March Marketing Trends Review: Search engine optimization, TikTok Ban and more

Welcome to the March 2024 Marketing Trends Review! In case you missed it, last month we started doing marketing reports to show what is working in our sales engine and what isn’t. Our goal is to peel back as much of the curtain as we can so we can help our community work smart instead of hard.

If you remember from last month, we took apart the entire website in February which gave us a lot of data about traffic sources, where we were losing customers and leads, etc. Some of the problems we discovered last month spilled over into this month, so it was another month of a lot of behind the scenes work.

The good news is it wasn’t nearly as much work as February where we literally rebuilt and entire website and 12 funnels, it was more like finishing touches, making sure everything was backed up properly, making sure plugins weren’t breaking etc.

That meant we could start going harder on the front end with our social media content again because everything was at least okay enough where it wouldn’t cause a systems breakdown behind the scenes.

Goals going into March:

• Start regularly posting podcast episodes again for both Make Money Your Honey and Entrepreneur Expat
• Get all of our social accounts going all at once
• Build up a social media library that automatically posts our best content every month
• Get ahead on our social media content calendar
• Improve website performance per Google standards
• Start converting more of the attention we are getting into automatic sales call bookings

Below you’ll find some of the highlights in terms of March marketing trends.

We got over 240k views on a TikTok and lit the internet on fire.

This was specifically for our Entrepreneur Expat brand and the followers tripled. Here’s what worked:

• We discussed a controversial topic – Americans leaving the US. This topic makes everyone who isn’t an American who left or thinking about leaving upset so naturally it took off TikTok.
• We presented some data – in this case the fact that Mexico is making it’s requirements for Americans stricter.

What was interesting is we posted the exact same content on LinkedIn, and while TikTok had thousands of comments of people hating on us, LinkedIn commenters were intrigued and wanted to know more about moving to Mexico.

This makes a lot of sense giving that our target market – successful online entrepreneurs – definitely spend more time on LinkedIn than trolling people on TikTok.

It was a good lesson in knowing where your audience hangs out.

I wouldn’t bank on TikTok for getting clients, but I might use it to get media attention the same way I used to use Twitter for that. Also, considering the news of the TikTok ban, we don’t fully know how it will affect us since we’re in Mexico and not the United States so I’m not putting my eggs in that basket.

15x Increase in Automatic Sales Call Bookings in 4 Weeks

We had a 15x increase in automatic sales call bookings in four weeks from making a few tweaks to our funnel. Plus, we’re average a 500% increase in monthly sales call bookings from 2023.

No DMing.

No calling.

No posting on social media 5x a day (although I do enjoy doing that and it also brings in leads).

No paid advertising.

Just our marketing and sales engine doing it’s thing.

We also introduced something new and started testing it. We’re calling the Automations Audits. What we do is we audit your funnels and technology for free. No sales pitch at the end.

At the end of the call we present what we found and then should you decide you want to know more about working with us, then we discuss it further. Within the first week of posting about this on social media, it generated $11,000 in additional sales.

We teach our clients how to build their own marketing and sales engine in our Effortless Sales Engine program. Learn more and apply here.

People Finding Us on Google Search Is Up

This is a chart of what our clicks from Google looked like before we optimized the website versus after. As you can see, it’s on the up and up. Here’s what we did:

• Fixed everything that was broken on the site which sped up the site
• Moved to another server which also sped up the site
• Deleted a bunch of unnecessary things from the site which sped up the site
• Made sure pages were actually being indexed

Since we’ve always done search engine optimization with keywords that didn’t change, so we think what really moved the needle was simply fixing everything that was previously broken and making the site faster.

Wins for the month:

Here are our top accomplishments for the month:

• Introducing Automations Audits which started generating sales within the first week
• Going semi-viral on TikTok
• Facebook and LinkedIn brought in the most sales this month whereas YouTube brought in the most leads.
• The website is finally optimized after it being broken for years.
• Effortless Sales Engine and Persuade to Profit were actually tied this past month for sales.
• Our free guides are so good people are sharing them and sending referrals within 48 hours
• We had a successful email campaign that helped us qualify and segment leads for sales
• We still took plenty of time off and had a lot of fun this month

Challenge Areas:

We’re making a lot of progress with our marketing and sales machine. Last month we said going into March we wanted more of the attention converting into automatic sales call bookings and we accomplished that. However, we did run into some challenge areas:

• At first most of the leads were not qualified, that did change toward the end of the month when I switched the messaging and started making sales much easier.
• We couldn’t get all of our social channels going full-steam ahead while we were dealing with tech issues behind the scenes
• I was somewhat shocked people were still wanting to buy Persuade to Profit so I wasn’t fully prepared for it. I thought for sure we would be retiring it, but the need in the marketplace is returning. Just goes to show to always have multiple products. While I’m no longer teaching it live, people are purchasing it on-demand.

Biggest Takeaways for March Marketing Trends:

Here are our biggest takeaways for the month of March:

• As per usual, the more we market the more money we make.
• Google really does matter. I’d stopped paying attention to it years ago, but the truth is Google, YouTube and search engine optimization make up for the part of our machine that we can tweak, optimize and grow over time where as social media is more short lived.
• If I don’t dumb down my messaging, I might get less leads but they are far more qualified.
• We took a look at our sales opportunities earlier this month and realized we could pause on getting new referral partners and interviewing new podcast guests for a while. We are way ahead in those two areas and need to spend more time on past clients, social media leads and leads in our email marketing database which are higher priority. That means less work for now.
• Spending a couple of hours last month to create a social media schedule with content that automatically rotates each month has made my job much easier in terms of marketing. That alone was bringing us new leads from LinkedIn and Facebook without me having to do any additional work. This was made possible thanks to a tool called OneUp.

Next Steps going into April:

Now that all the behind-the-scenes infrastructure and website stuff is finally done, all we need to worry about it more marketing and sales. Our goals for April are as follows:

• Get more automations audits booked from the website, social media and our email list
• Get Justin’s videos and social media going. Right now these results have just been from either my content, or the content we do together. We’ve had tons of requests from clients for him to do his own content and we’re finally ready. We can officially pull him out of building things so he too can do more content marketing.
• Focus on past clients, current clients, social media leads and leads in our database. We have plenty to work with and new ones coming in each week.

We’ll see how this all goes in April and will report back next month.