How to Stop Wasting Time on Marketing Channels That Don't Work. Ep. 158

If you're trying to market your business, you're probably focusing on multiple channels and may not know what's working and what's not working when it comes to marketing your business. It can be so frustrating for entrepreneurs who want to grow but don't understand where to find the answers as to what to focus on for marketing. 

Join me in today's episode, and I'll share how you can start to unravel your marketing and understand what's working, what's not, and why it matters. If you've ever struggled with your marketing and wondered if you were wasting your time on a specific marketing channel, today's episode will help you start to understand. 

Transcript

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Hi there. So I had the most amazing conversation with a new client the other day. He's in the one-on-one marketing coaching, the elite marketing coaching program, and we're working on really figuring out what's working from a marketing perspective and what's not, where the gaps are in his funnel so that we can really increase the. Response rate and increase the conversions and really increase honestly, the amount of money that he's making, the number of leads, the number of clients, all of that. And I thought that that might be really helpful for you as well, because I know you are also trying to build your business. You're also trying to increase your revenue and leads and all of that. So what we started talking about was his current marketing. In order to figure out if we are wasting time on our marketing efforts, the first thing we need to do is really. Focus in on a quick audit of our marketing. So what I had him do was just time track for a week. You don't have to do a full week. You can just think about it off the top of your head. But what I had him do was identify the marketing channels that he was using. So we looked at where are you marketing your business? So as you do this, you can jot down, are you on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn? Do you have a podcast? Do you have an email list? Are you running ads? Are you doing local marketing because you're in a local business? Did you join the Chamber? Are you in a networking group, et cetera. So jot down all the different places that you're marketing your business. Then you can either do time tracking for a week to really see exactly how many hours you're spending on things, or you can give yourself an estimate. I spend an hour on this, I spend two hours on that. Think about also like the amount of production time. So if you have a podcast or you have a YouTube channel, how many hours are you spending actually creating the content and editing and uploading all of that? If you are handing it off, you're paying someone to do it. Be sure and jot down how much money you're spending each month just so you kind of have an idea. If you're on Pinterest and you're pinning, you know, five pins a day, that's 150 pins a month. That's a lot of work. Somebody is either spending a lot of hours creating pins, optimizing'em, updating'em, uploading all of that, or they're spending a lot of money for a VA to do that. So keep track. Is it hours or is it dollars? So go through each marketing channel that you are using and jot down how many hours, and then also how much money you're spending. Now what I want you to look at is to see which channels are bringing your leads and your sales. If you're not yet tracking that, you need to start tracking your convers. So that you really understand moving forward and can answer the question of, am I wasting time spending 20 hours a week on Instagram? Am I getting anything out of Pinterest? Am I growing my YouTube channel? Am I growing the channel or am I actually growing my business with what I'm doing on the channel? So you're going to want to keep track of this and figure out how many leads are you getting, how many sales are you getting that's gonna help you start to get a baseline of like, what are you working on? The reason I have you look at the hours you're spending and also the dollars you're spending along with your leads and sales is because this is going to help you start to understand what your return on investment is. So let's say, this was not the client I was talking to, but it was a student. She had been focusing on Pinterest and she had hired a VA to do Pinterest for her, and she had put 90 days into it. She was doing five pins a day, so 150 pins a month, and the VA was, she was overseeing the strategy. She had taken the course, she understood what to do. She had the VA creating and optimizing and uploading all of the pins, but she was looking to make sure that they were optimized, they were done right, et cetera. So she had done 450 pins, and her Pinterest was growing. She was getting more visibility on Pinterest. She was seeing growth in her followers, all of that. So at first glance, it looked like Pinterest was working really well. What she had learned in her course was making a difference. She was growing her p. And I said, now I want you to look at your analytics. I want you to see of the people who are now following you on Pinterest, of the visibility that you've gotten on Pinterest, what has it translated to from a conversion standpoint? What