Maven Marketing with Brandon Welch

Frustrated with Advertising? Take it Back to These Basics

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If advertising has started to feel frustrating, expensive, or harder than it should be, this episode is your reset.

In this Maven Monday conversation, Brandon Welch takes marketing back to the basics that actually drive growth: becoming known, liked, and trusted in your market. Not trends. Not hacks. Not chasing the next platform. Just the fundamentals that make people think of you first when it’s time to buy.

He breaks down why strong brands feel “easier” to grow, why everything gets more profitable once trust is established, and how businesses lose momentum when they abandon the basics too early.

If you’re tired of guessing, switching, or feeling like your ads should be working better than they are, this episode will help you refocus on what actually moves the needle.

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Host: Brandon Welch
Executive Producer: Carter Breaux
Audio/Video Producer: Nate the Camera Guy

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Brandon Welch:

You need to have a persona that repeats over and over and over, and you need to let people see you as the real human being with mission, with vulnerability, and with surprise that they didn't expect from somebody in your category. And if you do that, you could have a tenth of the budget and move 20 times the mountains. Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I'm your host, Brandon Welch, and today it's just me and you. Hey, we're taking a fresh look at the best principles, the things that have worked for me and our clients over and over and over when it comes to growing a company. And if you have a company, a service company, or uh any sort of company in small business America doing less than$100 million, we say, uh, qualifies you as a small business. Um you have found already, or you're going to find at some point, that marketing is just frustrating. And so uh this is um the place where we help you eliminate that frustration in marketing. We eliminate that waste. We help you grow your business. We show up here every single week. It is something we are just unreasonably excited about is to help owner operators like you or the people that you are working for grow that business, get a little more with a little less. And we do it because we believe small business can change America. We believe that the big dream, the things that we all want, more freedom, more abundance, the ability to give to our communities, the ability to raise good families, we believe small business is one of the most powerful forces that will ever exist in the pursuit of that. And so today we are taking it back to the basics. And this is a presentation I've given hundreds of times just to like an entry-level approach to marketing. But it turns out that the basics are always also some of the most advanced things we can do. And so if you have found yourself frustrated with advertising or marketing, we're gonna talk really quick about why that fails. Have you ever spent big money? Have you ever spent big time? Have you ever fought for an idea? Have you ever lost sleep or gotten really excited about something that you were sure was gonna work, and then it just didn't? A lot of those conversations start with the idea that, oh, there's this shiny new platform, or maybe, maybe it's TikTok, or maybe it's a new form of Instagram reel, or maybe, maybe it's something off the wall, some gorilla marketing tactic, and we just get really excited because we either see somebody else doing it, or very often it's brought to us by a person whose job it is to kind of sell us that advertising or get us excited about an idea. And there's nothing wrong with that. The excitement of marketing is one of the great parts about it. And there, there's a lot of good things that can come from that. But we tend to rally around this idea that it's like we just have to get on the right platform, or we have to do some sort of catchy ad, we have to make some sort of perfect targeting, you know, errand to reach the perfect person. And really, that fundamentally skips us past the most important thing about marketing. The only thing that really matters is did we connect with a human and convince them that we can make their life better? Did we connect with a human and convince them that we have a better life for them? And a lot of the noise and the excitement and the hyper activity around technology and marketing really just skips us past this fundamental check, this blind spot that we sometimes miss. And a lot of the exciting things, a lot of the flashy things get in the way of the important things. And so um over the last 20 years or so, um, I have been on a quest to fix what we call that broken system of advertising. Um, and there's there's an order of operations that we found, first of all, after I uh learned this in my own family's business. Uh, we spent a lot of money on things that didn't work. Um, and we spent a lot of money on things that didn't work at a really critical time. And it actually led to our business going bankrupt and uh my family losing virtually everything that we'd we had built. And we were trusting advertising and marketing and all of these we'll call them fancy ideas uh to sort of get us through. And um about five years ago, I put this into a book known as the Maven Marketer. Uh at that point, it was um just the years of trial and error I had experienced um as both a business owner, um, as somebody who was in the in the um the industry of selling uh various types of advertising, and then eventually somebody who became the consultant after I figured out actually what finally works, what helps uh actually move the needle. And at the time um there was well over$10 million spent in other people's money to learn these principles. Uh so if you've ever spent thousands or hundreds of thousands and you're you're still struggling, it's like, well, we've spent millions learning this stuff. Uh, and today that's well over a hundred million um in and just like learned lessons. And I don't say that as uh as a mark of like flexing in any way. It's just saying it makes a whole lot more sense to learn with other people's money. And um we have done that. Uh, we have gone through that heartache. And there's there's been well over a thousand companies we've consulted or worked with one-on-one behind what I want to share with you today. And so the biggest thing I want uh I would have for you is that observation on marketing as a whole, this this happens especially with with