Is your marketing working or are you wasting your time or money? Marketing for Entrepreneurs. Ep. 155

Are you trying to market your business but not sure what's working? If so, you're not alone, my friend. I often have students and clients ask, How do I know if my marketing is working? 

If you're spending time or money (or both!) to market your business, then you need to understand how to measure your efforts to know if what you're doing is working. 

It's very possible that you're spending time or money on marketing efforts that aren't paying off. Let me show you how to start unraveling what's going on with your marketing efforts and get answers. 

Transcript

0:32

Hi there. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I do branch out a little bit from SEO and I wanna talk about your marketing in general. How to determine if your marketing is working or if you are wasting your time or money. So I know you're probably used to talking more about SEO on this podcast, and I get that, but I wanna start talking to you more about your marketing strategy. Overall online marketing program because my friend, you should not be dependent upon only one channel for your marketing. You want to have what they call cross-channel marketing, meaning you are present on multiple channels. So let's talk about how do you figure out. Is it working? What am I doing? What do I do more of? What do I do less of? Am I wasting my money? Am I wasting my time? These are all questions that I hear from clients when I first start working with them. So the very first thing that I have clients do is a time audit, and I'm going to explain why in just a minute. But I got a question from a new client recently, and she was very focused on Instagram. She had heard social media marketing was the place to be and she needed to be on Instagram. Because that's where her ideal customers were. Now, I don't think her ideal customers are spending a lot of time on Instagram looking for the type business that she has, the services that she provides, but that's neither here nor there. That's just my gut after having been in marketing for 20 years. And realistically, I wanted her to be able to figure out, had. It had her efforts paid off, so I didn't say, no, it's not working, or, yeah, I'm sure it's working. I said, let's answer that question. Are my 20 hours a week that I'm spending on Instagram paying off? Because the reality is she was getting tired of it. She was burning out from it, because that's a lot of time to be focusing on one channel and anyone. Who's done social media marketing knows that. It feels like it's a constant game of keeping up with the algorithm because it changes. One week. It feels like they want carousels, then they want static photos, then they want reels, and now you've gotta follow the trending topics and the trend. Audios and just all sorts of stuff, and it can truly turn into a full-time job. And what you have to remember is your full-time job is running your business, not marketing your business. Your marketing should support your business, but it should not be your number one focus and. Honestly, you shouldn't be spending 20 hours a week on any marketing channel. I would ideally like to see you have your marketing under maybe an hour a day, maybe five hours a week on marketing, not 20. So what we need to do is figure out are those 20 hours a week being spent on Instagram worth it? So the first thing I had her do well, the very first thing I asked was, are you getting leads? And she said, you know what? I don't even know. Okay, if you don't know if you're getting leads from a marketing channel, there are a couple things going on, but the first is you're probably pretty normal because a lot of people don't know. So how do you figure out if you're getting leads from a channel when you are talking to new potential leads or new customers? Maybe you have a program that people can enroll in online. What I want you to do is ask them, where did you hear about me? How did you find me? Because that's gonna give you some indication as to which channels are bringing traffic. Now, if she knew. You know what? I've had conversations, I've had DM conversations with six people on Instagram that led directly to sales. Then it would be like, well, that's probably worth it. How long was that timeframe that you had those six conversations? Was it all in the first week? Was it a month? Was it six months? Was it a year? And then how much money did you make from each of those new clients that you had those DM conversations on Instagram? Because now you can start to look and see how much time did I invest in Instagram? So she's spending 20 hours a week. Let's say she got six customers in a month, 20 hours a week is 80 hours. Six customers in a month, as long as she's, you know, making more than$10 per purchase.