have you gotten out of your Pinterest hours and effort and money? Because we remember she was paying someone to do it, so she went and she looked. She had had eight visits to her website from Pinterest in three months, so while her Pinterest looked like it was working. It was not sending traffic, it was not generating leads, and it was not generating sales. Those eight people who had visited her website from Pinterest had not opted in to any of her opt-ins, so they were not on her email list. They had not scheduled a consult. They had not purchased, so she had invested. In Pinterest, she had focused very heavily on it. Now, some people may say she's giving up on it too soon. She's not necessarily giving up on it. She's going to continue. And she told me, she said, I want to give one more chance. I wanna go back through it. I wanna see if I've missed something, because if I've missed something, I don't wanna end before I should. So she's agreed. You know, she's gonna go back for another 30 days, take a look at it and see is she missing something? If not, she said she's going to go ahead and make the decision because she's confident now that it's not working for her business. It's not to say that Pinterest doesn't work, but Pinterest doesn't work for every business. It's the same way with every marketing channel. So the way that you figure out how to. Stop wasting time on your marketing is by really understanding that the. Increases and the numbers and things like that on your social channels, your podcast downloads, your Facebook followers, Instagram followers, YouTube subscribers, those are basically vanity metrics. Sure, they're helpful. They help you understand how you're growing on that platform, but your job as a business owner. Is to generate leads and convert and make revenue for your business. That's the only way your business is gonna grow. If you don't generate leads and make sales, you will not have a business. You will have a hobby. And you're not building a hobby, you're building a business. So we need to look at where are we putting our time and where are the results coming from? Because very often we're trying to be on too many marketing channels and we're not getting. The results that we would want, but we maybe don't know how to look at them and see. So the new client he and I went through, he did his time tracking for the week. He realized where his time was going, and then he also looked at what he was paying for his VA because he did have somebody helping him with some of the social, which many entrepreneurs do because we all know social is a lot of work. He sat down and looked at it and he realized one channel in particular was working well, the others were not doing as much, so we talked about it. We decided that the focus would be to go all in on that one channel that was working really well and simply repurposed the content to the other channels where he wanted to continue to be visible. However, they were no longer going to be a high priority because they did not generate traffic and revenue. You can either do that and go all in on one. You can continue to support the other channels the way he decided he wanted to, at least for now. Or you can let those other channels go. So between you and I. My main channels for marketing are my blog or SEO for the website, for the visibility on Google and AI search and my podcast, because those are the two content formats, written and verbal, or potentially video, depending if you're. Listening, or if you're watching this on YouTube, those are the formats that work the best for me and my audience, and they give you the most benefit. They're also the formats that work the best for leads and sales for the business. And like I said. I'm a business owner the same as you are. We can't keep producing the content if we don't make the money to help offset the costs, right? It's just the way that it is. As a business, you have to make profit. You have to be able to sell products and services. Don't feel bad about that. That's a requirement of being a business owner, and I know it can feel weird and people don't like it sometimes, and you feel spammy selling. I'm the same way. I don't like the bro marketer tactics, which is why I don't use them, and you don't have to use them either, but I want you to really focus on what is working versus what is not working. Because when you can remove some of those marketing channels that are taking energy but are not producing results, you can open yourself up. To a couple of things. One is more focus on the channels that are working, which can allow you to create better content, to do better optimization. Maybe it's time to dig into SEO and understand how to get more visibility on Google AI and your podcast. Maybe it allows you to let go of a channel that you don't love. But you're on because people have told you you needed to be on it. Maybe like the student who realized she was spending thousands of dollars to be on Pinterest. She had spent over a thousand dollars in the last couple months to be on Pinterest, but she had gotten eight visits from her website. Well, she could have gotten eight visits from her website for free just by getting one blog post to pop up in Google just by creating a little bit of content. Honestly, she could