How to Uncomplicate Your Marketing and Attract the Right Customers
In this episode of Marc Haine Live, host Marc Haine interviews marketing strategist Sasha Awa (founder of Sasha Awa Marketing Group and co‑founder of My Marketing Mentors) to help small‑business owners and startups stop wasting money on scattered tactics and build a clear, repeatable marketing system. Sasha introduces a three‑phase framework – Prepare, Propel, Perfect – that starts with solidifying the business foundation (mission, vision, ideal customer profile, 4 W’s: why, who, what, how) before moving to a go‑to‑market plan and finally to tracking and refining results. The conversation emphasizes the danger of assuming a broad audience, the power of niche targeting, and low‑cost high‑impact outreach such as field marketing, partnerships, and referral programs, illustrated with case studies like Liquid Death and Red Bull. They discuss practical tools: using large language models (ChatGPT, Claude) for brainstorming and prompt‑driven strategy, building owned email lists, setting up basic martech (Google Analytics, simple CRM), defining KPIs, and measuring success beyond immediate sales (coupon redemption, email capture, social proof). Sasha also warns against common pitfalls – lack of testing, missing follow‑ups, and relying on one‑off tactics – and offers guidance on A/B testing, bounce‑back coupons, and aligning C‑suite expectations. The episode ends with a plug for Sasha’s upcoming book “Empower Your Marketing” and contact information.
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A lot of businesses are driving their marketing by posting, boosting, emailing, automating, redesigning, rebranding, and occasionally praying to the algorithm gods. Which as far as business plans go is only slightly more advanced than shaking that Magic 8 Ball in the boardroom. And yet, after all that effort, they still do not have the results that they expected. Spending real money on marketing that Looks busy but does not build the business. And that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode of Marc Haine Live. Of course, this is where small business owners and entrepreneurs can pick up some core skill sets to help them create the show-stopping, jaw-dropping experience that your customers and employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc And today, my guest is Sasha Awaa, Marketing Strategy Expert, founder of Sasha Awaa Marketing Group, and co-founder of My Marketer Mentors, and host of the Uncomplicated Podcast. Today, we are helping business owners and managers stop wasting money on scattered marketing tactics, simplifying their business strategies, and building a focused system that consistently attracts and converts the right customers each and every time. If this is your first time with us, welcome! If you find this episode valuable, please make sure you check out the past episodes, we have a whole library of 301 previous episodes, all with magical super-powered experts to help you with your business. And if you haven't done so yet, please do make sure you subscribe to this podcast. Marketing is one of those areas where small business owners can spend a frightening amount of time and money and still not be sure if it's working or not. A little money goes into social media. A little goes into, oh, let's try ads. A little goes into the website. Well, maybe not a little. Maybe a lot. And a little goes maybe into a tool that promises to 10x customer engagement, which usually is marketing speak for good luck canceling this subscription. And that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, where in your business are you spending time and money on marketing without being able to clearly prove that it's bringing in the right customers, the right leads, or the right revenue? Go ahead and share your experience on social media. Go ahead, share this episode, a link to this episode on your favorite social media platform. Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership and let's make you part of this conversation as well. As I mentioned, today's guest is Sasha Awa, a marketing strategist, founder of Sasha Awa Marketing Group, and co-founder of My Marketing Mentors, and a host of Uncomplicated podcasts. Sasha brings more than 20 years of marketing experience across startups, SaaS companies, media brands, agencies, e-commerce businesses. She has served as the fractional CMO for multiple organizations, helping business owners clarify their strategy, making smarter marketing decisions, and stop wasting money on tactics that were never built for their businesses in the first place. She is on a mission to help small businesses just like yours stop guessing, stop overspending, and to start building marketing systems that are clear, repeatable, and built for growth. Saasha, welcome to the show! I am so excited to have you here.
Thank you so much, Marc. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate the amazing intro. Thank you.
So yeah, my pleasure. Saasha, so let's talk a little bit about what you do. Who are your clients and how are you serving them right now?
