Why Your Marketing Is NOT Working

Why Your Marketing Is NOT Working

As a business owner, you are likely investing a lot of time and money into advertising, only to feel like your returns are completely upside down. In a world where consumers are bombarded by over 3,000 digital and print ads daily, breaking through the ad fatigue requires more than just throwing money at the wall and hoping something sticks.

In this episode, Jeremy and Nick dive deep into the actual reasons your marketing campaigns are falling flat and how to stop unintentionally self-sabotaging your growth. Using real-world examples—from the dangers of promoting a high-end plastic surgeon in a discount mailer to the disconnect of a legacy brand losing its identity—they explore why the problem usually isn't the platform, but the execution.

They break down what this means for business owners and leaders:

• The Medium vs. The Audience: Why putting the wrong message in front of the wrong demographic (like marketing a senior living facility on TikTok) is the fastest way to waste your budget.
• Missing the Bridge: The critical disconnects—like not having a modern website, lacking QR codes, or using confusing messaging—that prevent interested consumers from taking the next step.
• The ROI Blame Game: Why you need to shift your paradigm from "Return on Investment" to "Return on Intention," and why closing the lead is a sales issue, not an advertising one.
• Under-Budgeting the Execution: The danger of cutting corners on print quality to save a buck, or blowing $5,000 on a video with only $50 left to distribute it.
• The Omnichannel Reality: Why the "Print vs. Digital" debate is dead. Discover how blending both mediums creates a compounding effect of exposure that builds undeniable brand trust over time.

This is a candid conversation about the costly, completely preventable execution errors companies make every day and how you can step back to take a strategic, three-dimensional approach to your marketing.

Stop blaming the media, start asking the right questions, and learn how to run the plays that actually win.

Your Brand, Your Back Yard with Jeremy & Nick

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hello listeners. Thanks for tuning in to Your Brand, Your Backyard Podcast. I'm Jeremy Rentz. And I'm Nick Matheny. This podcast is centered around being a business owner, removing chaos, and replacing it with strategy, vision, and clarity. How to build a business, but more importantly, how to build your brand in your backyard.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

So if you're just starting a business, rebranding or expanding, or if you're a marketing professional, a business major, or all of the above, this podcast is created for you. So let's dive in.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Hello and welcome back, listeners. Hello, Nick. As always, it's great to see you. I love the bright blue shirt you got going on today.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Yeah, you know, I figured uh go with something a little bolder. It's uh last day of school for kids here in Indiana tomorrow, so they're all kind of jumping out of their skin, waiting for that last day. And, you know, of course, school is like eight hours of torture in their world, so uh should be good.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

I remember that as uh as a kid, as a student, couldn't wait for summertime, and summertime for the kiddos is here.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Yeah. Yeah, it'll be really exciting next week. My daughter, who's 10, she's uh she's famous in her school this week because there's some it's not get us book of world records with like records for kids around the world. And she decided she saw one that she thinks thought she could do, so she had she wanted to see how long she could hang upside down on her gymnastics bar and had it recorded for like seven and a half minutes, sent it in, and they awarded it to her, so it was in the new the newspaper here locally, and then one of the other big bigger newspapers sent us a message saying, Hey, can we interview her this week? And so it was like she said it was kind of surreal in the the school this week with all the teachers coming up and the kids, and she's like, Is this what it's like to be famous? I'm like, I I guess. So that was kind of fun, fun uh story to see that her paper her pictures would be on the front page of the the newspaper next week.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

That's very cool, but doesn't that sound terrible? I mean, how long do you think you could hang upside down?