$8 per purchase. You know, we wanna make sure that her hourly rate is decent. So let's just say that she's got a$500 purchase. So she made$3,000 and she spent 80 hours to do it. That means she made 37 50 an hour. That's not a bad return on investment for her time. But if she made$300 and she spent 80 hours to do that, she made$3 and 75 cents per hour. That's significantly below the minimum wage. It's not a great return on her time, and she probably would want to try something else. So that's part of what you look at is what am I doing? What return am I getting? How much am I getting per hour back? It's not a rule that you have to follow, but it helps you start to see. Are you generating money from what you're doing? The other way I like to look at this is to look at the analytics on my website to see where are my leads coming from. So I set up goals. Um, I've traditionally, historically used. Google, Google Analytics. I have recently started testing out and have fallen in love with Clicky. It is C-L-I-C-K-Y. I'll put an affiliate link in the show description for you. Super user friendly, super easy if you use that little affiliate link. Yes, it gives me credit that you've signed up, but as long as you're just on the free plan, it doesn't, it doesn't pay me anything. It just gives you access to it. Um, so you get a. A, um, a subscription trial with the premium features that is going to show you where your leads are coming from because you can set up goals in it easily. You can tie revenue to it, and so you'll be able to look and see, okay, I'm on Instagram and I'm making, I had 37 new leads come in this week from Instagram. Well, that's probably good if you wanna try to understand like cost. With that, you could then look at what does, if you have Facebook ads running, what does it cost you to get a new lead from your Facebook ads? So if it's$2 per lead. And you got 37 new leads over the course of the week from Instagram, then you got$75 worth of value. So now you have to think, how many hours did I work to get that$75 worth of value, but 37 leads in a week from a channel. Not bad at all. That's probably worth it. So you really wanna look at where are you spending your time. What I want you to look at then, beyond where are you spending your time is, where are the leads and sales coming from? Because very, uh, very often in marketing, what we find is that there are some channels. That are time sucks. We are spending a ton of time on them and they're not generating leads. For me personally, it's Pinterest. Now I know people talk about Pinterest and they say, Pinterest is this, darling. It's amazing. It's the social media channel that you have to be on. I will be honest, I've been on Pinterest for years. I've used it. I understand that it's an algorithm, it's a search engine, all of that. I have optimized my profile. I've done all the things. I get traffic from Pinterest. What I don't get are leads and sales, and because I don't get leads and sales from Pinterest, I no longer focus on it because. I know they try to make it out to be really easy and not take a lot of time. But have you done Pinterest? If you follow the guidelines, they recommend you're posting like five to 10 pins a day. And sure you can repurpose and sure you can do all of that. But the reality, if you're creating 150 to 300 pins a month. Even if you're using Canva, you've got templates, all of that. That takes time. You've got a lot of work to do to batch those pins. Then you have to upload them to Pinterest. Then you have to write your descriptions and you have to optimize, and you have to research keywords, and you have to do all of that. If you are not getting significant amounts of not only traffic, but engaged traffic, the right people, the leads and the sales, it's not worth your time. I felt so confident when I stopped doing Pinterest because I knew, yes, I'm getting traffic. No, they are not converting. This is a waste of time for me. I was able to then repurpose that time, reuse that time for another marketing channel. Ultimately, that old Pinterest time is what I now use for the podcast, and I can tell you the podcast is a much better marketing channel for me because I know that you listen, you learn. You implement what you learn, and then when you're ready, you work with me because you tell me all the time, oh yeah, I fell into your podcast first. I fell in love with your podcast. I have binged every episode. I am ready for the next one. And you want to work with me because you've gotten to know me and you've gotten to hear my teaching style and you know that you know what? I've learned this much through the free content. I can only imagine how much more I'll learn if I pay, and I work with Rachel Closer. So for me. Getting rid of Pinterest, freeing up those hours and using it for the podcast was the best decision I ever could have made. I can't imagine if I were still trying to use Pinterest and still putting all those hours into it, and I spend a lot less time on the podcast than I did trying to keep up with Pinterest and the requirements for posting.'cause 150 to 300 pins a month is insane. I'm sorry, but I'm just gonna say it. I'm, I can't keep up with that. I don't have time for that. So