When your marketing doesn't work

Hello and good afternoon. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. Welcome to my life. I'm just getting the right angles. There we go. Okay, so I'm coming to you live on The Facebooks, on LinkedIn, on YouTube and on Twitter, and over here on my phone on Instagram. Good afternoon, everyone. Today I want to talk about something that a lot of business owners struggle with. Hello, welcome. Is marketing. Marketing. When you start your business, you have to just, like, market and market, market, market for a long time or hopefully a shorter time before you get clients. And it can feel really discouraging when you're pouring your heart and soul into figuring out, like, what you should be posting and posting it. And you're being so brave and you're putting yourself out there and you're hearing crickets, and maybe you're not hearing crickets. Maybe you're getting a ton of engagement on these posts, but you're also not getting any paying clients out of it. So what do you do? And. And really, how do you hold marketing? How do you, like, keep yourself invested and. And in it? Right? Because it requires. It's one of the parts of your business that requires the most amount of energy when you first start out. Okay. It also requires you to be in the right emotional state. Right. Because here's the thing, words carry energy. They really do. So when you're in, like, a bad head space and you write something to promote your business, probably not the right time to be writing that stuff. Right? Because that bad headspace, that bad energy, those emotions, thanks to the, like, I'm actually seeing likes. Oh, another side note. If. Hello, I'm just going to do a little housekeeping. I was noticing the other night that people were commenting on LinkedIn and the comments were coming through. So if anyone's commenting and I'm not interacting with you and I'm not responding, know that it is not you. I'm not angry at you. I'm not ignoring you. I just. I wasn't seeing the comments. And I want to make sure. I love these to be interactive. So any questions you have, please put them in the comments or any, you know, comment comments you have. But if I'm not responding and it wasn't something super rude that you said, then know that the technology is just failing us. Okay? It happens. But anyway, so, okay, so you are starting a business and you're putting yourself out there and you're being so brave and you're not getting clients out of it, and it's super frustrating when that happens. And it happens to the best of us. Okay? It happened to me. It happened in their parents. Periods of times in my business where it still happens, you know? Justin, Hello. Let me see. As many great things at Streamyard does, showing all the comments is not one of them. I know, I know. It's. I was talking about this with some friends today that, you know, there's Stream Yard and there's Restream, and I've had awful experiences with Restream and their support team and all the stuff. And unfortunately, like, I love Streamyard and also sometimes, you know, just some work. Oh, well, there's no perfect solution to anything, right? Okay, so here's what I want you to remember about marketing, okay? If you're posting stuff and it's not getting you clients, I want you to know that while it might not be getting you clients, it is still working. All right? Marketing always works. And I know that sounds crazy because if you're like, you're posting and you're sharing and you're marketing and you're not getting clients, you're like, hey, this is not working. Well, let me tell you how it is working, okay? First thing is it's building awareness for you, what you're up to and, like, how you're useful to people. Okay? That's not invaluable, right? You're training the world what you do now. You're training the world about your business. You're coming up in their realm of awareness every single day. Right? I do this challenge with some of my clients when they're really struggling to build consistency on social media. And it's this that I call it the no Ferret challenge. Because every single day for two or three weeks, they have to write a post before, say, 3pm in the afternoon. If they fail at writing that post, then later that day they have to post a picture of a random ferret. And here's the thing, like the fact that they posted a ferret on social media and is still going to work for marketing. Why? Because people are going to be scrolling through social media and they're going to see this picture of a ferret, and they may not understand. I mean, they're definitely not going to understand why it's there, but the fact that they're seeing it and then they're seeing your name and then maybe the tagline, and they may even like click through and be like, why is this person posting a picture of a ferret? Mystery, right? It's still working. It's still working, right? The. I always say that, you know, as small businesses, we don't have a marketing problem. We have a memorability problem. Right? Our biggest challenge is we need people to remember that we exist. All right, so you posting, even if it doesn't necessarily work to get clients, it's still working. Andrew Stout, Happy Friday to you too, my friend. Let me see. Consistency