Yeah, so I set off to start my own strategic marketing agency. And what does that mean just for those that are watching today that are small business owners is that when you're working with a variety of different agencies, some specialize in digital marketing, which is Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, and so on and so forth. Some will specialize in different types of outreach and so on, or email marketing and a variety of different channels. So, what I really do is I consider myself the conductor of the symphony in essence of really trying to guide my clients what is best for them to be doing right now as it relates to marketing. in terms of where they are in their business. Not every business is going to require traditional marketing like the Facebook and Google Ads of the world. But it's really strategizing down and finding out where their clientele hangs out, who their ideal customer profile is, and ensuring that their foundation is in a good place, whether they're about to launch or whether they've been in business and they've hit a plateau within the marketing ecosystem.
Yeah. So, when you're looking at kind of the small businesses, as you start working with new businesses all the time, what What is the biggest marketing problem you're seeing that owners often do not realize is costing them too much money?
So, the biggest problem that I see is that a lot of the times, businesses are just inching to get to market, right? So, whether like I said, they've been in business and they're revamping something, they're pushing the conversation out to market immediately, or they're just about to start. So, the problem is that they really haven't gone back to the foundation of why they're doing what they're doing. So, I do a few things as it relates to the onboarding of my client. And if you like, I can pull up the screen. But I work in 3 phases. And my 3 phases are prepare, propel, and perfect. And prepare is the foundation. And a lot of clients tend to not have spent time doing it because they already have it in their head and they're like, let's just go to market, right? And that can be a problem because you know your mission. You know your vision. You think you know your ideal customer profile. But a lot of the times, we're here laying the bricks to build a home. And one brick can just be slightly slanted and a hurricane comes, a rainstorm comes, a snowstorm comes, and you're going to get a leak. And typically, that leak relates down to connecting your message to your ideal customer profile and really drilling down into that aspect of things. And that really is where the problem lies a majority of the time is having to take a step back and ensure that that foundation is in a good place.
And so, would you say then that the reason why the foundation is so weak is because we're really acting in a realm that we don't know what we don't know? And we're just trying our very best. And that's one of the reasons why probably the marketing hype gets to us because somebody says, oh, Google Ads and you're gonna 10 times. And you go, well, that just makes perfect sense to me because we don't know any better.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, it's not having the guide to understand where to even begin. And as you and I were talking earlier, a lot of companies are not deers caught in a headlight. They're deers blindfolded trying to cross the street. And that's the worst kind of situation to be in.
Yeah. And so, I know that in your notes, you were mentioning this about business owners are often spending money on strategies that were never built for them. For the people tuning in, what does that look like for them? How do they know whether or not they have a strategy that is actually geared to helping support them or just like some sort of a template out-of-the-box thing that they've bought into?
Yeah, so I think it's really getting honest about what your business objectives are, right? So, what are you trying to accomplish? Of course, everybody is trying to accomplish growth, sales, and so on. Right? But it's really narrowing down what are my business objectives, getting honest about the type of budget that you have to spend, and really digging into the type of indirect and direct competitors that you have. And once you do that in those, in those aspects, you really start to understand, okay, if I am a sneaker company that's brand new and I'm competing with Nike and I'm going to go out and I'm going to run a campaign on Facebook or Instagram or wherever it is or on TV, I'm just going to have a portion of that share because Nike is definitely going to be spending so much more than I am, which means that as I'm sharing space and advertorial space, you know, on Facebook, because that's how the algorithm works based on your spend, my ad is probably never going to get seen. So then it's really, again, getting honest and broiling down to where do I really want to be? How do I really want to attract the various audience that I want to get to? Nike has spent years to get to where they've gotten to. And they probably went out the gate with one shoe and they were targeting one type of person. Now, they target everybody, right? But that's where we need to get honest. We have a product that maybe is our hero product. Who is that hero product geared towards? What type of pain are they solving? And how can I get to them in a way where I don't have to spend a high budget? And even if I am spending a budget, how can I really maximize the dollars that I'm spending. So, that's why a lot of the times I look at what type of partnerships and referral marketing that we can do for companies that are starting out bootstrapping tech startups. Even if they're funded, it's really looking at how can we maximize every dollar and market to reach their clientele.
