The Death of Old Marketing: What Leaders Need to Know Now

Marketing used to feel like fishing with a net. You toss it out, you reel it in, and then you celebrate. Today, it feels more like fishing with chopsticks during a hurricane blindfolded. As cheap and easy as it is to do marketing Most organizations now are spending more than ever on marketing and getting less from it. SEO is collapsing. Ad platforms have multiplied like gremlins. And every expert tells you to chase the new shiny tactic. So, what if the real problem isn't your ads but the system behind them? 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 pick up some core skill sets to help them create the show-stopping, jaw-dropping experience that their customers and their employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And I'm so glad that you're here. with me today? Because my guest today is the Advertising Systems Architect himself, Skip Wilson. And today, we are going to be lifting the hood on modern marketing to figure out why the engine is, well, sputtering and how to rebuild it so it purrs like a kitten instead of coughing up like an old 1960s lawnmower. So, stick around with us. And hey, if you haven't done so yet, make sure that you subscribe to this podcast. And make sure that you share the podcast with your friends and family. I'd really love to get to 2,000 subscribers. I know that sounds so measly considering today's YouTube and podcasting platforms. I just want 2,000. That's it. That's my goal. Help me!

Help me!

Hey, you know, I talk a lot to a lot of business operators and managers who really swear that they're doing all the right things in their marketing. They're running ads. They're posting content. They're tweaking SEO. They're hiring freelancers and updating websites. Yet somehow, results keep dropping. Costs keep going up. And frustration is boiling over. But here's the thing. Most of them think that they have a marketing strategy. But what if really what they have is a version of a marketing junk drawer? You know that drawer in the kitchen that you shove everything in? You don't want to deal with it. Yeah, a marketing version of that. And that brings me to Our Question of the Day. So, does your marketing run like a system? Or are you just throwing disconnected tactics at the wall and praying to goodness that something sticks? I'd love to know what is your— what's your marketing strategy right now? Go ahead and share A link to this episode on your favorite social media platform. Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership. Put down your comments and let us know your thoughts. I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. As I mentioned, today's guest is a man who has stared into the chaos and abyss of modern marketing. And he's lived to build a system for the rest of us. Skip Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of Draft Media Planners, a multi-division ad tech and advertising operating system powering brands, agencies, franchises, and high-growth businesses. across the country. He and his team manage millions of ad spend every year across every major digital and traditional channel. And he's earned a reputation as the Advertising Systems Architect. You know, the guy who takes scattered, messy, exhausting marketing and turns it into a unified profitable machine. And his mission? To bring clarity, structure, and measurable results right back into marketing. Skip, welcome to the show! It's so great to have you.

Thank you for having me. Absolutely.

So, let's start off a little bit. Maybe you can dig in a little bit deeper to what you do for your clients. Who are they and how are you serving them?

So, I mean, the vast majority of our business is actually behind the scenes of other media and advertising companies and marketing agencies. They, a lot of times, are the ones that are determining the messaging and the brand stories and those types of things. And then, They, when it comes to actually choosing ad platforms and those things, they outsource it to us. So the analogy I use is like what Sysco Foods is for like a restaurant, we kind of are for ad agencies. We do work with a few direct businesses, but we kind of consider ourselves an advertising wholesale company or an advertising distributor because that's, which is just sort of a different business model, but it's kind of what's needed in the world today.

Nice. So, so let's talk a little bit about what I've alluded to through the opening. Why have marketing results dropped so sharply in the last couple of years?

Well, we— it's really because we got sort of spoiled by how good search was with Google and how good Meta was with reaching people for, you know, I mean, the better part of a decade where it was very easy to find the people that are looking for your product and get in front of them. and/or tell that story about your business.

Mm-hmm.

It's kind of like what happened, you know, a whole 20 or 30 years ago before my time in the media world where we were spoiled by having only 2 or 3 local TV stations. And then that got fragmented. The same thing now is happening with online channels. You know, no longer is everyone on Facebook. So now you just have, so, you know, you only had to worry about the one platform. If you could get your messaging right there, then you were fine. And What's happening is it's increasing costs because there's less people. And when there's less eyeballs and you're paying per thousand, there's more advertisers, less eyeballs, the costs of everything are going up. And so people are— and those are the only sort of easy self-serve platforms. So it becomes kind of a fragmented mess.

Is it fair to say that, you know, back 8 years ago, 5 years ago, It seemed to me that organic search results were kind of the thing and you didn't have to pay for ads. But now, there's just so many big pushes for people to invest. Like, I can't tell you how many times I get some invitation to do LinkedIn training or get a LinkedIn advisor or a Facebook Ads advisor or Google Ads advisor constantly. So now, is the big push now that it's all about just taking the money you have and just throwing it in there as opposed to looking at organic content as being successful?

