The Causey Consulting Podcast

Marketing Techniques to Ditch in 2022

February 10, 2022 Sara Causey Episode 112
The Causey Consulting Podcast
Marketing Techniques to Ditch in 2022
Show Notes Transcript

Are you still cyberstalking your prospects? Sending out 10,000 follow up emails? Recording cheesy "personalized" videos for people? If you hate doing these things and you aren't making enough money, it's time to stop using outdated techniques.

Key topics:

✔️ The number 1 thing on my list is anything involving a bait and switch or fraud. Don't, just don't.
✔️ Creating a "personalized" video for someone does not have the cool factor it did several years ago. In fact, it feels like you are intruding on my time and trying to give me one more task on my to-do list for the day. So how likely am I to watch your video? 0.
✔️ It's important to understand your Customer Acquisition Cost. Doing a lot of high touch, major time-suck activities = you staying broke. Likewise, sending 1000 follow up emails to someone who is not interested = you staying broke.
✔️ Things like newsletters, blogs, and yes, even podcasts, are not the right avenues for everyone. If you hate blogging or you've been podcasting and the only people listening are your mom & dad and grandma at the nursing home, is that really worth your time?


Links I discuss in this episode:

https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/5-marketing-techniques-to-dump/

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/336544

https://corktreecreative.com/376-leave-these-marketing-strategies-in-the-past/


Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey. Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. Today I want to talk about marketing techniques and tactics that you can leave behind in 2022. Now, the first sort of blanket, broad stroke statement that I want to make here is, if it's not broke, you don't have to fix it. If you have a tactic or a technique that works well for you, even if other people say it's outdated, or it's old fashioned, if it's still working for you, then I'm not going to tell you to toss out the baby with the bathwater. If it gets to a point where that tactic or technique is not really bringing in revenue anymore, or you don't enjoy doing it, then you'll want to take a look at whether or not it makes sense to keep doing it. But in the meantime, if you have some kind of strategy that's really bearing good fruit for you, and it makes sense for your business. Don't worry too much about what somebody else is saying on a blog or a website or a podcast. If it's working for you. That's cool. The very first thing on my hit list of tactics and techniques to just please stop doing is anything that involves a bait and switch. If you are reaching out to someone by email by phone, in mail, DMS, whatever. And you're pretending that you want to talk about one thing. But really you want to manipulate or finesse the conversation to go in a different direction so that you can then try to sell that person something without coming right on and saying that that's what you're doing. Please stop it is so annoying, and it makes you look like a complete liar. And scammer. Like all you're doing for me is guaranteeing that if I ever did need a product or service like the one that you represent, I'm not going to use you because you have proven to me that you're suspicious and shady. Now stories are very good illustrations for points like this. So I want to tell you a story. Yes, I'm going to have to be a little bit necessarily vague. But I received an email. And the subject line said something like I need your coaching services. And I'm like, okay, cool. Well, we'll see what this is. And the person had written Hi, Sarah, are you still a business coach slash consultant? If so, are you accepting new clients? And that was it, there was no further explanation, nothing else in the email, but that and I'm like, Oh, God, this is probably a sales email. Because here's the thing. Most of the time, if somebody comes into my coaching funnel, and they want to talk about potentially becoming a coaching client, they're very clear about how they found me whether it's they listened to this podcast every week, they heard me on someone else's podcast, they read some of my stuff on LinkedIn, they're clear about how they found me and what it was about my personality and my style that appealed to them. So when you get one of these nebulous emails, where it's like, I need your coaching services, and they're not really telling you anything else, you just want to have your antennae up. So I wrote back to this person, that depends, are you potentially interested in becoming a coaching client? Or is this a marketing email? A very straightforward point blank question, which that person did not care to answer. He wrote out quite several, it was like, I don't know two weeks later, the dude writes back, thanks for your reply, I decided to record a quick video for you. And it's like, delete. So that leads me to point number two. Are you still recording cheesy ass videos for people? Like that whole thing had a mo like, I don't know, maybe? What year is it? Now? It's 2022. I don't know, maybe five to six years ago. You know, that whole thing about getting on a platform and recording a quote, personalized video for somebody? At the time? It seemed cool, because it was like, Oh, wow, you