084: Marketing Isn't Your Problem, It’s Just Your Most Obvious Problem

I could be marketing-rich or I could tell you the truth. Yes, marketing is needed, it just might not be the priority right now. Growing your business requires much more than more clients and customers.

In this episode by listening [and taking notes], you’ll learn:

• The more strategic shifts that will get you far better results
• Why your business model, offer, pricing (and more) needs attention, first
• How fixing your foundation will equate to better ROI from your marketing

Enjoy!

Resources:

• Website
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• Facebook Group
• LinkedIn 
• Instagram

If you’d like to work together with me as your 1:1 business and marketing consultant, book a call here.

Transcript

To market or not to market

Five areas to review and improve

Book your complimentary consultation

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Have you noticed so much business and marketing content out there is so abstract and airy fairy? Like what they're saying sounds good, but what do you actually need to do? That's where the Good Marketing Good Business Podcast comes in. This is where I share practical strategies to help you grow your service-based business. And in case we haven't met yet, I'm Shannon Stone, award-winning business and marketing consultant, and for the last decade or so, I've been diving in deep with small business owners, helping them to make more sales and get more done in less time. And today's episode is no different. Enjoy. Hey guys, welcome to the podcast. I'm really excited to jump in and share this episode with you. Today we are talking about the fact that marketing isn't your problem, it's just your most obvious problem. It's a really big one. Hopefully, we can change your perspective on this to help you save time, save money, and then also make more money and create more time without wasting a lot of it. So if that is for you, this episode is definitely for you. Really excited to jump into it. Just very briefly, it has been a little while since I've been here on the podcast, and actually I had taken some time off business. If you and I are connected on social media or you're on my email newsletter as well, I very briefly shared, I guess, my experience of late and yeah, the reasons why I took time off business, which was for the reason that my partner had passed away from cancer and I was caring for him through that journey as well. So it's been a very difficult couple of months, but also a couple of years as well, as it obviously extended beyond that. So yeah, I I very intentionally took that time off, and as I felt ready, I started to return back to clients and bit by bit, you know, started to put the other wheels back on. And the podcast is one of those as well, which I'm really glad and excited about because I've always loved the podcast, and but it's one of those, like you can't for me anyway, like you cannot fake it. So now that I'm ready to jump back into this part of it, yeah, I'm really, really glad. So hopefully you love this episode and the podcast as much as I love sharing it. If you have any questions or requests, always do reach out. But let's jump into today's episode. So marketing isn't your problem, it's just your most obvious problem. Now, if you know my history when it comes to marketing, I started as a marketing intern. I've also been a marketing manager, I've also run a marketing agency, I've done some marketing things in Klein. You know, I've really worked my way through the ranks as far as marketing goes. And that all brought me to what I do now, which is I'm a business growth consultant for service-based businesses with a very strong background in marketing. So I feel like you have to really have been in marketing to tell people to not start with marketing. And that was really my experience, particularly when I was in the agency, because we would have clients come to us and their goal was to make more sales, and the way to do that, they're you know, putting two and two together is well, if I want more clients and sales, then we need to do more marketing or better marketing, which has a lot of truth to it for sure. But there's actually what I would find is that marketing was a very surface level problem or surface level solution to the problems that were really under that. If you think of an iceberg, it was just the tip on the iceberg. So why I often see that people love to dive into marketing to help grow their business is because it's very tactile, it's very loud, it's very out there, and it makes them feel like they're doing something, they're spending or investing in something, or something is happening. It's very easy and it's almost like a disguise. Like it's very easy to make you think that things are happening or about to happen or going to happen, especially in this day and age where you get the stats and the data and the clicks and the impressions, all that type of information can really help you to feel like things are happening. But I always bring it back to, and I've got a really good example here of a business owner that I spoke to, and they were spending about$2,000 every quarter on a magazine ad. So every quarter they had an ad go into their industry magazine. And do you think it was working? It wasn't. As far as generating inquiries, generating leads, generating interest, when you really look at that side of it, it wasn't actually working. Now, what if someone spent that$2,000 on a Facebook ad, say, you know, that same frequency every quarter? You'd get other impressions. You get the impressions, you get the clicks, you might get some leads coming through. But at the end of the day, is any of this actually converting into clients and customers for you? That's really the bottom line, and that's where it really does come down to. We can really dive into, you know, there's that testing phase that any advertising needs to go through, or that marketing and that understanding phase and tweaking creatives, tweaking strategies, constantly refining it. Yes, all of that is relevant and is needed when it comes to marketing, but there is so much more. And when I go into a business who they all want to grow, marketing is often one of the last