Yeah, it's very, very hard. You know, if we were coming up with a marketing plan for like, let's say like a roofing company 10 years ago, or not even 10 years ago, let's say 5 years ago, a lot of that would be, here's the blogs you should be writing, here's the content you should be putting out because it helps your site rank organically. Now ranking organically is almost impossible. You know, if you were doing, you know, the Gary Vee thing of like You know, and not even just ranking your website, but also posting on social media and those types of things. It was all about how many followers you have and all of those things. Now it's all about feed engagement, which means that those posts that are kind of like the evergreen, you know, here's the, you know, here's the roofing jobs we did today. Those aren't going to get seen by anybody. And so, which is not a bit, you still want to do them because people want to see that you're still in business and like doing things. So it's still worth doing, but no longer is that a customer acquisition strategy. Strategy anymore because it's not going to get eyeballs and very hard to rank organically in the search world too for sort of similar reasons. But the— whereas instead of Google pushing your site or your blog, you get the little AI summary. It might be pulling from your blog, but you're not getting credit for it. It's not sending traffic to you. So it's just sort of a different world even than what it was 18 months ago.

And that's a lot. A lot has to do with AI because people are— I mean, before AI, people would Google something, would ask a question. Of course, long-tail question or long-tail input was kind of the big magical thing is how are people asking the question? Oh, they're asking it like human beings. They're asking why blah, blah, blah, blah. And now, to your point, AI has kicked in and right after the search results, it gives you kind of this little snippet of stuff. And so, correct. So, when now people, I mean, I think human beings are just so slow to change anything that they've done for the last 20 years. But are there any myths about today's marketing practices that you think need to be busted?

Well, so I think one of the big ones is that there are so many companies that made a lot of money from pushing like content creation and those types of things that I think There's still a lot of which content creation I'm all for, by the way. I mean, that's but the there are so many people that are will still tell you things like oh you need to be make sure you're posting to your social media three times per day, or you need to make sure that you're writing a blog a week or those types of things. And that strategy kind of yeah that just doesn't work anymore. Again, you still should be posting regularly as a business because people want to see that you're still around. You know, you shouldn't be wishing people a happy Easter. You know when it's coming up on Thanksgiving.

Right?

But, you know, so you still want to be posting. That's not a bad thing to do. That's a good thing to do. And if you can't do it yourself, you should be paying someone else to do. But to your point, the biggest, I would say, myth is that people are running off of a year-old or more strategy because it was so prevalent for so long.

Yeah. So, so how does a business operator know if they're wasting money on tactics or even if they have the wrong tactics?

So, that's one of— so, that's one of my favorite— that's one of my favorite questions because in today's world, one of the good things is that it's never been easier to know what like an A on the report card is, so to speak. In other words, you should know what the customer acquisition cost for your industry is. So if you're a dentist or a roofer or in e-commerce, it only takes a little bit of research to figure out, you know, what a good cost per click is for you or what a good, you know, cost per scan on like a direct mail piece is for you. And then you also can find out what your conversion rate is on your landing pages should be. And then you just compare those to what the numbers are. I mean, that's essentially what we do that's special is Figuring out what those numbers should be, like what is the 50th percentile, what is an average campaign, and then you're just making sure that you beat that. If you beat that, you've got a winning campaign, and if not, then it tells you very quickly which piece needs to change. If your click-through rate's not there, then you're either reaching the wrong audience or the message isn't getting people to respond. If your conversion rate on your landing page isn't there, then maybe you're not— maybe it's a slower buying process and you need more remarketing. Or maybe the messaging on the landing page isn't, you know, call to action enough. And so it becomes very easy to fix once you know what results should be. It kind of then becomes like fixing a— it's like when you're trying to get a printer to work or something and, you know, like, okay, the power is getting from here to here, but it's not getting from like here to here. It's that same type of thing. If you think of an ad campaign less Really less like a holistic chunk and more in pieces. The idea of it quote unquote not working—I mean, that's that's lazy, right? It's like which part of it's not working, and then fix that one part. Right.

For for people who are tuning in, some of what you just said just went wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah. Because because you know the truth is that most entrepreneurs, most business operators haven't been. trained in marketing or good dynamics within SEO and marketing online stuff. And so, how do we make this a 101 so that the audience understands what it is they're out to achieve and what they need to be doing as business operators? You did mention if you don't know how to do it, hire somebody to do it. But then, we're looking at, okay, well then as a business operator, all I see is dollar signs. How do we simplify this so that at the simplest core, we have an understanding of— because I signed on to the LinkedIn guy who called me or the Google guy who called me. They said this would get my business seen.

Yeah, they said it would do it.

So, I'm waiting for people to come through my door. So, how do we simplify this then for the general public?

So, all advertising really is just 3 parts. And I actually still to this day, I didn't come up with this. I was trained on this and it stuck with me. And still to this day, when I'm in meetings, I, first thing I do is I take the little, my little piece of paper, although now I use a tablet, but it doesn't matter. And you break it into 3 columns. It's, you know, who is your audience? What are you trying to get that audience to do? And then what is the messaging to get them to do that? That's all advertising is. You figure it's a specific message to a specific audience. To get them to do something specific.

Yeah.

