Marketing ROI: Start Seeing Real Marketing Results #SmallBusinessGrowth

You ever thrown money out the window and then just hope it comes back with friends?

So if you're not looking at the right things when you're doing your marketing, that's exactly what you're doing.

Yeah. Yeah. No, Neither one of us have ever done.

No.

If you want to learn how not to do that, stay tuned. She's the CEO.

He's the marketing and operations guy.

If it's broken, you need the business fix. So we're back in the studio.

We are.

What has been happening in your life recently? Is there good stuff?

All sorts of things. My kids are in Newsies right now. They are the leads in Newsies.

What is that?

Newsies? It's a musical.

I was about to say. Is this. Should they get this checked out or.

No, it's awesome. I have two. My two children, my junior and my seventh grader are leads in their school musical.

That is amazing. Congratulations.

Thank you.

That's unbelievable. So is that playing currently, like, while we're recording this?

It's playing currently. While we're recording. It will be over because they had two shows last weekend. They have three shows this weekend. And then they'll be in the show hole of depression, which is sure.

The after the fact theater.

My life is over. It's all boring.

Right. Right. There's no more. I mean, same thing we get after this. After we're done recording, I go home and cry.

Oh, do you?

Yes.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

What about you? What's going on this week? The sun's shining. Are you out biking?

The sun is shining. The one motorcycle is getting slowly back together in frantic fashion, like every motorcyclist or like car guy does. As soon as we see the sun, we're like, oh, crap. That stuff I wanted to work on in December I should do.

Should have done it.

Right. I guess I'll do that now while I see everyone drive past. So, yeah, that's been the big thing. Yeah, it's been good stuff. We're going to talk marketing, return on investment. That mystical, magical thing that isn't always measurable, but we kind of want to make sure that they translate into business results. Otherwise, it's just. I mean, it's cool to make it rain. It is awesome if you can make it rain. But that rain should grow something.

Absolutely.

So it's interesting. So the number that I found was 5 to 15% of your budget should go towards marketing. Is this something that you've seen? Is this something that you agree with?

It's something that I've Seen. I do agree with it. I will say, depending on what growth mode you're in, sometimes it's more than that. Like if you're in the process of, I mean, you're building brand recognition, you're going through a major rebranding campaign, you're wanting to really pour gasoline on, on the, the fire that is your business. I think it can go upwards of 25%, but it's really how you spend those dollars that is really important. Otherwise, I mean, you're just, you said throwing money out the window, I say flushing it down a toilet. So you've really got to be careful.

I have a better analogy. And that even too is. It came down to one point. We were comparing two different methods of marketing. It was a business that I had worked at. Very old school owner. He wanted to do a very old school method of marketing. I was looking at something digital for him and said, look, hey, we can do the old school method or we can do the digital method. We can also take $400 out to the parking lot, soak it in diesel fuel and light it on fire and we still come out $50 ahead. At which point he looked at me and he goes, do the other one.

Yeah, it can be challenging.

Yes, it can. So, I mean, in your years of doing this, both years, because we're only, we're going to say it's only two years. You've got the experience, a wide experience in somehow only two years is what we're going to call it. You've seen some things go sideways.

Sure.

What is one of the more interesting things that you have seen go sideways? That was a marketing fail.

Well, I had one written down because you had asked me to prepare for this and now one came to me. So it's even better.

We're left turn.

We're left turning, left turn. So Affordable Care act happened a long time ago and we're working on brand recognition. What are we going to do to kind of get people to know who we are? We thought we'll sponsor Kids Day.

Kids Day.

Kids Day at what? It was with a radio station at a park in green. And we were going to be a sponsor for Kids Day, which is okay, but nothing that we do is really kid related. We're a health insurance agency. And so I'm like, why are we here? It was not good. We saw some clients, like, they showed. They're like, hey, we know who you are. We're like, great. Tell your friend. They're like, we're probably not going to. I mean, it Just wasn't the right target for us. We've done that. Another one. I can remember back way before Chrissy was CEO, like, when she was a child. I remember that my family decided that they were gonna be in a parade or in. I mean, we have a village that we insure. And so we were in their parade and we threw Frisbees. And I just remember hitting people with frisbees and thinking, that was not good marketing.

It's setting them. It's throwing a business card of who to sue for the injuries, pretty much.

So it's like you could see them, like, by the end of the parade, they're, like, rolling them instead. Like, how can you fling it? So you're not beating someone in the head? Oh, no.

That way. That way you take out the babies instead of the older kids.

Yeah, well, it was. Yeah. First piece. Those have been things that have not gone well. Then there's all. Then there's other stuff. I mean, strategies not being right, websites not getting updated correctly. I mean, those are. I mean, those are common too, but you wanted the fun ones. Kids Day, when you don't really do anything with children and Frisbees that injure the public.