smaller companies because you are an expert. You know what you do really well, you probably do it a certain way. There's probably a really good reason you do it a certain way. And everything you've ever done is probably built on that assumption that we're doing it better or we're doing it a certain way for a certain type of person. And so the the temptation is to think that, wow, people just need to know about what I do and how I do it. And we put that in the category, and this is one of the biggest mistakes, we talk to people like assuming they need to be informed, assuming that they need to know about all of the years you've been in business, assuming they need to know about your certifications and all of those things, about the about the granular features of your product. Those do have a time and a place in the marketing equation, but generally we over-emphasize those. What really we miss out on is our biggest mission, which is to inspire people. It's to inspire them with the better life that we can offer them. And so we tend to think that everybody is in the certain everybody that hears the ad wants to hear it. They're ready to hear it. They've been waiting for somebody to just hear about um, you know, our professional certifications and and you know the unique features about what we do. But the truth is most customers are not in that mode. Most customers were not waiting for that. And therefore, because we all live busy lives and the average American sees well over 5,000 marketing messages per day, they're never or they're very seldom in the right mode to hear information. Matter of fact, we believe there are three different types of customers. This is foundational to our method. There is the today customer, the tomorrow customer, and the yesterday customer. The today customer, of course, is the person who is on the loose. They're looking for something. They either entered the market suddenly because something broke, a life event happened, or they just finally had the money or had the time or had the seasonality to their life that it's like it's time for them to make this big purchase, or they got inspired by something else that moved them into the category faster than they would have. But right now, they are actually, they've committed themselves to buying and making a decision. That's the today customer. And the thing that we need to know about every one of these customers is it takes a different strategy, a different message, and a different type of media to reach them effectively and to win them over effectively. The way the today customer buys is fundamentally different than the way a yesterday customer buys or a tomorrow customer buys. Yesterday customer is the one who's probably already bought from you or they've made some sort of engagement with you. They may buy again, but in a lot of categories they have no reason to buy again. But if we do a good job connecting with them, giving them tribal bond, added value, and support, they will bring their friends and family back. And just by staying in their life and reminding them of the relationship that we're happy with, they will come back. And then there's the third type of customer, which is the tomorrow customer. This is the person who isn't buying. There's nothing you could do to make them buy a refrigerator or a set of tires or a new HVAC unit or an attorney or switch doctors or buy a piece of jewelry today, because in their life and their own continuum of what they perceive to be valuable or necessary to them, they're just not in the market. However, if we do a good job building a relationship with them, speaking about what we do as a future hope or a dream for them, or a future peace that they can have by by talking about a certain quality about the way we do things, and then giving them a commitment by showing them, showing up for them every day and making an unmistakable vow to them, then we can win them over long before our competitors. And every week that the earth moves around the sun, there's a different set of people that enter the market for what you do. And you basically have one of two options. You can wait until they enter the market, and you can you can try to compete with them at a very, very noisy finish line and a very, very expensive finish line, which is search engines and sometimes directories, and sometimes, you know, really wild promotions, and there's a time and a place for that. Or you can appeal to them long before they ever need you, so that when they enter that moment of what you do, they think of you first, they like you, they trust you, they they've known you for a period of time, not unlike a friend. And so that's what we call the tomorrow customer. The important thing to back out and remember is when you are trying to grow a business, there are three different types of customers you need to speak to. The most profitable marketing plans speak to each of them. So after serving thousands of companies, spending millions of dollars on marketing, literally every form of media tested. Uh, we have we have done everything from newspapers, TVs, radios, billboard, flyers, direct mail, all of the shiny OT, super targeted, super fancy geofencing digital stuff. It's it's literally we've spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on all of that stuff. And people always want to know which one works best, which companies grow the fastest. My answer is always the same. The companies who become known, liked, and trusted before the sale. Before the sale. And that really isn't a media equation near as much as it is a mindset and a commitment to be bigger than today's transaction. And that sounds really good. We all think we want that, but there it turns out there's a little bit of pain to get that gain. The way we really put that in our system is we say companies who focus on the tomorrow customer work and grow the fastest. They are the ones who position themselves to get the most amount of market share, the most amount of profitability. And things, after a certain period of time, just become remarkably easier for growth. And so there are three tactics to earning that tomorrow customer, to becoming known, liked, and trusted. And we're going to go over those today. The first is that we're going to talk to one person at a time. That's a very counterintuitive principle. People always look at me a little funny when I say you just want to talk to one person at a time. Um we're going to talk about what that means. The second is we want to be a consistent personality. And the third is that we want to show up daily in the lives of as many people as we can afford to show up in. We