And if you think of it in those terms, it really, you can become an expert very simply because that those are your levers to pull if you're not getting that specific outcome, whether it's sales, you know, so some people are selling stuff, right, directly. All businesses are selling something in some form or fashion. But I mean, some people are selling it directly, that like an e-commerce company, and some people are, you're selling some sort of lead, whether that's a roofing company or dentist or something like that. You're, you're not making the sale. You're just trying to get them further down the funnel. And so when you— so the first step is figuring out, all right, what's, you know, if you're not getting enough of those things, whatever it is, whether it's appointment or sales, then your 2 audiences you can pull on is, or the, excuse me, the 2 levers you can pull on is either audience or messaging. And so the idea of, you know, a lot of times I'll hear from business owners something like, oh, we've tried, and then insert, you know, we've tried Amazon's DSP and it hasn't worked, or we've tried Meta and it hasn't worked, or we've tried Google and it doesn't work. That is too in the weeds. You can't paint with that broad of a brush. Instead, it's either the audience, which maybe the audience wasn't there, which would be Rare on platforms like that, right? I mean, the idea that Amazon doesn't have your audience, I mean, that's— of course they do. You know, that's— I think it's something like 70-something percent of American households have an Amazon Plus account. So your audience is probably there. Yeah, same thing with Google and Facebook. But it's either your audience or your messaging that didn't work. And so when you think of it in terms of that, that it's okay, well, are we reaching the wrong audience? Or are we saying the wrong thing to them? It becomes very easy to sort of plug and play. Now, some platforms do better, you know. Yes, it's true that like if you're trying to reach affluent, you know, men 35+, YouTube is a great— is a better platform for you than like Instagram, for example.

Mm-hmm.

But that doesn't mean that you couldn't get an Instagram campaign to work if you put the audience restrictions on there of men 35+, high income. You just have to know what your audience is. So if you're doing it yourself, these are all very easily researchable things once you determine what your audience is. In other words, you don't have to know off the top of your head which platform is best. You can find that out pretty quickly. But what you can't find out is who your audience is. I mean, that's something that you have to— that's something you can't Google.

Yeah, so before, the audience and the message is really powerful. Is it— I get a sense when I talk to business entrepreneurs that they're looking for an ROI that they can measure. And so, they want to know that, hey, for every dollar I spend, I want to make sure I make $5 or $10. However, it's not a cause and effect marketing. Like, it's not like I know that when I'm in a restaurant, when the server drops me a menu, I know that person is going to order food because that's what they're there for. We've just given them the information. I know that the next step is we're going to make the sale. But when it comes down to marketing, it's not necessarily a one-to-one dynamic. So, what should be the expectation? Because to your point, when somebody deals with the ad agencies, the marketing Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads specialists and whatnot. They're going to give us a report and go, look how many hits you got.

Right, yeah, exactly.

Look how many clicks you got. And it's like, but nothing's in my cash register. Nobody's made sales. So, how do they know? How do we get past the smokescreen and actually be able to evaluate that what we're doing is good?

Well, that is one of the things. One of the things you should never ever do is give somebody money without having a very clear Mutual understanding of what the thing you're looking at is. Because yes, that's one of my biggest pet peeves in our industry is when someone is like, you know, hey, you know, you're running a campaign that's a lead gen campaign and your click-through rate goes up and you get on the call and they go, wow, look at your, you know, look how many clicks you got. You're like, well, that's, I don't care about that. I want phone calls, right?

Yeah.

You know, it's fine if, you know, it's fine after the fact, right? It's fine to be like, hey, I know you didn't get the phone calls you wanted. here's what we think happened with that, but your click-through rate isn't, you know, it's fine for that to be a part of the conversation, but that definitely shouldn't be the focus. So you should always know, you should always set clear expectations before you give someone money.

Yeah.

Really, I think the advertising world, the marketing world should be as objective as every other industry, right? You would never give, you would never like send your car to a mechanic without having a very clear expectation of that it's not going to make that noise anymore or that it's not going to do that thing anymore. It should be that black and white.

And to your point, when you do take your car in, they'll take a look. They'll diagnose it. And then, they'll come in and they'll call up and say, this is what we need to do. This is the problem. Do you want me to do it? And then, you have to authorize them to do it. But I get a sense that a lot of these contractors, a lot of these systems out there are all about, we're going to get you more followers or we're going to get you more clicks. And we fail to recognize like that a lot of the stuff that they're actually selling are really what I like to call ego metrics. Oh yeah, for sure. Right? And so, at what point do we start kicking ourselves in our own butts to say, to analyze the data that we're getting to say, is this an ego metric? So now that I have, like I mentioned with my podcast, I have 275,000 downloads worldwide on this podcast. But I I have less than 2,000 subscribers. Now, I'd like to get more subscribers just because I know that it helps me rank better and so on. But having said that—

It helps with the cocktail parties and those types of things.

Yeah. But I also know that the 275,000 people who trip over this podcast are getting quality information and I'm getting face time and so on because that is my mission. That's why I developed this podcast. But when you're a roofing company, when you're a plumber and you're trying to put ads in because you want to get busy, How do we start thinking about this more strategically rather than just going to the first Joe Blow who's gonna say, I'm gonna get you clicks. I'll get you followers and that will turn into money.

For sure. Well, you should only care about those. I should say we have a very small subset of advertisers with us because we are behind the scenes of other agencies where they have been hired to do some very specific vanity thing. So sometimes that is the task that's given to us. And we're like, okay, cool. We have had, I won't name names, but we have had agencies that were like, we're being paid by number of leads. We don't care if they're good leads, just get us leads. And we're like, okay, we can do that. So something that, so that is something that exists in the world, but not a good recommendation. And I would never suggest a business do that. That's, that's the assignment we're given. So, you know, whatever.

