Transcription
If I had to start over from zero with no audience, no money, and no reputation, and I had to learn digital marketing from scratch, this is exactly what I would do. I went from a rented bedroom with no more than $50 to generating my clients over $7.8 billion in sales. And these are the 11 steps that I would take to master digital marketing if I had to start over from scratch.
Starting with step number one, the first thing that I would be telling my younger self is to close your MacBook, to stop listening to any gurus, do not watch any more YouTube tutorials or do any more courses. When it comes to digital marketing, the two foundational things that are never ever going to change is one, you need the ability to go out there and to capture attention and the second thing is to convert that attention. If you master these two skills, you will never ever go hungry. Human beings are simply chimps in disguise. And if we understand what are the triggers, what are the psychological elements that we need to use to do both of these two things, then you will never have to worry about money ever again, which is step number one, understanding the foundation, which brings us to step number two.
So, how do you actually learn the skill of capturing attention? What we are going to do is we are going to go back to the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s. And we are going to start to basically study traditional direct response ads. I'm talking about old school ads that were placed in newspapers and magazines. So, what you want to do is you want to go to Google image search and you want to type in direct response magazine ads, direct response print ads, and you're going to see a whole bunch of ads from the 1900s. people that are selling skin care, jackets, suits, and even Rolls-Royces. And all you're going to do is you are going to read five to 10 of these ads every single day. And when you study these ads, you'll see that they all have a few key ingredients. And that is a big bold headline with a big unique hook in it. Then it's followed by a sub headline and then a native image below. What these advertisers realized back in the day is if they crafted up an ad that looked like editorial content that it would dramatically increase the readership of these ads. One of the greatest admen to ever live is David Oglevy and he ran what is still one of the largest advertising agencies in the world. And in his agency, he basically has a brand division and then he also had a direct response division. and he was famous of saying 80% of the profits that his clients made came from the direct response division in his business while over 80% of the revenue and the ad dollars that they put was in the branded division. And basically if you do a Google search for old school direct response ads, you can find people selling these swipe files online for like $50, $60, $79. I suggest that you buy them all and study them. The key thing here to do is to start to build a swipe file. Download all of those ads that you can find. Chuck them in a folder. Read them every single day for 30 days. And that is step number two. Capture attention.
Which brings us to step number three. How do we actually convert that attention? If you have the ability to effectively sell, then you don't need to worry about being the best at traffic. And when it comes to traffic, there's only two types of traffic that exist. The first is demand capture. And that is where you're going out and you are capturing demand that is already present in the marketplace. And I call these prospects prospects with a bleeding neck. It's not very hard to sell somebody a bottle of water when they have just completed a marathon. You don't need to be a master salesman in order to do that. But the limitation with it is there's only a certain number of people that are doing those searches every single month. And if there are people searching for it in the tens of thousands, then Google is typically the place that we start with. It's the lowest lying fruit. It's the easiest traffic to convert. And when it comes to Google, the rough click-through rate on most ads sits at around 4%, meaning there's a 100,000 people searching for that every single month, you're going to get 4% of that overall 100,000 searches, being 4,000 clicks a month.
If you're selling something that there isn't a huge amount of search traffic for, then you want to look at demand generation. And that's where we basically put an ad out in front of a,000 people. And the job of that ad is to capture their attention and to agitate a problem that they either have that they're aware of or a problem that they're not aware of, but once we start to educate them on it, they're like, "Oh, yes, that is a problem." And this is the traffic channel where all the big money is made. Don't get me wrong, you can make good money on demand capture, but the millions are made in demand generation. Now, if you're thinking, do I start with demand capture or demand gen? If I had a gun to my head or I had to go back 20 years ago sit down with younger me and I was like you can only work on one, I would pick demand generation because even if there isn't demand, you can drum up enough demand. And when it comes to traffic online, Google and Meta, they account for more than 50% of all traffic. If you master just Meta alone, you will be very, very rich.
Which brings us to step four. So now we know how to capture attention, we know how to convert attention. Now, it's time to understand, well, what is the way that I can actually put together ads right now in today's day and age? Well, in order to do that, we must look at what is the type of content that people are consuming right now. Meta put out a report every single quarter that shows us what is the most shared content on the platform, what's getting the most traffic, what are those pages, and you'll see they're things like TMZ, they're like Lad Bible, fitness pages. We want to look at what is the content that people are sharing and they're consuming. Just like what they did in the 1960s where they made their ads look like editorial content, we wanted to look like the content that people are already consuming on the platform. And what you'll quickly realize is that the three most shared types of content on the internet is always news, findings, or gossip. And that's exactly what we're going to make our ads look like.
