Top 3 Marketing Mistakes I see Small Business Owners Make All the Time

Want more visibility to the right people? More dream clients lined up to work with you or buy your product? Make sure to fix these 3 things that could be holding you back!

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Transcript

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Welcome back to Think Like a CMO, the podcast for entrepreneurs who are ready to stop doing random acts of marketing and to start thinking like the chief marketing officer their business actually needs. What's up? I'm your host, Sarah Gemmel. I'm a marketing strategist and consultant helping small business owners to build marketing ecosystems that actually create predictable results. Around here, we talk about what it really looks like to step into your role as the CMO, to really start seeing the big picture, leave your marketing with strategy, and to stop wasting time with productive, busy work that isn't actually getting you anywhere. This is all about no fluff, honest conversations, potent strategies, and practical insights that you can use right now to make your marketing work smarter, not harder. Okay, today's episode is all about the top three mistakes that you're making in your online marketing that is costing you leads and costing you revenue. And you know what I always say: if you're not taking notes, I'm not doing my job. So you can don't leave me, stay here, listen, even if you can't take notes, but you can save this and come back to it. Or if you're in a place where you can grab a pen and paper, go ahead and do that and start taking notes because you know I don't do service level bullshit. Okay, we're gonna dive into the nitty gritty. If you're listening to this, chances are that you did not get into business to be a marketer, right? You got into business because you have this zone of genius, this area of expertise that you are monetizing. You've been in the game for a little while, you've been showing up, you take action, you've seen some level of success in your business. But what you are doing in 2022 and 2023 is simply not cutting it anymore. And you're probably seeing that in the amount of clients or your revenue or your sales calls being booked are probably down, right? Because you have this area of expertise. You did not get in business to be a marketer, but lucky for you, you have me. And the other part of this is usually when you're super close to your business, it's really hard to see gaps. Okay. So we're gonna dive right into it. These are the top three mistakes in my 10 years in marketing, and I've helped over 1,200 business owners with their marketing. This is the stuff that I see a lot, and these are like kind of really easy, small tweaks that you can start to implement over the next three to six months, and I guarantee it will vastly change the outcome for you in terms of how you're getting visible, how you're attracting the right ideal audience, but how more importantly you're actually converting them and getting them to make a buying decision, even if that buying decision is just saying yes to a freebie, right? Or just saying yes to following you or showing up to a free event, right? We need them to make those decisions to even get into the pipeline. Okay, let's get into it. The first mistake I see all the time is you are ignoring marketing psychology and buyer behavior. There's this trend online right now that's all about like sales psychology and marketing psychology. And when I watch these things, right, it's like, well, people have loss aversion, they don't like to lose money. And then I see things like, you know, your uh ideal audience needs to know, like, and trust you. These are all correct, but they're also being told over and over and over again, it's just like an overdone surface level piece of advice where we really need to get into the nitty-gritty of understanding psychology of what's happening, what are they experiencing, and how are they making buying decisions and really getting into that. Some of the key pieces of marketing psychology that I want you to really focus on is when you're creating content, we need to be able to get their attention and keep their attention. That's number one, right? There's a lot of different psychological theories that I implement and that I use when I look at how do my clients get attention and keep attention online. Then we want to look at how can we actually move them from this piece of content into the next step, whatever that next step is. How can we get them to actually want to say yes, right? Whether it's a follow, an opt-in, a DM, a call, getting them onto a website to shop. That call to action is really, really important because you can have a really great post that gets their attention, keeps their attention, and then they take no action. We also need to understand that there are multiple different buyer behaviors and there's different psychological triggers that will work for different people at different times, right? So when you look at your marketing, how can you really hit different psychological triggers? This is not just like we need to build no-leg trust. Obviously, yes, but how do you build no-leg trust? How do you get their defensive walls down and empower them to take that next step and speaking in your marketing to different buyer behaviors? There's gonna be a whole podcast episode specifically on this one, but ignoring that marketing psychology and the different buyer behaviors is a huge, huge mistake that is leaving a lot of money on the table. The second one is really interesting, actually, because sometimes we even think we're doing this one and you're not, but not diversifying, okay? Not diversifying your marketing is really costing you a lot of leads and money, and this can look really different in different scenarios. Diversifying can apply to your content, the format of content, where you're showing up, and the different uh purposes of different marketing. So, what I mean by that, diversifying content. What are you talking about in your content? What is the format of that actual content? So this kind of hits formats and content at once. But if you're creating all videos, you're missing out on the people who prefer to read and skim over watching a video. If you're creating all content that's talking head, you're getting the people, you're missing the people who just want to watch a b-roll or to see something comedic, right? You also have to keep in mind that there's cold audiences, warm audiences, hot audiences, and we create different marketing for each of those audiences, right? So it could be the topic of your content, it could be the structure of the content, it could be the literal format of your content. You need to make sure you are diversifying what you're creating because your audience is going to consume information in different ways. And what your warm or hot audience needs and sees to hear from you is not the same as your cold audience. So also diversifying your platforms and where you show up. I say this all the time, but Instagram and an email list is not a marketing plan. Okay, relying solely on word