Yeah. And so, but this is a completely different way of thinking about the foundation of it. I love the fact that you started off having clarity over who the customer is because I think all too often, business owners look at their market and they go, my customer is anybody. Anybody who could use my services. That's who my customer is. And so then, you end up screaming into the wild and really not connecting with anybody.
For sure. And I think at the end of the day, I want to take a step back when you say it's a different way of thinking. It's really just quieting down the noise of what's in the market and what's being shouted at you. And then, really restructuring how am I going to get in front of the audience that I'm going to get into. And one case study that I love to speak to and speak about to death, which no pun intended, is a drinking— is a drink company called Liquid Death. And they basically put water in a can, right?
Yeah.
They went out to one particular audience, which was the heavy metal audience, which hence, like if you look at their designs and so on and so forth. Now, they're at different types of music festivals. But what did they do? They went immediately into the music festival, into the concerts. They started selling their products right where their clientele was. They didn't even waste any money on Facebook ads or Instagram ads. And they penetrated them right there then. They gave people an option to try. Why did Red Bull succeed? Because they came up with field marketers, which is an age-old thing. But they had a bunch of college girls running around college campuses giving out free drinks. Their budget wasn't very big. So, it's really creatively thinking about how you can really get in front of your audience without spending a high amount of money and really have the ability to either have them try your product or your service But really catch them at a moment in time where your product or service makes the most sense to them.
Right.
Now, that's very different obviously based on whether you're a B2B company or a B2C company for sure.
Yes. But even B2B companies have to show up somewhere.
For sure they do.
Right? And so, what you're saying is basically show up where your customers are going to be.
Yes, a lot of the times with B2B, we work a lot with LinkedIn outreach. I mean, People aren't utilizing LinkedIn the way they should be. And there's over 1 billion people on LinkedIn today. And people think it's just a platform just to connect and to say, hi, how are you? I'd love to be part of your network. I get thousands of those requests a day. Why aren't they utilizing it to actually tell me what they're doing, what they're offering? And a lot of the times they do as well, but they're not coming at it in the right approach because they're trying to appeal to everyone. That's why I mean by get really smart about who you're targeting. And get rid of the notion of, well, if I don't target all of these other people, then I'm going to be missing out. Forget about missing out. Build strong in the beginning and then go out. Amazon started with books. Now, they're everywhere and they're selling anything and everything. But they didn't start that way.
Right.
And we have to understand as well that all businesses is evolutionary in some form or fashion. So, when you're starting up, when you have a one-unit business operation or your brand new startup with only the 3 people just banging their heads trying to figure out how to get your product launched. Ultimately, that's today's problem. That's not going to be your 20-year-from-now problem.
Exactly, exactly.
So, one of the challenges I have having been an entrepreneur myself and then, just before we went live, I was telling you about my experiences being an entrepreneur with 3 restaurants. And then, when I left Montreal and came to Alberta, I was hired into a casino. And it was the first time that I actually had access to experts. I had an HR manager, a marketing manager, a finance manager. I had an operations person who was my mentor in helping me guide my department and so on. And all of a sudden, I thought, we need as entrepreneurs, we need to be able to surround ourselves with people who know better than us. And so, as people are trying to figure out this marketing component and they're looking at their budgets going, but I can't hire coaches for everything. How should they be looking at their marketing strategy as kind of a grassroots?