SPEAKER_00 2:04

About four seconds and I'd pass out. So I think I'd probably pass out before I even got to the full uh up and down position. She was like, Yeah, seven and a half minutes and no big deal. I'm like, uh, that's crazy to me.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Yeah, yep. That does not sound fun to me. But speaking of being upside down, Nick, our topic today is why your marketing is not working. And so, as a business owner, sometimes we feel like we're trying a lot, we're investing a lot, and we're just upside down. Yeah, so I'm excited about this topic, both for our listeners, business owners that get frustrated. And I think I think that's often. I know personally, I've been through it. I've I've met with hundreds, if not thousands, of business owners who are right in this same camp.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

Yeah, I think advertising is one of those things most businesses look at it like a necessary evil. So even when it's working well, they're like, it should work better, faster, and cheaper. So there's that constant rub, but there's also some some of it's perspective and some of it's technique. And so there's some X's and O's and some technique that we want to talk about today that will really help people understand how to not self-sabotage in this process.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

That's right. And the interesting thing here, I want to, I want to just kick this off and let's just take a deep dive in right away here. I want to talk about the digital marketing world and the ad fatigue that we all see and that we all get. You know, the status is each individual is being targeted online, Nick, over 3,000 times per day. When you think about all the various channels from digital display ads and banner ads on, you know, common websites like MSN or Yahoo or your local news stations, then you have TikTok and Instagram and of course Facebook ads. You've got Google, Google ads. There's a lot going on. You play a game, you can't get halfway through a game, and your game pauses and they're throwing, you know, the candy crush, you know, ad or whatever they're promoting. Yeah. And that frustrates me, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:27

How about you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, gosh, you can't. It seems like you can't go to a restaurant and go into the restroom without having an ad in the bathroom. Uh, I mean, it's everywhere you look, there's ads. And I think that's accurate that people, there is fatigue, is probably the right word. Just like there became fatigue about the number of emails we get, fatigue about the number of voicemails, the number of text, you know, the number of ad impressions that are seen digitally. There's a lot of fatigue to that for sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Yeah, there is. And then and then you go deeper into that. And, you know, a lot of businesses love the the pay per click model. And I don't disagree with it. The challenge today is that these social media companies, these digital marketing companies are really capitalizing on the profitability of it because it's everywhere. Every industry, and we're gonna get deeper into this, but the more companies per industry are doing that same strategy, the more it drives the price up on that pay per click, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Yeah, it's it's kind of that dynamic pricing, just like some of these college teams are starting to put in, or you know, oh, for this game it cost X amount of dollars, but for this game, it's not quite as popular. It's a little different price point. And and we're seeing that in the advertising world. So it depends on what industry you're in. It depends on what time of the year, it depends on uh what city you're in sometimes. So, you know, some of these clicks, uh Jeremy, maybe 50 cents a click, but then there might be somebody else that their clicks are fifty dollars or more every single click, again, just depending what industry in how competitive is there. So it's they've they've learned how to monetize it for sure. And and who pays for that ultimately is that you know, the small business owners that are trying to compete with uh the big mass massive companies have, you know, unseems like unendly unendless um or endless, I should say, marketing budgets. Right. Exactly. And what about what about the print world? Yeah, I mean, the same thing. The reality is print work, just like digital work, prints works, but the stats on print aren't much prettier. I mean, you know, typical conversion rate on print is usually somewhere between one and four percent. You know, uh again, if it's you're if you're sending a piece of mail, for example, to a current existing customer, it might be a little higher. But if you're sending out, you know, a thousand pieces of mail, you know, there's only a very small percentage, only a handful of you even going to open it up and look at it, let alone respond. And and so it works, it's just the numbers aren't super exciting. The conversion ratios are low, and that's why it takes so much of it, just kind of the same way that the digital's become it, just takes so much of it to make it actually stick.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Yeah, and and I want to emphasize that neither strategy is dead. Businesses are just executing them poorly, and there's there's multiple reasons for that that we are gonna really spearhead in this episode for our listeners. So the medium that doesn't match the audience is the most common reason that your marketing is not working.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah, I think you know, I I really look at it kind of like football, right? In in football, you have to run the right plays, right? But the plays have to be given, you have to look at the situation. So if it's if it's third down and 19 yards to go, and you run a run play that gets you seven yards, normally seven yards on a run play is good. That's a very solid run. But in that situation, it doesn't really do you any good, right? You need a 19-year-pass play to keep that ball. So I really, to me, Jeremy, it's got to be the right market, but it has to be the right message within that market. And then we have to have the right campaign, and then it has to be executed well. And I think where business owners get really easily is like, well, I tried print, didn't work. I did this in digital, it didn't work. I did a radio commercial, it didn't work the way I wanted it to. And they want to blame the media, the medium, versus saying maybe I didn't choose the right avenue to go after. And and one kind of final thought of is like, you know, if you think of like there's a national brand Val Pack, I think most business owners are familiar with. And that is great for restaurants and you know, people that are trying to save, you know, get a free appetizer or whatever. But if I'm a high-end plastic surgeon and I'm putting my, you know, I'm trying to promote my high-end plastic surgery, that's $10,000 or $20,000 in the same medium where it's tattoo parlors and restaurants, I just not sure that that's going to work exactly the same way that they wanted to. So that's that would be an example of picking the wrong vehicle for that, for that campaign.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