Yeah.

But the, what you should do is, you know, as a business owner, you should know what your, like, lead-to-conversion ratio is, you know. So for— we'll just keep using roofers as an example. If you're a roofing company, you should know that half of your inbound phone calls turn into an appointment and a third of your appointments turn into an actual closed roof. And then now you can— now you know a rough— if we can forecast your cost per lead, You know roughly what your customer acquisition cost is. You know, if it costs $100 a lead and it takes rough math, let's say 5 of those to get a customer, then you've got a $500 customer acquisition cost, which is fine because you're making $5,000 on the roof. Right?

Right.

You should know those things. And if you're working with a, with a, with a good expert, they should help you with those things. You know, help set that report card prior to taking money from you. But even if you don't, even if you're doing it yourself, or if you're wanting to do the math before you hire someone, that's the math, that's the math that should be there. You should know, okay, you, what you can't do is sell a roof through an ad. There's no ad in the world that is gonna say, click here to schedule your roofing.

Right? Right.

And so, like, that's just not a thing. But you can definitely run an ad to get people to find out how much a roof costs. And then, it's just knowing what your internal sales conversions are.

It's interesting. I have a speaker that I was introduced to. His name's Anthony Steers and he's called the Telephone Ninja. And he says, when you have a pizzeria, you don't go door-to-door with the flyer. And as soon as you drop off the flyer, expect to take an order.

Right, exactly. And that's one of the biggest, we see it a lot in the B2B space where we'll look at a campaign, whether it's for an accounting company or someone like that, where it is essentially that, where it's like, you know, the ad is, you know, book a meeting today. Well, no business owner is gonna wanna book a talk to an accountant, like, just because, I mean, that's, you know, that's not gonna be an effective ad. Like, so, you know, we have to, we have that conversation multiple times a week where you're like, yeah. Yeah, I think it's just your messaging. You don't need to have— you shouldn't say that.

Yeah.

Because we have that expectation sometimes.

Yeah, I'd love to dig into your ad systems framework that you have to help maybe turn the tides on how we understand this and how we can do this more effectively. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Okay, so I didn't have buy my book now on that ad, so that's a good thing.

That's right, exactly.

So Skip, you're in the middle of writing your book. You want to tell us a little bit about what you're doing and what that's going to be about?

I do. But actually, shameless plug for your book real quick. One of the things I always look for when I'm hiring a salesperson is have they ever done any sort of like improv or those types of things. Because if a person is— I care more about them having improv experience than I do about them having sales experience. Because you know that they know things like yes, and, and the ability to go with the flow and to, you know, take, you know, let a conversation sort of be taken wherever it needs to go. That's way more valuable than do they know the product. We can teach them the product.

Right. That's interesting that you say that because too often, and I, because I work with emerging and aspiring speakers, They get on a call and right away, they go into kind of sales mode. And they just, I just gotta spew out everything I do so that they understand who I am so that then they're informed and they can buy me. And that's not how the world works, right?

No, of course not. No, nobody at the end of the day, no one cares what we do or what they care about is how it can help them, right? Or like, they've got some sort of issue and that's Not in a bad way, but they've got their own stuff going on and that's, you know, we're all just trying to like have a good night's rest tonight. I mean, that's whatever we're all about, right?

That's right. Yeah, that's interesting. So tell us about your book. What are you working on?

Yeah, so we're working on essentially just a formal, like formalizing and publishing what we have been doing internally forever, which is like our 4, what we call our 4 Sprint Ad System. And it's essentially just how to build your own ad system. You know, business owners, often fall into what I call like nothing buttery, where they're like, oh, we use nothing but this or nothing but that, or I've tried that and it didn't work. And to your analogy on the junk drawer, they end up having junk drawer type of ad campaigns. And the danger with that is that when something happens like what happened a year and a half ago where Google changes algorithms or Meta suddenly loses dominance, if that's all, if that's where you've put your stuff, You suddenly don't know how to generate leads for your business anymore. So, understanding that systems framework for your business is essential to creating something that would work 100 years ago and 100 years from now.

So, can you walk us through that framework? You said it's 4 core steps, you said?

