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CopyDoodles Lunch & Learn 1/4 – “Where to Begin Your CopyDoodles Marketing in 2012.”

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Lunch & Learn Transcript:

Hi everyone, happy Wednesday. And first off Happy New Year! Happy 2012 to everyone that’s on this webinar. I am Lauren your CopyDoodles Success Coach. Today I’m going to begin talking about Where to Begin Your CopyDoodles Marketing in 2012. A few side notes, want to ask a question? Here’s how, just type your question in the question box in the GoToWebinar screen. I will answer all questions at the end, unless there’s something that goes along directly with what I’m talking about at the moment. We do have a Q&A session at the end though.

Also some side notes, have you seen our brand new for 2012 CopyDoodles website? It is super cool, there’s some huge changes there, we’re also working on updating the CopyDoodles Access Club. It’s going to be completely different than what you are used to, so it’s really exciting. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. Also some side notes, we have some new Doodles in the site, Valentine’s Day, which we’ll be discussing ideas for in two weeks in our Lunch and Learn on the 17th. And, also Ground Hog’s Day, which someone had asked me for via live chat. And just a few President’s Day, we already had a few in there, so I just added a few. And somebody had asked me on a past Lunch and Learn a few weeks ago for one’s like that bubble here in the top middle. So, it’s like a bubble star. And, I added a few in there too that you guys can play around with. Check it out, log into the site, check out our new HolidayDoodles, and our StarDoodles, things like that.

Also, I couldn’t remember if I told, a few weeks ago, if I told you guys about the tree CopyDoodles that we added. Somebody had asked for some trees, so I just created a bunch of different trees with money on them, apples on them, different trees that you can use for your marketing. I know it’s past fall, but if you need any, they’re in there, and if I’ve already told you about this, then I apologize.

Also next week’s topic will be CopyDoodles and Newsletters: What you need to know about adding CopyDoodles to your newsletters. I’m going to be showing you guys a bunch of ideas that you can pull from. And this year we have to promise there’s no more pushing your marketing and your business around. With the Lunch and Learns, I’m going to focus on taking charge of your marketing and making great decisions, coming up with great new ideas, and bringing in new customers. And then keeping, of course, your regular customers in the mix too.

We begin with today’s Lunch and Learn Deal of the Week, today’s Deal of the Week, if you join the CopyDoodles Access Club later in the year, and you missed out on any of our CopyTemplates, today I’m giving you $50 off of our 2011 CopyTemplates collection. You can head over to www.CopyDoodles.com/blog in order to check it out, and I actually want to head over there right now, because I want to show you our cool new site.

This is our brand new CopyDoodles website. There’s a lot of different things you can play around with in there. So you’ll definitely want to check it out. Even though you’re already a customer, it’s always fun to look at, and all the changes we have coming. The new CopyDoodles Access Club will have a very similar feel to this. It will be a lot easier to search, a lot easier to find what you’re looking for. It’s going to be a ton of new features that you’re definitely going to be excited for. And then www.CopyDoodles.com/blog has changed a little bit too. As you can see on the left hand side, it’s really easy now to find all of your CopyDoodles Lunch and Learns. On the screen will be the newest Lunch and Learn, obviously the video replay is coming soon. This is today’s Lunch and Learn, it’s here. If you scroll down you can see past Lunch and Learns, or you can view older posts. And then it’s also really easy to just click the button, and then see them all at once, and they pop up like this, so you don’t have to scroll through all of the text and things that I have there.

And, then going back to today’s webinar, I’m talking about Where to Begin Your CopyDoodles Marketing. It can feel a little bit hectic at beginning of the year, because there are a lot of things that you’re probably focusing on and thinking about, and things that you want to change in your business. I’m going to begin with basic marketing ideas. A lot of this presentation — I’m going to show you five different steps to beginning your marketing, and a lot of it’s going to be kind of organizing things to get ready for creating marketing pieces, and where CopyDoodles should fit in mix of that.

So, obviously the replay will be at www.copydoodles.com, the new site that I just showed you, and then the videos are sometimes a little large, so if you do want to see the replay, or if you want to pass it over to anybody in your office, just make sure they wait a few seconds for it to pop up, because it is a pretty large file, it is a pretty large video too.

I’m just going to jump right in, and obviously step one is to get a calendar, or use Google Calendar, because Google Calendar is super helpful, and you can actually share your Google Calendar with everybody in your office. You don’t have to show them everything on your calendar, so if you have marketing things in your calendar, you can share them, if you have personal things in your calendar, you can hide those, so it’s only available to you.

