If Your Marketing Isn't Working, This Will Fix It. 99% Of Business Owners Get This Wrong.

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As a small business owner, you wear many hats. You're the owner, you're the marketer, you're the seller, you're the hire. I remember in the early days I was doing pretty much everything. I was writing, I was bookkeeping, I was selling, I was marketing. I was doing a lot, but lucky for you, you have LinkedIn. They have the tools to help you boost your visibility, find prospective customers, and find the best team for your small business all in one place. So while LinkedIn can hang up all of your hats, it makes it easier to wear them all. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/MBAShow. Here's what nobody tells you about marketing. If you feel like you're screaming into a void while your competitors are effortlessly grabbing attention and getting all the customers, the problem is not what you think it is. It's not the platform. It's not your budget. It's not even your creative or your copy. Those things do matter, but they're really symptoms of a bigger problem. The root cause is what we're looking for here. The root cause is almost something that makes every single tactic not work for you. And once you fix it, everything else starts to work. Good news for you. By the end of this episode, I'm going to give you the exact diagnostic tools you need to find out what is the hidden cause of your marketing just not working. So you can stop the cash bleed and have a complete framework for marketing that actually converts customers. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week, and more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. I want to start with this one because if you get anything out of today's episode, here it is: the single most common mistake I see business owners do when it comes to marketing. Business owners often confuse branding with marketing. They don't really know the difference. And I'm telling you right now, they're not the same. And when you confuse them, your efforts get muddied. They don't actually become effective. Branding is about awareness. It's the long game. It's people knowing who you are. You're building recognition. You're building a reputation, building a feeling people have when they encounter with your business or your brand. Over time. Branding is important. It gets you known. People can trust you when they interact with your brand, but it doesn't actually convert people into customers. Marketing, on the other hand, is an activity designed to attract your ideal customer to what you do and attracts them to a specific offer that you have for them. Marketing gets you leads, and it's just that simple. The best way I could put it is that branding is an art, marketing is a science. Marketing is targeted, it's intentional, it's measurable. This is what they call ROAS, Return on ad spend. When business owners tell me their marketing is not working, they're almost always doing branding and calling it marketing. It's like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping everything sticks or something magical happens. They're posting content to build awareness without a clear mechanism to convert that awareness into customers. They might be running ads that build some level of recognition, but without driving anybody towards a specific offer, that's really just creating a lot of noise without creating a conversation. That allows people to learn more about you and buy what you have. And they get frustrated and wonder why the numbers do not move. You need to fix the framing first. You need to fix what you're trying to actually do. Marketing is not about being seen. It's about attracting the right people to the right offer at the right time. A lot of people that are great at marketing, they're unknown. You don't even know their names, right? But their marketing is so precise, so good that they don't have a big brand, but they make a lot of sales. So here's the principle that changed everything for me. Once I understood this, it unlocked so much. This one insight made me so much money. It's ridiculous. It's so simple. It's so basic. And for some reason, we just refuse to see this in plain sight. It's so, so easy. When it comes to marketing, your best friend is targeting. Not talking about the specific settings in your Facebook ad manager. I'm talking deeper than that. The deeper question of targeting. Who exactly are you trying to reach? Who is perfect for what you have to offer? Who, when they see what you have to offer, like, where you've been all my life, this is so good. I can't wait to consume this. I can't wait to buy this. They're throwing cash at the screen. Ask yourself, Are the people that I am presenting these ads to, are they specific people that are perfect for my product? Or is it sort of a guess? These kinds of people may want what I have. Let me give you a practical application of this principle in action. Okay. Look at your best customers. I did this so many times and it's made us so much money. This is what we do. We look at our best customers in Stripe. This is our payment processor. We look at our top 100 customers, maybe for you it's the top 10 or top 50, but we just look at who these people are. We look at their email addresses, we find their websites, we study them like our life depends on it because it does. These people are gold. These people already are buying from you. They love what you have. And when I say best customers, we literally filter in Stripe who's paid us the most over the years. And we go and we study them like they are subjects in a criminal case. Okay. We literally have all those strings and we're trying to figure out who are they specifically? What do they have in common? Where do they spend their time? How do they spend their money? What are their problems? What their business looks like? How many people are on their team? You know, we want to find out everything. We go and we try to get on a phone call with them. We send them surveys. We give them like gift certificates. For answering the surveys. Yeah, we're bribing them to get information because that information is going to shape everything for us. It's going to make our life so much easier. We want to find out what websites are visiting, what products are using in their business, in their workflow. What do they love about those tools? What