want to talk to one person, be a consistent personality, and show up daily. Let's talk about talking to one person. And you're thinking, I can talk to one person with a sales team, or I can talk to 50 people a day with a sales team. Imagine that you're in a coffee shop and you're sitting by yourself and there's a table behind you, you can't even see these people. But you know for sure they're not they're not friends, they're not acquaintances, they're just strangers. And they you hear one of them say something like, and then I told her, and you wouldn't believe what she said back to me. Okay, right there, you know there's never an appropriate time. This is this conversation never has been and never will be for you, but you cannot help but listen into that conversation because the the interesting thing about real dialogue, when when we write or speak in second person, as if we are talking directly to a person, it turns out that everybody will listen. This is a phenomenon known as the eavesdropper effect. We are very wired to listen to things in second person, even if they aren't about us. And um when we say talk to one person in your advertising and marketing, what what often happens is the opposite of that. It's ad speak. We we go to spend this money or we go to spend this time or we go to be creative in our messaging, and we think, well, I have to talk to everybody. I don't want to leave somebody out because I need all the people to think highly of me. And in doing so, we start saying things like, offering estate planning services for families in the Ozarks. And what happens in that moment is that this magic thing that happens in the brain when we know there's real dialogue happening, it dissolves. We don't hear it. Nobody hears it. Um if you were trying to actively listen to it, I suppose you might hear it, but but it doesn't it doesn't jolt anybody out of their previous attention. And when we say passive statements like offering us state planning services, what we want to do instead is say, don't burden your family with a mess. Click here to schedule a free state planning consultation. Now, the person who doesn't even have a family, the person who doesn't even really know exactly what we're talking about or hadn't even considered that they might need an estate plan, they actually are way more likely to hear this because we're spiring a bullet in the direction of every person instead of a shotgun that just happens to reach random people. We're saying, don't burden your family, and that's that's jolting. That's second person persuasive. The key word there was you or your. That's what makes it second person. Here's another example of ad speak. When you start writing to everybody, you start saying things like 108 years of combined experience and vision care. You know the owners are going to like that statement because they're gonna think, yeah, we've earned this. We are we're we're a big deal. You know, every every stakeholder will love these phrases. And maybe you are a stakeholder who's written some of these phrases. And it's not that they aren't it's not that this isn't true, it's not that this doesn't matter at some point in telling your company story. It's just that you are answering a question that nobody else was asking in this moment. When you're trying to reach the masses, when you're trying to become a friend, when you're trying to earn the attention of a lot of people at once who aren't in the mode of buying, what you want to do instead, instead of seeing that 108 years of combined experience, we you want to say, see every moment of your daughter's wedding in perfect detail. Now, at least half the population doesn't even have a daughter, but the uh the other half that that doesn't have the have a daughter heard this. They knew exactly what we meant. They knew that this just by this one statement, uh, we are standing for high quality life experience through your eyes. And that this is from a a campaign that we actually brought to life. And every other doctor, probably in every other town, is talking about their years of experience and you know how they have a large selection of frames and contact lenses and really smart doctors, and it's like, yeah, you and everybody else. And so you have to make it about them. You have to make it not just not just uh a benefit, that's that's better than a feature, a benefit's better than a feature, but you have to actually literally have the courage to say, Hey Slick, I'm talking to you. And even if you're not this person, you know what I'm saying when I'm talking about this. Let's look at another one. If you're in home improv home improvement, you might say ad speak would sound like offering energy efficient windows and doors for maximum beauty and savings. Offering anytime you put an ING after uh after a verb, it's probably you've probably like moved it towards the direction of passive. Instead, you want to say statements like this You know what? You should never be cold in your own living room. And everybody knew what we meant. We're standing for something. This is second person persuasive. We're talking to one person, I'm writing this as if I'm giving a one-way monologue, pleading for this person's attention, pleading for this person's better life that I want to offer them. And so that's what you want to do with all of your advertising statements. Another one we've said in a campaign like that is you know what, you don't have to keep donating to the utility company. And everybody else would say, you know, maximum energy efficiency and savings, and we're like, you don't have to keep donating to the utility company. It's jolting. So that's what you want to do. You can make your home more beautiful and more efficient with one simple improvement. Everybody's listening to that. Click here to get your price on replacement windows. So that's talking to one person at a time. Um if you just wire your messaging to do that, and when you sit down to write your ads, or you hire somebody to write your ads, uh, which is a very, very over overlooked part of the process of who who is writing who who is loading the gun. Um and and how precise is that ammunition? The ammunition is your words. And so you want to write to one person, you want to imagine when you're when you're putting this message out to masses that there's actually just one person on the other side of the lens of that camera or on the other side of the microphone. And in doing so, you will actually attract and get the attention of thousands at a time.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. We talked about the second thing, building a persona.