That's right. And we've talked about this before, Nick, on a previous episode uh that the the targeted audience approach is one of the most significant to identify when you're creating your marketing strategy as a whole, right? We all should take a thousand-foot view first. What is the marketing strategy? Who are we going at? Where are we going at? Then you can line up the dominoes to consistently and constantly and proactively be in front of them. And I think that's the most important.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, we have to understand, like I said, the demographic and then the vehicle that's being used. So I think of like, you know, TikTok, which tends to skew much, much, much younger as far as who's looking at that, right? Where Facebook tends to skew much older. So if you're going after retirees, putting an ad on TikTok probably doesn't make a lot of sense. But if you're going for younger people, right, because of your accessories or clothes or what it is you're trying to promote, and you're putting it on Facebook, that also might miss. So it's understanding what is that particular vehicle designed to do. The tricky part comes when you deal with ad salespeople. Every ad salesperson I've ever met in any form always thinks their product's the best. So when you talk to print people, they go, Print's the best. When you talk to digital people, like, no, digital's the best. And you talk to print put the print people are the ones saying, no, digital's dead. You talk to digital people like, no, print's antiquated, nobody does that anymore because they're trying to sell their product. Radio is doing the same thing, TV, direct mail, they're all kind of saying we're the best because they're trying to make a sale. When you could step back away from everything and just go, hey, I have no skin in the game. Let's just talk objectively about what each product is designed to do, who its clientele works best for, then customers become and businesses can be a little more educated, they can make better decisions.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Yeah. So what you're saying is if I have a senior living facility and I'm trying to fill my rooms, don't market on TikTok.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

I mean, you can. You're just gonna have a really low conversion ratio, and then you're gonna complain about how advertising doesn't work. And so that's kind of like, you know, the businesses don't like to hear this, but sometimes it's just that they're not executing things very well. Right? That's on them. And and it's hard sometimes for business owners to go, but no, I didn't do anything wrong. I I paid my money to them and it didn't work. But sometimes it's well because you didn't listen to what they said, or you picked the wrong market, or you got sold on an idea without you know pushing back on it and asking the right questions. So I do put a lot of this, the kind of the onus on this is is on the business owner to ask the hard questions to really understand the demographics and and and make the right choices because it's their business, it's their money.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Yeah. So just to recap before we move into mistake number two, Nick, the medium doesn't match the audience. A lot of businesses jump on board with a shiny new thing. Uh, you know, they're they're at the grocery store on the shopping carts, or they're choosing a billboard, a park bench, the side of a bus, you name it. Again, there's there's endless amounts of opportunity to market and advertise your business. But does that make sense for your audience in your community? And every community is also different, right? So you really have to take a look at what is the best, most strategic, most cost-friendly, efficient, but effective avenues. And that is the number one reason that a lot of marketing does not work. Or for our listeners, if your advertising strategy is not working, take a deeper dive into that.

unknown 13:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Let's go to mistake number two, Nick. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