do they hate about those tools? Where do they go when they're trying to solve a problem for their business? Do they go to Google? Do they have a coach? Do they listen to a particular podcast or our YouTube channel? We want to know all this information. Why? Because it paints a picture. It forms a profile of our ideal customer. I don't need more information than what's in front of me because these people have already proven to us that they want what we have, right? They are paying us a lot of money. They are our best paying customers. If I can find more people just like them, that's all I need to have a successful business. I need to just focus on these people. Not everybody else. Not everybody with a pulse. No, that's a waste of time, a waste of energy, a waste of money. The entire job of marketing is to find more people exactly like your best customers. That's it. That's what you do. You find those targeted people. Not everyone. Not a broad demographic. Not men in their 30s that, you know, play golf. No, I'm talking about specific people that are like them. People that are actually in the same groups as them. Maybe they're in the same Facebook groups. Maybe they're in the same masterminds, maybe they have the same business coach, whatever it might be. I want people just like them. When you market to that person exclusively, your conversion rates go through the roof. Your cost per acquisition, your cost to acquire a customer, goes down. Costs you less. That means you make more money. The customers are a better fit, so they stay longer and they don't cancel and they don't complain. Everything improves the moment you stop trying to market to everybody and you start marketing precisely to the person You've already proven to yourself and proven over the years they are meant to be served by you. And guess what? The more information I learn about our best customers, the more it informs everything we do in our business. What does that mean? Well, the first thing that we like to do is we like to transcribe all the calls that we have with these customers to learn the language they're using to describe the problems they're having and why they use our product or our service. To solve those problems. Why is this important? Because guess what? I'm using the same exact words on my sales pages, on my website, in all my marketing materials. Because when I find somebody just like them, they're going to read that and say, "These people are speaking my language. This is exactly what's in my head. This is exactly how I feel." I didn't make it up. I'm not a genie. I'm not a psychic. I just asked my best customers. This is why this is everything. And this is why I'm front-loading this information at the start of the episode. No child deserves to go hungry, especially at school. But right now, some politicians are cutting funding to programs that help kids access free meals at school while handing out tax breaks to billionaires. Hungry kids can't focus and learn. The National Education Association is made up of 3 million educators and allies across the country dedicated to making sure every child has the support they need to thrive in the classroom. Help the NEA keep hungry kids fed at school. Learn more at NEA.org/nutrition. Today's episode is sponsored by Square. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. Square works for one-location shops, mobile service businesses, and multi-location franchises. Take payments at a kiosk, counter, website, or with your phone, all synced in real time. With Square, you can track sales, manage inventory, and access reports too. Plus, Square supports every major payment method, including tap-to-pay, and offers instant access to your earnings through Square Checking. And built-in tools like loyalty and marketing help you connect with customers and reward them for showing up again. No special training required, just set Square up and start taking payments quickly. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com/go/mba. That's s-q-u-a-r-e.com/go/mba. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Let's talk about what good marketing actually looks like. Let's get extremely practical. Good marketing for a small business in 2026 is simple. It shows your marketing, shows to the right person, the problem you solve and how you solve it.

That's it.

That's simple. If you show that ad to somebody that is perfect for your product, it's going to resonate with them, whatever that might be, whether it's a Facebook ad, a piece of content, an email, a reel that you put up on Instagram, whatever it might be. The message is, is here's the problem I solve. Here's how I solve it. And here's what it looks like when I do. The after picture, right? What does it look like after you've experienced my product? Let me say that again. Here's the problem I solve. Here's how I solve it. And here's what it looks like when I do solve it. This is the after picture of my product. When that message is in front of the right person, they get interested, they get curious, and it gets them to click. And then this is where most people lose the customer. They get the click. They work so hard to building this ad and targeting the right person. And then they go to the site, they go to the landing page, they go to the, you know, page where the offer is there, whatever that offer might be. And that page doesn't make any sense. It's not aligned with the ad. It's a little bit off. It doesn't even look similar. Maybe the colors, the branding, the logos, maybe even the language is a bit different. Wherever you send them after the click, your website, your page, it needs to be completely aligned. It looks— needs to look identical to the ad. And here's a kicker. It needs to ask them for one clear next step. Don't overwhelm them with everything they can do and all the options and all the products that you offer. No, one clear step. You gotta walk them by the hand. One of the things we talk about in marketing inside our program, The $100 MBA, it's a rule. It's a rule we never break, and it's called a confused mind never buys. So if that one thing is to sign up for your email list in exchange for a valuable a downloadable or guide, great. That's the one thing they need to do. That's it. Step by step. Once you're on their email list, you can nurture them and then give them another offer, but don't bombard them on that page with more than one