Every year, more people are starting their businesses in the same industry, which makes it harder to stand out! If you want to scale your business past 7-figures, you must leverage relevance marketing.
So how can you compete without having the same resources as they do? The answer is quite simple.
You need to have relevance in your marketing. Follow that up with omnipresence to amplify that relevancy and intimacy to build connections, and you have a complete marketing system to scale your business past 7-figures.
That is the Relevancy, Omnipresence, and Intimacy marketing method that I’ve been talking about for years now.
But the true core of it is relevancy. If you can’t be relevant, everything else is useless. It’s the first thing that I start working on with most of my clients and mentees (people I mentor) who don’t have it dialed in.
Why is relevance so important?
That’s what you’re going to discover in this post. I’m going to reveal what I learned about relevance from practicing it for more than 10 years working in marketing and sales and after teaching about it for over four years.
But first, let’s cover…
What Relevance in Marketing Actually Is And What It Means to Be Relevant
Relevancy is one of the topics that I have been talking about since 2015, unlike the other parts of my method.
Relevancy is what gives you the ability to draw other people’s attention.
It has a lot to do with the quality of the messages you’re sending to people. It’s how you get people interested and invested in your product or service. It creates the way your business is positioned in the minds of others, and it determines how the offers you make to the market are received.
It’s what you’re saying to your market that attracts people into your world. It’s what compels them to invest with you to help them solve their problem or achieve some desired result. It’s what causes someone to say, “This is for me.” As I said, it allows for attention to come your way, and it also helps you keep that attention, even in this busy world of distraction that we all live in nowadays.
I’m sure you’ve seen entrepreneurs who have large social media followings and tons of people who consume every message they send out, but despite that, they struggle when it comes time to convert the attention into sales and revenue. They get their messaging right (which is one part of being relevant), but they have problems with other parts like positioning and offers.
You can’t be relevant if you don’t know the people you serve, what your best offer is, and how to position yourself the right way to make it a no-brainer for them to work with you (more on how to do this later).
If someone can’t understand that what you’re offering is specifically for them, then they’re not going to give you the time of day. That’s why relevancy in marketing is something that has been fascinating to me for years. Simply put, the ones who are relevant are the ones who make the most amount of money.
There Is No Competition, Only Someone More Relevant Than the Others
I don’t necessarily believe in the notion of competition, to be honest. Instead, I believe more in the fact that some people are relevant to a specific group of people more than others. Those are the ones who are going to have an easier time getting clients, even at a higher price than others in the same industry.
If you think about it, this makes competition irrelevant. Those who are relevant are the ones who get the best deals. They are the ones who do well in a niche. And compared to other businesses in their niche, they have more satisfied customers who are great to work with.
The problem is that most entrepreneurs don’t give enough thought to the foundations of relevancy, like how their messages are building or detracting from the power of their relevance in the minds of people in their market.
Compounding the issue is the fact that subtle changes to your messaging don’t always create immediately noticeable results. It can be difficult to measure the impact of a different messaging strategy because of the lag between when you make the relevancy improvements and when you reap the benefits.
That’s why I want to give you the strategies and mindset changes you need to implement to help you become as relevant as possible right away. Which brings us to…
How to Create Relevance in Marketing (The Step-By-Step Process)
There are several pieces to the puzzle when it comes to being relevant in your market. I’ve taught this for four years and have been refining it after working with hundreds of entrepreneurs to help them scale their businesses past 7-figures, in addition to building a few such businesses myself.
To be relevant, you need to understand and implement these 8 elements.
#1. Avatar – Identify Your Ideal Customer
You need to have an avatar of a specific person that you want to work with. You may be tempted to go after multiple, different groups of people. Don’t do that. Instead, have one person in mind and go into extreme detail to understand this person.
Scarcity issues always come up when I say that you need to have a specific avatar. Why not go after all the people that you could help with your services?
Yes, if you do commit to an avatar, you will start saying no to clients you would have previously said yes to. This means less money flowing into the business. And I’m not sugar-coating it. This will be the situation in the short term.
But soon enough you will start working with your ideal client, which brings valuable benefits to you, like:
- Building a better business and optimizing it for that exact customer you’re serving by providing higher-quality offerings.
- Smoother relationships with clients, which is ultimately more profitable as they require less of your resources to serve them well.