And I think what you're describing, by the way, before we get step two, is I think a lot of business owners look at things two-dimensionally, where really we need to look at three-dimensionally. We need to look at all of the angles to get a clear picture. And that just takes a little more time, which is at a premium, it seems like when you're running a business, you know, it's always saying, like, you should work on your business instead of in your business. But the problem is there's fires going on all the time, people quitting, not showing up, payrolls due Friday. You got this, and your main client decided not to pay on time this this month. And so it's really hard sometimes to step back and have that time to devote to this. So this is again why we're trying to do these things. So, you know, the second point, the second mistake people make, they just they they're missing the connection, they're missing the bridge. So, you know, you put together this brilliant billboard or this amazing flyer, but then they don't put the website in. Or they they put the wrong phone number in. I've seen that before. People put the wrong phone number in, and it's an old phone number, or you know, they don't put a QR code, and so they spend all this time and energy creating the via the product, but then they leave out key components that really make it hard for the consumer to to activate and use those.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

That's right. And what about the businesses who don't have a website? Yeah, it's tough. In today's world, without a website, it's it's tough. So you're running, you're spending money on a print ad or you're spending money on a digital uh campaign for what? Because the website is really that foundational piece because the customer, the consumer, your future patients, they have to go somewhere. Your website is your online retail store. It's it tells your message, it tells your story, it identifies your process, your product, your team. And that is so, so valuable and well worth the investment.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Yeah, and and I think, Jeremy, what's happened is as technology has changed, people's expectations have changed. So 20 years ago, it was normal that if you had a question for a company, you just pick up the phone and call them. And then it became normal to shoot an email to people and ask questions. Well, now what's normal is to go look at their website, go Google it and see what the reviews are, what people say about it, right? And so if you're still operating like it's 1997, that's going to cause significant problems. Now, if you've been around that long, maybe you got a lot of word of mouth and you don't need some of that stuff. But if you're in if you're in an environment where you're trying to grow your business and you're trying to really stay on top of things, then it then it really does become an important part. It's just kind of a fundamental thing.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

Yeah. And I think about the disconnect uh in the marketing message, as you mentioned as we opened up this episode. Think about Levi, right? Levi Denim. Very well known. But what if Levi, as we know it, decides that they're gonna launch like women's leggings and all of a sudden their digital ads and their marketing message is about leggings. Well, from what we know of Levi, that would confuse me as a consumer, at least me personally, right? Maybe they're gonna get into women's leggings, maybe they already have, I don't know. But that would be so, I believe, counterproductive in the marketing message because they've already built a brand that is recognizable, right? It's maybe the largest blue jean company in the US, maybe even the world. I don't know those stats, but isn't that what we're talking about? That message, the disconnect.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Yeah, because again, business owners are like, well, just more is better. And I'm like, no, sometimes just executing it better is better. And and so, you know, there's maybe there's nothing wrong with the product, maybe there's nothing wrong with the process, it just needs execution at a higher level. You know, and that kind of leads us into the the the never-ending debate I kind of mentioned a few minutes ago, right? What's better? Print, digital. And the reality is it's really we've we're in an omnichannel marketing program today, right? Where it's a combination of both. Now, is it 50-50? No, I'd say for very few businesses it's gonna be 50-50. A lot of that's gonna depend again, the tenure of where you're at in business. It's gonna depend on what industry you're in, what market you're in, you know. Um, not every place in the United States has the same level of technology. You know, there's places in the the Midwest and especially rural areas that, you know, maybe a little, you know, a little bit still more old fashioned, and you get some places on the the coast where it might be a little more advanced. So it's just to understand is that mix 60-40? Is it 70-30? Is it you know 90-10? But the reality is, I think in any world today, where if you're not doing some mixture of digital in some capacity and print in some capacity, and using the omni channel, then it's kind of missing the mark.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Yeah, that's right. So mistake number two is missing the bridge. There is a disconnect, whether it's again the message, the audience, the the ability to drive that traffic to a website or or in your print campaign, Nick, you're running a print campaign. Well, are do you utilize technology with QR codes? Because QR codes, you can generate a monthly report and track your scans to see what your traffic is like and to get you know a better idea or understanding if if that particular medium is working and to what level. So I think that's really important. And and that leads us into mistake number three here.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

Yeah, bad tracking and the ROL ROI blame game. This is a super common one. Again, I'm the same way. I've dealt with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of businesses, and they all want to blame the you know, the the ROI. I didn't get enough ROI, and it seems like doesn't matter what the vehicle is, there's always complaints about ROI and it's hard to track. So you wanna tackle the, you know, on the digital side, what's that look like?