Brandon Welch:

Most people go to advertise and they think, okay, I'm going to advertise. Advertise equals more business. And then they think, okay, well, what do I want to talk about right now? And that is usually the start and finish to the errand of that advertising shoot or that radio recording or that graphic piece that you put out, or that direct mail piece. And that can work. Some categories are not competitive enough that that you know, there's just enough people buying right now that that can work. If you just talk about the offer or the product, even if you do it poorly, it can work. But what if you could make it work way better? What if every ad you ran made your company stronger? This is what we talk about building a persona. It turns out, neurologically speaking, psychologically speaking, how we make emotional connections is no different for people than it is for companies. Brands are just like people. Brands are really just a collection of sights, sounds, smells, and feelings we get for a person, place, or thing. A brand can be encapsulated by a really good customer experience, like a really good retail experience. I'm thinking Apple. I'm thinking when I walk into a Trader Joe's, that's a very big part of their brand. It's sight, sounds, smells, and even feelings. It can be Chick-fil-A and how they greet us and can be the taste of that of that product. But for most small companies, and especially if you're in the service business, you don't often have the advantage of that tangible experience before the customer comes to you. So the best plan is to build a persona. The best plan is to build an attitude and a and a personality that just becomes attractive. Just like a good friend, just like a uh a celebrity, just like a Hollywood character. You want to use that technology, the way that we write. really memorable, legendary characters, and you want to put your business inside that. So the way that we do that is that we pick three to four defining characteristics of your brand. And you want to reduce it to three or four like repeatable, noticeable things that that get built on over time. If I asked you to tell me about your wife, tell me about that person, or tell me about your best friend, or tell me about your grandma, there are a few key key things that would come to mind immediately. It would either be their sense of humor, it might be their compassion, it might be a part of their lifestyle, like what they do that's kind of fun and interesting. It might be their hobbies. It might be what a good mom they are. But you would, you would, on any given day of the year, you would come up with the same three or four things that stick out. Now, you have the advantage with most of those people of spending a lot, a lot, a lot of time with them. And advertising, we don't have a lot of time. So we can't we can't let those obvious things permeate over time. We have to we have to define them so that we say every time somebody experiences us through a one-way communication via an ad or a social post or a graphic, every time we do that, we need the same sorts of things to be obvious and repetitive so that they get a sense of who we are. They get a feeling they get a a comfort they get a predictability with what they can count on us being like. And so we define that through a process called character diamonds. And this is this is used at the highest levels of Hollywood all of the the magnetic characters and books and and and TV shows and movies that you have come to know and love use this exact framework. I'm going to give you a quick example that everybody would know. Let's take Michael Scott from the office. Now the three or four things you you do that you define for your brand they need to be divergent. They need to have some element of it it fits but it doesn't belong sort of thing. So Michael Scott is a boss he wears a suit every day. He is obviously running an office he has 20 or 30 employees and then every episode we find out pretty quickly that he's unprofessional inappropriate and that is what keeps us waiting to see what's going to happen next. If we showed him being a boss doing boss proper business things that would not be a show that would be a PBS documentary that nobody wants to watch. But he's a boss and he's incompetent. So you need to find this element of divergence inside your company inside the characteristics of your brand you need to be the obvious thing which is what you do the lawyer the attorney the doctor and then you need to disrupt that with some element of humor some element of emotion