Ep. 8 - Mailbag: What do you hate about Marketing? - Part 2

Okay, here we go. So we're back with a few more comments from folks about what they hate about marketing. So thank you for chiming in. If you want to send more or have any other questions, email them to the address below. All right, so continuing on from last week, uh, comment came in because it, uh, because it feels like shouting into a void while everyone else has a megaphone and a 6-figure ad budget. Um, they don't like marketing. Honestly, I hate how much of their budget goes to feeding platforms. That they don't actually like or use personally. Okay, so that is quite a bit to unpack. We'll take a look at it kind of one at a time. For sure, competing with someone who has a bigger ad budget can be very challenging. And that said, a lot of businesses that have big budgets Also tend to care less what their media looks like. They play it safe. It's mainly paint by numbers. They have a budget and they spend it, end of story. It's not even really about the engagement sometimes. It's that someone told them they have this amount to spend, so spend it or lose it. And a lot of marketing teams and advertising teams, they're just there to burn through the cash. It's, it's a, it's terrible, but it does happen like that a lot of times when they're bigger. Um, you can use that to your advantage. So rather than worrying about how much of an ad budget you have, if you focus more on the content, cut through some of the noise, um, maybe even try and start a conversation with the people you're trying to reach. It does— so a small budget doesn't mean that you can't pick a big fight out there and get some attention for yourself. It just means you have to be a little bit more creative around it. As far as chasing likes, while it's true you want some amount of engagement when you're smaller, You really just need engagement from people you care about. It doesn't have to be everyone on the planet. That can come much later. Instead, you want to phone— you want to hone in on a smaller group of people that will get it and deepen those roots to your brand, uh, with those folks. And a lot of you know I talk about community a lot. A strong community is one that gets you and is way more powerful than a passing thought. So you, you need to do well on both, both the brand side and the community. They feed off of each other. But as far as like who you need engagement from, it's those people that you actually want engagement from. Doesn't necessarily mean that it's a broad thing. Now the algorithms are going to reward you if you can get people outside of your normal. That's true. But in the end, kind of the long game, those people might not matter as much. They might help lift you initially. But again, you play— kind of play both sides of the table if you can. In fact, the next block, we're going to talk a little bit about that part of it. Another comment that came in. Because every time I try to learn marketing, I feel like I'm drowning in jargon and buzzwords. Just speak human. And every time I think I'm going— I'm doing it right, the algorithm changes. It's like playing a rigged slot machine. Dealing with marketing technologies and changes can be a real time suck, especially these days, and especially for small businesses and small business owners. Early stage startups. Here's the thing: no one has the total and complete answer. So of course there are dozens of things you could be doing, but you really just should focus on improvement. So you create a baseline and incrementally improve as you go along. The slot machine is actually. Brings up an interesting point, so I want to pivot around that. Uh, I used to work for a slot machine company, so we learned a lot about that whole gambling industry, and casinos themselves are very good at creating intentional environments for their customers and prospects. You walk into a casino and the first thing you notice are kind of rows and rows of slot machines, and it does a few things. It first of all, it kind of infers in the person's mind that it's plentiful. It immediately feels big and vast and you know accessible because you are there's always a free slot machine somewhere. Their goal is not to fill every slot machine. Interestingly enough, so you don't have to wait. You can always just pick one and start playing. And in most people's minds, they all kind of look the same. Here's the thing, they're actually not all the same. Casinos will put tighter machines in various places and looser machines in other places. So a tight machine is one that doesn't pay off as often, But it might pay bigger. And then a looser machine is one that pays off regularly. It doesn't pay out the big rewards, but they tend to be— they tend to get more activity. And so depending on the player's style of play, they might feel better about one machine than the other. So they are very different when you walk in. And how casinos choose which ones are tight and which ones are loose. It kind of depends on what they're trying to do strategically, and they, they'll be able to move machines, modify them through software. They can adjust how tight one machine is versus another, and as long as they maintain like a, a balance across the entire floor, they're free to kind of adjust and, and make changes to The velocity of that machine. When you are also thinking about your marketing, that's kind of where I'm getting at, is like you can start to see where things play for you and make adjustments as necessary. Getting to that point is, is kind of like the sweet spot because it means you have something, it's regular, it's, it's— but you can tune it based on the situation. And we're talking sometimes, certainly in a casino, we're talking fractions