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Yeah, I mean, digital tracking is getting harder because of the new privacy updates, and you know, all of our devices, you know, all are always doing updates, right? That that frustrates me sometimes. I just figure out how to use my my iPhone and then I wake up the next morning and I got a new update. And oh yay, now I gotta find this button or how to share a contact, or it's just uh here we are. We're we're dating ourselves, I think. Uh these kids probably keep up with it better than we do. But it is getting harder and harder just because of the sheer number. Right? We're being thrown again in every direction. Digital marketing, and as a consumer, I and we've talked about this. It's not my job to remember where I saw you. The fact is, I saw you. I called you, I'm on your website, I'm here. I'm I'm ready to learn more about your business, your product, or your service. As the business owner, it really, really becomes challenging. And to your point about ROI, it is important to be able to identify, to do the best that we can, to ask our customers where did they see us, where did they hear about us. But think about this. If you are doing Facebook ads, if you are doing Google ads, if you are doing Yelp ads, you have a billboard, you're in a couple community publications. I'm seeing you as a consumer often and continuously, and that is the goal. That is an effective marketing strategy. But I'm not gonna remember the first touch point or the last touch point as a consumer. And again, nor is it my responsibility. Now, luckily for the digital world, there's a lot of digital marketing reports. Facebook will send you, you know, reports and numbers, and uh you have Google Analytics for your website. So there is some of that. But at the end of the day, your return on investment that is a commercial real estate term. That is not a marketing term. We need to shift the paradigm in the marketing world. What what the goal, what the objective is, is a relationship, opportunity, interaction. The more that I do, the more I build a relationship with my potential consumer. I don't know if they're ready today, tomorrow, next week, or next year, right? That the more you do builds that relationship, right, Nick?