uh some element maybe even of of um of a little bit of quirkiness okay we'll get we'll give you some examples of that in just a second. So the the the framework how this works is you take the obvious thing people see you as that's one of your characteristics. The second one we call this the South Star. North Star is what people see you as South Star is the surprising thing they didn't see coming. Then on the left if you're looking at the screen here what makes you human and real that's your vulnerability. Every brand needs to have a vulnerability. You need to have an origin story something sad or something convicting or something that is makes you just a little bit broken. Makes you just a little bit like real, okay? People do not like squeaky clean perfectionist people. Those are not people we want to connect with and then the West Star your fourth characteristic is the cause your vision your passion your why why you're doing this give you some practical examples. Okay Frank and Maven you you know us by now we are advertising people that's our first characteristic people see us yep those are advertising people we look like advertising people advertising is on our website we have a podcast about advertising we have a book about advertising no mistaking we're advertising people what you'll find out pretty quickly if you spend time around us is that we're very skeptical of advertising. And that is divergent because most advertising people want to talk all about advertising and they want to pretend like it's going to save the world and we go, now we're pretty skeptical of it. Like any new and flashy ideas, we don't really fit that mold. And that comes from a deep origin story of the thing I shared with you at the beginning of this episode which is that I had a lot of flashy advertising shiny object type things early in my career and I realized that was actually leading people astray. So we're broken in that way. Therefore our vulnerability compared to a lot of advertising people is that we're not flashy. We don't talk about the shiny objects near as much we will use them we use tools we understand them I would argue better than anybody but we are not flashy. We are not we are not package selling slick talking marketing folk. We bring it down to the street level. So we're advertising people but we're skeptical of advertising we're not flashy and then our hill we're willing to die on our why our cause our vision is business owners confidently growing. Okay you know our company you can maybe see a little bit how this framework plays out let's talk about a roofer what do most roofers do the average roofer looks like a roofer they probably have something like Aardvark roofing in their name like roofing is literally in the name of their company and it's like okay I get it you're a roofer and you would imagine a roofer if it was a commercial or any part of their brand they would be standing in front of their truck that says Ardvark roofing on it, right? That would not be predictable. That's not divergent but this is what most average roofers do. They don't have a vulnerability because they're tough and they common common knowledge conventional wisdom says just be slick and polished so no vulnerability most companies don't have vulnerability in their ads and they make some sort of guarantee some low price guarantee and that's that's their that's the depth of their why let's look at what a what a very very fast growing successful roofer is doing in a very competitive market. Characteristic number one he's a roofer no doubt about it. Characteristic number two, we turned him into a fun cartoon. Now what does cartoons have anything to do with roofing? We make his vulnerability that he's a little bit goofy plays into the cartoon which every other roofer every other professional is going ooh I don't want to look that unprofessional and he actually this man who's running this company actually believes it is his mission that you can have a lifelong friendship with your roofer. You can have that level of trust that is his vision that is his cause he's going to do a great job on your roof. But the biggest thing is that he can be a community cause he can be a community connection he can be somebody you can count on. He can be a guy you can pick up the phone and say hey Joey he wants he and all of his people to live the cause that it is possible to to be a lifelong friend with your roofer it's not just some out of town Yahoo that nailed some asphalt to your house. There's a way they go about their business that builds friendships.