What's So, the first step really is, as I mentioned, is getting honest about your company objectives, right? Because you're gonna hit launch. The floodgates aren't gonna open, right? But the reason why they're not gonna open is because you may not have a go-to-market strategy in place. Meaning, what are the different types of tactics that you want to put forward to really drive in traffic wherever you're driving in traffic, whether it is to your website, whether it is to your location of business and so on and so forth. So really starting out and I'm going to beat the dead horse about truly understanding who your ideal customer profile is because once you know who that ideal customer profile is, there's a multitude of things that you can do. And you can utilize the LLMs, the large language models like ChatGPT and Claude to really help brainstorm with you. Use these platforms to become your Chief Marketing Officer or your fractional Chief Marketing Officer or your strategist to help you figure out what are the best things that I can do from a high impact at a low cost. And really just prompt it and say, hey, I am a fractional Chief Marketing Officer for X brand where I support building out X product or service that appeals to X clientele or X ideal customer profile who has a pain point of blah, blah, blah. And put that in there and say, how can you help me? Or what strategies and creative ways can you help me get in front of this client that would be similar to the way Liquid Death does it? Or how Red Bull had built a community around a product. Help me figure out what are the best partnerships that I can partner with and referrals that can help drive business to me. And this really supports both B2B and B2C. And I think once you start there, it will really open up a channel that is far beyond what the industry speaks about, which is run ads on Facebook, do Google Ads, you know, so on and so forth. Now, granted, there is a foundation in marketing, as in running, you know, and setting up your website, if you have a website, to always be SEO optimized because you want, you know, if you're— especially if you're a local business. But at the end of the day, we just need to support our business owners to get really creative about the various different type of prompts that they can feed into the LLM to really help them—
Yeah.
them start strategizing without having to work with somebody right off the bat.
Yeah, well, first off, I just want to let the audience know that if you heard that, bookmark it because you want to come back to that and you want to get that again. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of people will consume this video and go, what was that prompt again? Well, look at the timestamp right now and know that you're coming back to that because that's going to be super value. So, Saisha, I'd love to dial, get into some more strategies that leaders can do to basically clean up their marketing mess. And we'll get to that right after this.
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I am speaking with marketing strategy expert Sasha Awa. Sasha, you have a book coming up in June, you said.
I do. I do.
Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about it?
Yes. So, my book right here is called Empower Your Marketing. And it's master the basics, stop wasting money, and fast-track your growth. And that speaks to everything that we've been speaking about earlier. And if you're just joining, it really is that 3-phase process. And the first one being ensuring that your foundation is in a good place so that you don't have to backtrack as you're moving through and figuring out why isn't marketing working for me. Right.
And it's interesting again with that foundation piece. When we don't have that foundation, when we're— would it be fair to say that a lot of business owners set that foundation through assumption rather than actually talking to their customers?
Yes, for sure. For sure, for sure they do that.
And so, because I can't tell you the number of times I've talked with small business owners and I'll talk something about their demographics. And they'll say something to me in the effect of, you don't understand. I've been in business for 20 years. I know my customers.
Yeah.
But then, the first thing that they say is, why don't you have more customers? Well, because the customers aren't supporting me in this town, or the market is too small, or there's too much competition. But you just said that you know your market. You know your customers. What do business owners need to do? You mentioned the LLM thing to be able to move people forward. And maybe that's the first kick at the can. But this idea of understanding I've built a business. How do I clarify the needs of my market base?
So, I'm sure as consumers ourselves, we've landed on a lot of websites, homepages, Instagram accounts. And we're spending a lot longer than 3 seconds to try and figure out what they do. And that's the problem because a lot of businesses just beat a dead horse in terms of trying to explain everything that they do because they want to come up with an amazing headline that they think that needs to be catchy or smart.
Viral.
Be rid of that and make sure that if you can explain it to a 4-year-old, you're actually doing yourself and your customers justice. Because if you can't and a 4-year-old isn't going to understand what you're doing, then we have a problem. And there lies within not only having confusion of messaging on your website but confusion of messaging when you verbalize what you do at a conference or at a networking event, when you're talking to your friends about what you do. And a lot of the times, because you're so attached to the business, that you tend to be in the weeds so much and in the details that you're trying to explain the details when you're actually not even explaining what the essence of the company is. And that's the problem. And it's another saying that I like to say where if you sell bikes, tell people you sell bikes. Don't tell them you sell the wind that blows through their hair when they're riding that bike by the beach. Because you're gonna have different audiences. You're gonna have an audience that's gonna be triathletes. or Ironman and they're gonna say, is that bike gonna get me from point A to point B in the time that I want it to get me? Or is it gonna break down? Or I just really simply want a bike that's gonna have a basket at the front and I can go to the farmer's market and I can get my groceries. My dog can sit in the front and so on. So, that's what I mean by all the variety of different audiences that you may have, right?
