Do you want to create simple, scaleable marketing system in your business and free up your time to focus more on delivering for your clients?
Many of our clients come to us with this goal but the road to getting there isn’t always what they expect.
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you might be aware that I’m a little bit obsessed with our dogs. I mean, look at them:
As cute as they are, they’re also a lot of work. Vizslas are not dogs you can just walk twice a day and be done with it. Learning how to live well in the city with a breed that’s meant to run and hunt for hours at a time has taken a lot of learning new skills.
I’ve take more than my share of dog training courses and many of them start out by having you practice the reward system without the dog.
Click (the marker that tells the dog you liked what they did.
Pick up a treat and put it in a bowl.
Boooorrrring.
But the best dog trainers I know spend a LOT of time practicing this simple but difficult skill.
What happens with amateurs is we reach for the treat at the same time that we click and now the dog is distracted by your movement instead of thinking about what they did.
One of our trainers posted on Instagram that advanced training is just the basics done really well.
A Scaleable Marketing System is Built on the Basics
As we work with larger and larger companies, I’ve started to hear this sentiment more:
We want personalized strategy and advice.
Often when I get this request, it’s from people who have built very successful businesses, but their marketing to this point has been mostly word of mouth and they are new to establishing online marketing systems.
Or, they’ve been marketing for a while, but are not getting the results they want.
When you’re new at something, where do you start?
The basics.
- New runner? Gotta learn correct form, build up your stamina etc.
- New swimmer? Gotta learn how to do those strokes correctly.
- New road biker? Maybe you need to learn how to ride in clipless pedals without falling over.
- Blue Ivy? Gotta learn to perform in front of sold out stadiums.
Wait. That last one is not a good example.
No matter how successful and advanced your business, if you’re getting started with online marketing, you need the basics:
- Your offer, audience, and messaging dialed
- An automated welcome sequence
- At least 1 automated sales sequence
- Proper engagement tracking
- Proper lead tracking
- Trackable links so you know what’s working to bring new leads to your business.
When you get all these things in place, you have a simple system that you can measure to find out what’s working so that you can do more of it, or what’s not working so you can tweak it.
Simple marketing automation scales.
We can set up the fanciest of marketing with the best of them, but when I look at the marketing that is really working, it’s simple.
Having 30 lead magnets and creating dozens of segments just means more to keep track of and makes it harder to see what’s actually working.
In the beginning, you may try lots of things, but it should be with the goal of narrowing down to the few things that are working well and then doubling down on that.
How to Get Personalized, Advanced Marketing Advice
Advanced, personalized advice comes from having a system in place and then being able to look at the data and make decisions about how to optimize based on what’s working for your business.
This is why so many people get in trouble trying to copy what they see other people doing. What works for someone else may or may not work for you, your business, your industry, your personality, or your values.
The people who unlock marketing success become students of their own audience and what messaging is resonating with them and driving results.
Of course, measuring your marketing requires that you're actually taking actions that you can measure. I meet many business owners who are stuck because of perfectionism or they've ghosted their list and not sure how to get started again.
When I talk to business owners like this, I remind them that you can't steer a parked car. Getting out there and taking imperfect action and then improving over time is the only way to success.
If you’re struggling with your marketing right now, look at the list above and ask yourself, Have I done the basics and done them well?
If you need help with that, you can work with us and get your marketing foundation up and running in as little as 4 weeks.
By the end of October 2023, we’ll be adding marketing dashboards for our clients that give you one place to see the performance of your email marketing + strategy sessions to help you interpret that data and make decisions on how to keep improving.