SPEAKER_04:

And so I'm going to show you what his ads look like well the weathermen have or the thunderstorms of help it's gonna be winning hell but you are gonna be some coming when the scum every professional cringes at that sort of advertising and they think but I want him to see me in my collared shirts and I want him to see me in my you know buttoned up hi I'm Tom with Tom's roofs and I promise that I will put a good roof on for you right here's the thing he he has tripled his business at a at a rate that would just blow your mind off of having the courage to break the mold of a roofer.

Brandon Welch:

Now you don't you don't have to do it as a cartoon that's just something we did with him we we chose that he could very easily be a roofer who is very very very serious and and poetic. Think of Tim the toolman Taylor when you had the divergence of Tim Tim Allen and then the neighbor who was poetic and like sophisticated you could do that. He could be unreasonably obsessed with quality or unreasonably obsessed with cleanliness you could do a lot of things that are divergent that would break the mold of the stereotypical blue collar roofer the point is pick something all the better if it's something that is already true but if if you're kind of boring be willing to admit it and then you're gonna need to fabricate something to make yourself a little more interesting. What are we doing? We're building a persona that everything about that jingle everything about the cartoons like it's a multi multi multi million dollar company and they are taking over their town like the market share they're stealing would would would be the envy of most roofers in America and that's what we're doing with stupid cartoons okay here's a different here's a different maybe a little bit different example so let's take a average jeweler what would an average jeweler look like it would be a jeweler they would probably be well dressed and you would go oh that's a jeweler and they're standing in front of a jewelry case no mistaking it's a jeweler. And then their second characteristic would be they're showing you fancy things, polished pictures and pretentious talk it would be every K jeweler commercial you've ever seen and they're saying here for all your jewelry needs. Did you know that jewelers sell rings necklaces and bracelets? That's that's the end that's the end of their their appeal most jewelers in America. Their humanness their vulnerability if they were even showing it but it would be staunch and snooty. They would they would look unapproachable by the way that they're talking by the by the millions of dollars in the shot that we can see with our own eyes and it's like ah they're a jeweler. And then they're most jewelers like the predictable thing is they just want to sell more jewelry. That would be their why we want to sell you jewelry let's talk about what a a well personed jeweler might do instead you would see a jeweler but how about we make him a real husband and wife my friend Randy has been in this business a long time he is unmistakably a world class jeweler. He has he has he has sold some of the biggest items of anybody I've ever met like in any category. He has sold a lot of jewelry but we never ever ever want people to see that or think that or even suspect that that's why he's on screen. So we make him a jeweler with his very beautiful authentic wife and they lead the spots and they talk like real husband and wife. Their vulnerability is they're actually not all that serious which you think well that's a little bit weak because I want my you know person selling me a$50,000 watch. I want him to be serious. Now at the business table of course there's there's professionalism and all the things you you need but they're they're not all that serious in their commercials that makes them likable approachable it was a really big advantage that this is who they are in real life we had the we had the the fortune of that they're just these really good people. And then the mountain they're dying on their their cause their celebration their why is that they are celebrating love. They're not celebrating jewelry very seldom will they even say come buy a piece of jewelry they're celebrating love. They're letting you make the conclusion let's look at the campaign what that might look like.

SPEAKER_03:

Love is hard.

SPEAKER_02:

It's not easy to find there is no substitute though many will look for it. But when you do find it it deserves to be celebrated with something equally hard and not easy to find. Something that has no substitute and no shortcut. Natural forever diamonds are the perfect symbol for the promise you're about to make celebrate forever with a natural forever diamond from Mitcham Jewelers.

Brandon Welch:

Your jeweler for life okay we were talking about love we have real couples some just married some who are obviously you know 30 40 years married in the in the spot and they're not they're not talking about jewelry they they wrap it around a natural forever diamond but that's a that's a side mention.

SPEAKER_03:

Let's look at another commercial just when you weren't sure love was a thing he showed up when you got lost and didn't know your way home he showed up when you've had the worst of days and just need a hug he shows up steady patient always there and for the moments you're not around you can show up for him with a reminder he'll wear for the rest of his life show him what he means to you with a gift from Mitchum Jewelers.

Brandon Welch:

Okay we're talking about the man in your life right that's a it's not a common angle for jewelers anyway but it's about showing up it's about celebrating that uh the sanctity of that relationship and that special person.

SPEAKER_02:

One more who do you think's made the great who do you think's made the greatest catch of the season it's always game day at Mitchum Jewelers. Who do you think's made the greatest catch of the season this guy. Catches like that are worth celebrating. Remind her she's the catch of a lifetime and when it's time bring that magic day back to life with a gift from Mitchum Jewelers.