It's funny because you remind me of some of the things that I see, that I see some people do in marketing is what I will call the ego advertising. They sponsor an event that they. I mean, it has nothing to do with them. It has nothing to. And that's not to say that was the driver behind sponsoring Kids Day. I'm sure there was good stuff involved with that, but there's some. And I wholeheartedly. And I mean, I know what you guys do. It's giving back to the community to sponsor community events that are, like, community centric, that are. Giving back. Oh, my God. Yes. That is. That's not as much marketing, though, as it is charitable.

Exactly.

When I see some of the people that are doing, like. I hate to say it, as someone that does, like, car, motorcycle, all that type of stuff, like, 90% of NASCAR is ego sponsorship. It is for brands that you really have nothing to do with. I mean, Siemens, the company that sells, like, MRI machines, you know, most doctors are making that decision wholeheartedly on the NASCAR car that they see going around the turkey. They saw it, right? They saw the. Oh, you know what?

Yeah, they can see it that fast.

They saw it 500 times at the speedway. So they thought, I guess that's the MRI machine that I'm gonna buy. So that there's some of Ego. And I mean, really, that is executives that just like NASCAR that say, I want the expensive suite. So I see that. To me, one of the things, the, the thing that's missing that you mentioned is that so many people, when they do marketing, why the hell are they doing it? I mean, what, what, what is the. What is the key performance indicator? What they. They're like marketing. And you're like, okay. And they're like, marketing.

What's the point? Is the goal to create top of funnel? Is the goal to create leads? Is it just. Yeah, exactly. Defining it. I think our. In sponsoring Kids Day, why did we do it? Because someone sold it to us that it would be a great activity and it would be a great. And we believe them and they lied. We haven't sponsored Kids Day since.

Oh, you haven't. That's unfortunate.

And I want to say it was like in 2011. Like, it was a long time ago. Okay, good.

So it's. Most people have forgotten about that by now.

They have. They're probably like, where's. No, they don't remember us as a Kids Day sponsor. It's good.

Most of those kids are now adults and have their own kids. Yeah, no, they don't care anymore. The other thing is too, is, like, when people talk, they've got this one size fits all approach. That's not. What are we trying to accomplish and what's the strategy behind it? Yeah, I. I get that all the time. For people with podcasts. I want to do a podcast. Great. What's the goal? Podcasting. No, no, no.

What? What.

Why are you podcasting? What? Why do you want to sit in front of the mic and talk to people? And why do you think anyone's going to listen to you? You may be charming, you may be wonderful, you may be charismatic. As I'll get out, you may have great information. But unless there's a point to it, then why. What's a red flag that you see with some marketing? Because I know we both have a list of these.

I feel like we're gonna get hate mail.

I'm good with it. Okay, Bring on the hate.

Bring on the hate. A few things. So one is when you're. If you're. Not a marketing expert, because that's most small businesses, like, we don't know. Like, we got into business to do the thing. We didn't get into business to do the marketing, to be able to do the thing. And so I think oftentimes there is. This is the formula that I need you to follow. And it doesn't matter if you're selling insurance or you're selling hamburgers. It's the same formula. I'm like, that doesn't really make sense to me because we have different customers. So that's one of. That's a big red flag to me when it's like we only have one system and we only do it this way another. And I think this is again, why we're probably going to get some hate mail is if it's personality marketing from the like, if you're using a marketing provider and you're, you're buying into the personality and it's just more personality than it is, what is the substance of how we're going to do the marketing and what is the true strategy behind it? Does that make sense?

Oh, no, those both make sense. Okay, those, those both make sense because we see it all the time. And the one that, the one that we see. And I know once again, this is going to bring out the hate mail. We see a lot of people that have been successful on Instagram and their marketing strategy is we're going to post Instagram. You're like, that's not a strategy. Lindsay.

Yeah.

Who we both know through 10,000 small businesses said it best when young and pretty is not a marketing strategy.

It's not.

No, no, no. Because I never would have made it in marketing like this. This, this is not young nor pretty. So this never would have worked in marketing. So I see that sometimes where. And what I worry about, what's tough is when someone buys into that because typically those are ter. They're less expensive. They're like, hey, we've got. I'm. I'm a marketer. And you're like, okay, great. Then someone buys into that. They pay the $300 a month or whatever it is for it, and suddenly they come out and like, well, that didn't get us anything. We got a couple of likes, we got a couple of follows, but that didn't get us anything. Now that's not to say there are some very, very good there that do that. The difficulty is, is they have been like, so many small businesses have been turned off by the ones that the fly by nights, I guess I would say that show up, take your $300, disappear and say, hey, you got likes. I, I don't know about you, but my bank does not accept likes for payment.