of difference. So it's not gonna be huge leaps and jumps from one thing to another, but it's over that long course of, say, a year, those, those results really start to show up. And so when you're a casino, you're really covering all your bets and you're playing a long game. That's really how they win. So a volatile machine is maybe one that rewards big, and it might get different kind of placement on the floor because you want people to see it pay big, and it gets really exciting when it's big. So they're putting that— they might put them on like end caps, uh, busy aisles, next to restaurant lines. Front door, wherever they feel like they want to create some, uh, energy for that particular, um, experience. And depending on the strategy, you might have maybe, say, looser machines deeper in, because then you're kind of rewarding people to go, oh, once you're actually in the bowl— and if you actually look at a casino floor, a lot of times The edges of the casino are higher up, and then you end up kind of in a bowl environment where the middle of the floor is more sunken in. So you kind of see everything when you are on the edges and you can look down. That's by design so that folks who are in the middle of the casino, for lack of a better term, they're kind of not stuck there. But But they are— there are smaller reasons for why they might wanna leave, or they're smaller— they're less compelled to leave because of how they sit into the middle of the casino. And so you're kinda just pulling people into the middle. And that's the other thing is like once they've sat down, that's an opportunity to keep their butts in, in the seats, allows them to serve them drinks and continue that play with, with that player. And again, all of these adjustments are fairly microscopic. So if you're a tourist, you're not really paying attention to these things, and casinos will often just change tactics depending on the situation. A lot of locals tend to figure this out pretty, pretty quickly, but there are other ways to get their money. And that's where the casino as a marketing machine start to cover even the bets after they've— say, let's say they lose because of a gambling engagement, they might still win because They're addressing the entire experience. So they know there are other ways for you to spend that money there— food, rooms, entertainment, gift shop, that kind of stuff— or the big high-end stores now that are attached to casinos. All that money happens with— after, even win or lose, people will soothe themselves with that kind of consumerism in that space. And that's kind of where casinos have this magical thing. They know— they know that when people come to a casino, the dreams are big, but the expectation is, yeah, we're probably going to lose something. If we don't lose on the casino floor, we're going to lose Uh, we're using our money to spend on the entertainment of being there. Um, so what does that mean for like a small business trying to plan their marketing? Uh, you need to think about how much you can cover in terms of where your capacity is to do certain things and try and optimize and understand ways to optimize how those engagements happen. So I'm gonna spend this much on email, I'm gonna spend this much time on social, I'm gonna spend this much time on face-to-face engagements, those kind of things. You wanna optimize that based on your own capacity or the capacity you have to hire somebody to do those things. And then you want to be really strong in how you do those things. So that as the world changes, you can adapt and be more nimble. So you just swap, swap into one thing mode or another mode. So one example is working with real estate agents. They might— it might be a sell time and it might be a buy time within the industry. And so you would have essentially playbooks for what you're going to do when it's a sell market and what you're going to do when it's a buy market. And you swap those in and out as you need to. You take different tactics, but you're, you, you're good at both. And so you need to be able to switch on a dime as you need to, as you want to continue building the business that way. Or You know, if you're talking ads, maybe you don't put all your eggs into one audience or platform. This week we'll do Facebook, this week we'll do TikTok, this week we'll do LinkedIn, something like that. Or we'll do search, and then search will help with this other side. It just depends how you— first you have to get kind of good at doing any of them and feel like you've gotten some momentum and you're able to track all that, then it's about optimizing for whatever the situation is. So you want to get good at multiple things because marketing is not a one-way street. No one silver bullet in marketing is going to work. You have to disperse, um, the attention, and attention will change in various places. There'll be opportunity, new opportunities to jump in on. You just have to be— you have to be pretty good at just picking out what the things you're good at and knowing how to adjust and tune as you go along. And of course, you know, if it's not your strong suit, bring somebody in who kind of gets all that. Okay, so misalignment. A lot of times Some of the feedback we got back for about why people hate marketing: it's a non-stop game of smoke and mirrors. I don't want to trick people into liking my product. Marketing culture rewards noise over value. The loudest brand wins, not the best one. Very true. Um, again, you know, nobody's gonna say Taco Bell is the best Mexican food. Nobody says that. However, because they're out there and their brand is known and they have all these tools at their disposal, they can still maintain and sometimes grow their business. That's not