- Ability to serve more perfect clients, which means higher revenue and profitability.
- Your customers will resonate with you because you empathetically understand them, which makes working with you a no-brainer for that group of people.
- You will become THE go-to person in your niche.
- Less energetically-draining clients, which will leave you energized to work on your business.
Not doing this in the agency that I grew into a multi-million dollar business caused me to quickly go $1M in debt. So commit to one avatar. Be the big fish in the small pond.
If you want to discover how to create your customer avatar the right way and learn more about my story on how I went from nearly $1M in debt to building a multi-million dollar business in a few years by just focusing on a single avatar, then check out the customer avatar post.
#2. Unfair Advantage
People tend to not make rational decisions. They make emotional ones, meaning your best chance of success is to amplify your unfair advantage. It should be a massive piece in your positioning and marketing simply because it’s the one piece that no one else can copy.
Your customers are yearning for an intimate connection with you, and when you unleash your unfair advantage, you’re able to actively and accurately engage the people whom you want to work with (your avatar).
Whenever I dive into the DNA of relevancy, it always comes down to this: who you really are. After all, why is it that two completely different entrepreneurs can have the same type of product and one will outsell the other?
And it’s not hard to find either. I’m sure a lot of you are thinking that you need to go on a self-exploratory journey that takes you years to discover your unfair advantage, but it doesn’t actually have to be that way.
You just need to dig deep into your experiences, skills, talents, knowledge, character, and connections.
#3. Positioning – Stand Out In Your Industry
Positioning is one of those things that everyone has heard of but very few people understand it. It is sort of like sex when you’re sixteen. You know you want it, but you don’t have much ability to understand how to get it. And, unlike your offer, your landing page, and your ads, you won’t see immediate results when you change your positioning. And if it doesn’t click with all other aspects of your marketing, you won’t reap the benefits you want.
I have to tell you that I didn’t understand positioning right away. I didn’t understand how to talk about it; heck, I didn’t even really understand what it was. But, what I soon realized is that positioning is a huge major key inside relevance in marketing because if you get it wrong, everything else won’t make sense. For example, if you’re helping people scale to seven figures and your major product is a $47 product, that’s not coherent.
After working with hundreds of 7-figure businesses to help them scale, I’ve created a step-by-step approach to help you create your positioning, test it, and make people actually see your position the way you want them to.
I share this step-by-step process and how I’ve developed my positioning over the years in this positioning post.
#4. Messaging – Attract The Right People At The Right Time
Marketing messaging is one the things people tend to ignore but it is a critical piece of all of your marketing efforts. Get it wrong, and you’re going to attract the wrong people in the wrong mindset at the wrong time.
While I officially launched and shared The Relevancy, Omnipresence and Intimacy Marketing & Sales Method publicly in April 2018, the seeds for it were being planted for years before it all came together.
I had something called The SSF Method, a method for understanding the Mindset of those who want to buy your products and services. It stood for The Sidewalk, Slow Lane, Fast Lane Method and it came to me while reading M.J. DeMarco’s book The Millionaire Fastlane.
Once you understand this, you’ll be able to nail messaging.
Because messaging is all about finding someone based on the stage where they’re at and presenting their problems and their pain and their vision back to them. Everyone in your audience doesn’t have the same issue and are not at the same stage in their journey. In short, everyone has a different mindset. And your job is to share the right message with the right people at the right time.
This is the central premise of the 3 Lane Marketing Method. It’s quite simple and it states that your audience falls into one of 3 lanes (i.e. categories):
- Sidewalk: People in this phase are feeling pain but they’re not sure why they’re experiencing this pain. They just know they have a problem, but they don’t know why or how to solve it.
- Slow Lane: People in the slow lane are keenly aware of the fact that they have some sort of pain and/or problem. They’ve accepted it, and they’re now looking for ways to solve their problem.
- Fast Lane: Once someone can understand their problem and can see a potentially viable solution, they are firmly in the Fast Lane. This is when you make the money.
The problem is that people target the fast laners with their messaging and they only capture the interest of 3% of the audience. You could move some people from the slow lane using a webinar, but unless you’re strategic about your messaging, your marketing won’t be effective.
So, how do you make your marketing effective and move people from the sidewalk to the slow lane to the fast lane?
