MBA1834 Why Your Marketing is Not Working

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One of my favorite topics is marketing, because marketing allows you to not be ignored. It allows you to bring in people to check out your website, check out your product, your service, and then once they know about you and they're on your site or they've booked a call or signed up for an email, it's now sales job to close that deal. Your product or service you is what's going to sell it. Today we're focusing on marketing. The first step of this whole process, getting people to the door. And sometimes we feel like it's hopeless. It's hard to get people to know who we are, to get to our website, to opt into our email marketing or for our freemium, for our opt in, for our free trial, whatever it is. You might spend money on ads, on SEO, on experts, on consultants, and it just doesn't work. It doesn't move the needle. And I'll explain why before we get into all four reasons why your marketing may not be working. A word about experts. A lot of people think they could just hire a marketing expert and that's it. That's all I gotta do. I'm gonna hire a marketing wizard and everything's gonna be solved. I made this mistake in the past. This is not true. There are things that you need to do as the business owner, as the business leader, to instruct, to guide, to help your expert that you're hiring. And I'll talk about that later on the show. How to find one and how to work with them. So let's start with the first reason why your marketing's not working. Number one, you don't know who you're talking to. This is a huge, huge, huge obstacle. A lot of entrepreneurs never get past this and their business fail because of it. They simply don't know who their customer is. They don't know who they should be talking to. So what happens is they start talking to everybody. They try to market every single person in the world. It's like you're a crazy person on the street trying to talk to everybody about what you do. That doesn't resonate with anybody. No one stops and listens to that person. This is why when you see those volunteers that work for charities, they try to stop you in the street with a clipboard and say, hey, you know, nice shoes. Let me tell you what I'm talking about. That doesn't work. The reason why it doesn't work is because they're trying to talk to everybody and they don't know who they should be talking. And this works hand in hand. But the first step is know who you are talking to. Who are your customers? What do they look like? I'm not talking about making up an avatar. I don't like this advice of like, hey, come up with this fake avatar. No, I want you to find an actual customer. Somebody who actually needs what you have, that wants what you offer. For some reason, a lot of business owners do not do this exercise and it's so important. You have to, you have to, you have to know clearly who your target market is. Who is the person you're trying to sell to identify them? What do they look like? What do they do? Why do they need their service? What other services are they using? Where do they frequent online? What their favorite blogs are? Are they on Facebook or do they prefer LinkedIn? Who are are your users? And the best way to start is with one person. If you have any customers, this is very simple, choose one and call them up. That simple. Get on a video call, get on a phone call, say, hey, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you so I can serve you better. Okay, this could be a current client, it could be an old customer. Call them up, take, you know, 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes of their time. Send them a Starbucks gift card as a gift. It's $10. Well, Spen. And what you're going to do is you're going to learn everything you can about this person. This is so important. This is why I think customer interviews are so important. Because you can record these video calls, you can transcribe them so you can use the language they use later on in your marketing, in your messaging, in your copy, in your emails, everything. Many of us think we know our customers, but we never actually talk to them. We think we know who we serve, who knows, but we never actually sit down and have a conversation about their life, about their business, about what they want out of life, out of their business, what they crave, what their goals are, what their ambitions are. This is how you know who you're talking to. If you don't do this, which a lot of people don't, they don't know who they're actually addressing. Imagine you're writing a letter to somebody convincing them to buy your product or service. You don't know who this person is. You don't know if they're an 80 year old grandmother who loves to rock climb or if they're a 30 year old couch potato that loves video games. The way you talk to this person, you address their needs, address their wants. So what's happening here is that you don't know who you're talking to. So you don't know how to write the right copy or how to create the right ads or even where to advertise. So step one, know who you're talking to. Number two, targeting. You need to target a niche in your market, you need to target a demographic in your market. You can't start wide, you got to start narrow. And then once you've totally saturated that small piece of the market, you become the number one solution in that market. You then move on. A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake where they don't target, when they market, when they actually advertise, when they create ads, when they try to do guest posting, when they try to do any kind of content marketing. This is your strategy. I'm going to give you gold right now. Okay, let's say you are a snowboarding coach, right? You teach people how to snowboard. You could teach everybody under the sun, basically anybody who is physically able to snowboard, to teach. But that's too big of a market. You're going to notice, really resonate. This is like you trying to give a speech in a stadium with over 500,000 people, right? You don't have a microphone. You're trying to talk and no one's going to hear you. There's too many people, right, versus you giving a speech to ten people, okay? And then another ten people, then another ten people, then another 10 people, another 10 people, another 10 people. Small, small, small groups. And eventually people start to talk. People say, hey, do you know about this person that taught me this? Pretty powerful. Now what's awesome about targeting is that these groups, these target markets, they're actually really tightly knit. It's a very small world in that market. Let me give you an example. I'm a snowboarding coach. So instead of trying to market everybody, I'm just going to market to a demographic, a small niche in the market. I'm going to target young adults that are at a university, that are employed, that work at a job, or professionals that play other sports, they're active in something else, like to travel, and are based in Sydney, Australia. See how niche that is? Why is that important? Because the likelihood of somebody else knowing somebody else that fits that demographic is quite high. If I live in Sydney, in a city of 7 million people, it's a big city. But if I like to travel, I live in Sydney. I'm between 