know, somebody cared enough about trying to obtain my business that they gone on platform like Vedas or loom and recorded a video for me. Wow. It's like it reminds me of when I was on the pirate broadcast with Russ and he, we were talking about how marketers can ruin everything. Yeah, it used to be fun to get an email. Now most of the emails you get or attempts at spamming you or calling you or catfishing you. And so it's like, oh, god, look at my inbox. And I feel like I have to sort through so much junk just to get to the real stuff from real human beings that I want to interact with. And so it is with these corny ass marketing videos. You know, again, if that technique somehow is working for you, and you're getting the kind of revenue that you want from it and it's not a massive freaking time drain, then that's cool. For me when I was doing it years ago, I'll tell you straight up I did not garner one second Client from using those cheesy ass videos not a single one. And I was like really put a lot of time and energy into grooming myself and looking good on camera and, and being very mindful of what I said. And then because I had super slow Wi Fi out in the country, it was like, take me forever to get the videos uploaded you and here's one of the dirty little secrets behind that it's all about collecting the data so that you can figure out well, alright, Sally, Sue watched my video up until 15 seconds. And then I said something that turned her off. Or this person went all the way to the end and got to my calendar link but didn't look anything. And now I need to figure out why. So it's like it's giving you all of this data. But if it's not actionable data, it's not something that you can can really interpret and then be able to determine Alright, well, how can I change my messaging? Or what isn't landing? Is this not the right message? Is it not the right audience, then it's just a huge freaking waste of time. Here's another thing if somebody sends me a video like that, it's one more thing I've got to add to my to do list if I decide to watch it. And if it comes down to watching your corny ass marketing video, or spending time with my family, spending time with my animals, having a billable hour for a client, I'm going to choose all of those other things over your video, I mean, live in the now. And I really do not want to downplay the amount of time like the the sheer time suck, that activities like that can be. I went through a marketing program several years ago, where the person leading the program was super big on those supposedly personalized videos. And sometimes they are personalized. Oftentimes they're not one time a guy sent me a video and it had nothing to do with anything that I'm involved with. It's like completely different industry completely different language. And I'm like, What even is this? So I just wrote him back and I'm like, Hey, dude, I don't know who he meant to send this to, but I don't think it was to me. So then he goes into overdrive trying to explain that. Yes, it was for me, yes, it is relevant to my business. I'm like, delete, I mean. Anyway, so in assessing the value of this marketing program, I started to talking to some of my peers that were also in the program. I never did have any success from it. Again, doing these cheesy videos never landed me any new clients, like literally zero, Zed, zilch. So when I asked around some of my peers, it said, Yeah, I have been able to land a few clients by doing the videos that lead to the calendar link that lead to the mouse in the house that Jack built. One of the things that I uncovered is that the amount of time the amount of energy that they had to expend was vast. So one of the things that I want to be super clear about is whether you are running a freelancing desk, whether you're self employed, you're a business owner, you need to really understand your CAC, which is your customer acquisition cost. I'll say that again, CAC customer acquisition cost, and it is the cost related to acquiring a new customer. And I would encourage you not just to look at financially, how much it costs for me to acquire a new customer, how much time if I spent that time doing something else would I have made more money. And every single person when they did that customer acquisition cost? Well, here's how much time I spent getting myself groomed and ready to go and set up my ring light and get myself on camera and recording these cheesy videos that most people didn't even watch, I would have been so much better off doing some other activity than doing the cheesy videos. So point number one if you're still doing bait and switch or weird, nebulous, deceptive tactics, Cut that crap out, too. If you're sitting in front of a camera recording personalized videos for people and it's not getting any revenue into your business and or you feel totally freaking exhausted and it feels like an albatross around your neck quit doing it. Now the third thing on my list is probably really going to get some rotten tomatoes thrown in my direction. I found an article called Five marketing techniques to dump now it was from about this time last year and it was written by Phil Barrett naturally, yes, I will drop a link to it in the comment section. But one of the things that he goes after is going to be some of y'all sacred cows. So here we go. Number three on my list was number one on his list, which