That’s exactly what I’ve been teaching people for years. I’ve distilled what I’ve learned into this 30-page guide that goes in-depth to help you understand exactly how to connect with your ideal clients through relevant marketing messaging. Click here to grab it.
#5. Create Content That Sells
You can push people directly to the sales page, but I’m sure you aren’t getting the results you want by doing that. A better approach is to use free content to get your customers from not knowing you to trusting you so it’s an easy process to sell your product.
Once you know your avatar, positioning, unfair advantage, and messaging, the next step is to create content that attracts the right avatar, positions you in the market the way you want, showcases your unfair advantage, and moves people from the sidewalk to the slow lane to the fast lane.
So, how do you do it?
It’s not just about posting one specific content type, like long-form content that demonstrates your expertise and that’s it. Yes, people may be interested to know how you do what you do, but that doesn’t immediately sell them on your products or services. However, when used as part of a bigger system, it can move people closer to the sale.
You need to utilize different types of content to meet people where they are, and show the right post at the right time to move them from one lane to the other until they’re ready to purchase. Now you know why most of the influencers on social media generate good content but can’t get people to close the sale.
And I’ve found that there are 13 types of content that you could start using to move people from not knowing you to closing the sale. You can discover these types, when to use each type, the formula that I use to create effective content, and more in this content creation post.
#6. Brand Story – Resonate & Build Trust With Your Audience
The reason why most people can’t get the traction they want in the online marketing space is because they’re hiding too much of themselves. You need to showcase your unfair advantage in your branding! Your brand story is important to help you build trust and resonate with your audience.
What I found is that your brand story is the most important part of your branding to create relevancy. That’s why I like to focus on it when I talk about branding. And to be honest, there was a time when I discounted this part of relevancy. For the longest time, I had my clients go through the process I created to create their brand story, but I never did it myself.
I always thought, if I’m good, people will follow me, but that doesn’t work. And in this digital age, we give relevant attention only to those who we can connect to via their stories and what they share, which allows us to vicariously live through them.
And you don’t need to be a master storyteller or have a lot of action in your life to benefit from the power of stories. You just need to be your authentic self.
However, you can definitely benefit from knowing that there are 4 core components that you need to get the benefits of a story in your marketing. I share those, how to develop your brand story even if you know nothing about storytelling, and more in this brand story guide.
#7. Methodology – Boost Your Authority And Credibility
Without methodology, it’s very hard to scale a business. Even when you’re just starting out, having a methodology will make you close the deal much faster. The methodology doesn’t even have to be something new compared to what’s already out there on the internet, but having one will boost your credibility and increase your authority in your customers’ minds.
It’s something that people often forget about. They jump right into sharing informational content without taking the time to consolidate what they know into a methodology. People will still want to work with you because they know you can deliver the results, but they won’t trust any of your team members to help them get it.
It’s better to get people to buy a methodology than to buy into you. For one thing, it’s much faster and easier. It makes the path to achieve results clearer, which makes it easier for potential customers to understand that what you’re offering is relevant to them, which in turn makes the selling part much easier.
You probably think that you need weeks to develop your methodology, but you actually don’t. I created the basis for the ROI method in a day and have continued developing it ever since. You need to do the same thing. In this post, I go deep into methodology, how to extract yours and validate it, how to publish it the right way to scale faster, and much more.
#8. Offer – Develop And Validate One That Sells
The offer is the last piece to be relevant in your marketplace. Most people have an okay offer, but it doesn’t click with the other pieces of relevancy, making it less effective. Having the right offer could make or break your business in the long term. The problem with entrepreneurs is they often make the game much harder for themselves than it has to be, even though there are ways to stack the deck in their favor.
Having the right offer will make the process much simpler, and it will also make it easier to grow your business. It’s like putting your business into turbo mode.
Not only will a great offer create happy customers, but also it will generate more referrals for you. As that happens, sales will become easier, your profitability will increase, and you will scale your business faster.
You need to make different decisions on which business model to go after and how to make offers that help you scale past 7-figures. I go in-depth about different mindset changes, the 8 aspects of a crazy irresistible offer, and the step-by-step process to develop your offer and validate it the right way and much more in this high-value guide. It’s one of the most in-depth guides I have created that goes into great detail about offers and product creation like nothing before. You can’t miss this one.
How Do You Bring All of This Together?
