When you hear the word relationship, what do you think of? It's probably not marketing is it?

Well I'm going to try and convince you that marketing is ALL about relationships and how strong you can build them. Those relationships dictate everything about your prospect and what they expect from you.

The way we think of marketing in a general sense is how many leads can it produce and how quickly can it be done. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing if done in the right order, but is a major headache if our audience is not warmed up to is first.

If you want to build up a following of people who trust you, recognize your brand and feel a sense of connection to you. You have to understand how relationships and human dynamics work.

When you meet someone you don't just go right up to them and ask them to marry you. If you did and by some miracle they accepted that relationship would not last long at all.

It takes time to get to know someone, date someone, move in together, and then finally get married and live your lives together. Your chance of getting a yes and the relationship lasting is much higher if you actually know the person.

This is the same way we need to start thinking about marketing systems and campaigns. You have to show your audience who you are, how you can help them and that you are a brand they can let their guard down with and trust.

You do this by producing content that your audience wants to see and that will produce value to them without asking for anything in return. Now in order to effectively nurture that audience you have to keep putting the content in front of them and constantly interact with that audience.

After you've moved them from a cold audience then you can start to enter the next phase, which is potentially asking them to buy your products or come into your facility. A warm audience that trusts you is also much more likely to convert when using different lead generation tools AND they will stick around much longer once they do convert.

The takeaway from this is that we cannot just focus on using lead generation tools as our only way to produce leads for our businesses. A long term marketing strategy that focuses on building a relationship and building awareness around your brand is key to developing a system where you have a consistent and more predictable flow of leads into your business.

This strategy takes consistency and might take 6 months to a 1 year to starting producing results, but it moves you into a long term focus for your business rather than trying to figure out short term strategies all the time.

If you want to win in business and marketing you need to be thinking years ahead of the game and working to understand how you can get yourself there by establishing micro goals along the way. It's even better if you know someone who you can talk with and who can hold you accountable for your goals!

Remember marketing is a long term game. Play it right and the pay off is always worth it. Focus on the short term survival game and you will eventually lose!

One of the most powerful and cost effective tools we have available to market our businesses is Facebook ads. It is a massive platform with obscene amounts of data compiled about almost anything you are even remotely interested in.

Because of this incredible amount of data Facebook has available we are able to construct highly targeted ads to people who have already expressed an interest in something similar to what you do or fit the profile of a specific buyer persona you have created.

Then there's the Facebook pixel. A little nugget of joy that allows us to track who visits specific pages on our website, what processes they were in when they visited and it allows you to build up a website audience off of that pixel.

When you create an audience from your Facebook pixel based off of traffic to your website it will take the people who visited and compile an audience called website visitors that you can use to run ads to.

Think about it this way: someone visits your website from something you posted on Facebook, looks at the page, doesn't convert and leaves your website. With the website audience created from your Facebook pixel you can retarget the people who visited that page and didn't convert with an ad.

Maybe you say thanks for visiting the site and offer them a free guide, consult etc. The big thing about this is that you are now targeting an audience that is no longer completely cold and by putting your brand in front of them more often you are essentially creating and building a relationship with them to move them from cold to warm to hot. When they're hot that's when you finally go for the ask!

The next idea to look at are look alike audiences. Say you've worked on a website audience, had some success and it doesn't seem to convert anymore or you need a fresh audience that's similar to what you were working with.

The lookalike audience does just that. You will take your website audience and create a lookalike audience in your audiences section of your Facebook as manager. The lookalike audience is exactly what is sounds like. It is a audience with similar characteristics to your website audience based of the profiles of the people in your website audience.

For local and small businesses it's smart to choose the 1% lookalike audience when you are creating it. The key to marketing to a lookalike audience is to not expect them to convert right away.

This is now a cold audience and in order to warm up a cold audience you have to put out excellent content for them to consume. I would spend at least a month putting good content in front of this audience and then go for an ask, which is simply revealing what your product is and asking them to purchase it or book a session with you for a consultation.

You can create these audiences from email lists, video views, content people engaged with on Facebook or even people taking action on an app.

The possibilities to continue to create new audiences and work them from cold to hot are endless and if you show that what you have is worth it by first building trust and a relationship through excellent content then you will garner a following of fans who will use your products and/or services!