is the only tried and true approach with social media. The post you think is F I y a I don't know what that means. Ends up being. And the post that is a throwaway goes viral. It does not. I know. It never makes sense. It never makes sense. Oh, my God. Yeah. And it's so funny when you're like, you spend hours on a post and you're like, this is gonna be like, go big. Like three people like it. So depressing. But to. To the point, the consistency is super important. Important, important, important here. The other reason marketing always works is because you learn what does not work to get clients, right? That's really valuable. Okay. If you're like, Edison developed the light bulb, right? Amazing invention. I'm really grateful for them. Like it. It's amazing, right? Oh, fire. Fire. FYI. Oh, I get it. F I y a fi F. Okay, Got it. I'm not cool, apparently, anyway. But it didn't take him one try to build the light bulb. Like, the light bulb that would work. What is it that he had to do? He had to find 1001 different ways to not make a light bulb. Sometimes you have to do that with your marketing too, right? So here are a couple, like, basic principles that I like to follow. And I teach my clients on this to actually do marketing that gets you clients, right? So here are two things that people tend to really stress about when they're starting their business, right? Oh, thanks, Andrew. I'm always smiling. It's. I think smiles make the world a better place. Anyway, so when you start your business and when you're, you know, showing up online and you're trying to convince people to hire you or buy your stuff, it's really tempting to try to convince everyone that you're smart and that you're credible and that you know what you're talking about, right? So what people tend to do is they tend to post to show off how smart they are. They tend to give a ton of advice and basically preach to what they think people should be doing, right? That's all well and good. All well and good. But I want you to remember something. You know, when people want advice, like when you're walking around and you have like, I don't know, something going on. If people just start lobbing advice at you, do you take it? I don't, I know I don't. I get actually kind of annoyed by it, right? It's just like, stop giving me advice. I'm just living my life. And, and people really, they go to church or synagogue or temple to be preached at. They don't, they don't go to social media to get preached at. The metaphor, the story that I like to tell, I need to do like a children's storybook of all my, my made up stories is like the two old men in the park, right? So I'm going to imagine there's this mom, she has like a three year old daughter and every day around like 11am they go to the park because the little girl is obsessed with the fishes in the pond, right? And so the little girl like every single day like, mom, we have to go feed the fishes, they grab some bread and they go to the park. And they've been doing this for a while now, right? And so the mom, you know, has kind of learned like who the people are who are generally there around that time. And she notices that every single day around the same time that she and her daughter are, there are these two old men and they sit on either sides of this little pond. And one day she's like, you know what, I see them here all the time. I should just go and introduce myself to one of them, right? So she goes up to the first old man and she introduces herself and says, you know, like I see you here all the time and I just wanted to introduce myself. I'm so and so my daughter over here, that's her name and what's your name? And he tells her and you know, he invites her to sit down and you know, she starts talking to him and he starts just giving her advice. Like if you ever have a leaky faucet, you want to tie a little string around it and draw it to the bottom so that you don't get that drip, drip, drip, driving you crazy all night. And if you ever have like a squeaky door hinge, you know, WD40 works wonders, you know, this, that and the other thing. And he's just throwing advice at her. And he's also saying, you know, like, I saw your daughter have a meltdown the other day. Here's what you should have done differently, you know, like helpful advice, you know, that he per his perspective, right? And he's perfectly friendly, right? So the day ends or the visit to the park ends. Mom goes home with the daughter. Next day she goes, introduces herself to the other old man, the second old man. And this second old man introduces himself, invites her to sit down and he asks her questions and he says, you know, I, I've seen you here several times and I just have to say, you know, you're, you're doing a great job. You're doing a great job parenting your daughter. I saw she had that meltdown the other day. You handled it like a champ. My kids used to have like whoppers of temper tantrums and oh my God, it's hard, it's hard when they're screaming and you feel like an awful parent and you're worried what people are looking at you and thinking and oh my God. And he's just empathizing with her and he's sharing stories about his own kids and his grandchildren and he's asking her more questions and you