It is, yeah. It's really understanding sort of The 4 sprints. One of the things that I get asked a lot is, you know, how long does it take for a campaign to work, or when should I start advertising, those types of things. And regardless of your industry or regardless of your budget, it really should follow these things. That first sprint is your first week where you shouldn't touch a single platform or even get in the idea of what platform you're going to choose. You should just be focused on identifying who is your audience and what's the thing you're trying to get them to do. Run campaigns before— for this, actually prior to Draft, but we've run campaigns before where we generated phone calls and then we ask, how were the leads? And they say, well, we didn't really have anybody to answer the phones. And those types of things are heartbreaking. You shouldn't, you shouldn't do that, right? Like, don't run a phone call campaign unless that's actually what you want, and you shouldn't want it if you don't have a way of answering phones or taking phone calls. So your first week is, you know, really honing in the thing you're trying to get them to do and who you're going to talk to, and then your messaging. What's the thing you could say to them to get them to do that next thing. Ultimately, you know, if you're trying to make a sale that is a multiple, multi-step sales process, there might be a, there might be a couple of rounds of that, right? Like, it might be that we're talking to a cold audience, meaning that they have no idea who you are, to try to get them to download this free tool. And then the people that download that tool We're trying to get them to book a call and you end up sort of like daisy chaining a couple of those together. But that's really sprint 1 is figuring out exactly what that process is. Then sprint 2, which is the 2-week test, you should now figure out where that audience is and where's the most natural place for them to do that. So if you are a roofing company trying to get phone calls, People are going to search that still. Google has click-to-call. That would be the first platform I would try. It's also where all the roofers are though, so not a bad idea to try multiple. It's part of what makes search a little bit different in today's world. Um, but if you're doing it yourself, just go with Google. If you're hiring an expert, they should be using probably 3 or 4 different platforms. But regardless, you pick your platforms and you run it for 2 weeks. That's, that's sprint 2. Then, and at that time too, you're gauging each part of the campaign to figure out, is this meeting those metrics or not? In other words, you can find out if your landing page, if, you know, 4% of the people that come to a landing page should be turning into appointments, then you just look what percentage of the people that came to my landing page turned into an appointment.

Right.

Not, not too hard. And then the hardest part is sprint 3, which is you continue to tweak and change the things that are broken for the next 90 days. And that's the, that's the part that one of the things I don't like, and I hear all the time, is when companies say, you know, you got to give it 90 days to work. That's not true. If, if you give it 90 days without making tweaks and changes, nothing's gonna— it's not gonna get better. It is true that it can take 90 days to work of tweaking and changing it and trying different things. So you continue to refine and push. And so when someone asks, when should I be advertising? My answer is always, when can you put 90 days into this? 90 days of budget, 90 days of time and care. And if the answer's not now, then don't do it now.

Yeah.

You know, because if you've got $500 to spend, And it absolutely has to work. I would not recommend putting that into paid ads. If you've got $500, you know, a month for 3 months, then you can start looking into doing— into running ads. $500 is about the minimum on every platform for the most part.

$500?

Yes.

Okay.

And so if you've got less than that, I wouldn't run any. I would, you know, Print flyers, start knocking on doors, that type of thing. And then sprint four is continuing to tweak and optimize. You should always be testing out new tactics to the same audience, be trying out different messaging so that when something changes, which it will six months a year from now, you're not caught off guard.

Do do you find that when you work with business owners, I know that you're dealing, you're a contractor for other organizations. But when you do work with business owners, do you find that they have a really hard time niching their markets? Like there seems to me when I talk to entrepreneurs and business owners, there seems to be a real fear of missing out.

Yes.

When you say niche down because all my customers are anybody, right? And so, like a pizzeria is advertising to And it's going out like, I would tell you my very first experience using Google Ads. And I didn't know what I was doing. And I put in my search criteria is going to be customer service because that's what I train. I train customer service. Well, I started getting all these calls for like, yeah, I want to return my shoes.

Sure, right.

How do I change my airline reservation? Because what was happening was people were going, customer service airlines or whatever. And all of a sudden, it would say, for customer service, talk to Marc. And it's like, so I was getting caught. Like, I thought I was being scammed. Like literally 2 o'clock in the morning, 3 o'clock in the morning, my phone is ringing, right? For all these things. I want to return my package. It's defective.

Absolutely.

So obviously, I didn't know what I was doing. But at the same token, we also have people out there who are so afraid of limiting the criteria because they're afraid they might be missing out. How can we reaffirm and how can we get them now to hear something that would make them focus so that it actually works for them?

Well, so real quick on your customer service example, you committed one of the mistakes that I would say I see in here all the time, which is you think of it as customer service. That is not what the person that you're looking for would actually be searching. They're going to be looking for customer retention. Everybody thinks they have good customer service. Like, I don't— there's no company in the world that would say out loud that they have a customer service problem. But they would say that they have a customer retention problem. And so that's— we, we had— we're doing a campaign for— actually, I can't say who because it's an— it's a state government. It's a governmental organization that helps kids in basically trouble and at-risk youth. And if you have a problem child, you're not Googling things like, you know, why does my, you know, you're not, because you, no parent that would actually take part in a program like this would actually be Googling something like, uh, how do I keep my kid from being a loser? Yeah, right, exactly. Because that's not, you know, they're looking for, you know, how to get a kid to sleep, how to, you know, because I mean, they're not thinking like, you know, okay, something's seriously wrong with, you know, with this kid. Um, And so, same type of thing. So first of all, always think, put yourself in the mind of the person you're targeting. In that case, it's not gonna be customer service, it's gonna be customer retention. Sorry, I couldn't let that one slip with a minute to spare.

No, no, I, you know, like I said, it was a lesson. It was an expensive lesson that I learned ages ago.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh, I know I'm smarter than that.

But it's one that I hear. I mean, it's one that we hear all the time. Or that is a common type of mistake that we see all the time. all the time. But to your actual— what was your actual question? I apologize. I got down there.

About making it too broad. Like they're afraid to niche down because they're afraid they're gonna miss out on something.

