In this episode I'm going to be pulling back the curtain on one of the biggest
marketing mistakes I see business owners and entrepreneurs making today.
Because while marketing is the single most important element to your business
success it's also one of the most confusing and overwhelming and misunderstood
subjects out there. And with so many different experts and influencers and
gurus all preaching what sometimes feels like completely different strategies, how
are you supposed to keep everything straight and know what to do for your business.
Well that's what I'm here to help you with right now. So let's dive in!
Hey there my name is Adam Erhart, marketing strategist and welcome to the
channel. The #1 place for entrepreneurs to learn proven marketing
strategies to grow your business online. If you're frustrated, overwhelmed and
maybe even a little stressed out about this whole marketing thing, you're not
alone. And while I can sit here confidently today after nearly a decade
in the game and hundreds of clients and thousands of profitable marketing
campaigns under my belt, wasn't always this way.
In fact, there was a point in my life when I had zero idea what marketing even
was. Much less how it all worked. I remember the early days of looking at
things like funnels and segmentation and positioning and differentiation and all
these crazy marketing terms and feeling very much like a deer in the headlights,
completely stunned, frozen and having no idea what any of this meant. And this is
pretty much the exact recipe for frustration, taking a look at all of the
wild and wonderful things that the world of marketing has to offer and thinking
that you need to do it all and you need to know it all and you need to do it
right now. And this my friend, is the biggest marketing mistake I see
entrepreneurs making right now. The belief that they need to do it all,
everything marketing has to offer and they need to do it all now. What this
works out to is essentially doing the wrong kind of marketing or more
appropriately, the wrong level of marketing for where they're at in their
business right now. So let me break that down. Not only can you not do it all and
not only do you not need to know it all but all of it well essentially, it's not
gonna be right for your business. Specifically where you're at with your
business right now, with your unique goals, your unique market, your unique
offer and the way that your business of position. Some things are going to be
more appropriate for your business and some things are just gonna be flat-out
wrong. Anything they're gonna hurt your business, maybe even drive you backwards.
So, if the biggest mistake is trying to do everything marketing has to offer,
well then what's the solution? Well essentially, the solution is using the
right level of marketing for your level of business. So I'm not gonna leave you
hanging. Let's dive into the levels right now so
you can figure out which level is right for you and what kind of marketing you
may want to consider and what's really just not that important yet.
So the first level of business is something I call a level 1 business. This is a business
that's doing anywhere from $0 to $20,000 a month.
Essentially this could be a brand new startup, it could be a business that's
been in business for a few months or maybe even a few years but
it hasn't really hit over that level of 20k a month. If you've got a business in
this zone, well you only need to be focused on a very few things in order to
grow and in order to build a bigger and better business. The very first thing you
need to do with your business if you're at a level one is to clearly identify
and articulate your ideal target market. That ideal customer avatar or ICA for sure.
Essentially, that exact person that you want to serve and who would most benefit
from whatever business that you're offering. The better that you know and
the better that you understand who your ideal target market is, the better your
business is going to be. Because you're going to be able to craft more
compelling and more relatable and more irresistible offers that really speak to
the needs and the problems and the pains and the frustrations of that ideal
customer, ideal client for your business. A lot of businesses get stuck making
well below 20k a month simply because they never really got clear on who it is
they're trying to serve and what the value they provide them is.
Which is pretty much the next thing that you need to work on, which is your offer and your
value proposition. Now, this part is gonna sound pretty obvious but you'd be amazed
at how many people missed the mark on this one. Essentially when it comes to
your offer and your value proposition, you need to make sure that you're
selling something that people actually want. Essentially, are you selling a
painkiller, are you selling something that's going to solve an immediate pain
for someone and the bigger the pain well the more demand or the more they're
gonna be willing to pay to have you solve this for them. If you can safely
check the box on that one and you know you're selling something that people
actually want and yet they're still not buying, could lead us to the second
problem which is that you're just not positioning it or essentially you're just
not marketing it in a way that makes it irresistible to them. This is why it's
really important to first dial in that ideal customer avatar, that perfect
person you want to serve, really figure out their pains and problems that you're
uniquely positioned to solve and then make sure that you're wrapping up your
offer and your value proposition in a way that's truly irresistible to them.
Alright, the next step you want to take for a level 1 business is all about
having focused media. Now, you may have heard the advice to be everywhere, do
everything and go on all the different social media networks and start a
podcast and write a blog and start a YouTube channel and create social media
content and all of that stuff. But the reality is if your business is still
level 1 and making less than 20k a month, you don't need all these things to
succeed. Rather, what you really need to do is dial in again on
ideal customer avatar, on that specific offer and value proposition that you
offer. Then you need to identify where your ideal target market is active and
present online and you need to design a cohesive and congruent strategy that
puts you directly in front of them where they are and ignore everywhere else that
they're just not. At this stage of business, you really only have three
goals: 1# is Lead Gen. Essentially generating more leads to bring them into
your business, the more leads, the better at this point.
#2 is Offer refining.
Making sure that whatever offer you're putting in front of people is
irresistible, so they simply can't say no to what you're selling.