I want you to start today. Your homework is just to take a look at where are you spending your hours marketing your business. So if you don't know, spend the next week doing a time audit and just jot down what you're doing over the course of the day. I did this recently to help me really see where I was at and what I could adjust, and I spent. I ended up spending two weeks,'cause one week was not as typical as a normal week, so I did two weeks and I did 15 minute increments and I just jotted down everything I was working on from replying back to student emails, holding calls, answering questions, recording podcasts, et cetera, in 15 minute increments, just in a notebook. It doesn't have to be fancy. I just kept track of it. And then I added up how many hours I was working each day and then each week, and then I went back and I analyzed it to see what was driving revenue, what was helping me grow, what was stuff that I could get rid of, what was stuff that I absolutely had to do. And it'll help you start to see where you can potentially make some changes, make some adjustments. If you don't yet have data that tells you which channels are bringing in the money, you don't know how to find it in analytics, you don't have it set up, um, go ahead and get clicky set up. I'll put that link, like I said in there. Go ahead and get that set up. It's gonna make it easier for you to find that in the future. And then you can start tracking and seeing, okay, these are my goals. This is how many people have signed up for this opt-in. This is how many people have submitted this lead form. This is how many people have become customers. Start tracking that data and it's gonna make you a lot, make it a lot easier. I have a brand new opt-in for you. That I've been working on, and it is a marketing checkup. So I'm gonna go ahead and put that. It's updated, it's on the freebies tab, but you want the marketing checkup that's gonna help you walk through all of this. Where am I spending my time? What am I doing? What's working, what's not working? And then I've also walked through like what each stage of the sales funnel is and what the big things are that you need for those stages. To help you identify the gaps in your marketing so that you can prepare and address the gaps that you have so that you're ready to focus on more and grow and scale. I've also, um, addressed a little bit about like. When do you scale with ads and you know, how do you kind of start to figure that out? Because I know that's a big question a lot of people have, and I see people try to move to ads too soon and that's why they end up wasting a lot of money. Ads are expensive and you've got to know that you. Um, you're converting organically before you invest in ads or you will just waste money, and I don't want you to do that. So get that opt-in, that new marketing checkup. If you wanna start working on this right away, you'd like to work on it. One-on-one. You want to have this, like have me guide you through it done with you. You can check with me and see if there are any spots open in Elite Marketing Coaching. As you know, I batch my content, so as of today when I'm recording, yes, there's one spot. I don't know if that spot will be available by the time that this comes out, so just. Shoot me an email. You're gonna get an email from me each week. Just reply back and ask, Hey Rachel, do you have a spot? If not, you can get on the wait list for the next spot that opens. We can work on this together. Otherwise, in January is the plan. There will be a new program coming out. It will be a six month cohort program as well, like simple SEO content, where we're going to focus on your marketing, not just one channel, but all channels. We're gonna make sure that you have everything set up so that you are ready to scale with ads, if that's what you want. But we're gonna make sure your sales funnel is working. You've got the right opt-in, you're getting the right people into the world, you've got the right, um, SEO, you've got the right content on your site. All of that to really make sure your messaging is good, everything so that your business can grow. I really want to help you grow your business and I am excited to share more with you. You may not know, but I'm actually. As you listen to this podcast episode, I should be in Nashville. I'm traveling to Nashville this week to meet with my mastermind in person, to work on some of these changes that we're making to the business and some of this exciting stuff. We'll be coming out for you in Q1 of 2026. Can you believe we're even starting to talk about Q1 of 26? Oh my gosh. So I am excited. I will be back in Tucson at the end of the week, but I'm spending a couple days in Nashville. I'm actually on an airplane this morning, headed there by the time you're listening to this. Alright, I will see you back here next week. I just wanted to get you started thinking about like, is your marketing working? Are you wasting time? Are you wasting money if you don't yet know, like how your um, or.