Yeah.
So, it's a different messaging and that's why it's maybe not one message is gonna appease to all or you might just be a bike company that appeals to triathletes and that's that. And that's why I say it is so important to get down to who you really are targeting. Because if you don't do it, then at the end of the day, your messaging is convoluted in market.
It's interesting as you were saying that. As part of what I do is I coach speakers. And one of the biggest challenges I have with emerging and aspiring speakers, or even speakers who've been doing it for a while but kind of lost their way, is this idea that you need to niche down into a target. Because the minute you understand who the client is that you want to talk to, you start speaking their language. And as soon as you start speaking their language, you start to resonate as opposed to trying to scream out into the wind to everybody who you think is going to hear you.
Yes, yes.
And I get so much pushback.
Yeah, yeah. And listen, the idea of we appeal to everybody typically comes from something within. I think as business owners, what we also have to recognize and what's not being spoken about a lot is that our business mirrors and reflects who we are internally. And a lot of the times when we want to appeal to everybody, we come from an area of lack, right? And it's the scarcity of, if I'm not going after everyone, then I'm gonna lose. Because you think that you're not gonna get a ton of it from that one particular area, right? And I had to deal with that with myself and putting out all the things that I was doing for when people ask me, are you industry-specific? I'm like, no, I'm industry agnostic. You can be industry agnostic but focus on one angle. Like I am drilling down right now and just focusing on venture-backed tech startups. I'm not focusing on mom-and-pop businesses. I'm not focusing on brick and mortar. I'm not focusing on bakeries or hair salons and so on and so forth. But I am focusing on a variety of different industries within the tech industry. Right? And that's niching down more than just saying, yeah, I support everyone and everyone.
Right. Having said that though, is it fair to say, I used to use a metaphor of dropping a boulder into the water and makes the ripples are huge. But then, I realized it was a wrong metaphor because the boulder is too big. And so, I started kind of with this metaphor of like a bullet going into a piece of wood. It goes in the size of the bullets, pretty small. But on the back end, it blows out the back end. And the ripple effect of that is just so much bigger. When we're resonating with our target market, our reputation starts to be that ripple. So, even that mom-and-pop bakery all of a sudden comes across, let's say, this podcast. They're more likely to pick up because they're now understanding this niche idea or this idea that we're bringing forward that they might even pick up and say, Sasha, could you work with me? And if not, could you refer me to somebody who would?
Yes, exactly.
Exactly, exactly. And that becomes the ripple that we're all looking for. And we kind of lose it, I think, somewhere along the way. So, you mentioned foundation as being this step number 1 out of the 3 steps. What's step number 2 and 3?
Yeah, so step number 1 for those of you also just joining is prepare, right? So, do you want me to throw it up on the screen so everybody can see?
I don't have the sharing set up. I didn't realize you had that ready.