Yeah, that is the number one thing. I mean, if I was— when I am sitting across from a roofing company and I ask, you know, who's your target audience? They're all— it's— the answer is always going to be homeowners.

Homeowners.

You're right. But it's like, you know, it takes like 5 or 6 lines of questioning to actually get close. I will say a simple trick I've learned for that is to be like, okay, well, let's, let's identify 5, 5 different target audiences for you, because then they don't see it as closing the door on, on others. Because yeah, there, it's a part of it's a lack of knowledge. I mean, you know, for good reason. I, you know, it's kind of a nice thing that most of us aren't paying attention to like income levels and those types of things of people around us, right? I mean, like, that's, you know, if you're a decent person, you're not usually thinking about, you know, what, you know, what's different about this person than another person. So part of it I think is that part of it too is, yeah, just as an entrepreneur, you're never, you want to be like, oh, if somebody wants this widget, I don't, you know, I don't care about anything else. It's like, well, right, of course not. But who's most likely to want that thing? Because you might need to be buying a Super Bowl ad, or you might need to be, you know, on a very specific 2 or 3 podcasts. You know, it just depends. You know, one of those might be a colossal waste of money. And, you know, sometimes you can get a lot more out of being on something that's a lot more targeted and not have to go so big. So try it. So if you are an entrepreneur who cannot think of your ideal target audience, try to think, okay, well, who are— what are 5 different audiences that I would really like to go after? And then you probably only have the budget to go after one of those audiences. But that's, that's sort of something that you're just gonna have to— you've got to deal with that personal struggle, you know, yourself. Can't figure out who it is though? Try to think of 5, because then you'll think of 5. It'll become a lot easier. And then you just have to sort of grit your teeth and cross off 4 of the people off that list.

How important is it to actually talk to your customers? He says knowingly.

Very important. That's— yeah, no, it's talking to your customers is I mean, one of the most important things. I always, even when you're writing an ad or whatever you're doing, you need to have someone who's in your target audience take a look at those things before you hit publish on anything.

And so much cheaper just to pull customers aside and say, hey, I'm thinking about doing this. Could you just give me your impression on this?

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, and it's companies like us, we cheat, right? Because we have ways to like scrape Reddit forums and those types of things and get, you know, customer sentiment and feedback and those types of things. But I mean, if let's say that you don't have that, just yeah, buy a cup of coffee for somebody and then you can get, you can get really great feedback. Somebody who's not related to you.

Yeah, something, right?

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, Skip, this is such a great conversation. If somebody's tuning in and wants to get a hold of you because they need your services, how could they get a hold of you?

Best way would be either through our website, which is draftmediapartners.com, draftmediapartners.com, or email, which is info@draftmediapartners.com.

Perfect. So, when you were talking about the the framework. And I got a sense that no point of the framework is actually you have to use this platform or you have to use that platform. You said in a perfect world, you'd want to test it on different platforms. But you want to be very strategic like you said. If you're looking for Instagram has a different marketing, is a different platform, different target market than let's say LinkedIn. LinkedIn, or YouTube. Just like TikTok now seems to be kind of right up there with people who are a little bit younger, a little bit more energetic, and a little bit more on the entertainment side of the framework. So, when you think of this framework that you have with the kind of the 4 pillars or the 4 core aspects, how does this simplify marketing across different channels now? Right.

So once you have your audience dialed in as far as who you want to target, then instead of thinking of a sea of a few hundred channels that you could potentially go after, you, if you sort of put yourself in the mind or better yet, like we said, buy a cup of coffee for someone in that target audience, it really is simple to figure out, well, where are they? You know, it's a— it's— you mentioned fishing. It kind of— that part of it is still like fishing where it's you want to go where the fish are, right? The best place to be isn't whatever the new shiny platform is unless that's where your target audience is. So it is something that becomes a lot easier and clearer once you know who your target audience is. But let's say that— let's— I think the hardest one is We've got a grocery store client. Grocery store really is one of the few businesses that crosses more or less all demographics, right? Like there's nobody who doesn't need groceries at some point. Then it becomes hard because you, you could make a case for every single platform because there's not a platform that doesn't have adults 25 to 54, which is their target audience.

Mm-hmm.

And so adults 25 to 54 are everywhere. Because that's basically every person for the most part.

Mm-hmm.

If you find yourself in that challenge, then you begin to get— then you get really niche. So if you can't get niche on the audience side, then you get really niche on the thing you're trying to get them to do or on the messaging. So then you either get hyper-specific on we want to move these 20 products, if in the case of a grocery store, or we really want to push gas sales this month. This particular grocery store also has a chain of gas stations.

Yeah.

You get niche on the other things if— and then it becomes— and then that's how you start to pare down the different platforms because, you know, there are certain platforms that are going to do better for convenience store sales. or soda sales than, uh, than other things. So if you can't get niche on audience— but audience for most businesses is going to be the limiting factor. Audiences is how vast majority of industries are going to determine what platform they're to choose.

