Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
Marketing is HARD!
Show Notes
This is something I hear all the time in my digital marketing business CATCO Enterprises.
Marketing is hard, Facebook doesn’t work, you can’t get traction without paid ads etc etc etc.
And guess what in my world, that is all wrong.
Spaghetti Effect
Yes, Marketing is hard when you take a handful of spaghetti and throw it at the wall hoping it will stick.
If you spend your time being transactional, going from one sale to another, chasing your tail all tail for you, marketing is hard. You are feeling constantly stressed, never have enough time in your day. In the end, you probably give up and don’t do any marketing at all.
That worked for a while, word of mouth and past customers might bring in a few sales, but you and your business are not thriving. You are caught up in the spaghetti effect.
A Clear Plan
A clear plan and action, is all that is needed. Marketing can often be an afterthought. Something to do when the phone stops ringing or when you have time. You get caught in the all or nothing trap.
You have been to a webinar, listened to a podcast or heard what someone else has been doing well and get all excited and try it. You go flat out for a few days or weeks and then you get busy or don’t see results, so you stop.
This all or nothing approach is often platform focused, gotta do Facebook, LinkedIn, are you on TikTok etc. You become a headless chicken running madly from one piece of grain to another. You are wearing way too many hats. You may be getting some results, but you are exhausted, working long hours and not having quality family time.
You Need Paid Ads To Make Your Marketing Successful
Rubbish.
We have hundreds of clients that we run very successful campaigns for year after year 100% organically. Now don’t get me wrong there is a time and a place for paid ads, and we do run them for some of our clients but that is part of a strategic plan not as the whole marketing plan.
You don’t need paid ads to be successful with your marketing and for some sectors paid ads don’t work at all.
Setting Realistic Customer Expectations
Your customers want to know how long it will take for you to complete the job they are paying you for, and you want to know how urgently the product or service will be needed. Customers don’t want to wait for weeks to get something done, but business owners also don’t want to rush through a job only for it to sit for another 2 weeks waiting to be picked up.
‘Urgent’ can mean different things to different people. Make sure that both you and your customer understand what kind of urgent the job will be.
People Like to Do Business with People
Business is always P to P, people to people. No matter what industry, what sector you work in people are always the ones to make the business decision. Make in the future robots will and no doubt some might say they already are. But for most of us, we deal with people.
Starting to get a good marketing flow when good quality leads are coming in and prospects are turning into wonderful top-level clients happens when we get out of being transactional, get out of being the headless chicken and start building relationships.
3% Ready to Buy
Did you know that only 3% of your prospects are ready to buy right now?
If the other 97% only see one message of yours, only have one touchpoint how likely do you think that they will be to remember you and your product. Yes, there are unicorns that you never forget and years later will look up to buy their product but let’s face it that is very rare.
Getting the other people to buy from you when they are ready can take time and means you need to build relationships.
Will, all 97% buy from you – NO!
And you don’t want them to.
A Mini driver will never buy a Porsche no matter how good the marketing is. Will a Porsche driver ever buy an SUV, maybe when their needs change and they now have a family? Or maybe not at Porsche now make their own SUV.
The point is, not everyone is your client and not should you want them to be.
Marketing Flow
Once you start getting a great marketing flow you can add some automation to create those touchpoints and build a great relationship with your prospects. Yes, automation don’t right is an amazing tool in your toolkit. Unfortunately, we have all been hit with automation done badly.
Did you know there is one higher level again?
Are You The Prize?
Attraction, is when you are the prize and people seek you out. Your ideal audience talks about you and recommends more ideal clients to you. You have targeted placement and are seen as the only one to go to. Life is easy, business is thriving, you have a clear framework and positive return on your marketing investment.
Attraction comes when all your marketing is working together to benefit your business in a holistic way.
Want to know more?
Check out my quiz to see where your marketing currently sits.
Marketing Doesn’t Need to be Hard!
Need week our special guest will be talking about how to scale up your business fast with less work so the perfect follow on from this episode.
Listen to the full episode of Small Business Talk episode 153.