the point, though. Here's the thing: marketing marketing only works when someone's paying attention, and. In the world we live in, that attention is often seconds on a good day, not even like an hour. Um, we're constantly shortening our attention span on things. And it's not about tricking people, but it is about, I would say, because there are so many distractions, Our phones, our lives, big heavy things in the universe. And if you're feeling like you have to be— do a big song and dance to get people's attention or play tricks, totally get it. I understand. But the truth is, I don't know if you need to. That's not to say, you know, don't have some fun and be creative. Um, in fact, I think you absolutely need to be creative. What I'm saying is you don't necessarily have to trade in your values and ethics as, as you're doing your marketing. You don't have to put something on that you don't believe in. Um, your brand, if you've worked on it properly, isn't just a logo. It's how you need to operate as a business. And I could do days on this, but In short, colors and tones and taglines—they're just they're just permutations that come out as a result of you having a brand. And your actual brand is the contract you're making with society at large. If you buy from us, you will get this. This is the promise. And when you can establish what that means. All your marketing can be built around that and maintain strong values and ethics that you might want to present out there. I need to show you, I need to kind of share a recent story that kind of demonstrates 2 different brand values. This happened, it's real. Um, so We remodeled our house a few years ago and redid our— one of the projects was we were redoing the garage, and I thought, hey, this is a real opportunity to create a lot of space by getting a roll-up door. So most garage doors are kind of these flat things, or they're, they're segmented, but when you— when they open up They take up a lot of room near the top of the garage. A roll-up door is actually like just a tube, so it's compact. And that employing a roll-up door meant, hey, we could actually add 400 cubic feet of space. But the problem is not many people make roll-up doors for a residential property. I was able to find one. We installed it, worked great, but had some quirks. And one of them being that the motor wasn't necessarily industry standard. Even the remotes that you use to open are kind of proprietary. You can't use them in like— you can't program your car buttons to operate them. But most of the time, you know, this was— these are all small trade-offs that we made for more space, and it worked great. Well, my wife and I went on a little trip, and my sister-in-law was house sitting and taking care of our kids. And when we got back, she said, hey, something happened with the garage door, won't open. The lights turn on, but the door isn't going up and down. Okay, um, fun, right? Everybody loves this kind of stuff. I call the motor company who manufactures the part that wasn't working, and they were pretty responsive. And I think part of it is they knew that they're kind of an oddball in the industry, and so, you know, earning my trust was very meaningful. They offered to find ways so that we could get around an expired warranty. They texted me, they told me I needed to get a technician out, and And to use this one company, but they would be there and kind of guide them and and really were they were very service forward in how they engage with us and with me. So really appreciated that because you know it's they have a funky thing and I bought it their funky thing and they didn't want to just leave me out there. So fine. Oh, by the way, this entire ordeal eventually took over three months, so I won't recount every step of the story. So they recommended this other door company repair because you know they didn't have their own technicians regionally. They contract out or they they identify partners they want to work with, and and so they told me okay contact these folks. We work with their— we work with them a lot. I don't know how much is a lot. Um, and this is one of those repair companies that are, I guess, franchised maybe, or perhaps they're part of some private equity grouping. In any case, they have a big brand, but everybody has these little small offices. When I contacted the door repair company, kind of had an icky feeling right out of the gate. A scheduler who I called, she was very curt. She wasn't interested in dealing with me even though, you know, the motor manufacturer specifically told me to go to them. In other words, I'm contacting them. They didn't have to do any marketing or sales to get my business. I'm reaching out because I was told, uh, or I was expecting that what I was getting was a partner to the manufacturer. And what I was getting instead was, yeah, we don't know what that company is. We don't— we've never heard of them. We don't know that motor. We don't— never heard of that brand. And so it became kind of problematic. Uh, because then I would get kind of runarounds. And, uh, so she eventually said, oh, well, you have to go to our commercial team because it's a roll-up door. And of course I'm like, okay, whatever, I don't care. Door's a door. I don't know why, uh, the fact that it's residential or commercial has to make too much of a difference, but, um, I just, I just need this thing repaired or replaced. Um, so I couldn't go to their residential estimator. I had to go through the commercial estimator. And by the way, he doesn't really answer his phone. I tried reaching him multiple times and, you know, didn't get it, didn't get a hold of anything, left messages, didn't get a call back. So at this point, I'm kind of getting like, okay, these