Simplify All Your Marketing and Money Making Activities with Dean Jackson and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #398

What's the biggest breakthrough that you could do right now rather than just going on a sequential, constant improvement quest?

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com this week we are revisiting a previous episode. Here are some of the best highlights.

So we're going to talk about marketing plans. I also want to say for all of our listeners, this is really being recorded for our Genius Network members and Genius X members. These are people that pay 25,000 a year and $100,000 a year to be part of a very high level discussion group to help build a better entrepreneur. One of the things that's most important, it's not the plan that's important, it's the planning. It's the psychology behind it. And that's what I want to talk about today. And I want to get some context wrapped around this. What is your definition of marketing?

I look at as a multi layered thing. Right. First of all is the context of it. I look from the top down and say, you know, starting with the revenue kind of review, what's happened, whether that's in December or whether it's in February or March, you can always kind of look back on the last 12 months to get a good sense of where you've, you've come. And I often tend to look at everything in rolling 12 months, so you can see the directional improvement in something. So part of the thing that I do when looking at it is to take all of the revenue. 100% of the money that you ended up making in the last 12 months came from all the cumulative activities that you did to generate that revenue. Every customer you had, every service you provided, every product you sold, everything all amounted to whatever that business big top line number is. Now that alone, sometimes people just set directional goals. That way they'll set like a top line number. You know, they want to do a million dollars in revenue or 100,000 in revenue or 10 million in revenue. And they look then down at the bottom line and say, we did, we netted this much money. So they, you know, made a million dollars in revenue and did $300,000 in profit. That's the way we kind of look at it. But those two things are the first way to look at it. But now I want to kind of dig deeper and just have a top layer understanding of dividing that revenue and into, before, during and after. Because it's from there that we're going to be able to See which tactics or which strategies are actually going to be able to move the needle, you know, and most people, this is what is so great. When we start, we talk about the eight profit activators and the before, during, after model that you can overlay that on any business. Right? Because it's a context, it's not a strategy. It's a context that some of the revenue that came from the total amount of revenue that you did came from people who had already spent money with you, your after unit, people who were already clients and they did more business with you, they continue to do business with you, or they referred new people to you. That's really the three ways that you get revenue in the after unit. And for every business is different, but there's some distribution of that, you know, some amount of all of the revenue that you did last year came from people who would be considered being in your after unit. And for a lot of people, just understanding and defining what is the after unit for them is a, you know, kind of a directional breakthrough because that gives you the ability to then look at the, you know, you're establishing what the, what the dials are to understand the numbers, but then you get to really understand, well, what are the knobs and levers that move that dial? And that's where we can get the action on the actual marketing plan itself. You know, I think layer one is just the diagnostic of it. So now look at it and say, where's the biggest opportunity? I don't like to look at things and say, this is the annual marketing calendar and we're shooting for 20% improvement or, you know, sustainable growth over the year. I like to look and see what's the biggest breakthrough that you could do right now, what are the things that we can get in place that can impact those numbers in the fastest way and then move on to the next thing. So we kind of use it as a roadmap that it's constantly evolving. It's constantly. You're using it as a guide map to pick what's the best next thing we can do and then taking that action fully.

Okay, so if you were to just use focus on buyers and subscribers as an example and the ones that are already know you.

Yep, yep.

They're always the highest level. I always love the Stephen Covey quotes. You know, to know and not to do is not to know, to understand and not to do is not to understand.

The biggest thing that it takes, it's the courage to do it. The courage and the confidence to do it. No You've got the capability, you've got, if you have it, if you're playing smaller than you have the capacity for, you know, if you have a bigger opportunity to add value for people, that's the, that's the surest, easiest way to have the biggest impact because it's almost all profit. And that's what I'm always looking for first rather than going to do new marketing on the front end. Right. So we look at work backwards, right? You've all, if you've got a list of people, you've got a list of unconverted leads. That's where I would do that same thing. Send a nine word email to those people, engage with them and make an offer so that they become, you know, a client. Because you've got this, you've already spent the money to engage with those people, you've already got them on your list, you've already got there the cost of acquiring them as a lead. You've already spent that money. So it's an asset that you have and you're just kind of maximizing what your investment was by doing that. Then I would look for what can we do to bring in new people, but only after I've done all of those other things to really pay for it.

You know, every element of any sort of movement enterprise business has some sort of message to market match. And I want to have people go from being episodic to being consistent with repeating and doing things that work. So for instance, one of the things that I have learned a tremendous amount of from you on is like super signature emails, three a week emails. And where I will write an article that is content based, people get it three times a week. Underneath it is all the different podcasts and different things that we have. So people are getting value, but they're also learning about what it is that I offer. And people love these three week emails.

Yeah, I would say, you know, exactly. Going down this, this path that we've been sharing here, you know, of looking at establishing first of all the baseline metrics because every business has different metrics, you know, different ways that revenue comes in. And you know, if somebody, you've got somebody who's got a large number of people who pay a smaller amount per transaction, but they do many transactions during the year is very different than a business where somebody like as a realtor, somebody may buy a house from you this year and then it may be five or ten years before they buy another house. Right. So you've got to understand that those are going to have different approaches and different objectives, right? And some businesses may have a small number of people who pay a lot of money. Some may have a large number of people who pay a little bit of money.

One of the things with the marketing plan, one of the objections that I think immediately comes up for people is like, I'm so busy, I don't have time to plan it and I don't want more stuff to do. Part of the marketing plan is not adding all the shit you're going to do. It's taking away all the shit that isn't working. Like, they go through the thinking that you talked about, you're going, okay, okay, I could go mine for gold, or I could mine for copper or silver.

Or dirt or rocks or lead.

So if you can identify the gold, whatever the most valuable thing is that you can identify and put your focus and your effort on those things and drop all the other stuff. Because I think part of your marketing plan for the year is remove everything that is half. And the way that I look at it is you really look and say, okay, this is half right now. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Is the time, the effort, maybe the money to put attention on this and to focus it? Will it ever become elf? If you already immediately say no, you're probably right.

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