Perfect. I'd like to get into, um, some pitfalls and cautionaries because my fear is always somebody will consume this and all of a sudden it'll become the new kind of policy or initiative of the month. And I want to get into some things that we should be aware of when we're starting to think about our strategy and revamping that strategy. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back. I hope you're getting a ton of value from today's episode. As you can tell, Skip and I are on a mission to support businesses just like yours. So, if you belong to an organization that could use our help, or you or somebody that you know might be planning a leadership retreat, a conference, drop us a line. We'd love to explore how we could be of service to you and your people. So Skip, what should leaders stop doing immediately to regain clarity and to start saving their hard-earned money?

If you can't, if you don't know your customer acquisition cost from paid media, then you should stop doing paid media immediately.

That's kind of like right up there with doing an ad and not having people to answer the phone or doing the ad but not having a follow-up process, right?

Absolutely. There are so many times where we go into a business or take over a campaign that quote unquote either it doesn't even matter whether it is or isn't producing results. I was gonna say if it's not producing results, but actually that's not true because a lot of times they're happy until we get in there and we realize, wait, you've got this many leads, but you're not doing anything with them. Or, you know, their conversion rate from their leads are like, is something like 8% or something that's just insanely low. And so if you don't know that full chain from ad to someone walking in the door or however they purchase from you and purchasing from you, then you really shouldn't do paid advertising yet. You need to stop everything and figure out exactly what that flow is because you can't tweak things like, you know, if you have a— if you're in an industry with a longer buying cycle, you know, like buying a car, for example, is one where cars, houses, a lot of times estate agents. Exactly. You know, you might be in that span for 60 to 90 days before you actually make a purchase. In that case, a lot of your funnels should be follow-up and retargeting. But you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you know, you know, what that chain of, you know, when someone comes to your site, how often do they come back a second time, third time, fourth time? In the case of a car, 7 or 8 times before they actually will make a purchase from you.

Mm-hmm.

Those things are all trackable now. There's really no excuse not to do it. You need to know the full chain before pulling the trigger on ads. And a lot of times, I mean, you'd be surprised how many times even massive companies we will start doing their advertising for and they stop at something that isn't quite a vanity metric. They'll stop at something like cost per lead, for example. Cost per lead is not— I wouldn't quite call that a vanity metric. But it kind of still is, right? I mean, if all you care about is cost per lead, we can get you $4 and $5 leads that are completely unconvertible because they're not necessarily real human beings.

Yeah.

Yeah, correct. Exactly.

Skip, what happens if, you know, for some entrepreneurs, this might be the first time that they're hearing about this? They have a website that they built back in 2005. They're a small mom-and-pop operation that deals with the local community. They don't know anything about this. They just know they wish they had more customers. How do they start?

The best place to start is to think through what is somebody who's never heard of your business before. How often do they typically find you? If you're a mom-and-pop store that's on like a retail strip, or something like that, or let's say you're in a shopping area, I'm not sure that you should do online advertising. You should— your first and foremost customer should be the person walking by. So you might get more out of a sandwich board in front of your store than you would on an online place. So, I mean, that's why it really does come down to figuring out who your audience is, what your messaging should be, and then what result you're trying to get, because that helps answer all those other questions. And so, in other words, you don't, you don't have to have some fancy long funnel. It could be, well, our audience is people who are walking by, or, you know, and our message is to, you know, to get them— our goal is to just bring them inside the store. So, what can you put on a sandwich board that's going to get somebody walking by inside your store?

So, that's your ad campaign right there. So, I love what you said there because a lot of the calls that people will get from marketing specialists will tell them how many more customers that they're going to get. And I think they sell a false bill of goods. Like they're selling awareness and— but to your point, it's like, oh yeah, we can get you $2 leads, no problem. But it's going to be people who live 5 miles away who won't walk to your store or they won't, right?

Correct.

They're 25 miles away. They're not going to get in and drive to your pizzeria because really, you just have a pizzeria. It might be the best pizzeria in town. But really, at the end of it, do people want to commute 45 minutes to go and come to your pizza? And if they do, yay for you because you got a really special product. Having said that, Right. to the people who are tuning in where you're constantly getting this barrage of promises from people about your ads, listen to what Skip just said. Because you have a local market, it might be as simple as a flyer in the mailbox, a sandwich board on the street to get people to convert because maybe you have an impulse product that is like, hey, I'm hungry. Where can I eat? Oh, I'm gonna stop here.

Exactly. Well, and that's where everyone should begin because like I mentioned, unless you know what your customer acquisition cost, you shouldn't pay for media. I have had business owners push back on that before and say, well, we're just starting out, so we actually don't know what our customer acquisition cost is. You still shouldn't pay for media because you need to, you need to figure out some way to get somebody who didn't know you existed to become a paying customer, or you don't have a business yet. So I mean, even if you're a startup, start knocking on doors, start cold calling, start doing something to get someone from no clue who you are to becoming a customer, or you shouldn't, you're You just shouldn't be running ads yet.

And again, the big neon light in my head is saying, one question you can ask your customer is like, hey, it was nice doing business with you. By the way, how did you find us?

Absolutely. And even though that question gets hammered on a lot by advertisers because it is— most people don't know, right? Or they say whatever the last thing is. They'll say Google even if it was they first heard about you from a TV ad 5 years ago. But it's, it's still gonna give you valuable feedback. And it's better than nothing, which is how I would say at least a third of businesses, probably more than, probably more like a half, have no real way of tracking true customer acquisition right now. So if you got nothing else, definitely still ask your customers.