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Yeah, and I and I really think that whole concept, return on investment, the pro the problem that I have with it is that that requires customers to care about your advertising, which they don't. It requires your employees to care about trying to ask and track things properly, which they don't. It requires your salespeople to do their job well, which sometimes they don't. And so there's a lot of variables there that are really not very practical. And so it's easy as a business to put it all on the, you know, that the medium again that we use, but there's a lot out there. So I think really when I think of ROI, I think of return on intention, not return on investment. So if the intention is to build a brand, the intention is to promote something, the intention is to catch the eyes of someone, that's what we're really looking for. And the number of times I've had businesses would say things like, well, you know, we got 10 calls, but we only converted one of them into a client. So it didn't work. And my reaction to that is like, well, wait a minute. If the job was to get attention and you got people calling you saying, I saw it in this vehicle, and you couldn't close them, that's not the issue of the advertisement. That's a sales issue on your part, or pricing, or something like that. So, but again, businesses don't think about that and go, Well, we didn't get much, you know, we we we were expecting to get this volume. Yeah, but you have a part in getting that volume. So I think it's really, really tough always because again, the the people that are consumers don't care. As much as you want to think your employees care, they don't. Yeah, they really don't, unless it's maybe a family or their part owner, but they don't care as much. So it's just hard to track it, and so people tend to drop it very quickly. And what I found is new businesses want to track every single thing. They want to like, oh, I don't want to waste a single dollar. This has been around a while, or like, I can't track it. I it's too hard. I'm just gonna use educated guesses based on experience, and I'm just gonna trust the process, and so it's more of like, do I trust the process versus do I trust the results that I'm getting today? Because again, they're looking at it a little more longer term. Again, I understand why new businesses because every dollar counts. So I understand why they tend to be over you know fixated on that.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Well, and then you add in the compounding effect of time. It's exposure and impression and time. So when you have a strategy that you're very strategic about the audience, who it is, where it is, and you just kind of keep beating that drum, and then they see you over and over. And it's like, you know, I I might not be in the market to buy a new Mercedes today, but they have a new model that comes out, and I see the TV commercial and it attracts my attention, and then I see it again, or I then I see it in a printed magazine, and now it's really getting in, and I'm like, I really like the look of that car. Maybe I should go take it for a test drive just to see if it's really as you know attractive and and good looking in person as what the TV commercial or what the ad in the magazine is making it look like. Right. But that compounding effect, they keep hitting me, they keep targeting me and almost forcing me into a bicycle, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Yeah, in fact, as you were saying that, it just reminded me something last night. I was at a function last night where it was just a bunch of about 60, 70 business owners, kind of a social hour. And as we're setting there, one of the people was like, she goes, Ooh, I like the look of that Cadillac right there. I want that. And there was an emotional attachment, seeing that, and they're like, ooh, and they're her eyes lit up and her voice changed. So that wasn't just seeing an ad, right? It was seeing the car. It was yes, it was the ad. It was the reputation, it was all of those things. So it's just really easy to get lose track and want to try to pinpoint it to one thing when very rarely is it one thing. It's usually a combination. Now, when we get into some of the things of tracking solutions for digital, you also get into things like UTM parameters and pixel tracking. And you know, this starts to get a little high-tech. So, so guys like me that are not maybe quite as educated on the some of the technology. I had to look up some of the, you know, some of these things. I kind of knew about them, but you know, when you start getting into, you know, UTC, this is where you're putting on special things into like your web address. You're adding on extra uh characters, you're adding on extra uh notations to that. So what it does, it allows places like Facebook and Google to track deeper statistics, right? It's kind of really dig in and look at what's happening. And so they can start to really look at saying, okay, what is this turning into? So that's why you'll see sometimes things will have not just their website, but it'll have a set of numbers or or letters behind it or whatever it might be. You know, you might be at the golf outing and it's got you know the ad, but then it all says, you know, BMW championship afterwards or something like that. So that's just so they can track that. And then you get into you know the pixels, that's a whole different world. Um, so now what you're doing is you're talking about invisible images that are in behind, you know, things. And what that does is and again, this is where you get into privacy because that starts to really record things. It starts to record, okay, what were you talking about? And what did you look up? And and again, people when they accept cookies and all those things, you know, those annoying pops up, accept reject cookies, accept cookies. People don't realize when they're accepting that, what they're doing is they're giving these companies the ability to go in and actually kind of watch all that stuff that's happening. So there's a there's a lot of stuff that's happening technologically that people just don't understand. And if you have a, you know, Siri or or you know, one of the Alexa devices and things like that, and you know, it's always amazing to me how you can talk about it, and then all of a sudden it starts showing up on your Facebook lead or your post. Or it shows up and you know, you met somebody, you type something in, and all of a sudden it's you're getting hit with that stuff left and right. It's because they're they're tracking all of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Yeah. It's like, you know, on our ranch here, uh, my wife and I, we were just talking about, you know, summertime, the flies come out, you know, around the horses. And so we were talking about this, and then I'm on Instagram the other day, and then I get the uh the I forget the name of the company, but they they specialize in creating these high-powered fly traps uh that you hang around the barn and you know the horse stalls. And and I'm telling you, uh, we bought them and they work. And now every day I log on, it's like, you need more? You need reorder, reorder. And now they're in front of me because of that. Exactly what you said. Now I want to touch on something before we move on, real quick, Nick. Those UTM parameters and the pixel tracking, this is, and we could take a you know, 20-minute deep dive into this, which we're not, but I do think there's some importance behind that when we're talking about trackability, because this allows when you click on that Facebook ad or that Instagram ad and it reroutes you to your website. Well, now you can pull your Google Analytics and you have a line item from where the traffic came from. And so that really is justifiable in that regard.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

Yeah. Again, none of the stuff is bad. It's just it's challenging and it's not two dimensional. So it takes time to really dig into it to understand it.