25 and 30, I'm a professional. There's a good chance I'll be frequenting the same blogs, the same forums, the same social platform and groups, the same meetups, the same local events as other people that fit that demographic in my local area. What happens is that let's say you are coach dean of snowboarding school. In that little group, it's not that little, but that little group, you become the household name. Everybody that fits that demographic thinks that you're the best snowboarding coach because you have really niched down and become the number one snowboarding coach for this demographic. Guess what happens when you become number one? You're going to move on to the next demographic, the next niche, where you add another variable, like maybe increasing the age or even people that have that ski but don't snowboard. The reason why is you do this, you become viral in that community and you just go viral. You go viral, you go viral on several little communities and eventually you take over the whole market, or at least a good portion of it, because you create the sense of word of mouth marketing that really, really works. Target, target, target number three. The third reason why your marketing doesn't work, you don't focus on one call to action. Now, if you ask me if you're ever marketing, always make your call to action. What you're asking people to do in your marketing in your advertising. Something that's very easy to do, something low barrier of entry, something free, like opting in for a free course or opting in for an email course or a free trial, or a free plan or a free template. This is a no brainer, great value, it's free, it's quick and easy. Most new marketers or new business owners, they try to make their call to action, buy this product, buy this service, and that's just too hard to do. It's hard to convert somebody from a cold lead to becoming a customer. This is like asking somebody to get married after just meeting them for a few minutes. Now obviously marriage is a bigger commitment than buying a product or service, but you get the point. So make it an easy call to action and make it your only call to action for all your marketing. If you're doing ads on Facebook or Google, that's what you send them to, that one call to action. If you're doing social media marketing, only call to action, focus on one call to action. Even if it's like, hey, I want to send them to a webinar. The point of the webinar is so that you can get them to do that call to action. To sign up for a trial, to sign up for your newsletter. The point here is you don't spread yourself too thin. Many people market and they say, I got five or six different things I want them to do and I actually try to get them to do that in the same advertisement. No. 1 call to action. And the last tip, the last reason why your marketing fails comes down to what I talked about at the top of the episode. Being a marketing expert. Listen, if you're not on a marketing expert, if you don't love marketing, it's not something that you study or do, then recognize that if you can nail the first three, then you can hire a marketing expert. Somebody that can take care of your campaigns, of your marketing, of your ads, all that kind of stuff. But they're not going to be able to answer the first three questions. You have to find out who you're talking to. What niche are you starting with and then moving on to the next and next and next. And lastly, what is the call to action you want to focus on? What is the ultimate thing you want them to do? Kick it back a few notches. You want them to buy? Okay, what's the step before buying? Oh, downloading your ebook. Go ahead and do that. Get them through the door and then have an automated sequence or have some sort of follow up sequence or invite them to your webinar to sell your product or service and just focus on that one call to to action. But your expert that you hire, they need information from you, they need direction. You need to say, hey, this is the plan. This is the problem we have. This is what we're trying to do. This is who we're talking to. This is the targeted audience. This is the niche we're going after. This is what we need everybody to do. I need you to help me get 500 new leads every single month. The first thing you're going to say is, well, how are we going to get these leads? You have to have something that's a call to action. Whether it's like, hey, download my ebook, you know, join my, my course. They are going to need you to create that. Right? The expert can't do everything. They're just focusing on marketing. That so hiring an expert's not a bad idea. But you have to be able to guide them, to lead them and at least get the first three completed and then hire them. I highly recommend if you don't want to focus on marketing full time marketing is a full time effort. You need to get somebody on board. You need somebody to help you with this. You lead them, you show them, and you hold them accountable. Experts, consultants, they're great, but you got to treat them like an employee. You got to say, hey, every day I want you to, you know, chime in. Update the scorecard. We have a scorecard in our marketing department where it gets updated on a regular basis. You do a sync every week. Let's take a look at the scorecard. How are we doing? Are we moving closer to our goal? Are we on track to hitting our goal for the month? What are the initiatives that we have done? Let's test it. Is it working? Do we need tweaking? You can't just set it and forget it. Marketing is an active, active department. And just because you hired an expert, it doesn't mean you are hands off, guys.

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You have to have your marketing sorted if you want to grow your business. People have to know about you. You have to have awareness. You need people to sign up for your call to action so that you can sell them on your products or service. This is an ongoing effort. If you can nail your marketing, you have the keys to the castle. You have the keys to the success of your business. But these four things, knowing who you're talking to, targeting, focusing on one call to action and hiring an expert, but giving them guidance and accountability. These will differentiate you from the competition and help you achieve your growth goals a whole lot easier, a whole lot faster. But don't skip these steps. Thanks so much for listening. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe. So you never miss an episode. It's absolutely free to subscribe on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. Whether it's Apple Podcasts or Stitch Radio or Himalaya or Spotify. We got your back. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The tools, the trends, the platforms, these will change over time in marketing. Whether it's advertising on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Google Ads, all that stuff can change. Over time. But the basics don't. And the basics are basically the ADA formula Aida Attention, interest, desire, action. That's basically marketing getting somebody's attention, getting them interested, getting them to desire what you're offering and getting them to take action. 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. Of.

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