Yeah. Any other cautionaries or pitfalls we should be aware of as we start thinking about what our marketing strategy is now and how we move forward and move it into the future.

One of the biggest is, and I know we've already mentioned this, but I think it is worth repeating, is not setting a clear report card prior to outsourcing or hiring someone. You should know what you're paying them for prior to, and then when they're not getting it, if even if they don't have a fancy, you know, 4-sprint system, Likely that first month is gonna be rough because they're— you're guessing at your audience, you're guessing at your messaging. So regardless of who you hire, that first month is always rough. There should be a very clear, okay, well, here's the part that's broken. You know, again, a lot of business owners, whether they're hiring somebody or not, think of marketing as like a solid block that either passes or fails when that's not what it is. Some part of it is likely working and some part of it likely is not. You know, if it's getting clicks and the time on site is good, but they aren't actually booking a call, then maybe something's wrong on the landing page. Or maybe we— you need to put more into getting people back to that site because maybe it just takes, you know, if you're some industries, if it's more than a $25 purchase or if it's booking an appointment, they're probably gonna have to come to your site more than once before they trust you enough to actually do the thing you want them to do. So knowing what you want to happen and then having a very clear understanding of how it's going to— how you're going to break the box apart to see which part's broken, you should know those things. And then it can't really fail. A piece might fail, but the whole thing won't fail.

But I like, I like that you're very systematic with it. Like, to your point, you, you try something, you diagnose it, and then you change Right? So then, you can tweak that. You can tweak the audience. Maybe your audience definition was off. Maybe the messaging to that audience member was slightly off, right? And so, trying little things in incremental fashions just makes more sense to me. And I like the fact that you say you don't have to put something for 90 days to see if it's failing. You can do it over a couple of weeks and see if it's failing. Correct, yes.

You can do many tests. Exactly. And there's never been a better time to get more immediate feedback. You know, you don't really have to wait. You know, I remember when I was starting off in radio, I remember at the end of the month that in radio sales, that dreaded time where it's time to call up the client to see how the prior month was, you know, where you're calling them up to be like, hey, what kind of, you know, Hey, how are things? How was last month? And you have no clue whether they had a great month or bad month, right? Because it's, you know.

You know, and the interesting thing was because of course, my background has been in hospitality and I've done radio ads. And they do the call and it's like, well, we had the lowest month ever. And it's like, that's interesting. So, if you didn't spend the money on marketing, would it have been worse?

It would have been even worse. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Which, you know, I mean, maybe or maybe not. Who knows? Nobody on either side of that phone call knows anything, right? And, and that was, and that's how, you know, I literally would have, we've, one of the things that I knew about car sales, I had a lot of car dealer clients early on. And if it was a rainy month, they didn't sell a lot of cars. And regardless of what they did in advertising, people just don't like to buy cars. You know, you don't want to buy a brand new car on a dark and cloudy rainy day. So I would know a lot of times, like, okay, it rained like 8 or 9 times last month. I know they didn't have a good month. And I call them up and sure enough, their radio ads didn't work that month. And, you know, it probably had nothing to do with the radio ads. And so now those days are gone though. Now you can get very immediate feedback on a campaign. And so—

Yeah.

As much as could be said about downsides of the current state of marketing. It's most of it is a good thing. I mean, honestly, I think the content creation engine was, was actually hurting and making it very hard for small businesses anyway. So it's actually, I think, a good time for small businesses as some of those things very hard for like a mom and pop to post 3 times a day every day, you know, or to come up with a consistent blog when they also have payroll to make and all those other things. So I'm actually kind of glad that that era has— is coming to an end. So anyway, I'm very optimistic and happy about the current state of things.

Awesome! Could you remind everybody one more time how they can get a hold of you?

Absolutely. info@draftmediapartners.com is the best way.

Terrific! And as we wrap up, do you have any last thoughts? Anything we haven't talked about? Any one thing that you want to highlight as your major takeaway?

The major takeaway is that advertising Unlike marketing, marketing is more general. Marketing is everything from how you answer the phone to, you know, your logo and all those things. Paid ads is an objective science. It's the idea of it not working as a whole just isn't there. So think of it more like an actual thing that you're trying to build. You're building a machine. Parts of it might not work. But then, you just keep swapping out those parts. And that's it. Think of it like a science.

That's how Edison built his light bulb, right?

Exactly.

Fail forward, fail forward, fail forward. Yeah. Hey Skip, this was really a great conversation. Thank you so much for doing this with us today. I really appreciate your passion and your expertise. It's brilliant.

Thank you very much.

If you have any questions about today's episode, or you would like to have a complimentary 30-minute brainstorming session with you and your team, feel free to book yourself on my online calendar. The link is down below. It's the one that's marked meetwith.marchaine.com. Super, super simple. And if you want, if this episode really resonated with you, please get in touch with Skip. He's a guiding trusted advisor that I know could maybe help you out. As always, I am at your service. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you subscribe to this feed. Follow me on social media. I put lots of content out. It's there for you. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. Bye for now!