things we actually look at. Not always, but very often. So I'm gonna run you through some of the other areas that are probably much more louder of your attention, and these are screaming more red flags than your marketing, and they may not be the most obvious, but these are like those small tweaks that make the biggest difference. So we'll run through some of them now. So you've got your business model, a really big example of a tweak or a change to a business model is Blockbuster. You know, you could hire the the DVDs and the VCRs, I think it was. I am old enough to have had a VCR and the tapes. It was the tapes. So Blockbuster versus Netflix. Obviously, they're different companies, but that is a very radical change in the business model. Same solution in one way or another, entertainment, movies on some kind of source, but delivering it in a Blockbuster way versus a Netflix way, radical change in the business model. Now, for most of us, we are not these radical businesses. For service-based businesses, you're probably looking at business model changes, like going from charging by the hour to charging based on value and redesigning what that looks like. So an accountant, for example, is it that you're going to them for your Bass and your taxes, you know, a couple of times a year for a couple of hours every year, and you're just paying them for that little gig here and there? Or does that accountant change it and base it on the value and redesign the way that they structure their business? And maybe it's that they map things out with you over the course of a year and they see you every quarter and they actually talk to you about the different things going on and how they can optimize certain things, or how your tax structure, you know, all the different accounting, accounting type things. So your business model is one. Think about how that could be relevant to you and what you do. Now, this stuff, business model stuff, is less readily available for people to often do their own research, but it is out there. There's people doing what you do in different business models. So if you can explore what that looks like, that would be helpful. But, you know, people often go with the thing that gets the loudest attention, which is marketing. So you can easily find lots of marketing ideas, less business model ideas, but do have a look. Or we can talk about it some more at another time. Now, another great area to have a look at is your offer. So, what are you actually selling your offer or your service suite, your services? What does that actually look like? And these things do need to be reflected on and refined somewhat often, especially in this era of time where you've got AI coming in and all these other things. You really want to be looking at what is it that you're offering. If you do offer something in some kind of way where AI is maybe starting to pull, like take some of your clientele or slow down that customer journey, you need to really look and review your offer and your service suite and see what we can do to improve it to make sure it's still relevant for the people that we actually want to help. So let's not be ignorant, let's be realistic. And just side note, as you go, as we're going through these, think about okay, well, if I were to invest in marketing and I'm not making these changes, such as tweaks or changes to my business model, tweaks and changes to my offer. Imagine if I'm putting money, marketing money behind these things, where that's going to lead me. It can really often be like putting money down the drain because you've got these underlying issues that actually need faster attention than what you might have thought. So just keep that in mind as we go through. Just coming back to what we said at the start. I want to help you to save money, save time, but also make money, make more time. Okay, the next is your pricing. Now, pricing used to be, I swear, the the first and quickest change I would make to businesses. It would be looking at what is it that you're selling and how much are you selling it for, and does that suit the value? Does everything there line up? And if you are ready for a price increase, there's a lot of ways you can go about that, but I would always think, why would we market something that is underpriced? Like if you have a revenue goal, a profit goal, wouldn't you rather work with less people and make that X goal rather than more people? It just it never would make sense to me. Like, why would we market something that is underpriced? We do want to be considerate of our clientele and all those kind of things. All these factors you include in when deciding your pricing. But if it is underpriced, then that is one of the best ways that you can start to make some improvements when it comes to your business and your growth. Next one that I have for you is who you target. Now, this has to be, I say this about everything and every one of them, but it's a very strong lever to focus on, and that is who you target. For example, you could be a professional service provider, you could be someone who tints windows or um does something for you know everyday consumers, whether it's residential or commercial, you could go directly to the consumer and that's who you target. Or, which is my personal favorite, can you target the B2B services and have them as your customer? So if you target, for example, or if if you were that window tinter, for example, and you do residential houses, you do windows, any kind of windows, you're up there for tinting. Could you target real estates instead? Could you target commercial companies that have a range of different properties that need tinting? So you're the person that comes in. Could you target, what do you call them, like your GJ gardeners and your Metricon homes, like home builders and things like that? So that is switching from who you're targeting. That's like a really obvious but nice big change from targeting the consumer to targeting the business or going B2B. But who you target is one of the really big and intentional ways that you can really improve your business and improve the growth of your business in so many different ways. So think about that, who it is that you target. Okay, the last one that I'll share with you, there really