No, I wish they did sometimes, but again, I. What does it matter? What, what do the likes matter if they're not conversions? So, I mean, that's. Yes, that is the struggle that had is kind of that how do you have, how do you define terms? Because what I define success as as a CEO is our marketing is creating top of funnel which is able for us to create things for our salespeople to convert which converts to cash. That is the goal. Likes are not cash like you said. Same thing with, you know. Well, we did this really great blog post and it got shared 10 times. That's great. How many of those people clicked on our website, subscribe to our newsletter or they're going to an event? Like how are we able to track these touches? So it doesn't matter how many clicks or visits we have to our website if we have no idea who's coming to the website and we can't convert them to customers. So yeah, transparency, communication.

We've, we've so I, I, I, I and you can see I'm all antsy to jump on this one. I'm like super amped up and I have not had coffee since 4 o' clock this morning. That should tell you something. The, the other big thing that I see is when someone guarantees specific results. That scares me.

Yeah.

Because this is not, I mean marketing is science, but there's also art to it and that you can't say that this is going to get exactly X number of people. You know how the only way that you can do that. And we, I come up against this all the time in podcasting. We can guarantee you X number of followers. Yeah. Because they're buying views from cell phone farms in Singapore. Oh and I, I recently just talked with a client that thankfully they, they're on board. But they were like look, we, we're looking at 10,000 views. And I'm like who cares? I'm like, if you're not gonna buy your stuff. Right. It's a cell phone farm. And if you've ever seen look it up. If you've never seen a picture of one of these. These rooms are like the cre planet. It's just a thousand cell phones all hooked to USB cables into a mainframe. It is creepy looking.

Wow.

But they're all watching stuff.

Yeah.

And it's just to give those the, I mean I, I was involved with something where they were doing wow. They were buying views later. And what they were doing is they were selling it to other companies. So this is some of the sheisty part of marketing and this is what I hate because they would say look, this is getting 4,000 views. And my brain instantly goes to okay, if 4,000 people saw this and not one person left a comment or one person left a. Like, yeah, that was not people that saw that. Because if you show something to 4,000 people, someone is going to have an opinion.

I would hope so. Either like it. Not like, well, and I'm sorry, how is your cell phone farm in Singapore going to buy a hamburger in Barberton? They're not.

It's not. It's not. And that's. But people get so hung up on the vanity metrics. And the thing that sucks is that's what they get sold on. Hey, we'll get you these followers.

But they're all fake, right?

Yeah. And what's interesting too is from like both of our businesses, there's a sales aspect to it. It's not just click enter the cart and away we go.

Exactly.

We realize that the marketing is setting things up for sales, for sales to come in. I mean, it's the set for sales to come in and hopefully spike the ball. We realize sometimes there's swings and misses. We totally get it. But yeah, marketing is geared to set that up. It's not. I see so many other businesses like ours that are a service or a product that takes that final touch and they're like, yeah, we did marketing, but we didn't get any more sales. Well, like, what did your salesman do with that marketing? Did they work in conjunction with it?

Well, and can you track your leads? Can you track what's coming in and can you track your convert? This is something that, I mean, we're working on intensely this year as an organization is figuring out, okay, all of the metrics that we have. We know that the world is changing. We know that Google is continuing to change their algorithm. So anybody who can guarantee your results, I want to know who their friend is at Alphabet, because there's no way that you know exactly what's going on. I mean, Google's dealing with some things in litigation right now. Meta's dealing with litigation right now. I mean, we don't know what's going to happen with some of those things. So to guarantee, truly guarantee conversion, I got questions. But the other part of this, I got a lot of questions about that and I really want to know your, like, if you've got a friend. I mean, I've got, I've got connections, but I don't have those connections. I want to know. But the other part is your marketing has to be able to talk to sales and that tracking of lead pathway is so important. And if you can't figure that out, that's been something that I think every small business struggles with it at a point. And when they start to rock, it is when they really figure out, okay, how do we track the lead pathway so that we know what's coming in and how do we convert it?

Here's a question for you, and I already know the answer. People don't consider this part of their marketing, but do you run a CRM?

Yes.

I kind of figured you did.

Of course we do. That's what we're working on right now, is making sure everything goes into the CRM and we're using it to its full capacity.

Right. And it's. What's interesting about that is because so many people, when they don't see results in marketing, it's because either A, they've got the wrong marketing or B, it. It. It's falling short and they're losing it in the CRM stage or they're losing it in the sales stage. And I see that all the time. But if you don't track those things, if you don't go in with goals, if you don't go in with some idea of some metrics to look at.

Yeah.