thing. So make sure there's no popups or weird offers or exit intent things happening on that page. Keep it clean. Keep it simple. You want to make sure that you finally got them on the page, that you convert them to do what they're supposed to do. Many people think they have a marketing problem. They actually have a conversion problem. That page is critical. Hey, if this episode is showing you where your marketing is going wrong, giving you some insights, getting you thinking about what you're going to do next and how to fix your current marketing situation, awesome. I want you to subscribe to the show, not only to support us, but because we have an upcoming episode you don't want to miss. If you want to learn how to build a brand and build organic marketing through long-term investments like a podcast, like a YouTube channel, then you're going to love an upcoming episode we're working on. I'm gonna be sharing exactly how I grew this podcast to over 300 million downloads. We won Best of Apple Podcasts in 2014. It put us on the map. We grew tremendously, but there's a lot of steps along the way, my exact playbook and some of the mistakes I made in the last 11+ years to make this podcast successful. This podcast has given me so much. It's given me a chance to grow my audience. It allowed me to speak to my people, to allow me to talk about the products and services we offer, but also It's put me on stages, it's opened doors, it's given me connections in so many ways I can't imagine. So I would love for you to check out that episode because it's going to change the way you think about organic content. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Now I got to answer this question that I know is probably in your head. Paid versus organic. What do you do, right? Every business owner who's starting to market their business asks themselves this question: should I run ads or should I build organic content? The honest answer is, you guessed it, both. Both in unison really work, but the sequence matters. What do you start with? And then what do you grow on top of it? Here's how I think about it. Organic content like podcasts and video and social media posts and email. This is stuff that has a long shelf life. Social media, not as much as the rest of the stuff, but in general, it compounds. In general, your traction, your views, your engagement, it compounds over time. A piece of content that you create today can still bring you customers in 2 years. I have a blog post that still gets a lot of traffic and I wrote it 10 years ago and it still gets us a lot of people to sign up for our podcast and our newsletter and our programs. This one post, but it takes time to build momentum with organic. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes it takes years. And paid advertisement on the other hand, gets you in front of your ideal customer in 24 hours. It's fast, it's super targeted, and it's repeatable. But the moment you stop paying whoever, Meta, for example, it stopped working, right? It just stops working because you don't own that audience. You're borrowing, you know, Facebook or Instagram or whoever's audience so that you can get in front of them. You're not building your own. So the best combination is this: build the organic foundation consistently over time. Dedicate yourself. Like I've dedicated myself to producing this podcast on a regular basis. We never skip a beat. We have over 2,700 episodes over the last 11+ years. So I am committed to that foundation, but also use advertising to accelerate the results while the organic audience is growing. I like to use both at the same time. And specifically, I like to start with retargeting ads. If you're starting out and you never run ads, this is the low-hanging fruit you need to start with. It's what's going to get you customers as fast as possible. So what's retargeting ads? Retargeting ads show ads to people who have already been to your website. Or people who have been to your competitors' websites. How's this done? Well, with the power of Facebook and Meta, they have this little piece of code that you put on your website, and it's pretty much every website has this code if they run any ads on Facebook or Instagram or any of Meta's products. That means that they know when somebody's on that website. So why is this powerful? Why am I recommending retargeting ads? Well, because people are already warm, especially if they've already been on your website. They've been on your website, they've seen your offers before, and then they see an ad on Facebook, they're more likely to click on that ad and convert. Whether that ad is for a discount, whether that ad is for something free that they can learn more about you and build some trust with you through email, whatever it might be. The point here is, is that they're more likely than somebody who's never heard about you before to convert on an ad. This is dramatically more effective than you showing ads to cold audiences, people who have never seen you or don't know what you're all about. You're not introducing yourself with retargeting. You're actually just following up. And I'm sure you've seen this as a customer where you've maybe been on a website and then you see all these ads for that website on Facebook or on Instagram, maybe even see ads for their competitors. So you could literally start with $5 a day with retargeting. You test your messages, you test the audience, you test who you're targeting, you test the page that they go to to convert if they're not converting right on the platform. Find out what works perfect before you increase the budget. See what actually gets you somebody to do what you're asking them to do, whether they sign up for your email list or to buy your entry-level product. The biggest waste of money in paid advertising is scaling your spend before you have proven to yourself that the ad actually converts. So you can literally start with $5 a day, see it convert. As you're improving, you're testing, you're experimenting. You should be tweaking things almost on a daily basis, 2 to 3 days, to see you are getting results and seeing what doesn't get results. You know, the only way to know if something's working or not is to compare it to something else. So once you find out what works, once you find that, okay, this is actually making me money or it's getting me leads, put some more money into it. A