are so many, but this one is around your systems. And I wanted to make sure I shared this with you because of one of the really obvious examples that I have for you. I had a client who, when she would work with someone and wasn't even completely through the entire delivery, but got through to the key, the first milestone in her service. There were 22 different steps that she had to go through just to get through to phase one being completed. This isn't even going into the full delivering the whole service. This is only partial. There were 22 steps required, and she was doing them all manually. And not only manually, they were all in her head, as any expert operator is. You know, you can just do your tasks, do your deliverables like the back of your hand, you know exactly what to do. But breaking it down and realizing how many steps are involved really should open up to you how you can create some systems around this. And systems can look like all sorts of different things. You can use some type of automation, you can delegate even some of it as well. Maybe someone can help to onboard the person or take care of some of the some of the things that are the highest and best use of your particular time. So adding systems to the whole spectrum of your business, but you can break it down to the various elements. So onboarding a client, that client delivery, offboarding that client as well, as well as your internal systems, what is taking up big chunks of time? Because time to a business really does equal money. And if you think about, okay, coming back to I want to market my business because we want more clients and more customers, do you really want to go through the 22 plus steps that are possibly unnecessary for you to do and for you versus someone else doing them? So getting the right pieces in place is really important. If it was automating it with a system or handing off even just a chunk of it to someone, this is what can help you to then eventually take on more clients and customers if that ends up being, you know, part of your plan. So some of these things, there are definitely more. I've really broken down like the end-to-end, like every little intricacy within a business that needs addressing, not just your marketing. So your business model, your offer, your pricing, who you target, your systems, hiring and delegating, all of these things are part of helping you to grow your business. And the best way that I find is to find the biggest bottleneck. What is really causing the biggest disruption and slowing that business down from growth. And to say it is just marketing is almost like a cop-out. It's like, yeah, no, not always. Maybe for some, but definitely not for everyone. And this is why I often see when you get, you know, you might buy a course or hear about one particular strategy, one cookie-cutter strategy, and it works for one person, but it doesn't work for the other person or the other business. It is often because it's these things that are underlying that are different between business A versus business B. So doing something the same as everyone else, you're not going to get the exact same results. We're often made to believe that, but it's definitely not true. And I don't need to convince you of that. You probably already know that, you've probably already experienced that. Okay, so I've shared with you a range of different solutions or possible solutions that you can have a look at before you look at your marketing, and hopefully you start to see that marketing isn't just your problem or your only problem, it's just your most obvious problem. But when we can really solve what's happening below the surface, it's like really strengthening that foundation. You may not even need to invest in marketing, or at least not in the way that you were thinking. It really might shift some of the approaches that you initially were thinking before we had this chat here today. So if you would love some of my help, the best way that I know to really figure out for you where to start is to do a personalized diagnostic where I audit where your business is currently at. And every single business is definitely different. Like I said, you can be given the exact same strategy, but is that going to work for you versus your neighboring business? Probably not. So I would love to invite you to book a complimentary consultation with me. It's my free gift to you. On that call, in that session, it goes for 60 minutes. We really clarify what your goals are, we really dive into what your business looks like. And just from that session alone, I can always start to see and give advice and direction on where you need to really address some things. Some are more urgent, more simple things that you can address, you know, today, this week. And then some of them might be a little bit more longer term and you know, really do need some more tailored refining and things like that. So if you would love to dive into it a little bit deeper, do book a consultation with me. The first one is absolutely free. That's my gift to you. The best way to book that in is to go to my website, so shannonstone.com.au, and you'll see a button on there to book your call. If you need any help, you're stuck on anything, definitely reach out. Love to be able to help you. And that's what I have for you today. If you have any questions, any requests, like I said, always do reach out. I hope you found this episode useful. And like I said, I'm back here on the podcast. Really excited to be sharing this all with you, and just excited to be back in business and like I mentioned, really putting the wheels back on, which never fell off. They were just kind of like in pause for a moment. So that's really nice too. Anyway, hope you have an amazing day, and I'll chat to you really soon. Hey, thanks for listening. If you found this episode useful, I'd love for you to send it to a friend. The best podcasts I have found have all been recommended to me. If you can spread the word by sharing this episode, I can spend more time helping you by creating episodes just like this one. Send it, text it, tell somebody about it, whatever you need to do. The more you spread the word, the more I can focus on creating needle moving episodes to help you and your friends.