MBA1819 The #1 Marketing Mistake Business Owners Make

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Today's lesson is all about the number one marketing mistake business owners make. And here it is. Most people think that marketing is some sort of complex art form that you have to really have a special talent or special knack for. You got to get the messaging just right. Your brand has to be perfectly on point. You got to know how to fine tune your channels and your funnels. People get lost in all of these details. And yes, I'm not saying those things are not important. Honing in your messaging, honing in your brand, understanding who you are and being consistent in your messaging. All important. But in my experience, you can kind of get that a little bit wrong and still do well if you avoid this one mistake. And here it is. The number one marketing mistake business owners make is simply not marketing enough. If you build it, they will come. Can't be further from the truth. When it comes to business, having a great product is important. Focusing on building a great product and improving it is important. But if nobody knows about it, it's going to be incredibly hard for you to grow. Even if you rely on word of mouth and people telling other people there's just not enough momentum. You need to constantly be marketing. You need to constantly be telling the world what your business does, who it serves, how it serves them, why people love it, what makes you special, why it's exciting. You have to be pumping out these messages constantly. Always. And most businesses don't do this. Most businesses, they do a bit of marketing and they stop. They'll run a couple Facebook ads and then they won't do anything for a couple of months. They'll publish some blog posts, but they'll share it a couple times and then forget about it. Does this sound familiar? It's okay if you are guilty. Okay, because I've been guilty in the past. And if you're listening right now, you are on the path to solving this problem. You have to have a system to always be marketing. You've heard of abc. Always Be Closing. This is abm. Always be marketing. You have to constantly be telling the world about what you do. You have to toot your own horn. You don't have to be arrogant, you don't have to be obnoxious, but you have to be. You have to exist. You have to say. Being ignored is very easy in a crowded marketplace. So if you're not putting yourself out there, if you're not, not only creating great content, but sharing it with the world in multiple ways, not only just by social media, not just by paid ads, not just by partnerships, but guest posting and getting on stages and working with influencers and just being everywhere. Okay? This is the key to successful businesses. Read any business book. Look at the history of any successful business. They're always finding way to always be marketing. Even companies that claim that they don't do any advertising, they're marketing, okay? Even though Tesla doesn't have super bowl ads, their CEO is constantly marketing on Twitter, is doing interviews, is totally in sync with the media. So I want to give you some steps here so that you can avoid this mistake. One of the reasons why people make this mistake is because they don't have a system to market their business. They just think, okay, um, I'm going to create something good, I'm going to sell it, and hopefully people will come. I'll try a couple things here and there. Often people won't have results or won't get results right away, so they quit and they just continue to go on the hamster wheel. So I'm going to give you a system and you need to do this like you need to shower every day, right? You just got to keep doing it always. Even if you don't see results, just keep doing it. The results will come in because you are marketing. First step is you need to define your audience and you want to try to get as niche as possible. And I'll tell you why this is important. I'm not saying you can't sell to everybody. I'm just saying you need to talk to first a niche. For example, we run a webinar software called Webinar Ninja. Our core customer teaches for a living. Okay? They teach their content on webinars. They're creators, they're trainers. They might be teaching woodworking or accounting or business. But the point here is what they do for a living is they sell content. They sell what they know, they teach others. This is our audience. We just focus on this audience. Yes. There are so many people outside this audience that can buy Webinar Ninja and use it and love it. Corporates and software companies and e commerce stores and all that kind of stuff. Right? And we do have customers from those markets. But it's really futile to try to speak to everybody. What you're trying to do first is pinpoint who are your core fans, the people that will absolutely love what you have the most. Okay, everybody can love it, but who's going to love it the most? Now once you do, then just focus on that audience and focus on marketing to them and where they frequent on the Internet. Okay, why is this important? Because what happens is that you create some sort of marketing bubble and you create the sense that in that market that, oh man, this business, this product is everywhere. Everybody's using it. I've heard it on this blog, I've heard it on this podcast. I've saw it on Facebook in this Facebook group. And it seems like you're bigger than you are just because you're concentrating your efforts in one group. This is a secret to a lot of businesses that have grown rapidly. Companies like Wistia or ConvertKit or Slack. All these companies have said in their founder stories, in their interviews, this is what they did. They focused on one market and they just honed in on being everywhere in that market. And then after a few years, they move out outside that market a little bit and go to a different group. For example, ConvertKit, the email marketing software, just focused on mommy bloggers first, not just bloggers, but just mommy bloggers, then cooking bloggers, then than