Sorry. No worries. So, Prepare is phase 1, which is building your foundation. Propel is phase 2, which is the plan for your launch. So, that's your go-to-market strategy. And phase 3 is Perfect, which is executing and refining on what you're doing. So, as we talked about in phase 1, the Build Your Foundation, it's knowing what your company objectives are, knowing your budget, really drilling down on who your customer profile is, and then working through the 4 W's. Which I like to call the why you do what you do, which is your story. And I'm sure you talk a lot about that for storytelling when people go out on stage. The way you do it, which is your distinctive way of doing things from an understanding of how do you set yourself apart from your indirect and your direct competitors. And who you do it for, which is what we talked about in terms of your ideal customer profile. And the what, which is your product and/or your service. So, those things are very important to just really get it on paper. Do the exercise because people you onboard and even vendors that you work with, this is a document that you can share and they will really, really get into your mindset. So, Phase 2 is Propel. After you've done all the foundational work, it's ensuring that you're ready to get to market. So, that could be building out your martech stack at a very basic level. So there are things like, you know, ensuring your Google Analytics is connected to your website, making sure that you have a simple CRM system. Or if you're a business that has been in business for a long time, you know, you're either on a HubSpot or you're on a Mailchimp or you're on a Constant Contact. But it's always essential to know that every dollar you spend, you want to make sure you're building your list to sell to your list because that becomes one of your biggest and most inexpensive marketing channels as you're growing and putting information out there. Collect as many emails and contacts as you can because these people are either going to be your customer in X amount of months based on your sales cycle if you're in B2B or B2C, or they're going to be somebody that's going to pass your information on to somebody else. Remember, if you're somebody that's marketing or doing content on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, that's owned. That's not owned land. That's rented land. That's why your email list becomes something that's very important. That becomes land that you own because you have a way of reaching out to these people whenever and however you want to. So, email is very important. And whatever you do, make sure that there's an exchange of you requesting something from somebody else. Yes, you can give value all day long, but you always want to make sure that you have the ability to get in contact with somebody. And as it relates to building out your go-to-market strategy, this really boils down to what we talked about earlier and the prompt that Marc has asked you guys to ensure that you write down because The LLMs and the ChatGPTs and whatever it is that you're using can really help support you having a marketer on staff. But really, it's your LLM that you're utilizing to help you. So, get into the mindset of questions that a marketer would ask. Hi, I'm a go-to-market specialist, or I'm a Chief Marketing Officer helping my client who is in X industry. And that's really going to come from this business brand foundation that you're building with your 4 W's of this is my mission. This is my vision. This is who I'm trying to reach. These are their pain points. Why I've developed my product and service. These are my indirect competitors. These are my direct competitors. Maybe even show ads that they've been running or who they reach and the products and the services that they sell. Fill it with as much information as possible and then ask it to come back to you with how can I get in front of my audience at a high impact, low What can I be doing from a potential of partnerships, referral marketing that are really going to help me get out there and get some return on investment with top-of-the-funnel awareness and maybe even middle of the funnel of getting people to come in and purchase? And what can I learn from that? So, that really is part 2 or phase 2 as I like to call it, which is Propel. So, it's getting you ready and getting you into the market. And you want to make sure that you're able to really understand where these leads are coming from and track them. And that's why it's important to set up your Google Analytics and connecting it to your website. Or whether you're directly sending people to a landing page to purchase through Stripe. But ensuring that you know the tactics that are working and the tactics that aren't working.
I love that. And part of that is to test it. What steps do leaders need to take in order to identify When tactics are working or producing the best returns? How do they test for it?
Yeah, so it really just depends what platform you're utilizing. But let's say, to go back to a Red Bull when they were running around campuses giving out a variety of different Red Bulls, right? Free products for everybody. At the same time, you also need to know and understand what is your measurement of success. Just because Red Bull's measurement of success was X doesn't mean that if you're also a drink company that your measurement of success is going to be Y. So, you need to really then again, and I will keep reiterating this, get honest with yourself about what those things are. If Red Bull wanted to tell their field marketers, if you get rid of all of your cans, that's a measurement of success, right? But if Red Bull also came back and said to them, get rid of all of your cans But make sure you get emails in exchange. That's also another measurement of success. So really understanding what your key performance indicators are in terms of how you want to measure success, which isn't necessarily always a sale in the beginning. What are you getting in terms of putting out there into the universe of having somebody experience what your product or service is? And it may not necessarily equate into an immediate sale. But what have you achieved That feels like the beginning of success. And maybe, it's somebody even just telling you, wow, I love this product. Or, wow, this is a really amazing platform and I'm going to tell everybody about it. Maybe just a simple compliment can be a measurement of success because that can also be proof of product or proof of concept within marketing.