So when you put together your ad, this is the exact framework that you want to use. The first one is A for attention. You have to put something out that's going to get their attention. Then it needs to get their interest. It needs to be of interest to me. We need to be talking specifically about the problems or the big benefits that that market wants. D for desire. We want to flame the fans of desire to double-click that Apple Pay and ping ping. That's exactly what we want them doing. And then we end with A, which is action. So whether you're running ads to generate leads or you want somebody to make a purchase, we are going to tell them what we want them to do. And so when you put together an ad, you just cross off ADA. You make sure that you follow that framework and you will already be miles ahead of 99% of advertisers.
This ad that you can see up on your screen right now is an ad by David Oglevie and it's called the man in the Hatheraway shirt. And Oglevy is very famous for they were going to the shoot and it was a shoot selling these dress shirts and on the way he picked up an eye patch and when he arrived on the set he walked up to the model and he put the eye patch on him and this shirt went and created record sales for the company. And the reason that it did that is because first it captured attention. So the way that you apply this is exactly the way that Oglevy applied it way back then. If you think about a Meta ad, you've got an image which is your creative. You want to use a photo that was taken from your phone. And you might be thinking, "But Sabri, I want to be the Apple of my industry." Or you might be looking at Nike and looking at all these massive companies. That is not what you want to be doing. You want to look at what people did on the climb, not what they're doing at the summit. And if you play that game right now, you're going to lose your shirt and you're going to go broke very, very quickly.
And that is point number four. Study modern media.
Which brings us to step number five. Whatever it is that you're selling, I want you to basically start up a new Instagram account, a new Meta account, and go and basically start engaging with content and following the celebrities in that niche, the brands in that niche, and then just let the algorithm cook. And when you log in the next day, you will start to see that your news feed becomes littered with advertisers that are all selling similar products to you in your niche to your customer. And what I want you to start doing is paying attention to the ads that you see the most frequently. And after you see the ads pop up in your newsfeed, this is exactly what it is that I want you to do. I want you to screenshot that and immediately drag it into a folder onto your computer. The next thing that I want you to do is to click on the advertiser's name and then go to their ads library. And I want you to pay attention to the ads that have been running for a long period of time. The beautiful thing about Meta Ads Library, it shows you exactly when that ad was published and if it is still active. And if someone has been running an ad for a month, two months, three months, even a year, you know that thing is printing money. Otherwise, you do not continue to pour money into it. We're going to create a swipe file of all of those ads. Then we are going to go through to their landing pages and we're going to be reading their landing pages. We're going to be taking full page screenshots of their funnels and also adding that to a subfolder in our swipe file called landing pages or funnel. And we're chucking them all in there. Then you want to keep a Google Doc of all those competitors' names. And then what I strongly suggest doing is to basically go on to Claude, go on to Chat GPT, find out who the founder is and start doing some sniffing and detective work around to see how much revenue that they're doing. We just want to study the people that are between $3 million and $100 million. And we want to look at their ads and we look at their funnels and we want to keep them in our swipe file. And that is point number five. Build your industry swipe file.
Which brings us to the next step. Now, what we want to do is regardless of what it is that I have got to sell, this is the exact step-by-step process that I do, and I literally wipe the floor with much bigger, more established competitors that have way more money than I do. So, what we want to do is we want to sit down with whatever the product is that we've got to sell and we want to start doing something that I call the Halo strategy. And it's where we go out and we forum forage around the internet and we start to do some private detective work and find out exactly the pains, fears, hopes, and dreams of our marketplace. What is the number one keyword that people would be searching in order to find what it is that I am trying to sell? And I call this the coliseum keyword. There's always going to be one keyword that represents the most amount of traffic in your niche. And you want to type that in. You want to type in digital marketing. You want to type in protein powders. Then you want to go over to forums like Reddit, Quora, where you're literally looking for the most emotionally charged comments that people are leaving on these comments. It could be the complaints. It could be the things that they're searching for. It could be reviews that they've left about other products that they've bought. And you want to take all of that information and you want to start to populate this template you can see on the screen called the halo strategy where you put all the pains in one section, all the fears in another section, all their desires in another section, and you start to flesh this up. This is literally how you can go from being an absolute newbie and knowing absolutely nothing about the product or industry that you serve and with a number of days, if not hours, you can know more than pretty much anyone knows in that niche. And that is point number six, the halo strategy.