know, just really building a connection with her. At the, the next day, the third day, who is she gonna go back to, right? Who is she going to want to go and continue a conversation with? And the answer is always that second, that second old man. Yes, exactly. So, but anyway, so the point being is it's really tempting. Hi, Juliana. It's really tempting to want to like give people advice because we're told everywhere on social media, go and give value, go and give value. Go tell people like helpful tips and all this stuff. That's great. But you know what happens when you see helpful tips online is you think, oh, wow, this is really helpful, a really helpful bit of advice. I'm going to save this and come back to it and you forget about it. Like the act of saving it. Like it, once you save it, it is gone from your memory. Like you're never going to revisit it. You're probably not going to remember who posted it all stuff. But when someone empathizes with you, when someone makes you feel seen and heard and they normalize the struggle of being human. Like Elise Myers on TikTok does a beautiful job of this. She tells the most cringe worthy stories of herself being out in the world and people connect with it because we can all imagine being in those shoes and it makes, it makes the viewers feel special that she's sharing these stories. It feels like we're connecting with this person, right? And it feels like because she's sharing kind of vulnerable moments about herself, it feels like, oh my gosh, like, here's someone I could Trust. Because she would have no judgment for me because, I mean, she's done really embarrassing things herself. Right. And to the next point. Hello. Welcome to the next point. You know, being personal over being preachy. You know, if people want to be preached to, they're going to go to church, they're going to go to temple, they're going to go to synagogue, wherever they go to practice their religion, that's where they're going to go. You know, they may go to political rallies, sure, maybe people like getting preached to there as well. But they're not going to social media. They're going to social media to be social. That's the, the definition. And when you're socializing, what is that? At its core, it's connection. And how do you connect with people? You get personal. And. And I'm not saying you have to divulge all of your deepest, darkest secrets or anything that's, like, uncomfortably vulnerable or things that you want to hold dear to you. Like. That is not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is you want to give people enough so that they kind of like, if they were to describe your post, you know, the story that you shared to a friend or a family member, it's almost like you want them to not really be sure if, like, they're describing you as a friend or just someone that they follow on social media. Right? And this could be how you take your coffee in the morning. And if you're a sociopath and you don't drink coffee, then how you take your tea in the morning doesn't really matter. The important things here are you want your ideal clients to feel like, wow, this person really understands me. They get me. And really, the only way for you to do this is to do market research. Right? Unless you're coming off a job or a career where you were already working with your ideal clients and you know them incredibly well, you're going to have to do some market research to find out exactly what it is they're frustrated with, what they're afraid of. Right? What they want more than anything. And you just normalize that. Just an authenticity is so important, too. I say fuck a lot. I do, too. And when I water down my language, it takes away from the who I am. Those who don't like colorful language might not be the person I'm meant to work with anyways. Yes, yes. It's 100%. You can't water down who you are. Like, my big thing with my clients is, fry, fry, fly that freak flag, okay? I can't say fly right now. I keep wanting to say fry. Fly it. Right? Because your ideal clients, even if they don't like the same weirdo that you like, they will feel like they know you that much more if they know that, like, you're obsessed with Bill Nye the Science Guy or something. I don't know. That's just the first thing that came to my mind. He. I used to like him as a kid, but I've heard he's kind of not very nice in real life anyway. But yeah, yeah, that, that personal connection is super important when people are trying to decide if they want to buy from you. The thing to remember here is no one, no one scans the world for the most bland version of the person who can help them solve their problems. Right? We scan the world for people that we like and then we start finding excuses to hire them. Right. Or to work with them. I love your language. Never change. I will not, Andrew. Do not worry. Anyway, yeah, so you want to connect with your ideal clients. You want to show empathy for where they are. You don't actually have to solve anything for them. Okay? That's not. That's not the thing that they're coming to social media for. They want to know that you understand where they are and you understand where they want to go. And then they have to know that you help people go from that point A to that point B. Right. Simple as that. And they also have to know kind of how you help people. Are you working with them one on one? Are you consulting? Do you have a group program? Do you have a course? Right. They're going to find their way to get closer to you and be in business with you, but you have to tell them how to do that. And you want to be personal. You want to be personal. Hi, Jason. Welcome. You know, I'm not going to remember someone who's just constantly posting about. Here are the top three things that you should be posting on Instagram. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to remember the person who shares a selfie with their dog while they're still in their pajamas and drinking their coffee. Right? And they talk about their dog and they describe their dog and, like, how embarrassing their dog was the other day when it walked up to a stranger and licked its crotch. That's what my dog likes to do. Do. Very, very charming. Especially when you're just, like, walking down the street and it's a random stranger. Anyway, I'm also going to remember when someone, you know shares about their first job and how they screwed up. You know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna remember the person. Okay. I'm not gonna remember advice. I'm not gonna remember a resume. I'm not gonna remember someone spouting off statistics about how this industry works and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Jason, Asterisk deletes my top three postpartum post. Yes, delete it, Jason. We don't want it. Although, you know your top three boots to buy to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, that could be helpful. That teaches people things about you and about boots. Let me see. And let me see. Justin. And your prospective clients might relate with that free freak flag, too, which makes you even more relatable. Absolutely. I'm a Harry Potter nerd. I love Harry Potter. I have read the books. I can't even count how many times I've read the books. I also can't count how many times I've listened to the books on Audible. I used to fall asleep to them. Right. I'm also a huge West Wing fan. Oh, my God. The West Wing is one of the best shows in TV history. Okay? I can tell you the plot of pretty much every single episode, and I can describe the funny bits, and I can describe the dramatic bits, and I can tell you the names of all the characters, and I can tell you the moments where they actually screwed up. Like, there's a storyline in season two that they referred to in, like, season six, and they got the details wrong. It drives me nuts. Every single time that's a different story. But that kind of stuff, like, you don't have to be a West Wing fan, but maybe your dad is. And the fact that I am a nerd, you start relating me to your father. Right? And hopefully we look very differently. But, like, you know, hopefully you have a good relationship with your father and ipso facto, like, you know, that is in that. That sphere of influence that is within your family. Anyway, I am going to be switching over to Tick Tock. This is my new thing every. So I think, like, three times a week, I'm going to be going live on these platforms, doing live in this normal format. And then I'm going to be jumping over to Tick Tock and hanging out with my knitting and just answering some questions on the topic. And so if you would like to hop over there with me, I'll be starting up, I think, in five minutes. I'll be answering any questions about what's going wrong with your marketing, why your marketing isn't working to get clients. So if you Want to come join me there? Please do. My username is katie.kdhd. i know. Very clever, Justin. I will absolutely click on that YouTube link as soon as I'm done with all of this. Unfortunately, it doesn't work from here, and it'd be a little distracting if I just, like, went and watched a video mid midstream. Can I drop TikTok handle? I think I can HD. Does that work? It worked to Facebook and to YouTube. Okay, so, Andrea, I will go into LinkedIn and I will post my TikTok handle. I'll message it to you as well, so. But it is k. Hold on. Can I do it in a banner? That'd be fun. Oh, my gosh. Jason, can you tell jokes while knitting? Calling it a knitwit. I never thought of it, but I absolutely can. I'm gonna have to learn some jokes first. I also am not good at multitasking. Hold on, let me see. I'm gonna create a banner. Dot KDHD Scroll. Okay, so here we go. We are going to. Okay, so this is my username on Tick Tock. If you're watching over here on. There you go. Can you see it, Andrea? Can you see the. This, the little banner that's scrolling across the bottom? That is my username on Tick Tock. On Tick Tock. Jason, if you send me some jokes, I will tell jokes on Tick Tock. Anyway. All right. Amazing. I hope you all have a lovely Friday. If I don't see you over on TikTok, then have a great weekend. This is day three of me doing a 30 day live challenge. Okay? So I will be coming live with you again tomorrow, and I cannot wait to see you there. And again, any questions you have for me on your marketing, come and join me on TikTok. All right. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. Thank you for joining and I will talk to you soon. Bye.