Brandon Welch:

Your jeweler for life Christy caught it the first time okay so what are we doing? We're making real people we're making you your brand a person they can put in a category of their mind that's predictable that's likable that's trustable that is as approachable as a as a real next door neighbor might be. And isn't that who we all want to do business with we don't ever want to be handled. We don't ever want to be prodded or sold or polished or overpushed and there's just something magic about when you see a goofball trying to catch a football on a screen and his wife's standing next to him and she's the one that catches it like just that that humor it's like these are your best friends these are the people you want to spend Friday night with okay and to some degree that's what you need to be doing with your brand some of you this will be a lot easier than others um if you are a if you are if you have the natural gift of comedy just let it shine. If you don't have the natural gift of comedy probably don't ever try to fake it because you will never be funny. Either find somebody who can write something funny that your otherwise not funny persona does and and that will work. Or take the the other emotions available to you. We believe you have to make somebody laugh, cry or get angry. Maybe you're just really really serious and really freaking good at what you do. Talk about why the way that you do what you do is so important and let some of your unbridled passion come out. That that would be that would be divergent. This is a really tough thing to teach on a podcast. I wanted to give you a couple of real demonstrations because the big idea is that you need to have a persona that repeats over and over and over and you need to let people see you as the real human being or even a slightly accentuated real human being with mission with vulnerability and with surprise that they didn't expect from somebody in your category and if you do that your ads you you could have a tenth of the budget and move 20 times the mountains with your ad compared to your competitors. So you want to build a persona here's the last thing this is actually the easiest thing. This is just a a product of a little bit of math and a little bit of strategy. We want to show up daily so what have we talked about we talked about talking to one person at a time being a real persona and now we're gonna show up daily and it turns out that if we're talking to people like real people and we let us see them as real people and then we just show up daily that's exactly what marriages and the best of friendships and the best of relationships on planet earth are made of so what does showing up daily look like this is where you're gonna buy your media in a very specific way. The media industry in America is frankly not set up to serve you. The media industry in America wants to sell as many dude ads and make their bottom line look diversified for their stakeholders and this is true for TV station owners, radio station owners this is definitely true for any digital platform. Every that's just the way of investment, the way of progress and the American investment economy is that they want to see multiple revenue streams with multiple recurring revenues tied to them. And what that produces even for very well meaning advertising teams and even for very well-meaning sales managers and some of the people who are my dearest friends in this industry it means that they're incentivized to bring you a plan that is probably fancier and more fragmented than what will actually work best like the temptation to be on a bunch of different TV stations at once or be on a bunch of different radio stations at once or be on two weeks on this station and two weeks on this station and it's sold or it's it's proposed as as you're being everywhere. And a major failure of media schedules in America is that you're trying to be too many places without enough frequency. You're trying to talk to too many people too few of times and you are way better off. This is why we say show up daily if you had an unlimited budget it would be easy to show up daily to everybody and and the biggest biggest biggest brands and maybe even a couple in your market think of the mega advertisers in and in most medium sized markets that's a that's a that's a 700 to 7000 to a million dollar budget to do that. To do that well even in a medium sized market I'm talking about a population of of a Midwest town with a million people in it you would have to have a million dollar budget to do more than a couple of things really well. If you're not at that mark or even if you are what you want to do first is fill up one audience at a time the magic of broadcast which we talk a lot about on this uh podcast is that still today and especially for the population that is 35 plus there is still there are still sizable audiences that during the week or during every day they they tune into the same news station they tune into the same syndicated repeating programs that happen every day. And as long as that's true in American media and it is changing but it is still true the airing of this podcast in 2026 you want to show up you want to buy a news program or you'll laugh but but a a wheel of fortune or or some sort of program that's on every day that's in tune with the average family and the average person in America. And you want to buy that program a minimum of three times per week before you spend a dollar on anything else, fill that one audience at least three times. We like to do it four or five times a week and then we add our next program. But if you do it just a minimum of three times per week 52 weeks a year that's that's sort of the equivalent of showing up daily or showing up enough times in a week that the audience has a perception of they've seen you daily it would be even better if you were doing it five days a week and then the