You have no idea where it's going sideways at that point. What I'd like to say is, like, you're talking about your sales pipeline. If you can't see the whole pipe, you have no idea where the leak is.

Exactly.

And it could be just. You end up with a wet basement and you're like, I'm grumpy about this, but you have no idea why.

Yeah. And sales and marketing are really intertwined. They're not. And there are some organizations that have them as separate departments. We do not. We have them as one unified team. And that is because there are parts of the sales process that involve heavily the marketing mind and marketing, branding, all the things that are happening, the tools that marketing is putting together. And then there are parts of the marketing process that absolutely have to be informed by sales or else it's not going to work. So I think it's really important that when you're working with marketing, whether you're working with a vendor or you're working with a team internally or a combination of both, which is what we have. They have to all be on the same page and they have to talk to one another regularly because that's something that happens all the. Well, marketing did this. It's like, that's great. Did sales know that you did it? No. Well, how. How the heck that's supposed to help you?

I was At a company. When I first kind of started my career, I was at a company, I was in sales and it was this constant battle. It was in a call center. Oh, right. And inbound. Inbound calls. Thank goodness. I. Can you imagine me in outbound? Do you want stuff? No click. Do you want stuff? No click. That wouldn't have gone well. Would not have gone well.

Why are you hanging up on me? Would say I didn't breathe right, right?

No, 100%. But it was interesting to watch. Looking back at, at, at that dynamic. If there was ever a minute where the phone wasn't ringing, marketing isn't doing their job. And if there ever was a minute where there was more than like five people on hold, marketing's like, sales sucks. They won't, I mean, look at all this stuff we're doing and they won't.

They do anything, right?

No, but they would never, like, marketing would never say, hey, we're going to do this or to look at this or how can we help? It was, we're going to market and sales is like, we're going to sell. And there just zero communication between the two.

Yeah.

What I find is interesting is do you see it with some other business owners where the owner's doing the marketing and the owner's doing the sales and the marketing and sales departments still don't communicate well?

Oh, yeah. Heck yeah. Because they look at them as two separate buckets and they're not until you look at it as one part of it. I mean, it's an organism. It's all together. I don't know that you truly appreciate, understand, or can manage. Because that's the other part of it is it's easy. I mean, I guess some degrees when you're not communicating with yourself, it's a problem. But if you can't communicate with yourself, how in the world do you expect to do it with a team?

Yeah, I see it so many times. They're like, okay, marketing hat. Okay, sales hat.

Okay, same damn hat.

Right, Right. Take the two hat. Well, maybe take the two hats and sew them together.

Exactly.

It may look weird. Weird looking. Once again, this is why I'm not trusted to dress myself. You're always fashionable. I am always wearing the same shirt. Because once again, part of my marketing is the fact I cannot be consistent. Well, I'm consistent and I cannot be trusted to dress myself. So I don't want to be, I don't want my marketing to be the guy that always wears the weird stuff, the guy that doesn't match I'll be the guy that always wears the right. So it's interesting to. When I see some of that stuff, because then, once again, it lacks strategy.

Yeah.

Because it's. I got a phone call about this. Well, if they are going to have the two departments communicate. I got a phone call about this. I may have had 30 phone calls yesterday. I got a phone call about this today. So we're going to change our entire marketing strategy to this. Yeah, I see that all the time.

Well, and not being able to give it. There are two things that are hard, I think, especially as CEOs in the marketing piece. There's the, I want results right now, like I want them tomorrow. And then there's also, you have to trust the process. And how long do you trust the process? And so that's the struggle sometimes with, I mean, outside agencies is as a CEO, I want a timeline of. I don't need you to promise me results, but I need you to give me metrics and milestones of where we're going to be in three months. What do you expect to happen in six months? In 12 months? How do I know if it's a red flag or not? Because what I want to know is, what does success look like for you as the marketing company? What does success look like for you? And it can't be, well, I'm going to cash your check like that. Great, I'm glad.

Lights on and they came on today.

Exactly. And I think sometimes again, going at hate mail, that I think is how a marketing company defines success. Well, they're like, well, you're paying us to do this job. I'm like, yes, but what does success look like for us if you're doing that job? Because I want to know, am I. Should I expect leads? Should I expect the ability to convert? How much top of funnel is this? Where is the stuff coming from? Because again, I'm not the marketing expert, but I want to know how to vet the marketing expert and I want to at least teach me what I need to do to kind of understand. So then when we're six months in and you said, okay, by this point you should have some semblance of like two to three leads a month that should be generating. You should be getting some type of content. Like, we should be able to see some of the analytics on the back end. Okay, but if I'm not seeing those things, then let's talk about why. Or they're like, oh, you need to trust the process. I'm like, but you told me the Process was going to be here and it's not. So that's.

You told me this is a six month process, not a six year process.