How do we actually launch ads and really master this traffic channel? You are going to suck unless you get a lot of reps in. So in order to get good, we have to first get frequent. And so if I had to run one type of ad creative, it is only going to be static ads. What we are going to be doing is we are going to be writing five new ads every single day. And the reason that I love image ads is because you can split test them very, very frequently. You can test different angles. You can get feedback from the market of what works and what doesn't a lot quicker than sitting down, shooting a video, editing it, putting it out there. I can do a 100 times more volume with static ads. When it comes to the technical stuff and the targeting and the budgets and all of those kind of things, we're not going to mess around with any of that. We are going to use broad targeting because Meta's algorithm is so advanced that you can literally put in America, Australia, Germany, and it will determine exactly who that ad is trying to target and it will do all the heavy lifting for you. In terms of budget, there's no hard and fast rule. I recommend starting with something like $20 a day. It's roughly around $140 a week, give or take. That will allow you to test around 25 different creatives. 25 is a nice clear number for you. We are first going to look at are we generating leads or are we selling product. If we're selling products, we're going to look at the ROAS. Which ad that I am producing that is giving me the highest ROAS? If it's leads, we're going to look at which of the ads that I'm running that gives me the lowest cost per lead. So they're the primary metrics that we want to look at. And we're also going to be looking at what message, what ad that I'm putting out that has the highest CTR because more people are clicking on it to find out more information, which is exactly the goal of the ad. So if you can see that there's an ad angle that's getting a disproportionate click-through rate, that is a good clue that this is a good angle. And then you want to make sure that that is also present on your landing page. And you might be thinking, hey, I just jump on a Claude, Sabri, and just write my ads and away I go. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Everybody that doesn't know what they're doing, they use AI and they feel like it's good. If you don't know what a good ad looks like and you don't know how to write one yourself, every time you get an output from Claude or Chat GPT, you don't know if it's good, right? You're like, that looks great. And you run it and you're just going to burn money. You first need to know what good looks like. So when you get an output, you can discern very quickly, is this crap or is it good? And that is step number seven, launch and learn.
So, one of the most important things with becoming in the top 1% of digital marketers in the world is to be a student of markets. And once you do that, you're going to realize that there are certain different markets that react in certain ways. And this all comes down to the market sophistication and competition continuum. So, let me run you through all the different states of awareness in any given market. So, the first one is like these guys are already sold. Like they are buying now. They are completely sold that your solution is exactly what it is that they've been looking for. And because this market is so easy to convert, most of the ad dollars flow into this market and it has its limitation around scale. Next, you've got people that are product or service aware. So, they know like options like yours exist. That market is not as small. It's getting a little bit bigger here, but these people again, it doesn't take much to convince these people. And then the next up is solution aware. So these people they are seeking solution to pain that they have already got. Then we've got problem aware. They're not aware of all the solutions that exist in the marketplace. They know that they have a problem but they haven't gone further down the rabbit hole to start to research what all the different solutions are. And this market is starting to get enormously bigger than the first couple of markets. Then we go to the biggest market of all which is unconsciously unaware. So, these people aren't feeling any pain. They're not even aware that they have an issue. However, they could be a great candidate for whatever it is that you're selling. Have you ever woken up in the morning not even aware that you were going to buy something and then seen an ad and for some reason got sucked into that thing and you ended up buying? This happened to me when I bought a spinning top that is sitting on my desk. I didn't wake up in the morning think today is the day I'm going to buy a spinning top. And in any given market, this is the biggest opportunity. It represents the largest blue ocean of any market, but it requires the greatest level of skill.