of mouth is not a marketing plan. Where can you show up outside of social media? Where can you show up outside of email? Yes, social media and email are great, but where else can you show up to diversify? And then the fourth part of this is the purpose. So, kind of speaking to like the cold audience, the warm audience, the hot audience, you have different marketing efforts for attracting new audiences, for getting visible to new audiences, and then you have your other marketing for nurturing and converting. They should be in two different buckets. And I see online entrepreneurs all the time having like just nurture platforms. Example, Instagram and email. Both of those are nurture platforms, right? Or on the on the other end, they're spending all of their time trying to get visible and just get new audiences and visibility and visibility and visibility, but there's no nurture platforms, right? So I'll give you some examples of the different types of platforms. The visibility platforms to new audiences that could be things like speaking engagements, podcast guesting, media features, paid traffic, TikTok, uh, Pinterest, SEO. What else is like a visibility platform? LinkedIn, kind of sort of, depending on how you use it. Right now, Substack and Reddit are actually really great platforms for visibility to new audiences as well. Under the nurture bucket are things like Instagram, your own Facebook group, your podcast, your email list, your text marketing, networking groups that you're going back to frequently, where it's typically like the same people. That's a right, really great way to nurture your existing audience. But I want you to really diversify. You should have like one, two, or three platforms under each one of those buckets. And not every single way to market is going to be content-based. It doesn't have to be a million different social media platforms. The third mistake, and this is really, really important, the third mistake that you're making in your online marketing that's really costing you leads of money, and this is really a big one. But focusing more on visibility and more traffic and a bigger audience, but you're not converting or nurturing the audience that you already have. So often we get caught up in like what size is your audience, and how many followers do you have, and how many subscribers do you have? And we constantly feel like we need more traffic, we need a bigger audience. If sales are low, it's because we don't have enough eyeballs. And I can guarantee you that's not necessarily the case. If you've been in the game for a little while, you're constantly showing up. You have those people who are watching and opening and engaging and all these things, but they're not buying because you're not nurturing them. You're not giving them a reason to say yes. You're so focused on building your visibility and getting in front of new people that you're neglecting the people who are already in your world. And remember what I said a few minutes ago, the content is very different. The content that you put out there to attract new people and to get people into your world is very different than the content that's actually going to get them to convert, which is why we talked about diversifying platforms and purposes, right? But when you focus so much on just trying to get more traffic and a bigger audience, what a better option is, is to start looking at how you can better nurture and convert the people who are already here before you start bringing more people into your audience. This even goes for networking. If you do a lot of networking and you have a great audience in networking, but you're not getting referrals, you're not getting leads, you're not getting sales, you're not getting opportunities, how can you better leverage the people in your network? How can you better follow up with them? How can you create a better introduction? How can you give them a better ask or a way to support you? And how can you leverage these people already in your network before you start to grow them? If you're having a hard time nurturing your relationships that you already have, then you're not ready to continue bringing new ones in, right? In order to bring in more of an audience that's actually gonna buy from you, you have to take care of the audience you already have. This is a huge, huge mistake I see in online entrepreneurs all the time. When sales are low, it's all about more content, more eyeballs, more visibility. And while yes, you do need to bring in more visibility on a regular basis, if you are constantly just bringing in new eyeballs but not consistently or reliably converting, it's not really gonna fix your sales problem. It's not gonna fix your pipeline problem. I want you to make sure you check out the other episodes on the podcast because we're gonna dive into these three things on a separately. But I want you to look at where are you showing up in a way that is not diversified? Where are you ignoring marketing psychology? Marketing psychology is understanding what people need in order to know, like, and trust you, in order to move through the pipeline. What do you know? Or maybe there's just a big fat question mark next to marketing psychology, right? It's marketing psychology, like we said, is so much more than just know like trust. It's so much more than saying people have loss aversion, those are obvious, but there's so many psychological triggers that you can understand to then better understand the buyer behavior, right? To make your marketing better. We talked about diversification, where where can you diversify? And then where can you better nurture and convert the audience you already have? In most cases, I can guarantee that your audience has enough people in it. You just need to do a better job at nurturing and converting them. Which is honestly great, right? Because building a whole new audience is so much harder than nurturing and converting. So you have the people, you have the watchers, the lurkers, the fence setters, the dream clients who are consuming your content, but they're not taking action because they need you to give them a reason to say yes, right? They need you to show up differently. We can't put it on the audience. It's on us, it's our responsibility as the business owner to show up in a way that matters to them, in a way that's gonna get their attention, in a way that's gonna nurture them, in a way that's gonna get them to feel safe and comfortable to say yes. Thank you so much for tuning in to Think Like a CMO. If this episode helped you think about your marketing in a new way, I want you to go ahead and make sure you're following the show so you don't miss any other episodes. Leave us a review, share this with a friend, feel free to even share this on Instagram. Give me a tag at Sierra Gammel. If you're ready to tighten up your strategy and create a marketing plan that really works, and I want you to check out the free resources. You can even book a clarity call with me. Everything's going to be in the show notes for you. And remember, you already are the CMO of your business. So let's make sure that you're thinking like one.