Year process.

And yeah, it's, it's funny because the, the, it's interesting because I've seen that in a lot of the CEOs that I've worked with where it's like, look, okay, we need some marketing. And they call you after sales have been down a little bit and forgetting.

That it takes a long time to build that funnel back up.

Right, right. So they're a little bit freaked out and hey, we need to do marketing.

Marketing.

Okay. We need sales next week. We're not. Nope. See ya. Bye. This is not the right thing. It's funny you said the communication about the like, what does success look like? You saying that kind of harkens back to like one of my core values is success is a shared thing. No matter what we're doing. If you're successful, it'll find a way. Back to me, if whoever I'm working around, even not even doing business directly with, if someone else in this area is successful, then great. It is gonna, it's gonna lift all of us up. What's interesting about it is when you go in without that clear strategy and without clear, like ideas of where we're going, like we said, you can't promise specific numbers, but we can say, look, you should start to see an increase here or you should start to see an increase here. Those are things that are quantifiable and those are the things that you should be aimed at. Like, hey, you should start seeing more emails coming in, more email contacts, because that's what we're doing. And if you look and in six months you see that, you're like, oh, hey, great, they're doing what they said. It may not be the exact number or it. As long as it's something directed. The other thing that I find, yeah, the other thing that I find interesting about it is too many people come confuse marketing with branding because they are very, very different. Branding is the stuff that you put out there just so people recognize you. It's why you see Coca Cola everywhere. It's why you see Pepsi everywhere. That's just branding. It makes it recognizable. There's no action to it. There's no nothing else to it. When you see the Coke ad on TV and you see the little kid take a drink of Coke and suddenly is not only addicted to Coca Cola, but now he's got this refreshed look on his face that's Marketing, because that's a call to action. That's that, oh, you're thirsty, you need one of these. Because the fact you saw Coke on 10 trucks going down the road, 62 signs and four NASCAR cars, that's branding. So those are the two things that are different. Branding gives you no results. Specifically, it's a touch point because everyone feels like two. How many times have you thought, okay, well we made an ad. Why isn't the phone ringing?

Exactly. Did you tell them to pick up the phone and call you?

No, not only that, but so many people real don't realize you need to get in front of people like seven, eight times before they finally figure out who the hell you are.

Yeah.

What you do. I mean, clarity, hr, the HR thing at the end, first off, it scares me, but I know what it is.

AUI takes a lot more.

Right.

And I think someone that we work with, with closely, Elizabeth Orley has said, you know, it used to be seven or eight. Now because of the bombardment of email and LinkedIn messaging, I don't know how many people you've been LinkedIn connected with who's tried to sell you stuff today. With me, the magic numbers 5.

It's usually 6 or 7.

It takes up to 20 to 25 touches is what it is to finally get someone to potentially convert to you. And most people quit at five.

I don't, I think a lot of people quit before that. But yeah, because they, they put the, the piece of marketing out there and they, they, I mean, they feel like it's holding up.

I put it out there. Why aren't you seeing it? It took me 10 hours to make it. Yeah, it takes them 10 seconds and they're onto the next thing because they're swiping or they're moving and.

Right.

If it's digital, I think it's a whole, I mean it's a whole nother animal. I mean, we're having conversations now with, with where technology is and do you pay for ads? Do you not pay for ads? And at this point in time, we're kind of in that space of we're not going to pay for ads right now because is we don't know how to track it because so many things have changed with algorithms and publishing worlds and content and AI. So it's like, okay, we're going to hit the pause button for a minute and go back to some of the in person things. One thing too, Josh, that I wanted to say as you talked about, like funnel and how oftentimes we need Sales tomorrow. So we want marketing today. Is what I have seen too with organizations is that when time, when money gets tight, people go, I need to cut my marketing budget immediately.

Oh, drives me nuts.

And I'm sure it does drive you nuts. And that's, I mean, you only, you learned that lesson the hard way one time in that you turn off your marketing budget and then you're like, well, why isn't the phone ringing? Six months later, we've shored up all of our financial issues and now we have, now we have another problem that's bigger. You do not turn. If your marketing machine is working, that is the last thing that you turn off because it's enabling you to kind of continue to feed and build your pipeline. Because to turn it off, off, to spin that puppy back up, it takes a long time because again, you're starting. People forget you are starting from scratch when you do that.

I have a great story about that. My dad has actually done some consulting for a business that over the years we, we watch it cycle like perfectly. It's a six month cycle. They're like, oh, crap, we're slow. So they turn on the marketing machine and in six months they're like, we cannot handle all of this business. Yep. So they shut it down, freak out completely. And in six months they're like, we're gonna go out of business. And so they turn on the marketing machine again. And it's this vicious cycle that's like this knee jerk back and forth and back and forth. I mean, it's like sitting in a wave pool.

