Marketing - You've Got To Keep Banging The Drum

In this episode of the Stay Hungry Podcast, Joel and Martha dive into the critical importance of persistence and strategy in business growth. With a backdrop of recent speaking engagements and discussions about marketing, they explore the idea of "keeping the drum banging" - a metaphor for maintaining consistent efforts in lead generation, customer engagement, and brand visibility. 

Martha shares her insights from speaking on topics such as AI in marketing and the importance of building wealth and legacy beyond just financial means. They highlight the often-overlooked metrics that can make or break a business, including the critical timeline for converting prospects into loyal customers. The duo emphasizes that many entrepreneurs give up too soon, missing out on the potential of their marketing campaigns. 

This episode is a treasure trove of practical advice on marketing strategies, business integrity, and the power of mindset. They delve into how nurturing relationships with prospects is akin to fueling a car, without ongoing effort, you risk running out of momentum. Additionally, they touch on the significance of aligning business decisions with values and integrity, and how this approach not only enhances reputation but also leads to long-term success.

Key moments include:

- The significance of understanding customer conversion timelines and why many businesses fail to track them.
- Insights on the importance of consistent lead generation and the consequences of neglecting the top of the sales funnel.
- A discussion on the relationship between marketing strategy and customer needs, including the nuances between high-ticket and volume-based sales.
- The role of business integrity in client relationships and how transparency can build trust and long-term partnerships.
- The importance of visualization and intentionality in setting and achieving business goals.
- A personal commitment to team culture and the impact of positive energy on business performance.

Packed with actionable insights and thought-provoking discussions, this episode encourages business owners to embrace persistence, integrity, and a growth mindset. 

Tune in to learn how to keep your business thriving in a competitive landscape!

Links:

Website: https://www.codebreak.co.uk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codebreakcrew/
Facebook: https://facebook.com/codebreakcrew/

Joel's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joelstoneofficial/
Joel's Facebook: https://facebook.com/joelstoneofficial/

