CHAPTER 10, The Structure - Early 2005, Sheraton Hotel, Woodbridge, New Jersey… after seeing an ad inside the newspaper Star Ledger, I showed up to an event where a gentleman was presenting. I purchased his $300 course and I consider it the best foundation I could have ever had when it comes to running a successful business and here is why.
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The course was basically a slapped-together black and white copy made from some sort of 1967 xerox machine. But the content is majorly responsible for the success I’ve had to date because it started with direct response marketing particularly targeted at a specific pre-defined audience.
But I have to tell you. I think I’ve come to really appreciate that training even more in recent times. However because of my lack of experience, I spent years testing out different ideologies that don't put marketing first over the years. After taking account and counting the blessings and the failures, I have concluded that I was in fact lucky to have taken that training earlier on in my career.
In fact, it doesn’t even matter that I had derailed quite a few times from this concept of purpose and people-driven marketing. It’s just that powerful to drive massive success at any moment that I’ve decided to come back to the foundation. The foundation is just as important as the “structure” if not more important.
A few times over the years, I’ve failed at setting up the “structure” sustainably because of many reasons. One of the main reasons is the fact that stable structures are boring. But at the end of the day, they work. Isn’t that all that matters?
But I am still human. And by that, I am alluding to the fact that I still get influenced by the “shiny object syndrome”. You can also call it “grass is greener on the other side” syndrome.
It’s an on-going battle. But I have gotten better and better with this in recent times. It’s about making the foundation just as important as the “structure”.
In fact, everything we have discussed thus far in this book is the foundation. And I hope that you took it seriously because it’s a foolish man who built his house on the sand.
Over the course of this book, we’ve discussed the goal, the person, the value, the connection, the system, the list, the data, the information and the sources. In essence, we have broken down all the parts of digital marketing to make it as simple as possible for anyone with a marketable offer to understand.
Back when I started engaging in digital marketing full time and more, I had to know everything. Actually, I chose to know everything probably because I really do enjoy the art and science of influencing and persuading people. More importantly, it was useful because I was building a business just as I am still doing today.
There is more structure with the digital marketing industry today. In fact, I just counted more than 20 jobs where you can earn 6 figures or more. These are skill sets that are primarily responsible for scaling any business.
Today, you don’t have to know everything. Sure you should have an overview understanding of each of the areas. But if all you want is a job, you can simply pick one of the previous chapters and don’t stop your research until you get to the level of the equivalent of a doctorate degree.
On the flipside, it is important to read this book 10-15 times in order to make the most out of it. For every additional time you read this relatively small book, you will learn something new. But you will have to excuse the fact that I am not your typical scholastic writer.
In the last chapter, the source, we covered the different web traffic channels. But we didn’t get too much into the actual platforms and their categories such as:
And many others…
However we get a little deeper with each one of these traffic sources and media forms inside our flagship 15 weeks coaching program “Digital Marketing Intensive” (DMi15). Here at www.myEmpirePRO.com , we primarily focus on content marketing through search engine optimization, and paid media via Google and Meta (Facebook) ad platforms.
There are many digital marketing and PPC ad platforms to choose from namely; Google Ads, YouTube Ads (also part of Google Ads) Meta Ads (which used to be Facebook Ads), Instagram Ads (accessible through Meta Ads), Microsoft Ads (which was once called Bing Ads), LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, Pinterest Ads, TikTok for Business, Snapchat for Business etc. Each and everyone of those ad platforms tend to follow the same campaign breakdown “structure.”
The idea of having to figure out all the different pay-per-click (PPC) ad platforms out there probably feels overwhelming right? I understand. All you have to do is pick two or three marketing strategies to execute on two or three ad platforms.
But I also wouldn’t do that until I have set up a successful campaign on one platform first. And what do I mean by success? It depends on your business objective for that campaign.
One of the problems that have cost me millions is the unproductive idea of multitasking. In a real business world, focus matters more than ideas. I find it cute when people talk about multitasking in this great light of new discovery.
It’s true that many things are happening at the same time in any given business. That’s why I will have to put context as priority over focus as well.
It all depends on what you mean. Each process among many in a system with respect to focus on a primary business objective has to be clearly defined if you don’t want to waste resources. So it’s best to set up a campaign successfully on one ad platform first and start collecting data before attempting to scale out to other platforms with the same “campaign breakdown structure”.
If your business has less than 10 employees, I would cap out the number of ad platforms at three. The rest of the focus should go into optimization of your campaigns on the two or three ads platforms you’ve chosen and your business operations.
Understanding a campaign breakdown structure is important because it’s the same skeleton that you will implement on any platforms you chose to set up campaigns on. This “structure” will be useful from both a mental and a campaign execution standpoint. Once you understand it, you can execute a digital marketing campaign set up on any ad platform successfully.
Level 1 - How: The first level is simply defining the platform you choose to run it on. This is the level where you decide which of the many ad platforms you want to run and test your PPC campaigns on. The rest of the levels are about the specifications inside the campaign itself.
Level 2 - Why: On this level, you get to choose the business objective of your campaign. What is the purpose for this campaign? The ultimate purpose of a digital marketing campaign is to make money right? But you need to be a little more specific.
Is it to primarily generate the most video views, reach, visits to external pages, capture leads, or sales? When you are specific, it makes your desired outcome and results easier to track, measure, monitor and control.
You may also be defining your budget for this campaign on this level.
Level 3 - Who: This is where you get to define your ideal prospect and/or customer and their attributes. It’s very hard to be specific with this level but you have to put in some effort for your digital marketing campaign.
At this level, you will get to define:
And more…
Level 4 - What: At this level is where you define the actual message that describes your offer to the audience you specified on level 3.
On the actual ad platform, you will get to upload the images, the video and the ad copy as we cover in more details in Chapter 3 “the value.”
This is the actual creative that the audience, again as defined on level 3, gets to see on the feed and the placements. So it needs to be intriguing enough to catch the attention of the audience you defined. Hence the time I took on breaking down “the value” in chapter 3.
On Meta Ads (a.k.a Facebook Ads), level 1,2 and 3 are Campaign, Ad sets and Ads respectively. On Google Ads, level 1,2 and 3 are Campaign, Ad group and Ads respectively. I promise. On the other platforms that may be unconventional, it's similar.
At the end of this all, it’s all in the mindset. Approach setting up a digital marketing campaign with this 4 level-structure and your chances of better outcome is sure.
Another way you can protect your business from losing money is to buy email marketing placement from other marketers who have built a healthy email list. Check out www.myEmpirePRO.com/traffic especially if you are in the biz-opp or financial niche.
You can simply order clicks and visits over to your websites to pique initial interest. After that, you can then set up a retargeting or remarketing campaign on major platforms like Google Ads or Meta Ads to re-attract your audience from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google and their various media partners.
This is an unconventional way of driving consistent traffic and building your list. But you can still apply “the structure” mindset to stay organized. Anyway, in the next and final chapter, we will enter the execution zone. It’s time to put this wealth of knowledge to work.