Yeah. And people forget, oh my gosh, we've sold all of this. We have this great, we have a great funnel. We can't, we can't meet customer demand fast. Fine. Create a waiting list and hire more people. There are ways for you to do these things. It's okay to say, hey, I know you wanted this. We've had so much customer demand, it's going to take 30 days. Are you okay with that? No. You're not. Oh, I'm sorry. Most people are going to say yes. Here, let us put you on a schedule.

Yeah, we'll put you on the schedule. Great. Okay, great.

Don't freak out and turn everything off. Go hide in your basement. It's like a little, not a good idea.

Little kid with a light switch.

Exactly. And it's, I mean, and that's, that's, it's. I mean, if you think about your, your business as being a car, I mean, you're revving the engine. You're turning it off, you're running like, it's just. Why would you do that? It's not gonna, it's not gonna bode well for your resale value.

I I so I'm gonna do a defense of marketers here too. Okay, go for it now. Because I told There was this analogy that I have that I was excited to use. Never look at a marketing person's website site.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, don't ask us for our HR handbook clarity. Say same thing.

Right. It's because it is the same reason why you never buy a mechanic's car.

Yeah. Last person to work on it. Yeah.

He worked on everyone else's stuff all day long. He didn't take. He ain't working on that car when he goes home at night. So you cannot judge a marketing company by their website. But what I will say is, and I'd love to get your take on this how, what are some things that you would say if someone's looking to hire marketing firm marketing? 1 or 2 or looking to do anything with marketing? What would be a couple of things that you would say? These are the things to make sure that you're not just making it rain out the window as you're driving down the road.

I would say there are three.

Okay, let's hear them.

Three would be. First, you want to ask for clear ROI projections. So, or clear. Let's define what those metrics are. If you can't give me projections, let's define what the metrics are. What does return on look, what can we expect? What are we measuring? Let's make sure those measurables are things that actually mean something to your organization. Like we said, likes don't really mean a lot to me. Website tracking, conversions means a lot. Newsletter, if I can get them onto our newsletter, if I can get them to an event. If I can get people signed up and, and engaged and starting to talk to us. So they're in our funnel. Great. So that's number one.

I like that one.

Yes. The next one would be, you need to be involved in your marketing strategy.

Ooh.

You know your business better than anybody that you're hiring. You do. You know what you're doing. You know your company, you know your product better than anyone else. So be coachable, but don't be a pushover. So if I mean like this, I mean, great example. Like, we're HR people, like, there are certain rules and things. We're not stuffy HR people, but we are HR people. If somebody came to me and said we're gonna film you like you're doing a workout video. Be like, that's not who we are. No, that's not. Nope. We're gonna film it where you're yelling at people. That's not who we are. I mean, same thing on the insurance side. If they're like, we're gonna do this and you're gonna be high pressure. You're gonna push, push, push. I'm like, that's not consultative selling. That's not who we are. At aui. We're gonna do this, and you're gonna be very polarized. That's not who we are. Like, there's got to be something around. And again, if the person that you are hiring, if their marketing expertise has always been things that are, I mean, B2C business to consumer, and you're a B2B person business to business.

It's different.

It's very different. And so don't be afraid to say, you know, maybe we're not the right fit, or tell me how you're going to do this differently. Because my avatar of who I'm selling to is very different than someone who's just buying a hamburger. I'm talking to a business owner who potentially most likely has people and has some challenges around their people. So how are you going to target as opposed to the taekwondo dojo down the street? Like, we're not the same. And don't treat us like we are and don't act like we are, because if you act like we are, we're probably not going to work together.

My favorite thing is when you talked about these, the stuffy and the screaming HR video. It went back to every job that I had worked previously, and the first day was always sitting through the terrible HR videos about how not to sexually harass Sharon down the hallway.

That's exactly right. Federal government makes us do those things, so we say it. I will say the third thing, though, Josh, before I get. Because I'm gonna get sidetracked with bad HR videos is don't be afraid to ask those questions and demand accountability of the person. They are the expert. But again, it's okay. Ask lots of questions and make them explain it. If they get frustrated by your questions, they're not the right company for you.

No. It's funny because if I start working with someone that doesn't ask me questions, I'm like, I get suspicious.

Yeah.

Because, like, as we do some of the marketing stuff, I'm like, you. You don't really want to. I mean, I know you don't necessarily need to see how the sausage is made. But you should have an idea of what's going into this.

Yes.

And what's supposed to come out the other end of the factory here, because. Yeah, no. When someone doesn't ask questions, I get suspicious. I loved your bit about not every business is the same and the being involved. My first questions going in the door are always, okay, what are the goal? What's the goal? And what is the pain point that you solve? Solve for people. If someone doesn't ask that question of you, like, what pain? What are they, Mark? How are they doing? Marketing.