So the people that are buying right now, that is the red ocean. That is the most contested. All the advertisers flow in there. All the ad dollars fly in there. Then you have the orange ocean, and they're people that are problem aware. They're even a little bit solution aware. It's not as contested, but there is still remnants of blood. That's why it is not blue. So when it comes to aware, the red end of the spectrum, the things that these people respond to is things that are product, service, and price. It's like basically what is it that you got to sell? How much is it going to cost me? Is there some kind of incentive or offer bundle for me to buy right now? The middle orange market. These guys are going to respond to claims and proof. and we are going to basically be using hero mechanisms to differentiate what it is that we've got and how it's different from all the other solutions that they might be researching right now. Then in the blue uncontested unaware market, these guys are going to basically be responding the most to explanation and storytelling. It's basically you need to take someone from who the hell are you to shut up and take my money. And the best way to do that is through story. You must understand that people are at different places and you must meet them where they are. And that is step number eight, the market sophistication and competition continuum.
Which brings us to step number nine. Now it's time to take all of those insights and to assemble the copy using my 17-step secret selling system. And I have personally used this framework in my agency for over 2,000 funnels to generate my clients over $7.8 billion in sales. So, it first starts out with calling out your audience. Pick the person that accounts for 80% of your revenue and write your sales page directly for that person. It doesn't mean that it's not going to convert other people, but you want to speak specifically to the bulk of your market. Step number two, this is the most important element of the entire funnel and the selling system. It is the headline. And when it comes to headline, the thing that is very hard to beat 9 out of 10 times is a big bold benefit headline. I.e. if you operate in a weight loss market, you can't just say in your headline, lose weight. That is an old offer for a market that is far too sophisticated. Instead, what you'd want to do is say, "Lose 10 kgs in 6 weeks, guaranteed." The job of your headline is to stop your prospect in their tracks and demand attention for them to read the next part of the landing page. Which brings us to the third step, which is to back up, expand, and support the main big benefit that you've talked about in your headline in your sub headline. Is when you give a little bit more details, however, still not the full picture that once the prospect starts reading, it just glides them through the copy. Which brings us to the fourth point, which is to create irresistible intrigue. The things that people pay attention to are things that are new and novel and that are intriguing. So, you can't lay out your hand and tell your prospect absolutely everything in the jump. You need to slowly unravel the story and the messaging by intriguing them, opening up loops using copy that then opens another question in their mind. And the only way that they can answer that question is to keep on reading your landing page. Which brings us to step number five, which is to shine a flood light on their problem. People are much more motivated to move away from pain than they are towards pleasure. And so you're building up all of this like pain and pressure in it where it's like they're just so thirsty by the end of this. They're like, "Just give me the solution. I know that you got the solution 'cause you understand all the problems." And you wouldn't be doing this unless you have the solution. Which brings us to step number six, which is to reveal our solutions. is how it addresses all the problems with the existing solutions in the marketplace 'cause that's what people want and that's exactly what it is we're going to give them. Which brings us to the next step which is point number seven and this is where we lay out our credentials. Whatever gives you the authority to be actually selling the thing. This is what you want to lean on. Other credentials can be former clients that you've worked with, case studies, results, any unquestionable proof that the claims that you are making are going to deliver or they have delivered for other people. Which brings us to step number eight, which is to detail the benefits. What I want you to do is I want you just to create a very basic two-column spreadsheet and list out all of the features of everything that you've got. And then next to it, write the corresponding benefit of what somebody gets from that feature. And the only thing that I want you doing in your copy is talking about the benefits, not talking about the features. Which brings us to step number nine, which is social proof. You need to use every single trick that you have up your sleeve. I'm talking about so much unquestionable proof that you could convince a jury. That is literally the mindset that you must get in. Which brings us to step number 10. You need to have something that I call a Godfather offer, which is an offer that is so good that your prospect simply can't refuse it. And in order for your Godfather offer to be compelling, it needs to be specific. We guarantee to increase your revenue by 43% or you don't pay. Which brings us to step number 11. We need to now stack bonuses. So you want to think about what is a bonus in your marketplace that you could offer that your competitors are selling that you can simply stack on as an additional bonus to your main offer. The more bonuses that you add, the higher your conversion rates will be. However, the sweet spot is around two to three additional bonuses.