probably get a lot more than eight visits from the right blog post. I know I do. She could get visits from chat, GPT or perplexity if she was optimizing for ai. Like there's a lot you can do. What I did when I ran the audit the last time I found, so I had tried Pinterest. Everybody kept saying, Rachel, you've gotta do Pinterest. It would be amazing for you. You have such a great background in SEO. It's SEO. And it was like, no, I don't know that it's gonna really translate for what I do. But I figured I'd give it a test. And so I did give it six months and I did build pretty good traffic and I followed the best practices and I did all of that. And I did build a decent sized Pinterest following. But when I looked at the analytics, the people who were finding me on Pinterest were not necessarily engaging with the website. I did have one opt-in that was working well on Pinterest. It was for our marketing planning template. It worked well. It got a lot of traffic. It got a lot of pins. However, the people who got that template were not interested in converting. They were interested in the free template, but they then kinda left the email list or they were on, but they weren't active. They didn't engage beyond getting that free template. So yes, it was getting traffic. Yes, they were coming to the site, but they were not making that third step of the funnel, which was the conversion. So I hope this helps you kind of understand how you figure out how, if you're spending time on the wrong marketing channels, what you can look at, do that time audit this week. Get a feel for where are you putting your marketing hours and dollars. And then look at where are the returns coming from? Because as long as you're tracking your leads and you understand what's coming organic, what's coming social, what's coming, podcast, et cetera, that's gonna really help you make decisions and be a more confident marketer. Speaking of Confident Marketer, I finally have the most amazing name. I know I've told you a little bit about. The group program coming in Q1, ideally Q1 of 2026. I don't have an exact launch date'cause I'm still developing everything, but it is the Confident Marketers Club and we are going to go through all this type stuff for your business and really make sure. You have the right opt-in, you're hitting the right conversion rates. You've got enough traffic and visibility like we're gonna look at every stage of the sales funnel and help you figure out what you need to focus on first, and then. As a group, we're gonna go through with me guiding you and making those changes. So you need traffic and visibility help. Great. We're gonna go over here From an SEO perspective, you have a podcast or you wanna launch a podcast, great. We're gonna get that focused. You have three opt-ins, but only one of them is working. Cool. Let's get rid of the two that aren't working and let's test something new for that other program. You have this happening in a conversion standpoint, you have this kind of conversion rate. Ooh, okay. That's not where we want it to be. Let's test something out on that page. Let's see if we can bump that conversion rate up. We're going to learn all about the metrics so that you understand and our confident in your marketing, so that you are ready to grow and scale and build that profitable business. You wanna start doing Facebook ads, but you're terrified. We can work on that. Like this is gonna be the most amazing group. I'm having so much fun doing the research and planning it out and figuring it out. It's gonna be a six month cohort. Cannot wait. If you're interested, I have a marketing sales funnel audit. It is a brand new freebie. I'll put it on the freebies tab at the website. Download a copy of that. It's going to walk you through what is in your marketing sales funnel, what the different steps are, so traffic leads, conversion, and metrics. And it's gonna ask you a set of questions about each one, and you're gonna just mark'em down. And then you're going to identify which area you need to focus on the most. Like it explains what each area is about, how it impacts your business, why it matters. Then it goes into helping you understand from a prioritization standpoint where to start. It even gives you a few tips based on what you need. If you need traffic and visibility, this podcast episode will help you If you need an opt-in, you don't know how to create one. This will help you. If you don't know. If your opt-in is working, try this one. If you don't understand if your website is helping or hurting you, come on over here. So you're gonna get a lot of information that's gonna help you understand where you're at and what you need to focus on from a marketing perspective. So I'm so excited about this. Download that copy. Then you'll be on the first to know when the Confident Marketers Club opens up in Q1. Like I said, it is gonna be amazing. I am. So excited. I have created it based on the feedback from my current students and my clients and you. So let me know what questions you have about marketing, what you wanna learn. I am so excited to help you with this and cannot wait to introduce it to you and get to know you inside the Confident Marketers Club when you're ready. All right, I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.