Yeah.

Other than just posting pretty pictures of your stuff, if they don't say, what's the pain? What pain point? What problem do you solve for people?

Exactly.

Granted. And I have to say this, you're hr, so you kind of create problems for people, but you solve problems.

We do not create problems. We do not. We see opportunities for growth. That's not okay. We're fractional hr. We're only in your business when you need us. We don't have time to create problems.

No, no, I understand.

You don't pay us to create them. That's what full time HR people sometimes do. Now I'm going to get more hate mail. Yeah.

No. When HR used to answer to me, I was like, no, handle it. Because you do not want me in this. You do not want me in this.

Yeah, well. And there are also certain points when you're working, whether you're working with an expert who's a vendor or you're working with an expert within your organization. Once you've built that level of trust, you don't have to micromanage, you don't have to ask a ton of questions because you've got the metrics defined. You know, it's going, it's like, I trust you. So like now there are times where we've, we've worked with some people for several years and now they're like, do you want to talk about this? I'm like, no, I don't handle it. Just do it. Because I trust you to do it. I trust you to figure out, well, this has changed and I need to tell you why we're moving in this direction. Like you can. But we can talk about that for 20 minutes or we can talk about, we can watch cat videos for 20 minutes. Either one, you're still going to do it. It's not going to change anything. Because I trust you. If you've built that trust, you've got the dashboard, you've got the scorecard. You're continuing to track metrics. You don't have to micromanage.

No. Because you're going to see the numbers.

Exactly.

Initially you want to know what's going into it. But once that gets set up and is rolling. Just show me the numbers.

Exactly.

Have we ever discussed that? I mean, a couple episodes ago we talked about cash flow.

Yes.

Which seems like it's kind of a numbers thing. Numbers seem to be heavily involved in a lot of this. We've talked about some.

Marketing is math. I know people don't want to admit that, but it really is. Marketing is math.

Very much so. So what's one metric that you see that gets overlooked?

I think that people don't know how to track conversion. And I know. I feel like it's the most important.

Sure.

But we don't track it.

Are they good leads?

Are they good leads? And where are all of the pathways? Because oftentimes we only define like two. We define website and maybe social media or a phone call. Like that's one of those three things. Things. But there are. There's newsletter, there's event. There is, oh, I got a referral from this person. That's something. If you're a B2B and you've got a lot of COI centers of influence who are referring you business, keep track of those because those people can be good as gold. I mean, we have a couple of relationships that we have developed over the course of the last five to ten years that have, I mean, literally given us us hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. And it was because we cultivated it. And then we realized, oh, this is working. How do I support these individuals? How do I support their customers? Because they're naturally sending them to us. So how do we build? How do we convert? So it's the conversion part. But then identifying all the lead pathways is really important. If you can figure out how to track that in your CRM and use it the way it was designed to instead of just. Just paying it to be a phone book, you're doing good.

It. It's funny you say that because I think we need to do an episode on CRMs.

We can.

If for those of you that are just listening instead of watching the look on her face as she said that was abject horror terror. Yeah, yeah. It. It looked like I may as well have been holding a chainsaw H. To me. So one of the things that I see with it is too, is that so many people, they. They look at just one or two numbers like you said, they look at just one or two numbers and they're happy with that. I want people to look at that big picture because it's a big picture thing.

It is.

The other thing that you alluded to is where are these coming from? Is not only where are they coming from, but how many times did you contact them, how many emails have they gotten? Because once you start to realize that, then you can start to budget and forecast. When you're saying, hey, we've been getting people that typically on the sixth or seventh email, finally say, let's set up an appointment. We get people that on the second or third one are the second or third time they've seen one of our Facebook posts, they set up an appointment. So if you have an idea on that, you know how you can build that funnel to be like, here's where we need to execute. That's a big thing that I think a lot of people miss on.

And a big part of marketing, I think it's that it's. They don't build the roadmap because it takes a significant amount of time, and it really does. And it takes attention span. Like, this is. This is, again, something that we're working on internally as an organization is, you know, what are the lead pathways that we need to identify and then how many touches and what do those touches look. Look like? Is it just. We're going to send them the newsletter. Okay, we're going to do that, but then we're going to have a phone call. And then after we do this phone call, if they don't hear us hear from us again, we're going to. We're going to send them a targeted email. Okay. Then we're going to have another phone call. Then we may show up at their door. Like, there's certain things that you have to do to cultivate a lead, depending on what type of business that you're in and really figuring those things out. That's why it's really important with marketing and sales to be collaborative, because they. They can talk about. Okay, that really great piece of. Of marketing material, I took it to this person and I delivered it on this date, and it worked. Okay, well, that's great. But what are all the other things that led up to that conversion?