I want you to find something that’s large, actually over on www.copydoodles.com I found a huge year calendar on Amazon that I recommend that everybody picks up, you can hang it on your wall, it’s actually erasable. You can use dry erase markers on it, and this should be something that you can write in, that you’ll look at every day on a daily basis, whether it’s a huge desk calendar, whether it’s the calendar I posted on www.copydoodles.com, or it’s a personal calendar that you keep in your bag, or you keep with all of your business stuff, maybe you like to use your phone, maybe you like to use Google Calendar, whatever. In it, you’re going to, in a few moments, plan out every thing in your business life.

This includes your marketing plan, which we’re going to talk about. It includes regular emails that you send, those might be the easiest to begin with, because if there’s a regular email you always send every Thursday for a TV show, for a blog post, put those in there. And then put in ideas for what you want to talk about in those blog posts, what you want to talk about in those TV shows, and things like that. But, we’re not yet ready for putting things in there yet. Just when we are ready, you’re going to want to have at least one new marketing idea each month via different mediums, whether that’s online, direct mail, social media. Don’t constantly bombard your prospects and your clients with only email, because half of your people might not read email, or they might get your emails and they read them once in a while. If you’re trying to sell something, it’s always great to hit people with as many mediums as you can to get in their face. First, just get a calendar, don’t even think about any of that stuff yet. You can have an inkling of what you want to think about, but first just get a calendar.

Next step, think about your 2012 goals. Write your goals down in order of most important. If you have a lot of goals, think about if you’re stretching yourself, or your company, or your employees too thin. Come out with a list of at least 10 goals, whether they’re specific sales goals, new product/service launches, getting more customers, developing new products and services, moving customers to new levels of engagement. Maybe you have customers that have been sitting on your list for a long time, and you want to move them up, you want to have them purchasing more, you want to get more involved with them; you want them to continue to stay your customer and be more involved. Maybe you want more social media followers, or you just want to build brand awareness. Write down all of your 2012 goals, and then next to your goals, write down how much time you think each goal will take. This will help you realize if your goals are feasible, and it will ensure you don’t waste time on goals that aren’t possible, that won’t work, or will take way too much of your time.

Come up with a list of, I’m just saying 10, but come up with as many as you need to, and cross out and add to your list until you have something complete, and you’re happy with. Also, rewind to 2011. Write down 5-10 things that worked for you in 2011. If you notice that any of these things kind of relate to your goals, and they worked, then go with it. And, then you want to make sure you’re writing down things that made you more money and things that increased your list of followers. The big, important thing here is that you want to make more money, you want to get your name out there more, you want to get your business out there more.

And if you’re doing a lot of things that don’t make you more money, or don’t increase your followers, or don’t keep people engaged, or keep people on your list, keep people purchasing your products, then stop doing them. Write down 5-10 things you did that didn’t work. If any of your goals that you just wrote down are things that maybe correlate to things that didn’t work, like if you are trying to boost your social media, and you did something last year that didn’t work, make sure you note that down, because you probably lost money, you lost followers, you lost time. You wasted your time, your employees time, your business remained stagnant. And 2012, like every new year, is a great time to continue to think about growth and change.

Step 4, now plan out your big marketing ideas, and the dates you need to begin working on them. This is when you get that giant calendar — maybe you get a calendar that has a notes section on the right hand side or below, or anywhere that you can put your goals and your rewind to 2011 on the bottom, and then, as you plan out, it’s right there so you can focus on it. Using the two lists you created for guidance, plan out your marketing for 2012. You don’t have to plan out the entire year at once, it’s helpful, because you’re done and you don’t have to worry about it. If you take three month chunks of time, or six month chunks of time and start planning stuff out, you’re more likely to get it done, if you plan it out and you give yourself enough time to do everything.

During this time, of course, focus on what worked last year and what did not. If you didn’t take statistics at all last year, then look to see what your most profitable months were, and try to remember, ask your team exactly what you did during that month, and the month before to get to those numbers. Mark everything down in your calendar, not just what marketing plan you want to do. If you want to send out a postcard on the 20th of January, don’t just write down that you want to send out a postcard, write down the cost of the postcard, the time, how many people the postcard will go out to, what you want the postcard to talk about, what you want your call to action on the postcard to be. Of course, even write down important things like what color you want it to be, what CopyDoodles you want to add.

Think about things you might want to start like a newsletter, maybe you want to begin an online TV show, don’t start both of them at once, because you probably won’t have time to write a monthly newsletter and launch an online TV show, and you’re going to be bombarding your list all at once.

Host webinars, those are really simple and easy to do. That might be on one of the very higher list of your goals, because they’re a lot easier to get started, whereas a newsletter you have to start planning the layout, and an online TV show may take a little more time.

