2 - Crafting Your War Map and Executing It Relentlessly

Alright, in this video, we're going to talk about crafting your war map and executing it relentlessly. A war map is your marketing strategy. So marketing is a war against human inertia. Most people go about the majority of their lives on autopilot. And they spend their days, they lie in bed at night, thinking about what they fear and what they want. But most people aren't like you and

I. Most people need outside pushes. And you know, to be fair, even top performers like you and I likely had pushes. In fact, I would certainly say I did. They maybe came at a younger age, but certainly somebody came from the outside, you know, my parents, coaches, mentors, things like that, that helped me overcome my own inertia. So most people are in a state of inertia where

they really want something and they're really afraid of something, but they're sort of on autopilot and they have this inertia. They're just doing what they've always done or what's easiest or the path of least resistance. And they're just going to keep doing it unless something interrupts them and gives them a really compelling reason to do otherwise. That's something is your marketing. And make no mistake, this is

a war. It's not a war against them. In fact, it's a war for them against their inertia. Because they and their inertia are in conflict. Humans at their deepest level want something and fear something and they want multiple things and fear multiple things. And this inertia keeps them from it. So you're not fighting against your prospects, you're fighting for your prospects. In fact, you're fighting with your

prospects against their own inertia. So without you, let's just say without you and your war map, without you and your war map, these people may never claim their secret treasure. They may go through their entire lives, never really getting what they want. Or they might just spend like an extra five, ten years, two years, six months, any length of time is quite sad or disappointing to think

about what they could have achieved or accomplished or gained but didn't because of their own inertia, their own resistance. So in marketing effectively to them, you are freeing them from their own self-imposed limits. You're freeing them from the part of themselves that is resisting achieving what they really want. You are the outside hook. You come in with your three punches and you eliminate their resistance. So without

you and your war map, your prospects may never claim their secret treasure. If they do, it's probably going to be later, slower and they wish they had achieved it earlier. So by marketing effectively, you're freeing them from their own self-imposed limits. Okay, here's the problem that a war map solves. Something that surely you've experienced in some form is this. There are so many marketing methods out there.

You can just Google how to market an online business, how to market an agency, how to market a freelancer, how to market freelancing services, how to market consulting services. And you'll come up with thousands and thousands of different approaches, different variations. And it's really overwhelming. It's hard to pick them. It's hard to pick just a few and execute them. So this is the initial problem. There are

so many marketing methods. And which ones are really effective? Which ones are the few that will actually generate tangible, meaningful, significant results for your business? That's the first problem. Most people have no clue. The second problem is your clients maybe seem to come in waves. Like you'll get a couple clients and then you'll just go a month or two and then you'll get another client or a

couple more and then you'll go another month. And there's just these long dead periods in between. So whenever somebody's in this, they always have this desire to end the feast and famine cycle and be able to generate leads with consistency. And one way to do this is an automated marketing funnel, which we'll talk about in module six. But you don't actually need paid advertising and an automated

marketing funnel to do that. You can do it for free or almost free. And that is the purpose of this module. You don't want your clients to come in these big waves. You want to have a relatively high degree of consistency with which you can generate leads. Now the final problem is how to actually stick to a marketing plan. It's one thing to whiteboard out a beautiful

marketing strategy that looks like it could have come out of an episode of Mad Men or some complex growth hackers notebook. But the real problem with marketing is most people don't do it consistently. Most people don't execute an effective marketing plan with consistency over the long term. That's a big problem. So something that's critically important for us to tackle is how do you actually make sure that

you stick to your marketing plan, that you execute it relentlessly and that you do not fall off it after the first few weeks. But instead you continue to reap the benefits for months, if not years. So here's the solution. Here's the outcome that we're going to create. You've chosen just a few carefully curated marketing methods that you know with near certainty will generate leads in your niche.