And social proof. Sasha, this is an absolutely fantastic conversation. I'm sure people are at this point leaning in. For the people who might be interested in working with you, how can they get in contact So, you can just go to my website, sachaaawa.com.
So, that's Sacha, last name A-W-W, dot com. And you can find out all the details about myself and how to work with me.
And you mentioned, so we talked about the second phase. The third phase of your system looks like what?
So, the third phase of the system is then it's tracking and analyzing what's working, what's not. So, we briefed on that a little bit. So, it's making sure that you have mechanisms to be able to track that, whether it is that you're utilizing tools to do it or you're utilizing simple spreadsheets at the beginning. I mean, listen, everybody's got to start somewhere and be strappy. But just make sure you know how to go back and recognize where a lead or where a sale has come from.
Yeah, it's interesting because you said sometimes our marketing doesn't result in sales. I do know like even from the casino standpoint, when I was the Director of Food and Beverage and I would work with my marketing with my marketing manager to do things to really kind of spearhead initiatives. And I remember sitting down with the COO of the casino and he says, well, prove to me that this was successful. And we'd look at finances over the quarter, over the half year, over the full year. And we'd look at how successful we are. But we had no real tie to, are we successful because we were this active?
Right.
And that we did all this great work? Or were we successful just because the market changed and people just wanted our product? How does one prove the ROI, especially if they're dealing with the CFO?
Yeah, so I had to deal with that a lot being internal and then also working with my clients in terms of the marketing that we're doing. And that's why it's important that the company as a whole and all the C-suite level know what their KPIs are on a monthly So, you know, to answer that question, you know, as you were working in the casino business, you know, did everybody come together and were they in alignment in terms of what was success for them? At the end of the month, was it just purely sales? At the end of the month, was it X amount of people that came into the casino? At the end of the month, was it people spending money at the casino tables? What was that measurement of success for them? And based on each one of those channels, how were you tracking that?
Yeah.
them. Because then, a CFO is going to look at a one-to-one spend versus return on investment. Because there's a variety of different things that everyone can be looking at as it relates to a measurement of success. But you need to ensure that you yourself know what your KPI is and that you translate that to the rest of the team. Otherwise, you're just kind of walking in and doing business blindly, which nobody wants to do.
Yeah, a lot of— would it be fair to say that some marketing initiatives are kind of those seeds in the ground? You're not see the harvest for some time. A lot of it is cumulative building and being present and people seeing you more than one time. Again, working with speakers, I can't tell you how many times I've talked to a frustrated speaker who says, I don't know what's wrong. I've sent out 300 emails to prospects and nobody gets back to me. And it's like, did you do any kind of follow-up? No, there were 300. And it's like, did you do any follow-up? And so, this idea that we do something once and it's going to reap this reward is a mindset I think somehow we have to shake ourselves out of.
Yeah, and I love that you bring that up in terms of like, let's say for example, he did send out 300 emails. Why didn't he A/B split test? Why didn't he do 2 different types of emails that had 2 different types of intros and communications and descriptions of the way he described himself? Because if he sent 3 out and he got no responses, even if he didn't have a follow-up, then there's something wrong with the way he's communicating what he does. does and who he is, right? But if we had, then that almost becomes statistically insignificant because we have nothing to test against it, right?
Right.
So, there's a variability of maybe it's because he didn't follow up. Maybe it was because the email wasn't great at all. Maybe he wasn't reaching out to the right people or the right events that really resonate with what he was offering. He didn't do his diligence in terms of, is my message going to work for the type of event that they have, right? In terms of the audience that they're attracting. Is my audience at this event? And maybe, he missed going back to phase 1 in terms of what that foundation was, right?
Right.
But yes, you are right. There are different types of marketing that you do to just generate awareness versus direct sales, right? And so, that is what I was talking about a little earlier and I broached on, which is the top of the funnel, which is always awareness. And then, mid-funnel, which then bringing them into the sales funnel, right?
Yes.