And of course, look at the whole calendar and figure out if any of your marketing promotions can tie in with the holidays, whether they’re big, important holidays that everyone’s promoting during, or they’re holidays like National Spaghetti Day, which today is National Spaghetti Day. If you want to do something like that, plan it out now, even if it’s like 11 months from now, and you know you want to do it and later you’re going to fill in more of the details, because it’s really far down the road, like cost, and time, and comments. Do it now.

Think about if you want to have any contests or giveaways, and think about if you can afford to have contests and giveaways. If it costs you money to be giving away products or services and you’re not really going to make a lot of money back, or you’re not really gong to get a lot of views from new customers that get them on your list, then why do them? Maybe give them a free PDF that you’ve created that only took up your time, it didn’t take up a lot of your money.

Give yourself enough time to implement each goal. Like, I said before, don’t start a newsletter and online TV show exactly at once, unless you have the manpower to do it and it’s ready and it’s ready to go, because if you start too many things at once you’ll probably slack off later in the year, stop doing them, and then that just looks bad on you and your business and you’re really not helping yourself, it’s just a waste of money.

Because all of these things with marketing always take time. You implement something, it’s not going to happen overnight, I mean unless you’re lucky and you’ve got some great start up, but it always takes time. So, you want to make sure you’re doing things this year that you can continue doing this year, next year.

And, if you need any ideas, of course, check all old Lunch and Learns. And, when you’re writing on your calendar, write in pencil. Don’t write in pen because you’re always going to want to erase. Somebody that you work with might come up with a better idea after they see your calendar, maybe you can put it together first, show it to your team, people can throw out new ideas and you can tweak the calendar from there.

Step #5: Think about all of the things you put on your calendar. So, you’ve put on that newsletter that you want to start, starting in February. You’ve put on that TV show and you’ve given yourself enough time and your TV is not going to start until May, or something like that. Think about what you can do to those things to make them more exciting and more eye-catching. Simply putting that you want to create a newsletter isn’t enough. Think about what you can do to that newsletter to make it different than anybody else in your industry.

If you have enough time, start subscribing to newsletters, whether they’re free newsletters, prepaid newsletter to people that are your competitors and that have a lot of business. And, take from them what they’re doing and think about what they’re doing that you think is missing or that your customer would think is missing and add that to your newsletter. Your things have to be eye-catching. And, think about what can you CopyDoodle? This is exactly why I told you to write everything in pencil, because now you can go back and add things to make all of your marketing throughout the year more exciting and more eye-catching so that people will pay attention to it and they’ll want to engage with it.

But, wait, I’m not just talking about your sales letters, and your emails, and your newsletters and adding CopyDoodles to them. I want you to really revamp your marketing because people are bored. So, just taking that postcard and throwing CopyDoodles on it will work, and just putting, you know, CopyDoodles on your website will work, but also think outside the box. Think about why people are bored, why your customers might be bored and what you can give to them that’s valuable to them.

And if you did well last year there are always ways to do better. So, I’m going to give you just a few ideas how. So, let me just tell you — sales letter. Maybe you’re sending out a sales letter and you want to send out a sales letter in June. Maybe you tweak that sales letter that you’ve been using for a while or that you’ve been tweaking and updating and create a story from it, create a handwritten letter using one of our CopyFonts. Handwritten letters work really well. Maybe you take a customer who’s a very good customer of your business and has been a customer for awhile and call them on the phone and ask them why they’ve been your customer for so long and take that story and write a letter to your list from your most valuable customer telling them why they’ve been a customer for so long, if that makes sense.

So, say, Cathy has been the best customer you’ve ever had in five years. Call Cathy on the phone, thank her for being a customer, ask her why, and take those ideas and put them into a letter and send the letter from Cathy to your list telling a story. Or have her write something up, if she’s willing to.

Then if you’re sending a postcard, think about instead of sending a postcard turning your postcard so that it looks like a ticket. You can still use the same size, you know, you can still send it as a postcard, but a mini ticket or a menu. Think about what would stop you if you received it in the mail. And, I actually included these images here because this is something I received in the mail probably about a week ago. It is super cool. It came in an envelope, but on the front I could see — I couldn’t see any of this pass. This was the front of it. I could only see my name and my address, but it looked weird because it looked like stamps and things like that. And, I thought to myself, “Wait, I didn’t buy anything,” and then I realized that it was a sales letter because when I turned it over it had, you know, other information about being a sales letter.

So, I open up the boarding pass and actually it was stapled there. It was a little booklet, I actually have in front of me. It’s just a tiny little booklet and it’s not — the staples are actually completely fake, and everything is completely fake about it. So, when I turn the page I saw — the next page is actually a fake piece of carbon paper. So, bottom left there, that purple piece, that’s completely fake. It looks like carbon paper, and I thought that it was at first, but it’s really thick. They just took dark blue paper and printed black ink on top of it, so it looked aged. They actually printed — as you can see they circled on the right hand side that confirmation number. There was actually a corresponding, on the carbon paper, a black circle too, so it looked like they circled and it went through the carbon paper onto this boarding pass voucher.