Right.

And what leads to. And yes.

Was it the thing or was it all the things?

All the things.

Because it's typically all the things.

All the things.

It's not typically just the thing.

Yes. So I have a question. My turn. So how can businesses use positive marketing And PR to kind of counteract the effects of negative competition. You know, we talked about negative competition a couple episodes ago too, when I said I wanted to throat punch people.

So how you've said that a couple of times though.

I get violent.

That's why the table's nice here. I feel safe.

I mean, I work in a highly competitive industry. Highly regulated, highly competitive industry. And insurance that consists be nasty. Such. So, you know, how do you use your positive marketing PR to kind of counteract the competition?

What's interesting is, is whenever I hear, whenever we get someone that's like got trash being thrown at them.

Yeah.

Their competition saying bad stuff, nasty stuff, whatever. To me, I always tell people, don't directly address it, don't give them fuel, don't like, hey, no, I mean, because whatever you do is the equivalent of nuh.

Yeah.

What I, what I always tell people is you cannot counteract bad press, bad PR in one take. And everyone wants to just do it and be done with it. And you can't. You have to build things. If there's an example of working with someone where they're saying, hey, look, they aren't doing their job, they aren't getting stuff done, they aren't bringing people to the, to. To specific events. And I say, well look, we need to show that we are doing the things to do the things. So there was this event had X number of people at it that needs to be opposed to anytime there's an event. If someone's saying you're not doing things, well, great. Hey, they may not see what you're doing, but you need to show them, hey, look, this week we got made progress on this project. This project, this project, this project is just getting started. There's those types of things that you can do on that. Now if it's direct competition, that's bad mouthing. You are saying you don't do the things or you don't help the people. First off, what I always tell people is make sure that that's not the case.

Yeah.

I worked with someone recently about this where they had a salesman that was kind of going rogue. And they're like, I'm getting all this bad. Like everyone's saying we're terrible and we're tough to get a hold of. And we're. And I'm like, well, are you? And they're like, well, I don't think so. And I.

You're not.

But I called the salesman and I didn't get a hold of them. And I called pretending to be a customer And I was like, oh, so this isn't wrong. So I'm like, so now what we need to do is we need to address this and say, hey, look, we've got new this or we're changing to this. And don't say, hey, guys, we messed up. The people that know you messed up know you messed up. You don't need to tell everyone else you messed up. The people that don't know you messed up, you don't need to tell them that.

Yeah.

What you do need to say is, hey, look, we've changed things because we realized maybe something wasn't quite right. So that is, to me, it's the big thing. And the other piece that has be authentic in it. I, I. So many people appear like politicians. I am so sorry that I did the thing and it will never happen again. And I'm like, right. And then next week, the same thing happens. Just be authentic. If you're. Your people see that.

Yeah.

It's one of the things that I love about the podcasting and the videos. People connect with us. They know who you are. They know who I am. It makes it easy.

It does.

We don't really put on a show. No.

What she sees, what you get.

Yes. So that, that, to me, it's being authentic for that type of stuff is just huge. And just move along with your life. People will move along very quickly.

Yeah, very quickly.

To me, we have spent quite a bit of time on marketing today, and I still think we could vent for a while longer or more. But at that point, I think we've heard enough business owners scream and be.

Like, okay, we're done with marketing now.

Correct. Yeah. To me, the big thing for me, if anyone takes something away from this is I want to make sure that people take away. Get some metrics that you're going to look at that are reasonable, not just likes and not just, hey, we're going to add $10,000 to your bottom line. Because they ain't gonna.

No, no.

That's the big one. Your advice in terms of the way to talk to them, the way to ask those questions, the way to make sure that they're involved. I love that. Do you have anything else to add that people need to take away from today?

The last thing I would say is, you know, marketing can be expensive. And so as you're vetting things, don't always go for what is cheapest. Go for what is right for your organization.

Value.

Yes.

Yes. Look for the value in it. That being said, I mean, everyone should be subscribed or following or all the other happy stuff.

Stuff.

We want to know what you want us to talk about because we will talk about anything, obviously, as long as it's in your business. And we can maybe help fix it. Like we have hopefully helped fix some of your approach to marketing today. Go to the website, which is the business fix podcast.com, check out the social media, and by all means, leave us the review like I said. And, and next episode, we're talking about leadership.

Woohoo.

Yeah, I think you're going to, you're.

Going to be doing. I'm excited about that one.

I'm pretty sure you are. Yeah. Thank you guys for watching. As always, take care of yourself. And if you can, take care of someone else, too, we will see you very soon.

Sam.