author type bloggers that sell books on their website. And in each of these little circles, ConvertKit seemed like the only solution you should use, because they're everywhere. But in fact, they were just in those groups. So once you've identified your market, your ideal customer base, where do those people frequent online, what groups are they a part of on Facebook, what forums, what blogs do they read, what newsletters are they subscribed to, what tools do they use? All this should be a brain dump in a document. Why? Because you want to be in front of those people in those groups, partnering with those companies. They have that audience you have or want. And you can get in front of them by partnering with them, by being part of them, guest posting on them, being on their podcasts. This is a strategy that we use constantly. And it helps. Okay? Now you know your market. Now you know where they frequent, who they use, the places they visit online. Now you need to have a strategy to create great content about your product or service. This could be blog posts. This could be short videos showing demos of what you do. These could be testimonials, These could be reviews. This could be images of your team. They could be profiles of Your customers. These are all little pieces of content about your content that you can put on social media to put in groups or in different kinds of slack groups if you have permission, right? You can leverage these pieces of content to write for other blogs that your audience frequents. So you have to start with your own content. Creating great content. Again, like I mentioned, these can be short videos that you use on social or blog posts that you share on social or podcast episodes like my podcast, right, that deal with your topics. You don't have to create your own podcasts even you can share somebody else's podcast. As long as there's alignment with your business and brand, you can be a curator of great content. I highly recommend that you use a tool like buffer that schedules your social postings so you know that you're constantly pushing out great, valuable content. Next, you need to dip your toe in paid advertising. Even if you're just spending $20 a day on Facebook ads or $20 a day on Google Ads just to get started. You have some presence and then start upping the ante. If you want some advice on what tool to use to run your ads, I highly recommend use Ad Espresso. It's a great tool. They're not a sponsor of the show or anything. I just been using them for years. They're fantastic. Great for split testing. Going to save you a ton. Next. People love strong brands, okay? If you are happy to be the face of your brand, brand affinity is a real thing. I have bought products, I've bought services because I love the founder, period. I buy Nikes because I love the story of Nike and Phil Knight's book Shoe Dog. Half the people that own Teslas do it because they believe in Tesla's mission and Elon Musk. This is not rocket science. You could do the same for your business. How do you do that? Well, get on other podcasts, okay? Be open to be interviewed. Be part of virtual summits. Get on stages. Now that things are opening up in Covid, try to get on stages in your local community, in your local events. Be comfortable being the face of your company and be helpful. One of the best things I've done is have this mindset as much as I can when I go to events is I want to be as helpful as possible. How can I help anybody I contact without promoting my business or my brand or my products? I just want to help them with what I know as much as possible. Make an introduction to somebody I know. This will help you be a tastemaker. Brand affinity matters. Get in Front of people, get on stages, be a part of summits, be part of webinars, offer free workshops to other companies, no strings attached. This is all you really need to do, okay? And my advice to you is have a spreadsheet, have a calendar of events. Make sure you are doing some form of marketing. Any of the things I talked about every single day of the year, okay? You could batch it out, you can schedule it out, but that way you know for sure you are always marketing. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply. To wrap up today's lesson, don't make the mistake of just simply not marketing enough. Simply not prioritizing marketing. Marketing needs to be done. Here's something that I learned the hard way in my entrepreneurial career. Seeing my competitors in whatever business I started, I would see them have an inferior product, a product that's a whole lot worse than mine. But their business is doing better than me because they're marketing. They're constantly marketing. They're really pushing it. They're getting customers to look at their product more than mine. So therefore they don't know mine exists and therefore they think this product's all right, when in reality mine is better and I can actually win them over if I just get in front of them. When I saw this in black and white, simple terms, I realized I just gotta keep on marketing. I gotta out market people with a better product, have that drive, have that mentality and your business will thank you. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. We read every single review. I love reading them. And of course, by leaving this review, enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday, where we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. Listen in on Friday to see if you won that simple. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Marketing is actually 80% admin and repetitive tasks and 20% strategy and creative work. So even if you just do the 20% and get an executive assistant to help you with the marketing part, the marketing admin part, this is going to relieve you of a lot of stress and a lot of work. Set up the system, set up the plan, set up the schedule of what you're going to post when and how often, and then get some help to execute. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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