Which brings us to step number 12, which is to stack the value. Realistically, this is what this would cost. And then you start with that high price, but it's not that price. It's actually not half of that price. It is just 20% of that price. It just increases the desire for them to want it even more because they were sold at the higher price point. Which brings us to step number 13, which is when we actually reveal what our price is. We've built up the value. Now it's to actually come out and say, "But you're not going to pay anything close to that. This price is just x, y, and zed." It's all about value-based marketing and providing value to each and every prospect and treating them as if they are a paying client before they even give you a cent. We're going to say get a 30-minute, a 45-minute, a 60-minute free consult. And we are genuinely going to deliver that level of value on that call as well. Which brings us to step number 14, which is to inject scarcity. If you don't create urgency for somebody to buy, guess when they will buy? Never. So you must increase scarcity. If you've only got 15 items in stock, you've only got 15 items in stock. So let it be known. I have seen this increase the conversion rates of upwards of 30%. Which brings us to step number 15, which is to give a powerful guarantee. So in any transaction, there is risk present. And guess what we get in exchange for burning that risk? Sky-high conversion rates. And we get to slash our customer acquisition cost usually in half. This brings us to step number 16, which is to insert your call to action. You want to tell people what to do. These are all the steps that are involved. Break it down in forensic-like detail, and it needs to be the titus. This is what we call offer copy, where they can read it, and they don't need to interpret what you want them to do. They know without a shadow of a doubt what they need to do. Which brings us to the 17th and final point, which is to add a PS. It's like the TL;DR, where you get to summarize everything on there. the risk reversal and it's like a micro little landing page within the PS itself. It's like the final kick of the bruise that prompts somebody to act. And there you have it. That is Sabri Subub's 17-step secret selling system.
But when we're thinking about where do we emphasize, where do we spend a disproportionate amount of our time when we're assembling this? So these are the elements that literally carry 95% of all freight in your funnel. First, as I've covered already, is the headline. Then the sub headline form what we call the headline complex. If no one reads the headline, they're not going to read any other element of your entire landing page. Then the next point is the offer because this is ultimately what it is that we're offering and that we're trying to sell. The next point is the sub headlines. These are the sub headlines that are sprinkled all the way through the page. And the way that I think about these is they are additional little hooks. You imagine that you've got somebody that's scrolling, those sub headlines need to open up so much curiosity and so much specificity that it stops them and they have to kind of read it again. Then the fifth and final point is the PS. I've already gone through why it's so important. You need to do a very, very good job at summarizing everything and also assigning a cost to your prospect doing nothing. And that is step number nine, my 17-step secret selling system.
Which brings us to step number 10. The highest paid copywriters in the world, the guys that get paid $200,000 to write a sales letter, these guys have a 30% hit rate. The best guys in the world, they do all of this. They write the sales letter, they launch it, and 70% of the time it fails. So this is a long journey to get to. If you want to be making the fortunes, that is what's required. If you want a breakthrough outcome, you've got to put in a breakthrough effort. Then you want to look at all of these numbers, your CTR, CPL, ROAS, time on site, conversion rates, and you basically want to come up with a hypothesis of what is happening in your funnel. And then as you run more split tests, you're basically creating a new hypothesis and going, "Okay, let's test this against the control." And you continue that loop forever. I get a severe level of anxiety if I go to bed at any given time and I don't have at least five split tests running. So if you do this, you will continuously be making more and more money each year. And that is step number 10, which is dialing in your funnel. And this is the real skill in digital marketing.
Which brings us to the 11th and final step. You are now a marketer. And as a marketer, you need to be a student of markets. So even when you see an ad that is completely unrelated to what it is that you sell, you must click on that ad because it is all market research. And often times you get one or two things from another industry and then you apply it to your industry. And the moment that you think that you've learned all there is to learn, that's the moment you stop learning. And the moment that you stop learning is when you stop earning. And while the technology changes, the psychology doesn't. So dedicate yourself to being a lifelong learner. Those skills are going to compound throughout your career and through the rest of your life and you will make more money than you know what to do with. Which is step number 11. Never stop learning.
And if you wonder, hey, why am I making these videos? Why is this Shark Tank dude putting out all this content on YouTube? I grew up in a single-parent household that had a lack of money. And I said to myself, if I ever get to the stage where I have an abundance of money, I am going to send the elevator back down. And if one of these videos can help one of the people watching, then all of the content that I put out is worth it. This is everything that I wish I knew when I was getting started. And if you follow these steps, you will get to where I am and fast surpass me a whole lot quicker than it took me. And just as a parting gift, I have included my 17-step secret selling system as a link in the description. And if you liked this video, you're going to absolutely love this one, which is 17 years of marketing advice in 46 minutes.