And that has to be a good mix because in order for somebody to know who you are and what you do, there has to be an awareness. That's why I like to go back to Red Bull because Red Bull giving out free drinks is top of the funnel and that's awareness. And that's why maybe their boss said, if you get rid of all the cans, that's successful to us.
Yes.
But in the middle of the funnel, if you get rid of all the cans, And you've gotten email addresses to people who we can sell to, that's another part of success. So, there's varying degrees of different types of measurements of success. And that's why it's important to make sure you lay those out because not everything that you do and not every effort that you put out is always going to have a one-to-one to a connection of a sale.
Right. And it's interesting as well. Back in the newspaper days, whenever we put an ad in for anything, we try to figure out some way of bounce back. And I recently did this with an arts association that they wanted to try the community print paper. And I said, well, if you're going to spend the money on it, why don't you gear and try to see if there's any value in it and put a bounce back in there? And what that meant was we put a coupon, a discount, something that somebody could bring to the market, the arts market, and actually cash it in for something. And it was interesting because they were so convinced that because they did this work, this would— and they spent $140 a month to because it's a monthly publication. And they were so excited that they actually had an initiative. And this is going to be exciting. And after 6 months, not one single coupon came back.
Yeah.
Right? And being able to— so, is there methods to do kind of virtual bounce backs or looking at our strategy to figure out how we can incorporate bounce backs so we know that when a lead comes to us, we know it was from a So, what I think would be interesting with an issue like that is that if they looked at the month prior to those coupons going out.
Because I cannot tell you how many coupons I get, let's say from Walgreens, from the receipt that gets printed out. And I will either put it in my car and just say, oh, I can utilize this coupon the next time I go to Walgreens. And I'm at Walgreens and I'm not using it, right?
Yeah, you forget that it's in the glove compartment. Yeah.
Yeah. But an interesting measurement could be, did we have more volume based on this month compared to last month when our coupons went out? But people didn't just— people didn't forgot to bring their coupons, but they knew that there was, you know, a particular sale or something that was going on and so on and so forth, right? I mean, when we think of companies that utilize a lot of coupons, I mean, you know, RIP to them, but they were amazing, which was Bed Bath Beyond, who used to send the coupons in store. Sorry, not in store, but they would send the coupons either in email or, you know, through the mail, a lot of the times when you got there, they already had the coupon sitting there because you could say, oh my gosh, I forgot my coupon and that's 30% off. Okay, don't worry about it. Let me just scan what I have here. And they have barcodes that they utilize for that any given month, right?
Yes.
Which then what does that create? It creates a happy customer who's going to come back and they're going to realize, okay, no matter what, if I have that coupon or if I don't have it, it doesn't matter because on the back end they're scanning that particular month and so that they know who's coming in and who's verbalizing and saying, I got a coupon in my mail or I got a coupon in my email and maybe, you know, Wi-Fi is not working, they can't pull up their email and so on and so forth. So they're not attributing it directly back to Sasha as a customer, but they're attributing it back to that they've received a coupon and they can still measure this, the measurement of success, which is why they kept doing it.
Yeah, which just made perfect sense. And to your point, they helped build trust because they didn't make it a mandatory component to the process.
Yes, yes. I think what Starbucks did later, which they probably learned from what Bed Bath Beyond was doing, is they created an app. So, the app was where everybody was at any given time so that they could directly attribute and track. So, they had it right in the palm of their hands versus having to bring something to an actual physical store.
And McDonald's does that now with their app. They have your offers, right? And they called it your offers. So, how personable does that make it sound, right? That this is offers just for you because you're special.
Yeah, even though it's going to like 600,000 other people.
Right? So, Sasha, I'd like to get into as people are kind of uncovering and kind of hopefully learning from today's episode. My fear is always that people put band-aids on stuff. And so, I'd like to talk about as people start looking at their marketing strategy of how they should maybe pivot and change up a little bit. I'd like to talk about some pitfalls and cautionaries. And we'll get to that right after this.
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Subscribe to this podcast and make sure you subscribe to this feed. That way, you'll get notification whenever I bring you fresh new content each and every week. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe. Stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. See you next week.