There are many pieces to becoming and staying relevant. If you apply everything that I’ve shared with you, it will take you some time to get it done. The question now is how do you bring all of this together?
Most of the time the people who come to me to scale their 6- and 7-figure businesses have one or more of these pieces correct. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have a business. But once you can add any of those pieces to the mix and improve the other ones, that’s when you can scale your business much faster.
LET’S RECAP!
The better your offer, the more you’re going to be able to sell it.
The better your offer and the more defined your avatar, the more relevant you will be.
When you improve your messaging and create content consistently, more people will contact you, which increases your positioning as the “Go-to expert” in your niche.
Add your brand story and your unfair advantage to the mix to show more of YOU.
Create a methodology that makes it easier for people to see the path to redemption.
And every step of the way, the process to close the sale becomes easier and easier.
I don’t want you to think of relevancy as a funnel. Relevancy is important in every interaction that somebody has with you, whether that’s in your funnels, sales calls, social channels, ads, website, or anything else that you create.
Because everything of value you create to attract new customers that isn’t based on the process I’ve just described is going to be very difficult to scale. It will also be more difficult to get the customers you want, feel connected to, as well as customers that you can actually help.
When you’re developing your relevance in marketing, follow the order in which I shared them because each one builds on top of the other. You can’t go from story back to avatar, but rather in the specific order as I described it. When you get all of these parts correct, that’s when the magic is going to happen.
Once you’re clear on every piece of relevancy and are able to show that in everything you do online and offline, it becomes much easier for someone to see you as relevant, and it automatically turns you into being that big fish in that very small pond.
Which brings me to…
The Truth About Relevancy Marketing
What relevancy actually is and why it’s effective at growing your marketing.
To sum it all up, relevancy is clarity. It’s the clarity to know whom you are selling to. They know that you are selling to them. You know and they know clearly whom you’re helping. You have a clear image of how you want them to see you. You have clarity on the messages they need to hear, and how they need to be seen. You have clarity on who you are, and you’re able to articulate clearly your uniqueness and your brand story to make them resonate with you.
And you have a simple methodology that makes them understand the solution to their problems in a clear way. You have an irresistible offer that’s aligned with who it’s actually for (your avatar) and how you will deliver the results (your methodology.)
Once you achieve this clarity, your path to growth becomes clearer.
Relevancy Isn’t Easy, But That’s The Good News
I’m sure you didn’t sign up for all of this when you started reading this post. When it comes to marketing, people always look for the shiny and sexy stuff that’s going to generate them results right away; but, if the foundation isn’t set the right way, the tactics won’t matter much. They will only help you achieve marginal improvements.
I’m sure you can see now why most people don’t care much about the things we’ve discussed in this post. Even though they could make or break your business, they require doing some soul searching and changing your mindset, which most people are afraid to do
And that’s the good news…
It isn’t easy and thus not everyone is willing to do it. This means that other businesses in your niche are not equipped with the same tools as you. So when it comes to relevancy, they aren’t going to be able to nail it like you are 😉
And what happens when you bring all the pieces together at once?
Something amazing, that’s what. You create a scenario where you’re ultra-relevant to the right people who see you the right way at the right time in the right place. People who understand your unfair advantage, realize the value that you have, resonate with your story, and want to buy your offer.
Not many people understand how all these pieces are interconnected This means that you’re way ahead of the curve now, and you have the tools to help you develop all these pieces the correct way.
My intention for you is that six months from now after reading this post and implementing all of this stuff, all your marketing efforts will start clicking and your business will start growing exponentially. Because after my clients work with me on this, they come to me and say, “Hey, my webinars work better. Hey, my website works better. Hey, my email works better.” And they now see more ROI from their efforts.
A lot of the time when these people do the exercises shared here on the blog, they put them on the wall in their office, and every piece of content they create – every video, webinar, and funnel on their website – now comes from that context.
And that’s what I want to give you today: the context, so that you can go and contextualize yourself. Relevancy is being able to get someone to understand who you are very quickly and simply. And in the modern world, that is how you attract immediate attention.
Even if you capture this attention for only a few moments, omnipresence should take care of the rest and amplify your relevancy.
If you want to know more about relevancy and the other 2 parts to my marketing method, omnipresence and intimacy, make sure to check out this page, which has cool in-depth guides and the resources you need to help you implement these principles in your business.
