Sales and Marketing. Essentials only

What’s the problem? What’s the problem that your product solves?
It should be a pain-in-the-ass, rather than a nice-to-have-been-solved problem.

What do you sell? Most people don’t know what they sell.
You don’t sell a book, service, consultation, widget or a new life. No!
You sell a WAY TO A RESULT. A WAY TO A PROBLEM FIX.

Your customer has a problem, that needs to be solved. And you sell a solution for that particular problem, for that particular customer.

No one of those, who bought a drill, wanted a drill. They wanted a hole.

Marketing has always been an answer on a question: who your customers and where they are. Write down a one-sentence description of your ultimate money-in-hand-and-ready-to-buy paying customer. She probably doesn’t know about you, but she knows about your product. She has a problem and she is looking for a solution. You need to show up. And you do it with advertising.

The only purpose of advertising is to sell. Advertisement is not about to impress, please, amuse, get more traffic to your website or keep your name before the people. The only purpose of advertisement is to sell. 
If advertisement doesn’t sell, it is useless.

Advertisement function is simply to say the right thing to the right people 
at the right time.

The purpose of advertisement headline is to pick out people you can interest. Your customer has a problem, and she thinks about it. The more painful the problem, the more often she thinks about it.

She has an ongoing conversation taking place inside her head. And you will capture her attention when you enter that conversation. And you do it with a simple headline. With keywords from her head.

Your customer has 2 types of conversations in her head: explicit and implicit. Explicit is exactly what she is talking about. Exact keywords and their meaning. Implicit is what did she really mean by talking that way.
Often they are the same, but… you know.

Every keyword represents a different mind-set, a different set of needs, a different personality. Every. Single. Word.

“Learn Russian” vs “Study Russian”. Feel the difference?

Keywords in advertisement body tell your customer, that you are relevant. Relevance means that you have a solution exactly for her problem.

Put benefits first when you make advertisement body. Features describe your solution: what it includes, how big or small it is, etc. While benefits are emotional payoffs that your customer gets from using your solution.

Example:

Superior Blogging Service
Share your thoughts. Inspire others and get inspired.
Unlimited number of posts for free. Try now!
www.medium.com

which is, byline:

Headline with “blogging” keyword.
Emotional benefits.
Temptative feature.
Where to buy.

Simple, clear, specific and relevant for the one’s who are looking for a fully functional, free of charge blogging service to share their ideas and thoughts.

Advertising is very expensive. Anything expensive must be effective.

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is that I don’t know which half…

More, than 80% of your sales will come from fewer than 20% of your advertising campaigns. You need to find out those campaigns.

Know your digits.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Right from the source link to a landing page, from landing page to signup, from signup to purchase offer, from purchase via billing cycles to cancellation — you need to track your customers. You need to build a system, that will provide you with your digits, so you could analyse and improve and optimize.

Run A-B tests to get real data.

If we have facts, let’s use them. If all we have are opinions, let’s use mine!

You need to experiment to get data. You need to test. But you want to test safely. A-B tests give you this safety.

Run A-B tests everywhere: in Google Adwords campaigns, on landing pages, with prices, email offers… And realize, that if you improve metrics (for example, conversion rate) on each step just twice (which is attainable), then overall throughput will be not just 2x, but: 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 16x.

Then repeat.