Then if I turn the page again, the next page was a ticket, or a check or $1,300 to take a Caribbean cruise. And then I turn the page again, and the next page, which I didn’t copy, is same size, and front and back, it’s actually just a mini sales letter. It says, “Congratulations, you won a free cruise,” which I probably didn’t really win a cruise. I’m sure I didn’t. And, then it says, “Call toll-free…” and here’s the bullet point reasons why should go to this cruise. It has a ton of logos and things on it, so I guess I can trust Caribbean Cruise Line to know that they’re partnering with Radisson, Ramada. And who knows if this is a scam or it’s real, but it caught my attention.

So, this is a really awesome way — and I’m sure a this cost a little more money, but you can obviously slim down the cost by using fake staples, using the fake carbon paper, and you could even just take this fake check and create a postcard out of it and on the front have the fake check on the back have mini, tiny little you know sales letter, call to action, and then send it out to people because it will catch people’s attention.

Also, think about if you’re sending out a newsletter — what Mike does with all of his newsletters is he always has a customized CopyComic right near the address. So, whether he changes the tagline underneath the CopyComic to just be a different tag line that corresponds with the newsletter, or if he actually puts the person’s first name in there, he always uses one in the back, just because it’s eye-catching. Really on the back you can’t put much, because people are looking for their name. They’re making sure it sent to them, and you know, it has to be sent out. But, always use a CopyComic if you’re sending out a newsletter right there, because it can be part of your newsletter too.

Envelopes, like I spoke about two weeks ago. Make sure that they’re handwritten, make sure you use a bright color, you use fun stamps, that they stand out. Even on this newsletter that Mike sent right here you can see that he’s used a fun stamp. It’s something different. It’s not just, you know, your normal Forever stamp.

Also think about if you send your newsletters in an envelope. Do you send your newsletters in a bright red envelope? Do you send your newsletters in a clear, plastic envelope type bag where people can see inside? Maybe you have a Post-It note on the front or you have some sort of sticky on the front that is eye-catching because when it arrives people want to pick it up and open it.

So, again, write down these details. Even write the color of the envelope you want to use, because when the time comes to it, you’re going to be super swamped and you’re going to be super busy. So, if you take out a day or two right now in the beginning of the year, I know I’m sure it’s still busy for you, but if you take out a day or two to think about all of these things, all of your marketing will correspond, all of your marketing will tie together and your business will look like one. Your brand will be kept intact because you’re not rushing to mail something out right away, not thinking about the color of the envelopes.

And, write down all of the information you can, because say six months from now you’re starting to hire someone and you want someone to help you with marketing and you don’t have the time to completely train them. You can give them the marketing calendar and it will have all of the information that they need on it and they can bring their own ideas, obviously, but you’ve planned it out for them. So, you won’t have to worry as much about them taking charge.

Also, for a webinar or TV show use CopyDoodles and CopyFlash, not only in your presentation or show, but on your sign up pages, your emails. I’ve recently did a Lunch and Learn about this — I guess not recently, a couple of months ago. So, make sure to check that out, if you’re not sure how to do any of this.

And, then think a lot about your opt in boxes. How many subscribers did you have in 2011? Actually this opt in box I show here is from www.MikeCapuzzi.com we also revamped that site and made it very different. So, if you head over there you can see all of the changes we did, but we have a big arrow, a big CopyDoodles arrow.

Our opt in box now goes across the entire top of the screen, so it’s above the fold, above the header and it’s right there in your face, you see it right away. But, think about your opt in boxes.

Do people respond to your free offer? We switched up our free offer, not just because people weren’t responding — people were responding, but you know we had that offer for a while. So, it was now time to change our offer and have something different to maybe capture a new audience or capture people that we didn’t capture with our past offer that maybe still come back to the site, but haven’t opted in to our list yet.

Or if your offer is working and you don’t want to change it, you don’t have time to change the entire offer, you don’t have time to make new videos, or a new PDF, then just think about how you can make your opt in box more appealing with a simple CopyDoodles arrow, maybe you use a different font, you use different colors. It’s a really easy time to switch this up in the new year because you can just say you’re kind of revamping everything, you’re changing. And, this is obviously why we did this at www.MikeCapuzzi.com and www.CopyDoodles.com

So, I’ve been talking a lot, but those are just a few ideas that I had for 2012. Obviously, you can really go anywhere and we’re going to continue to be adding things into the CopyDoodles Access Club, like we always do.