And #3 is all about service delivery. Really making sure that you're delivering a
darn good product. Because it's not gonna make sense to do all this marketing and
really define your ideal market and put an offer in front of them if your
service delivery can't back it up. Because you're going to rely a little
bit on word-of-mouth on referrals and on essentially building a better product, a
better service and a better offer for your clients moving forward. Alright so
that leads us nicely to a level 2 business. Which I define is a business
doing roughly between $20,000 a month and $200,000 a month. At this stage of
business, things start to open up a little bit more. You're gonna have a
little more cash flow and a little more revenue in order to fuel more marketing,
more business objectives. At this stage you've also proven that you've
identified an ideal target market, you probably have your offer pretty dialed
in and you've proven that people actually want it and they have bought it.
Which is why you're doing this level of revenue. Now this doesn't let you off the
hook from refining and tweaking and constantly trying to find a better ideal
customer avatar and really defining that top 20% of clients that you like serving
and who are getting the best results. The same thing goes for your offer, you want
to continue to improve and massage and tweak it in order to make it even more
irresistible and even more of a no-brainer for your ideal market. But you
can at least safely say that you've got a solid foundation, so pouring more
marketing onto it is going to be a good idea. So what do you do at this level in
order to grow and get to the next one? Well the first thing that you want is more
traffic. Essentially traffic is attention, its clicks, its eyeballs, it's people
watching your videos or signing up for your webinars or downloading your lead
magnets or booking discovery calls or whatever it is.
Essentially what you want to do here is drive more traffic. And the reason we can
do this safely, relatively confidently, is because at this level of business
we've proven that we have an offer that actually converts and that people
actually want. So it only makes sense to try to get more people to it. Now just
like with level one, you do want to be focused and you do want to be strategic
about your channel selection but you can afford to open things up a little bit
more. So at level one maybe you're focusing on one or two different traffic
sources. Level two, makes sense to open it up and maybe we'll try a third, maybe
even a fourth. This is going to allow you to broaden your reach and essentially
get in front of more people who could potentially do business with you.
The next thing you're going to need in order to grow is less of a marketing concept
and more of an overall business function but that's going to be investing in your
team. Now, whether we're talking about hiring more contractors or potentially
even looking at bringing on a full-time employee or two or three whatever is
needed, essentially at this point you're going to need some support in order to
grow to the next level. First of all, you probably can't do everything yourself.
But even if you could, you probably shouldn't because there are going to be
some things that are really uniquely designed for you and for your specific
skill set, the rest you're going to want to delegate. The other thing you're going
to want to invest in here are systems. Systems are incredibly important and I
appreciate they may be pretty boring but the revenue they generate is absolutely
not boring. And the time savings. You can save a lot of time with systems.
Essentially a system works in order to sort of ease the process and really make
sure that the right things are getting done in the right places at the right
time and by the right people. This freeze up a ton of mental bandwidth for you as
the business owner and entrepreneur. So you can focus on more high level
activities like: creating new marketing campaigns and improving the service that
you're offering. Plus having systems are absolutely mandatory to move on to the
next level which I've called level 3 business. A business doing between
$200k a month and $1 million dollars a month. It's during this
transition around the $200k a month to
$300k a month that things start to get a little bit more complicated and
all of the things that you've done up into this point, well still valuable and
still important but they're gonna need to be beefed up even further. Because
above that roughly $200k - $300k a month things
get a little more complicated, you're gonna need a lot more support. The first
thing you're gonna need to look into here is building a bigger team. Talking
about operations managers, maybe accountants or lawyers and social media managers,
maybe media buyers... The list goes on. The best businesses in the world are built
on people, so you're gonna want to make sure that you're surrounding yourself
and you're bringing on new and fresh talent. As well as people that are
experienced and people that can be trained in order to get familiar with
your culture and your business and the growth and the goal and direction that
you're heading. There's another point as well that you need to consider, as you're
moving into level 3 business and as you're growing and scaling and that's
that profit and revenue, well they don't scale at the same rate. Essentially it's
easy to appreciate if you're doing $10.000 a month, you could have
a 90% - 95% profit margin. That be pretty normal. On the other
hand if you scale it up to a $100K a month, now you might
be looking at 20% or 30% maybe even 40% profit margins if
you're in a service business and things are pretty dialed in. But as you move up
to $500k or $1 million a month you're
simply not going to be looking at those same profit margins because you're going
to have more operations and more team and more expenses involved. This isn't a
bad thing, it's part of doing business. But it's something to be aware of that
whatever you're looking at right now just be aware and appreciate the fact
that profits and revenues they're not going to scale at the exact same rate.
Don't let that deter you though because building a bigger business means you can
have a bigger impact and essentially it allows you to do even more marketing and
that's the fun part. You see marketing is going to enable you
to continue to grow your business, to continue to make a bigger impact,
continue to expand your reach and and help even more people. That's an amazing
thing. This is why it's finally at this stage, level 3 business of doing between
$200k and a $1 million-plus a month that you can finally deploy the be everywhere, do
everything strategy. Because you're going to have the cash flow, you're going to
have the team, you're going to have the revenue in order to support and
essentially build on this marketing initiative. If this brings us full circle,
you can also see why the do everything and be everywhere approach is terrible
for a business at level one, maybe even a level two. It just doesn't make sense. So
what's the best way to do everything and be everywhere. Well, the best way to do
this and the way to really throw gas on the fire for the business you built
is through adverting. Which is why the next thing you're gonna want to do is
check out the video I have linked up right here on How to advertise for a
small business. So make sure to check that out now and I'll see you in the
next episode.