Black Anvil

"Where do I find new customers?" Find out where your competitors are advertising and spread your message there. Build out a profile of what channels your competitors are using and study their messaging. Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Substack. What kind of content do they create in those spaces? How would your content be something new to add value to the conversation? Are your competitors even going after the problems and concerns your new audience is facing? You can always use Google Trends to do a quick search for what you have for a product/service and compare it to what people are searching for. That gives you at least a baseline to model language with. Ultimately, you need to get them to convert, and your best bet is newsletter signup. It is something easy that gets them paying attention to your ideas, news, and content. Nothing opens sales up better than a story. Building sales into marketing gives you better returns by not only increasing average order value but repeat sales as well. Don't let your customers buy and just walk away - continue building a relationship with them by demonstrating how you can help. #BlackAnvilTips

"How do I make more money from my customers?" Increasing Average Order Value and Repeat Purchase Rate are the two sales ways you can do this. You could also find savvy new ways to lower your costs, but I'll leave that for the engineers and finance nerds. I'll use a coffee example: If you want your customers to buy more per purchase, then you have to give them more value or find new customers. Everyone, including you and me, has a weekly spend in mind for a variety of things. If the price is too high, I'll get my coffee somewhere else kind of mindset. If you can sell them the coffee plus the cookie they were just going to buy from someone else anyway, then you just increased your average order value. Just don't make promises you can't keep for value is my suggestion. Raising prices can do this too but you will need one of those finance nerds I mentioned earlier to see if that even makes sense. Customers pay attention to price details. Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR) is tough. You need to understand the weekly/monthly/yearly budget the person has in mind for this and work from there. If someone buys coffee on their way to work once a week trying to sell them coffee every day isn't going to jive and vice-versa. Working from their cadence and budget you can reverse-engineer what their behaviours are and figure out how you can plug into that. From there, sales will happen so long as you can demonstrate value. Getting customers to buy even just twice a year instead of once doubles your revenue. RPR is the number that makes or breaks good sales targets. Let me know what you think below.

"Where do I find new customers online?" The best spot? Just for your business? No idea; No-one knows and if they tell you they do without your data they're selling you a story. Assuming you have an e-commerce website that can handle sales, you can always do short small tests to measure growth. If you want to find out where you should go to find customers try the following things: 1) Build a Google business profile. It's free and you can link in your CTAs. It also lists you on Google Maps once you confirm the business identity. So if you make cookies and someone is in your area looking for "cookies" you will get in their list. 2) Try Facebook. If you already have an account for your business try an advertising campaign for a small budget. Have the CTA direct people to a sale point or landing page signup. The question is, how do you track it? They're going to give you impressions, reach, and clickthrough. How do you measure conversions? Do you have other slick methods? Post them below or let me know what you think of mine.

"I need more money" It's what a lot of small business owners tell me: they are busy looking for more customers. By having new customers, it drives revenue growth; Revenue growth means more bottom line. What if it doesn't, though? I don't mean to be negative, but every business attrite customers over time, including yours. If you don't fill the tank back up by acquiring new customers for each one you lost, then you're actually in the hole. What if you get back what you lost? Then you're likely still in the hole because you had to pay marketing to get the new ones. If you broke that revenue down into components and then strategized around each of them, it would grow that component and maybe grow your revenue: Customer Deals: You need customers buying things. Find the events necessary to create a sale and then drive them for that funnel. If you have an e-commerce website and find that people only buy once when they sign up for your newsletter, then drive all traffic to your newsletter landing page. Repeat Purchase Rate: If your customers only buy once per year then your value for each customer is basically what they just bought. That's bad if you want to grow and terrible if the cost to acquire puts you in the red. You need to create value on the original conversion and for ongoing sales. If you can't do both then you will not be able to hit the geometric growth you need. Average Order Value: Your customers have a weekly budget in their mind for certain purchases just like you and me. If you figure out that your products only engage part of a solution for your customer, then build the other part out and get that revenue. Don't leave money on the table if your customer is still capitalized, on budget, and looking for solutions.

Here are some of the metrics that business owners have been asking me to find for them lately: - How much revenue does a newsletter subscriber spend per month on average? - How much does it cost to acquire the subscriber? - How do these audiences interact with products from another channel? - How long do we keep a subscriber until they leave? - What is the margin between acquisition cost to monthly revenue for a subscriber? These are all important metrics to know as you're building a map of the buyer's journeys into your sales funnel. Understanding costs and returns is a healthy and necessary task for the sustainable growth of a business. What questions do you think are important when building marketing and sales funnels? Why? No wrong answers, just curious.

Has anyone else noticed ChatGPT is not amazing anymore? I'm finding that it keeps giving me errors on processing data from spreadsheets I upload and it seems to lack the ability to understand complex queries unlike it could before. Just curious if this is something with me or if other folks are experiencing this.

When I evaluate marketing/sales teams here's the stuff I go over: - DKIM/DMARC verification - Audience surveys - Content - Funnel - Audience "Deadzone" - Pipeline - My recommendations - Final report I do this over a three-week period and have weekly calls to summarize what I've found so far. During that time I work with the team on these components in a collaborative way so that we can get to understand each other and how we work. What do you think? How do you survey your audience and learn from their interests?

One thing I've learned while building Black Anvil is that people want to get to know you before doing business with you. My current funnel is the following: 1) Talk about marketing and sales problems here until someone connects with me looking for marketing and sales advice. 2) We work out that they want my help more directly so we collaborate where I evaluate their marketing/sales funnel. 3) I run an evaluation program for them that allows me to get into their process and see what they're doing. During that time we work on material and processes to build it out and collect feedback. 4) Weekly meetings and a final report later give them a better idea of where they need to invest more time and money. If you're interested in knowing more, feel free to ask below or dm.

Funnels are not funnels or at least working ones. Lots of holes in them everywhere you look. One key concept I do with the marketing sales process is to identify what customers get from value and break it into two distinct events: 1) What value do customers get from an initial purchase? 2) What value do customers get from continuous purchases? These can be and are likely two different measures of value. Here's an example: A bank brand markets its services at a discount for first-time buyers and offers cash to switch to them. After the switch is made, people stay with that bank because the services are great and the cost of switching to a competitor is too high. Does that sound familiar?