folks either have no idea how to address this problem and don't want to, or they're processes for intaking someone like me. Um, they're just not good at it, like just flatly not good at it. Both of these could be reasons, or they're so busy and there's so many commercial doors going on and he's just— he can't, you know, we're— I'm small, I'm just a house, and he's got like warehouses he's putting doors in. I have no idea. Didn't they didn't explain it anyway why I'm not getting a response? So these are the challenges, and so now I'm building this picture in my head about this brand and what they're actually good at and what they how they treat their customers. So now the mental image is starting to build out for me. Eventually, they came out once to to inspect. And figure out what might be wrong. They spent some time on the phone with the manufacturer. Manufacturer says, oh, let's try replacing the circuit board. And so a cycle with that. You have to get the new circuit board. They have to come out again. They charged me for the replacement of the circuit board, which didn't solve the problem. But what the circuit board replacement also allowed for was the exchange of a— for a new unit completely. If I didn't do that, then I wasn't gonna get a new unit. So I don't know if it mattered at this point because, you know, as you'll hear at the end of the story, we spent a lot of money. So anyway, eventually I was able to get the new motor, and so they send a brand new unit. It's not even the same model number. It's it's a newer one. I can tell it's a little bit smaller and sleeker. It's quieter, and this they are doing all this. The manufacturer is doing all this. No cost to me. They're basically saying, yeah, the old unit we can't even replace it. So we'll just give you this completely new one. New model. Don't worry about it. Never ha never asked me for money once. Ever. Okay. However, the repair company, they didn't care. They— to, to replace the, the motor, they quoted me $2,200 just to replace the unit because under their estimation it would take 5 to 6 hours. They talked about, oh, we'll have to remove the door and you'll need 2 techs out there. Um, and this is after, by the way, paying $900 for the first repair effort, the circuit board replacement that didn't work. So I need a garage door, and not many people make the roll-up kind. So what are we supposed to do? Um, yeah, fine, $2,500, spend half a day fixing this thing. Hopefully it's all done. Right, so they come, 2 guys, right on time. I have no problem with the service people. They're communicative, um, they clearly are intelligent, and, uh, and they show up and they know what they're doing. And in 70 minutes— amazing, right?— they've completely replaced the unit. Didn't have to take the door off, and they were done, you know, before I could finish my coffee in the morning. Okay, great. Wow, it works. Press the buttons, it works. It's going up and down. Like I said, it's quieter, so that's cool. So I go back to the— so, you know, they leave and we're fine, and I go back to the estimator and it's like, hey, you know what, your guys took only an hour to get the job done. Any chance you can revise the amount? So what do they do in that situation? What would you do? What is the right thing to do in that situation? What is best for your brand? I think even a modest reduction in the original scope of work— $500 off, $300 off— I don't really care. I want I'm looking for an acknowledgment that, one, they overestimated the job, and two, they care enough about my happiness to soften the blow. $2,200 in this economy for a garage door that it took them less than— it took them an hour to replace the switch for, of which I did a lot of the work. In terms of like hunting them down, hunting down the manufacturer, all this stuff. No. His response was, you signed the contract. If you asked for an hourly repair rate, it wouldn't have cost you so much. End of email. That option of an hourly repair rate, he had never brought that up. In any of our conversations, so he gave me an estimate that was cut you till you bleed on the floor. That kind of estimate instead of hey, you know what? We don't. We've never worked with this unit, so we don't know how much work it's going to be. But why don't we? Do it hourly as an option. That was never on the card. That was never on the table. It was never discussed. So now we're out over $3,000, all in just pure labor. And in my mind now, that brand is a dirty, dirty brand. They don't care about the customer. The only time they were fast to respond was to send an invoice and collect payment. If you want a name, if you want the name of that company, email me. I'm happy to share it. But I— that's two— those are two different brand experiences with the one problem we were having. One that says, you're— we understand how complicated this is, and we want to make sure that You know, whether or not we continue to have a relationship with them didn't matter. It's like the right thing to do is please that customer because of no fault of their own this happened. And then the other side was, fuck you, we're gonna take your money and you're dumb for trusting us. Those are the 2 brand experiences. Different spectrum, right? One end of the spectrum is this, one end of the spectrum is that. It's kind of up to you which one you want to be, but whatever it is, it should be part of your brand statement, and then you live up to it. Because again, it's your promise to society of what your brand represents. If you can't do it maybe don't have a brand. So that was quite the rant. Again, thank you all for sending comments. Be sure to like, subscribe, and share so others can find this content, and I'll see you next time.