is newsletters, and I'm going to read from Phil's own words. While this advice might go against the grain, it's never a bad idea to question if the time invested in a marketing channel is worth the effort. companies of all sizes and verticals produce newsletters for customers and prospects. But that effort would be best used and other forms of marketing are used John Ross, CEO of test prep insight and quote, so here's the thing, a lot of newsletters go out and a lot of them never get read or some of somebody might say yeah, this looks interesting. I'll come back to it. later and then later never comes, they get busy with something else. So if you are relying on a newsletter, whether it's weekly or monthly, quarterly, whatever as a means of driving in revenue, and you're not seeing that revenue, let it go, let it go. I had so many people telling me well, you know, hey, that email list is like pure gold, you want to get everybody on board, and you want to make sure that you're interacting with them regularly and kill Sopris. I just wasn't seeing a good return on investment from doing a weekly newsletter. And it had also become a time drain, it's like, do I want to come up with a topic and sit here and write about it? You know, at a time when I could have been doing something billable for a client, and I do I want to get my VA some potential topics and say, All right, go do some research, you know, see what kind of statistics and figures you can find for this and then get back to me. So then I've got to pull her off of other projects and add her doing that research, I'm going to pay her for the time she spends. It's like, oh, I'm not seeing enough of return on investment to keep doing that. And frankly, I just don't enjoy it. You know, I do. I love this podcast, I enjoy being able to carve out time to record these episodes. And it's much easier for me to just sort of speak extemporaneously about a certain topic than it is to sit down and be like, Okay, I got to get in MailChimp, and think of something to talk about on a newsletter this week. So if you find that the newsletter format is not bringing you the kind of return on investment you want, it's something that feels like a complete time suck, you don't have to keep doing it. The fourth thing on my list is also the fourth thing on Phil's list in this article, which is cold outreach, and I'm going to read from his article first. If you are still doing cold outreach, you're wasting valuable resources. There are many ways to reach the target audience. So why start from zero? With the abundance of information and resources available, reaching out cold is almost irresponsible in quote. This, like the heavens have opened up and an angel is strumming on its heart. Hmm, exactly. Oh, my God, like, cold calling cold prospecting. I can remember like back in my early days in staffing, watching these people, like boiler room, you know, I mean, they would sit there with a Tear Sheet of information and be like, Okay, well, if I've got to make 100 Cold Calls to get one person that will agree to an appointment, I guess that's what I'll have to do. You I look at it, I even then to me, it felt like Insanity and a huge waste of time. But looking back on it. Now, with all these years of hindsight, as well as business experience, I'm like, if you want to sit there with a Tear Sheet and call a bunch of randos to get one prospect out of the funnel, then I mean, good on, you may go right ahead, waste your time, but I'm not going to do that. And again, I'll give you another example. There was a guy who sent me an InMail on LinkedIn, apropos of nothing, I don't know him. I don't know anything about his business. We don't have like mutual connections, really, I don't, I don't even understand how he found me or what he wanted. But I'm going to read a snippet of what he sent me. I'll omit his name, obviously, I wanted to see if we could set up a time for us to meet. I wanted to say hi. And he put hi in all caps. And who and who knows, maybe how we might be able to help each other send business each other's way or something. Like I said, who knows? And he thought, who knows, and all caps with a smiley face behind it. Can we set up a time for just a chat? And I looked at that, and I'm like hell no, to the gnome? No, no. So I wrote him back declining the email. And I'm like, Thanks for reaching out, but I'm not interested. I'm slammed with work and billable hours. So unless someone has a cogent reason for needing a random phone call from LinkedIn, I'm not doing it. And yes, I did do that. And I encourage you, you know, if you're tired of people just spamming you. If you're in the mood to not just hit the delete button, but to really clap back, go ahead and do it because some people don't learn that what they're doing is obnoxious and it's unwanted unless someone tells them that is obnoxious, and it's unwanted. So doing cold outreach and spamming people on LinkedIn. You know, some there are some programs out there that will automate the SPAM for you so that you can like just spam people all day. And I also tried, I'll be honest with you guys, you know, I always pull the curtain back on my own foibles and bad decisions. Like for a little while, when I was first getting started trying to get a coaching practice going trying to get established as a consultant. I ran one of those automated programs. And you know, when