little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. Turn that $5 a day to $10 to $15 to $20 to $100. You get it. Now, If you have been marketing and nothing is working for you, here's how to diagnose the process. You have to start with that targeting question. Who are you showing your ads to or your content to? Are these people already ready to buy? Are these people who already buy from you and love it, right? Are these people somebody who've proven to you that they're willing to take out their wallet and buy your product or something similar? Are you marketing to a broad audience hoping that some of them will be a right fit? Hope is not a strategy, and stop wasting your money on it, please. If the targeting is wrong, nothing else is going to fix your problem. Nothing will matter. Okay. You need to fix the targeting first. Make sure you're showing the ads, showing your content to the right people. Second, look at the ad itself. What are you asking people to do? Especially if this is cold traffic, people that have never heard of you, are you asking them to buy a $1,000 product? Somebody who's never heard of you. Or are you asking them to sign up to just give their name and email address in exchange for a really valuable freebie? Cold audiences need low friction as the first step. Something that's super simple. Join your email list. They get to download something that's genuinely useful, something that they can use immediately. Instant gratification, a template, a checklist. And by the way, if you want a template for your templates or checklists, we have them for you to download. Just go to 100mba.net/template. Your job with cold traffic is to get them into your world first. Get them on your email list where you can nurture them and then convert them through time. Never try to sell something expensive to someone who doesn't know who you are yet. Third thing is you're gonna audit the whole funnel, the whole process, from the ad to the page to the page conversion to the conversion to the follow-up on email, all the way until they actually buy. And then after they buy, do you follow up and see if they need anything else, if you can help them with anything else? Where's the drop-off happening in those steps in the process? Okay. There's your problem. You need to get specific, fix that specific stage, not the whole funnel at once. Make a change, test, make a change, test one stage at a time. And finally, ask the hardest question of all: is the pain you're solving strong enough? Do people actually need or really desire what you have? Sometimes marketing does not work if the problem that you're solving is just not urgent enough. It's just not painful enough. It's just a nice to have or kind of cool. If they don't need what you're offering badly enough to act— and by the way, this doesn't have to be like, you know, medicine. This could be entertainment, but they just really want that entertainment. If they don't want it bad enough, they're just not going to convert. It's just not something that is worth their effort, let alone your effort. So you should really take a look at what you're actually offering. Maybe your offer is just not compelling enough. If you ask yourself, Well, how do I know this? Where do I go? Go back to your customers.

Okay.

Go back to the best customers you have. The people that have bought from you, people that maybe are early adopters, ask them what they were struggling with before they found you. Get those words out of them. Use those words in your marketing and build a better product, a better service, a better offer, a better ad that serves those specific people. That simple. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I wanna tie this up to make it super simple for you and clear. Stop confusing branding with marketing. Marketing is a targeted activity. It's a science that we need to analyze and make sure every step of the way is working as it should. Study your best customers obsessively. This is one of the best activities you could do. And if you don't have a lot of customers yet, even if you have one or two customers, just talk to any of the customers you have. If you don't have customers at all, talk to the leads, the people on your email list, people that have followed you on Instagram. Talk to these people, DM them, get information to find out what they're all about, who they are, so you can attract and try to serve those people, build for those people. So you understand what their problems are so you can solve them. If you're tight on a budget and you want to start with paid ads, start with retargeting. Don't go with cold traffic. You know, run ads for people that know who you are and what you do. Build organic content side by side for the long term. So you can build that brand and build that awareness. But at the same time, make sure that you're running specific paid ads. You don't have to spend a lot of money. You can start with $5 to make sure, $5 a day to make sure that things are working. And once it is working, you can start increasing the budget. What I found is that marketing is not a mystery. It's actually a system, but you have to be willing to experiment. You have to be willing to take bets and see if it works and fail and try again and fail and then try again. And then what, something got better now. Something happened now, a little tweak actually made an improvement. I got a sign-up, I got somebody to sign up for my newsletter, I got somebody to buy something. It takes a bit of trial and error for you to actually nail your marketing. You can't just do it once and just hope that everything works out. That's just not reality. Now you got the system, now you know what to look for, now you gotta do it. I'm in your corner if you need help. If this episode gave you a framework, gave you some ideas, gave you some insights maybe you haven't heard of before, awesome. I want you to subscribe, but I also want you to check out a recent episode we recently published that's gonna help you beyond marketing. We're talking about sales. How to Sell More and Make Millions. I give you my ultimate sales masterclass in this episode. Go ahead and check it out because I give you all my secrets, everything I know when it comes to sales. Go ahead, absorb that episode, and I'll see you in the next one. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.

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