weekends you can do something else or take off. But you want to do that 52 weeks a year. That's what allows your message to snowball and every single experience Exposure, as long as you're doing those other two things well, makes your brand and your company stronger. You're winning people over long before they need you. If you're doing radio, the current math we like is that you need to run a minimum of 30 spots a week between the hours of 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. That will get you somewhere between a three and a four frequency on the average radio station in America. If you're on a talk format, you can get away with more like 20 to 25 spots because people listen for longer periods of time. But if you're on rock or country or any of the other formats, you need that. You need 30 spots a week between the hours of 6 a.m. and 7p. And what that will equate to is that the average person hears your ads three to four times a week. What are we doing? We're showing up daily. We want to do that 52 weeks a year. People ask, what about Christmas? I'm slow at Christmas. Do it anyway. What about Fourth of July? People aren't doing anything fourth of July. Do it anyway. When people sleep for long periods of time without hearing your message, you lose that snowball effect. And the best thing you can do to keep building a snowball is to keep rolling it across the snow. The snow is your customer's mind and their attention. If you are doing a if you're building a business all on social media, um we want to see you have at least eight to twelve frequency per ad per month. And there's a little bit of trial and error to figure out what that's going to be. Facebook will help you project it, but but essentially you want you want to choke that audience down in geography small enough to fit your budget. And if and if you can't get this much frequency with a budget with the money you're willing to spend, you need to buy a smaller audience. You need to either reduce your radius down on digital media, or if you're talking about broadcast, you need to buy cheaper programs. Just ensure that they have a good track record of people showing up every day. These aren't like specials. Don't buy primetime, uh, don't buy sports until you've done all this other stuff we've talked about for a couple of years. You want to buy audiences that repeat daily. So that's the principle. Every given market will have a slightly different way to achieve that. We've done a lot of other episodes on how to buy media well. This would apply to billboards by saying pick a billboard in a location and leave it there. You might change your billboard up, but don't move it around town like a lot of billboard companies try to get you to do. You're way better off to have your ads in two to three places. Do one thing really well. Fill one glass at a time. That's a core value here. Fill one glass at a time. Make sure that audience, if you're selling jewelry, make sure that audience, the next time a birthday or anniversary rolls around, you're like, it may only be 15,000 people that are coming back to this media every day, but dad gummit, those 15,000 people are gonna think of me first. They're gonna like me better. They're gonna instantly want to do business with me first instead of going to a stupid search engine and having to look at me and all of my competitors at one place and choose us based on who happened to answer the phone the fastest or who happened to have the most amount of five-star reviews, which is a thing. Those things are important. But if you will spend 70% of your time and effort on showing up daily, being a solid personality, and talking to people like they're a real person instead of ad speak, you will win. And the other 30% of your budget can be spent on those transactional things, those sales. But if you are doing these three things well, show up daily. Be a real person. Talk to people like they're sitting right across the table from you. You will build an ad campaign that will be extremely hard to compete with, and you will rise to the top of your category. You will still market share, you will be more profitable, and you will build that big dream that we always talk about on the Maven Marketing Podcast. We're so glad you're here. In review, talk to one person at a time, be a consistent person persona, personality, show up daily. When in doubt, when you're frustrated with your marketing, have the courage to simplify it in this way. And we promise, we promise that's going to be a better path to success. We would love to help you. We love having you as a listener. Thank you so much for being here. Like and subscribe, tag somebody who you know is frustrated with their marketing right now. And if you want to go a little bit deeper, we would love to take your exact campaigns, your exact market, the things you are facing in your business. And we'd love to workshop them with you. We have the Maven Marketing Podcast. You can join that at MavenMethodtraining.com and jump in. That's Caleb and I. That's many members of our team. You get you get access to our our best advice personalized for your business and and our clients that work with us directly. They spend many, many, many thousands of dollars every month to do that when we're doing it for them. But we'll we will at least give you our best shot at it on the mastermind episodes, which are they're just a little bit of money. That's all we ask. We're just paying for our time and the technology and the people to help support that. It's not a moneymaker for us, it's part of our mission to help you eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business, and achieve that big dream. And that's why we're back here every Monday. That's why we'll always be back here every Monday, answering your real life marketing questions because marketers who can't teach you why are probably just a fancy lie. Have a great week.