it got me absolutely nowhere, most of the people that that I reached out to were kind of like, hey, you know, thanks, but no thanks. And I didn't feel good about what I was doing. You know it to me it felt smarmy, and looking at it empathically it's like why would you want somebody doing this to you? I mean, even if you have good intentions and you genuinely believe that you can help that person like, is this a wanted interaction? Probably not. And you need to be careful of these Sharky old school salespeople that come from a different era. You know, I once had somebody in a marketing program, say, if you're looking at a prospect, even if they're telling you no Buzz off, leave me alone. If you know that your program or your service could genuinely help that person, then you are under a moral imperative to reach out to them it is your moral obligation to try to sign them or close them. If you know that you know that you know that you can help them. And it's like, gross. No, it's about consent. It's about mutual consent, in order to help somebody they have to want to be helped. Believe me, there is nothing worse than getting into a coach client relationship with someone who just wants to sit and bitch, they want to cry. They want to play the martyr, they want to play the victim. They don't really want you to help them get out of a rut. They just want to talk about how hard they've had it in life. So it's not a good scenario for anybody to try to foist your help onto somebody that doesn't want it. Okay. Okay. Number five on my list is pitching anything that is or sounds like a pyramid scheme. I received a DM from a guy again, I don't really know him not really sure what it is that he's promoting. But he sent me this message that's like, Hey, thanks for being connected. Do you keep your options open when it comes to making additional income? And I wrote back? Nope, that's just got to be that. But see there is marketing technique where you ask the person something that no sane person could say no to. Because I'm sure this guy's sitting there thinking, well, no sane person would say no, I don't keep my options open when it comes to making additional income. But what I'm telling him is, I don't want to be contacted by you know, I don't keep my options open about additional income if they're coming from a pyramid scheme, or a cult. So anything that sounds like cult speak anything that sounds like a pyramid scheme, please stop doing that. Number six on my list is trying to be all things to all people all the time. There's another article that I'll drop a link to from entrepreneur.com called Six outdated marketing tactics, you need to leave in the past where they belong. And number one on their list number six online is trying to serve people on mass. And I'll read from the article, every person is unique. And you need to cater to that fact, gone are the days of blanket personalization. According to a 2017 state of personalization report by segment, almost half of customers surveyed said they would likely be repeat buyers because of a personalized shopping experience and quote, this is another reason. There are many reasons. But this is another reason why I don't do any of those group coaching. Heard everybody on to Facebook, and everybody gets blanket personalization. Because it sucks, you know, look, no offense, if that's how you run your business. If you're making money, and everybody feels happy, then that's cool. But I never enjoyed it. I never enjoyed it as a consumer. And I know that I wouldn't enjoy it as a coach to me, it just feels really demeaning. And I remember talking to a coach that I worked with in the past. And I said, you know, I just sort of feel like, nobody cares about my success or failure. And I don't really understand what I'm doing in this group. And she clapped back and said, Well, you know, of course nobody else cares as much as you do. Like it's your business, you should be the one that cares the most. So I clap back on her. And I said, Okay, point taken. So why do I care about all the other people in the group? Like, what are we actually getting out of this? And after that, it was just silence and crickets, but it just it begs the point of like, what is the point of it hurting everybody into a cattle call on a Facebook group. More often than not, those things turn into a giant stitch and bitch, let's all sit here and tell our tales of woe and complain and drink coffee together, but not really, actually get down to brass tacks and solve our problems. From a marketing perspective, trying to be everything to everybody and use the same tactic for Sally that you use for Billy and then for John and for Jane, probably not going to work in the long run. Ironically, number seven on my list is podcasting. If it is not something that you enjoy doing, and you're not seeing a good return on your investment, then why keep doing it. Or if you're consistently putting out a podcast but the only people listening to it are your best friend and everybody at your grandma's nursing home. You're not actually seeing any clients or potential clients from it then you don't have to keep doing it. Everybody in their dog and their brother and their aunt and their uncle and their kid has a podcast now and it's incredibly saturated market And to really make a go of it, you have to do it consistently. And you have to have some kind of a voice, some kind of a perspective that's different from everybody else. Otherwise, it's just going to sort of sit on the shelf and no one's going to really engage with it. If you're finding that you're not getting a good return on investment, it feels like a time drain, then you don't have to keep doing it. Number eight on my list is blogging for no apparent reason. I will drop a link to this article in the write up for this podcast episode, there's there's an article from Cork Tree Creative. And actually, the first thing on their list is blogging only for blogging sake, I'm going to read from that article. Now. Blogs currently rain superior when it comes to digital marketing trends. Many companies use blogs in their day to day business. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a company that doesn't utilize blogging, I'm going to break in for a second here to say if everyone is doing it, that's kind of an indication that it's probably getting stale. As one of my mentors used to say to me, watch what the crowd is doing and move in the opposite direction. I'll continue to read. Blogs are a great way to establish brand authority, engage customers and offer valuable information. They can also boost your company's SEO. But many companies only focus on the SEO aspect of blogging. This results in pages of blogs that have very little content and instead contain the company's target keywords over and over. These blogs will show up on search engines, but they are pointless and useless for customers and quote, I would actually argue that since this post was written in September of 2018, SEO and Google, I mean, all of this stuff has gotten so much savvier like Google has figured out if you're just dropping buzzwords and keywords over and over again, to help with search engine optimization, like they're not going to prioritize you in their rankings. Anyway, if you're blogging, just a blog, you don't enjoy it, you're not seeing a return on investment, or you're having to pay some company. Like I think there's a company out there and I don't I don't remember what the name of it is. But I think you pay them like$100 a month. And they'll post stuff on your social media, they'll go strike blogs for you. And it's like, huh, I mean, again, if you're doing that, and you're seeing a good return on investment, you can really legitimately say, yes, people are engaging with this stuff that they're posting for me, and it makes sense, then that's cool, keep doing it. But if you're on the fence about doing something like that, and you're not sure it would really benefit you or you've been blogging and blogging, you don't enjoy it, you're not seeing a good return on investment. You don't have to keep doing it. Number nine, marketing to people who don't really make sense for your business, or who don't fall into the correct demographic of client for you. This is similar to trying to be all things to all people but it is a little bit different. So I'll use myself as an example. I really do not work with little teeny tiny startup companies. It's just not a good fit for me. Been there done that survived it did not enjoy it. Just being transparent with you guys. It's not my it's not my thing. I'm i The the craziness, the frenetic pace of everything today, we want this tomorrow, we want that, oh, and tomorrow, we may not even be in business, we may not have the financing even pay you it's just an insane world. That is not for me. So if I were to go out and market to teeny, tiny startups, how much sense would that make? I mean it but yet I see people doing that. And it's like, okay, if you already know that this business is not a good fit for you to market to or you already know that this individual is not a good prospective client for you, then why do you continue to do it, it makes no sense. It's such a waste of time, energy and money. Which leads me to Number 10, I sort of had this as a top 10 list in mind. So I will wrap it up here with number 10. And this is, even though it's at the end of the list is by no means the least important. For me number 10 is being any type of stalker. If somebody tells you no, remove me from your list, unsubscribe, don't call me again. And then you persist in harassing that person, either because you think you have a moral imperative to do it, or you just really, really, really want their business or you're really hurting for money or whatever, stop it. It is so freaking annoying to tell somebody No, I'm not interested, leave me alone, go away, remove unsubscribe, and then have them continue to bother you. Again for me, when you behave that way. It just simply guarantees that if and when I'm in the market for a product or service that you provide, I will not use you because you have behaved like a complete and total stalker. So stop it. Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list. But I hope that if you've been doing something that's not working well for you, and it's not bringing in money, it's not making you feel good. You're just doing it because somebody somewhere told you that was a technique to use and even looking for somebody to give you permission to stop doing that thing and pivot in a different direction. Hopefully I can be that voice for you today. I'll see you in the next episode. We hope you enjoy today's episode. If you haven't already, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.