the technician in the martial art and training very hard. I was less good at imparting the knowledge to my students and organising this knowledge into an encouraging learning format.
In The E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber he talks about this same problem for many employees transitioning into building their own businesses. Many get stuck in the mindset of working their business just how they used to work as an employee! But it doesn’t work. As a business owner, you’re no longer employed to do what you’re good at (and perhaps like doing). Your job is to make the business work – to make it profitable.
Online Marketing Mentor – Changing Your Thinking
It’s all well and good learning some marketing tactics; but if your thinking is still limited your business growth will be limited too. Many who transition from employee to entrepreneur see their own business as an escape from the chains of employment.
But without changing their mindset, they could quite easily find themselves running old mental programs and doing the very things which used to work for them as an employee. However, that doesn’t necessarily translate into helping them build a profitable business. That’s a different set of skills.
This is why a good online marketing mentor will help you both with your technical problems and with your mindset issues which you may not be able to see for yourself. In reality, the technical difficulties are far easier to overcome!
Online Marketing Mentor – Types Of Marketing
Every business is different so you’ll need to choose a marketing strategy (and business) which suits your needs. An online business mentor can help you decide which strategy is best for you. However, ultimately you’ll need to choose based on your advertising budget and type of business. A physical business will be advertised differently than an online business too.
Free Marketing Strategy
One of the best marketing strategies for a physical business is Google Places for business, or Google My Business. This is a free listing that any business can set up as long as they can verify a physical business address. Of course online businesses can use this service too if they are running from a specific physical location. However it doesn’t offer the same advantage for internet based businesses because the search will only show up locally.
Blogging
Blogging is another tool a business can use in its marketing “box”. This is a slow but cheap way to get your business found on the search results and bring new customers in.
Email Marketing
If you also encourage your website visitors to sign up to some “freebie” on your site, you’ll be able to get them onto your email list.
From there you can keep in touch with them and potentially build a relationship to sell to them down the road. With an email list, you can massively improve your sales rate over time because you can maintain contact with people who would have only visited your website for 10 minutes – potentially never to return.
Facebook Marketing
I used Facebook marketing to help build up my Kung Fu school. Many marketing platforms allow the business owner to target very specifically the kind of person who would be best suited to their business. With a local business you can target people by age and location as well as interests and preferences. For my school I targeted only people within a 10 mile radius of the school location. With laser focused targeting your keep your marketing costs down and acquire customers for very little once you understand your customer “avatar”.
See why is target market important.
Customer Avatar
Your customer “avatar” is what your perfect customer looks like down to their every detail:
- Age
- Sex
- Interests
- Location
- Job
- Family
- Interests
- Pains
- Problems
- Relationship status
With marketing platforms gathering so much data on their users, marketers can now target people with extreme precision. This is great for marketers because they can aim their marketing at the people who are most likely to value and purchase their particular products. You can even use Google or Facebook’s artificial intelligence to help you find these people in a number of ways:
- Cross matching user data with other similar people
- Retargeting people who have interacted with your advertising or website
- Optimising your adverts for the lowest cost
- Letting algorithms decide who to show your adverts to based on previous data.
Get Help
One of the best investments you can make in your own business, or if you want to build an online business from scratch, is your own marketing mentor. Access an online community of support and a mentorship program and all on one business system. Click here for more information on a cutting edge business system and online education platform.