In fact, you will know with certainty as soon as you test them. Second outcome, you generate clients month after month with consistency. You can, with a lot of confidence, say, I'm going to get four new clients this month. I'm going to get eight new clients this month and I know exactly how I'm going to do it and how the numbers break down. That's number two and number

three. You execute your marketing plan automatically relentlessly each day and you actually find it fun and enjoyable. So you're naturally motivated to keep it up, keep doing it and keep generating your leads and clients. This is what we're working towards. So here's the method for creating a warm up and you're going to do this at the end of the module. I wanted to introduce it here, but

you're not actually going to complete the worksheet and create your warm up until you've learned about all the marketing methods, but you need to have the framework first. So what you're going to do once you've watched the rest of the videos is list all of the marketing methods that you're going to use, all the ones that are relevant or that you think might be relevant and how

often you do them per day or per week or per month. Typically you'll list all three of these, but sometimes maybe you'll list only weekly or only daily and weekly and you also want to type, you also want to include the type of content that you post or that you send. This list of different channels along with types of content and frequency is your warm up. Now,

the second step is you want to create a visual tracking system so that you can check off crystal clear boxes each time you complete a marketing activity and so you always know exactly what you have to do. There should be zero gray area. Just like in all areas of your life, there should be zero gray area when it comes to your marketing. You can do this using

depulse. You can do this using any project management system. You can do this using the reminders app on your phone. I did that for quite a while. You can do this using Evernote. You can do this using a pencil and paper. There are so many ways you can do this, but make sure you have a visual tracking system so that you know exactly what you have to

do and you know when it's done. You check a box off, you turn something from red to green, you have a clear visual indicator and third, you want to execute your warm up early each day. If not first thing in the morning, do it like right after your morning routine or right after your most important task for the day. This could be your most important task for

the day, in fact. Then immediately after you want to reward yourself in order to rapidly build habits. Some of the marketing activities are going to have a little bit of work involved like customizing an email template or writing up a new organic Facebook post or recording a new YouTube video. You're naturally going to have some resistance to them, especially because there's a possibility of rejection. In order

to very quickly build this into habits that you execute it each day effortlessly, you want to reward yourself after you do it. Examples of rewards could be take a long walk, take 30 minutes and watch an episode of your favorite TV show. If you've executed your warm up, that's well deserved. You could buy a cup of gourmet coffee and spend half an hour drinking it. You could

have a chat with your best friends, you could check social media if that's rewarding for you. There are a whole slew of things that you can do, but you want to make sure you have something that feels like a reward that you do as soon as you execute your warm up each day. Now I'm going to give you an example of a daily warm up and a

weekly warm up. So here's an example of a daily warm up. You could post one Facebook video, two short Facebook posts, and one long form Facebook post on your Facebook news feed. You could send two outreach emails to cold prospects, send one lumpy mail package to a cold prospect, send one handwritten gratitude letter that something we'll get into, reach out to three people to generate referrals or

clients from existing relationships, and then post two Instagram posts, one that's a tip for your target market, and one that is a video. That's just a sample. This is what it would look like, and you could have this as a daily reminder on your phones that you just check off these boxes each morning and then do your reward. Here's an example of a weekly warm up, so

the activities are going to be slightly different. You could record one new YouTube video per week. You could publish one new LinkedIn post per week, attend two networking events, appear on two guest podcasts. We have a video talking about how to get on guest podcasts, as well as guest post pitches, sending guest post pitches. We have a video. I think they're touched on the same video. This

is a great, more long-term marketing strategy, which is what I don't think it was mentioned in the initial video, but it's something that we'll cover as well, and it can be extremely powerful. Here's an example of a weekly warm up. These will be different depending on your niche and what you're personally best at and what gets the best results and testing, but these are examples of what

they could look like. The most effective marketing methods vary by niche. More B2B businesses, especially larger companies, you're going to do a lot of cold outreach and leveraging existing relationships to get introductions and things like that, whereas in more B2C niches, for example, my niche because I target entrepreneurs, things like Facebook and Instagram will work extremely well, whereas cold outreach might not work as well. Use the

recommendations that I provide as well as a group feedback, post your methods in the group research, look up what your competitors do, and similar niches are in the same niche, and testing, actually figure out what works, go and try stuff. Use all these to determine what will work in your niche. You're only going to end up using a select few of the methods we've laid out, and

then maybe slowly expanding your number of methods, but it's very important to have zero gray area and not to get overwhelmed, so we'll start with just a few. Like I said, this video explains the concept of a warm app. It explains what it is, why it's important, the problem it solves, and how to create one, but it doesn't actually make sense to create one until you finish

this module, because you don't really know what the marketing strategies are yet, so go through, watch the rest of the videos, and then once you've done that, come back, complete the worksheet, create your warm app, create your visual tracking system, and then go get executing. Yes, this is just a recap of that. Yep, so that's a warm up. There's a worksheet and examples provided, so you'll craft

that at the end of this module. All right, guys, I'll see you in the next video.