SPEAKER_01 30:10

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Let's go to mistake number four overformatting and under budgeting. I see this one all the time, and we see this, you know, it's kind of like the people they go out and they, you know, like, oh, I'm gonna do a direct mail campaign, and they buy five thousand, they get printed off five thousand copies something, but they go with the cheapest paper, the the cheapest, you know, it's flimsy postcards, and it looks like garbage. It looks like, you know, you know, a fourth grader put it together and it looks like it was, you know, kind of printed at home almost. So yeah, they went after it a big way, but they executed very poorly as far as the look of it.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Yeah. And it and it what comes to mind with this is when you under budget or you cut corners in your marketing strategy, or you cheapen the message or the medium, what does that say about your business? What does that say about your brand? The quality. If you can't afford to go big, it's like go big or go home. If you're going to do that particular strategy, then do it. Do it at a high level, invest the money, don't cut the corners. So I think that is extremely important. So businesses that spend five thousand dollars on digital videos, but only have a $50 ad budget, that doesn't add up. Right? You could you could spend all your money in videographers and creating great commercials and great content. But then if you can't afford to get it out into your audience, get it out into the community in a big way to where everybody in your area, your community, your backyard, if they don't see your brand at a high level, then you've wasted money.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Yep. Well, and I think, Jeremy, that depends on what image your business is going for, right? So if you're a high-end corporate attorney and you have an office downtown and it's got marble floors and all that stuff, and you're billing $500 an hour, $1,000 an hour, that makes sense. If you're a bankruptcy attorney and you're in that same place, I don't know, that makes a lot of sense. You know, you might be okay being in that off the strip somewhere, you know, office that's not real fancy, because it's again, it's just the client, you got to understand the clientele you're going for, right? And and so this is part of it. So yes, you have to look at where you're at in your business. And we want to focus on what is your image. So if your image is, hey, we're the cheapest guys in town, and that's how we're making our hanging hat on, okay, fine. But if you're not going after being the cheapest in town, which very rarely are, you know, businesses are going after that, then you do have to think more about the quality of the print versus I can put it in this publication and it goes to 50,000 people. Well, it might be better to go into that publication that goes to 7,000, but it's a better quality publication, it aligns better with the target, even though it doesn't go to as many, but it gets good quality, so there's not as much waste involved.

SPEAKER_01 33:21

Think about a furniture store, right? Well, let's go on both ends of the spectrum here for a second, Nick. Think about a low-end furniture store. You're gonna target, you know, renters, apartments, right? You're affordable. Uh it's that's great for for kids or families just starting out. They need a bed, they need a coffee table, they need a couch, and they need a dining room table. Right. So that particular furniture store isn't going to market to people that live in a million-dollar plus homes. Then you flip that, and you've got great furniture stores like Crate and Barrel, Restoration Hardware. Those are big furniture, solid furniture. Those are built for home owners. Furthermore, their price points. So you're not going to market to beginners, right? Just getting their first house, their first apartment. You are going to strategically go after those million dollar plus homes because those people want quality. And that's where the marketing strategy comes in. Yep.

unknown 34:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:36

And again, it all ties together. It's got to be going after the right, you know, the right audience. So you have to define as a business what is my audience. Then you have to go have the right messaging that makes sense for that audience, like you said before. You have to put the right campaign in. So if you're going as a presenting yourself as an expert high-end, then you put a 10% off coupon in it, that probably doesn't sit real well with your customers, right? And so you just have to understand those. So you execute the whole thing. And again, it's tough. And that's why there's marketing agencies. So they can give some insight, some background, but that comes at a cost, typically an extra 15 or 20 or 25% on top of you know your expenditure. So everything comes with a cost, it's always trade-offs. So I guess it leads us to where do we go as business owners? What's the final final you know analysis?