Free Marketing Budget Calculator: https://codebreak.outgrow.us/knowyournumbers

Arrange a call with Codebreak: https://form.jotform.com/241272835208051

Transcript

0:13

Martha we're back in the game. We're talking about how you've got to keep banging the drum. What the fuck does that mean? Does that have something to do with the drum? It might do but we won't reveal that yet How are you? I'm good. How are you? What's been going on? Everything I've been speaking in Scotland. I've been Booking speaking gigs at wedding conferences, which is a new one. Yeah Think I've got a speaking gig in Orlando might have one in Miami Available for bar mitzvahs Yeah It's yeah. Yeah heck tick. What are you speaking about? Well, you know marketing a bit of mindset. No, I am in Glasgow. I spoke about two different things AI in marketing and I spoke about wealth and legacy and about how Building your wealth creating a legacy isn't necessarily just about finances and how you compound Your efforts and how most people just Create some income spend that income recreate some income spend that income and actually there's a better way But that's not what we're here to talk about today. Okay, so We've talked about This sort of phrase before my mom famous said when the music stops people stop dancing you've got to keep banging the drum she didn't famously say that she said it to me on a car journey home on the phone once but I was like that's very profound. That is profound, it's on our wall. It is on our wall I might actually like whenever we get some of these finals redone in here have that as one of the things and then just have like Joel's mum as the name underneath. Superman's mum. I'm not Superman, I'm Batman. Superman's shit. I don't know anything about any men. Super or Bat? I don't know anything about any men. Super or Bat? Well Batman doesn't have superpowers and Superman does. But Batman is a bat? No, yeah he's just he's not a bat, there's nothing battered. It's not like Spider-Man been bitten by a spider and has the qualities of a spider. Batman fell in a well when he was a kid, was terrified by bats and then used that as his iconography to strike fear into his into the criminals of Gotham. So can he fly? No he can glide. In his suit? Yeah. But he doesn't grow wings? No. You know that? I don't know that. You're definitely playing stupid. I've never watched any of the Batmans. Superman, Spider-Man. Outrageous. Get the Robert Patterson Batman in you. Is it good? Someone told him he'd never ever make it as an actor. He's in some good films, Robert Pattinson. And some terrible ones. He just gets given a hard time because he was in Twilight. But that would be like hammering Daniel Radcliffe for being Harry Potter. But he was good in Harry Potter. Is Robert Pattinson not good in Twilight? No. He's good in everything else. But since he's playing a vampire with no emotion, it kind of... Yeah, it's a bit wooden. Yeah, yeah. Maybe he was playing it really well. Nailed it. Perfect casting. No, honestly, he is a great Batman. And I will fight people who tell me I'm wrong. Really? Because I think people pass judgement based on, oh, isn't that the guy from Twilight? But he's done a lot of really cool things since then. And, yeah, the Batman's sick. And the spin-off series Penguin's very good too. Anyway, speaking of which, they're very good at banging the drum. They bloody recycle superheroes and characters all the time. Bring people back to life. Yeah, exactly. But that's kind of the point I'm making, is that a lot of businesses, they don't know metrics that are really important to them, like how long it takes for a prospect to become a customer. And that could be time, it could be number of emails, number of text messages, how many calls. Why don't you know those things? In our business, at one point, it was 18 months from joining our database. to becoming a customer and now we've got that down to nine months but I meet so many businesses that give up on their marketing campaign at six months who charge a lot more than we do so they might never know if it was working or not. And actually this has recently happened with a client like if you stop filling the top of your funnel you will see it in the bottom of the funnel and you might think no I'm right I'm still making sales and I haven't been doing my lead gen and then you get three months down the line and it all dries up and you wonder. You're literally talking to someone at the moment who's going through that yeah and they've come crawling back like well we're not named names it's not like sounds really mean but it's a it's just like the maths of the game like you've got to put people in at the top and nurture them towards and touch point yeah and it's annoying and it's frustrating you have to keep doing it but it's akin to driving your car if you don't put petrol in the fucking car the car won't move and you have to pay for petrol you have to pay to fill the top and eventually the petrol runs out and you have to top it up again so and you won't see the ROI necessarily on the top of your funnel immediately yeah nine months especially if you're high ticket especially if you're high ticket because the distance from the top of your funnel to the bottom of your funnel is a lot longer high ticket. You can shorten that, speak from the stage, hence what I was just saying then, write a book, do a podcast, but writing books, speaking, driving around the world, well driving around the country, flying around the world, speaking on stages and recording an hour's worth of podcast every week takes up a lot of fucking time and effort. You can't be that business, it's like we've got leads, they're just not booking in our diary. It's like, that's not how it works. Like if it worked like that, anyone could do it. You've got to convince them and yeah, there are high demand things where they don't have to do this. Like electricians and plumbers, we mentioned quite a lot on this podcast but ultimately there's not enough of them to go round and there's so much work out there that they don't have to do this stuff. But if you want to become a high ticket electrician, you've got to build your reputation in installing control four panels or installing cinemas and building reputation takes effort and communication and branding and customer service and reviews, like however, there's no shortcut. Yeah and it's different I think if you solve a problem that somebody's got, like your boiler's either broken or it's not, you can't convince someone they've got a broken boiler if it's not broken. But then you have the whole like right should I have Baxi or Worcester Bosch and that like I don't know much about boilers But let's say the Baxi is 500 quid less That's an easier sell but then maybe the Worcester Bosch has got a 10-year warranty and it's and then then it's like do I want to deal with the people who want the high-quality item with the long warranty or people who want cheap and cheerful and quick and and neither of those is wrong or right or wrong, but it's a different marketing method and a dip and If you're going for the cheap and cheerful and quick, you're gonna need more volume of customer And so it's a different thing to go in for people who want to put a ground source heat pump in and Can afford to drop eight grand on their heating system Ground source heat pump you lost me. I don't even know what that means. It's like an alternative form of heating your house We're meant to change to it because we're on oil not gas Big tank in the garden that's to get filled up twice a year Because we're not on mains gas They come and put LPG in it that's how we heat our house very expensive overheating house very inefficient and Some of our neighbors have moved to ground source heat pumps which is like a big fan outside your house that warms our air and pull there from at the grind and It's more energy-efficient, it's better for the environment but it's fucking expensive to like retrofit. You get a grant for that? Supposedly, but the amount of phone calls we get are from random grant companies that are definitely not grant companies. You just want your mother's maiden name? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why are you in my bank? Yeah, exactly that. So, I don't know how the hell we got to this. Yeah, boilers, plumbers. So, level of intent is a thing, level of need is a thing. You know, if at the point of need there's more demand than there is supply, you're absolutely laughing. Marketing is not your biggest issue in your business because we see that with premium products all the time. You see that with Bitcoin, you see it with diamonds, you see it, literally you can see it with plumbers, you see it with healthcare, but then if you're a service business and supply outstrips demand, you've got to be fucking good at marketing and you've got to keep banging the drum and you've got to stay in front of people and you've got to prove why you're better than the competition. I literally just said on a sales call now, I'm not here to throw shit at the competition but they won't tell you this and then said something that I know competitors wouldn't say because it'll do them out of money. Yeah. It's to do with designing emails and I told him the truth about how to get a high... high open rate versus paying a design agency to design you pretty emails. That never gets, the images never get downloaded. They never load, yeah exactly. And he was like, I can't believe you just, we've spent hours and hours and hours designing these emails. I went well, you're not wrong, it's just I'm getting you to the result and I'm gonna lose money by doing it but it's the right answer. We've had a lot of that recently haven't we? I love integrity marketing, like that whole like, what do we do that is the right thing to do that might not be great for our bank account but gets people to the result quicker. And the more we do that the more work we get. Yeah we do a lot of like support with people and their accounts that they've done something ridiculous when they were younger on Facebook and now they're banned for life. And I've got to go crawl into Mr. Zuckerberg but it helps them and then they can advertise which means we can help them. Literally I said to you yesterday if helping someone for the right reasons is a good thing to do that's a good enough reason to do it. And every time we take that attitude we make more sales. Now you can see that as woo woo or just see that as being in the right state of mind but it definitely fucking works. We have clients now that live in that space in their head that have an abundant amount of work because they behave like that. Now, I'm not suggesting that their tarot cards were great or something. I'm just saying that like, the more positive outlook you seem to have and the more you help others, the more good things seem to happen. That kind of, that effectively is what manifestation is though, right? It's like, whether you believe in it or not, saying you're gonna do something is setting the intention and you are barreling towards the- Because I see that as visualization. Because people talk about manifestation and I'm like, well, I don't think I can create something from nothing. I'm creating something from something, but unless I can see it, it's not gonna happen. Yeah. And I think some people get confused and think manifestation is like wishing something into truth. Yeah, and I don't wish anything into truth. I point myself in the right direction and get after it. But if you don't know what the direction is, I like, I think like that business ownership thing is, if you want something, you then find out as much as you can about that thing. You point yourself in the direction of that thing and you block out the- noise and to people who aren't business owners who aren't determined in that way that's really strange behavior. But like you know like we've got it here in the business like there's things we're gonna do with the podcast studio, there's things that we're doing behind the scenes, there's the Florida trip as a team where I'm like... Have we spoke about that on the podcast? No I don't think so, I was like dropping it in subtly but you've highlighted it massively now. Yeah so like I've said, Neil and I have said we're gonna take the team to Orlando to celebrate 10 years of Code Break. It's a massive fucking thing. I've had my eye on that for about three years. Well yeah yeah it has been mentioned before. Yeah there was a turnover target wasn't there that I said if you hit this turnover target I will pay for you all to go to Orlando and we missed it like that's the honest truth. But also like a lot of those staff aren't here anymore so it's like but I'm also I'm not like the sort of person that would dangle a carrot like that and not deliver that's disgusting. Yeah. So now the opportunities come for us to do it and I've attached it from a turnover target and just said look this is what we're fucking doing. But it's that whole visualization piece. I remember I sat in a car with our old accountant, probably seven years ago and said to him, if we hit this, I'm going to take the team to Orlando. And he laughed at me. And because at the time I drove like a fairly clapped out car, didn't have a particularly nice house. I haven't heard the word clapped out, but it does. Didn't have a particularly nice house. The business wasn't what it is now. And he laughed at me. I was like, I'll fucking show you. Yeah. I love that when people doubt me, it's almost mine. Watch. Because that business now, I mean they've done all right, but I can see from a distance that not a lot's changed. And our business has fucking changed loads and we're all going to Orlando. And clients are invited. Like, that's definitely not been announced. Yeah, no. Although I keep accidentally letting it slip. Yeah, but like, fucking epic. Like, there's no ego in it. To be honest, I really want to go to Orlando and I'm really grateful for what you guys have done and I want you to come too. And then I was like, oh, well clients could come as well. That'd be sick. Like, what more reasons you'd need? I mean, like a lot of people are like, well, what's the business case for that? Is this going to cost you a lot of money? Well, there isn't much of a business case and yes, it is going to cost me a lot of money. Yes and yes. But like- But look how happy I am. Look at this face. But how much, like pulling it back to what we're talking about, can we bang the drum about that? How many of your- How many of your suppliers treat their team like this? How many of your suppliers have this kind of like abundance attitude? How many of your suppliers are out there and after it? The whole like stay hungry mentality. And I'm getting more and more comfortable with us just banging that drum. Like we are not like other agencies. We're not like any other business. And you're either gonna love that or you're gonna hate it. But if you love it, jump on board because it's great fun. And I think like when we're in good energy in the office and stuff, that actually like translates into a real buzz about the place. Like we, you and I had to go for drinks. Had to, that's a bit rough. When chose to go for drinks with someone last night who's going through a very difficult thing. And he's an ex-employee and like, we both care about him a lot. That's really like, yeah. Put a lot into perspective. Yeah. For me. And we're like fortunate to work somewhere like this, to create what we're creating here, to be able to like drop things and go for a drink. And it's just like life's for living. And if you're about that, then you're gonna get on well with us. Like we, like one of our clients who doesn't have a job,