SPEAKER_01 35:31

And and I was gonna ask this question. So for our listeners, before we wrap this up, I am a business owner, I own a painting company, you're a marketing consultant, which are both very, very true in this example. But I come to you and I say, Nick, I am struggling. My business isn't doing as well as I want. Help me, my marketing is not working.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

Where do we go? Well, I think any good company should start asking questions like, well, what are your objectives? Right? What are you trying to accomplish? What have you tried so far? How long did you do that for? What did it look like? What copy was it? If they're not, if if you've got an ad agency, a marketing company, and they're not asking a bunch of questions about what you've done and what you're trying to accomplish, they're just going into, well, you should do this, this, and this. As a business owner, I would be very leery of that. Just like I'd be very leery if I go to the doctor, they don't ask questions and run tests, they just start prescribing medication and say, look, we're gonna do this or that without really digging into it. I'm gonna be very leery of that, right? If I go to a car dealership, and instead of them asking me questions about what I'm looking for, what I'm interested in, why I'm in the market, what you know, that they just go, hey, I got a great car for you, let me go show you this one. You know they're just trying to sell you something. So I think that's where it starts. And so whether that's a marketing agency or an individual company selling advertising, if they're not asking those questions to start with, you probably need to start going, hey, wait a minute. You're just trying to sell me something here. Let's let's really think through this objectively.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Yeah. And as we wrap up here, what wins? What's the answer? Do I go print or do I go digital? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

The answer is yes. That is you. Yeah, do I do that? Do I do A or do I do B? Yes, you do both. And again, it just comes down to figuring out the right mix for your business. Where you're at, what the competition's like, what the sources available to you are, what your budget is, a lot of factors. And you just figure out what's the best mix for me right now. And if you don't know, that's where you have to turn to some people that are more experienced or have some expertise that you can trust, whoever that is, and and help them. But it yeah, they're you know, it's kind of a spoiler alert. There is no perfect answer. There is no one vehicle that's going to fix the marketing issue. We all know word of mouth is the best, but it's hard to get to where you can run a business just on word of mouth. That just takes so long to build that.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

And so it always business plan around word of mouth or the possibility. We can hope for it, we can wish for it, we can push for you know, five-star Google reviews. But at the end of the day, you need a quality website. You need the ability to be found through all of your competition. Google, you know, your company, your product, your service near me or in your town, in your city, in your county. Right? Because there's thousands of people. What I know to be true is there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of homeowners in my backyard who need my service. But are they gonna find me or are they gonna find my competitor? And I am constantly evaluating and strategizing. Am I hitting this community, this neighborhood, well enough, often enough, through yard signs and door hangers and my the side of my truck and my own branding with you know hats and swag. I'm in four different community publications. Some reach new home buyers, some reach affluent. My targeted audience, Nick, is homeowners. That's obvious. But I want uh homeowners that can afford, who care about their home, who want to make it beautiful, who understand they're educated that it's not just about the look, but it's also about the protection. In Colorado, you've got the sun and the wind and the rain and the hail and the snow. We never know each day what we're gonna get. And in most cases, it's all of the above all in one day, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:48

Sounds kind of like Indiana weather in the spring. So if you don't like it, just wait a few hours. Now, and again, some of you are, you know, some of our listeners, you might be in commercial applications, some of you might be in industrial applications. So that specific example network, but there may be trade meetings that you need to go to, or there may be associations that you can belong to that you know would help, or whatever happens to be. So just dig in, find out what's the right fit for you, and go after it and stay consistent.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

Well, this has been a lot of fun. Great information. Great to see you, Nick. Listeners, thanks for chiming in. Thanks for listening, thanks for your support, and thanks for your feedback. We love hearing from you. If you've got suggestions, recommendations, or topics that you want us to uh to touch on, feel free to reach out. You can see our contact information in our show notes. But until next time, great to see you, Nick. Great to see you, man. Thanks for listening to the Your Brand Your Backyard Podcast. I'm Jeremy Rentz and I'm Nick Matini. Be sure to like, follow, and subscribe and tune into the next episode. More great content coming soon.