Listen to this when your marketing feels chaotic and without direction

We stop treating marketing like a grab bag of ideas and start running it like a system that creates predictable leads. I walk through how to think like the CMO of your business so your content, messaging, funnel, and metrics all work together. 
• spotting random acts of marketing and why they create unreliable lead flow 
• understanding why old tactics stop working as the market and buyer behavior shift 
• using an Attract Nurture Convert system to build sustainable lead generation 
• revisiting your offer, target audience, and the real problem you solve 
• tightening messaging and positioning by getting specific about who you serve 
• making sure every piece of content has a purpose in the pipeline 
• choosing a primary KPI and tracking the metrics that actually feed it 
• building a simple funnel from visibility to nurture to a conversion event 
• cutting productive busy work and prioritizing high impact marketing tasks 

If this episode helped you think about your marketing in a new way, I want you to go ahead and follow the show so you don't miss any more episodes. 
And if you're really ready to tighten up your marketing strategy and to create a plan that actually works in generating leads consistently with dream clients, check out the free resources or book a clarity call using the links right in the show notes. 

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Transcript

Welcome And The CMO Shift

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Think Legacy MO, the podcast for entrepreneurs who want to stop doing random acts of marketing and start thinking like the chief marketing officer your business actually needs. What's up? I'm your host, Sarah Gemmel. I'm a marketing strategist and consultant for small business owners to help them build a marketing ecosystem that actually predictably and reliably brings in results and leads. Around here, we talk about what it really looks like to step into your role as the CMO, to start seeing the big picture, to lead your marketing with strategy, and to stop wasting your time with productive busy work that isn't actually getting you anywhere. This is all no fluff, honest conversations, potent strategies, and practical ways that you can start using these strategies right now in your marketing to work smarter, not harder. I spend a lot of my time consulting with small business owners and solopreneurs who are not new to the game. They've been in business for a little while, but the marketing that got them here is no longer serving them. What you did two or three years ago is not working for you anymore. And that's probably why you're also here. A lot of the conversations I have around marketing is there's really no strategy in place. And you're you might be noticing that you're doing a lot of like random acts of marketing, right? You're doing a bunch of different things, your lead flow is unreliable, it's inconsistent, it's unpredictable. And where the random acts of marketing comes from, or what it could really look like, is you're doing different things each day, each week, each month, right? You're relying on creative downloads and different ideas.

Why Random Marketing Breaks

SPEAKER_00 1:35

What you've had do really well before is no longer working, and you're not really sure why. So you keep just kind of showing up and trying different things. This really happens when there's no clear strategy that connects all the different things you're doing. And this also comes from with this whole podcast being about thinking more like a CMO, right? When you think more like a CMO, you know what tasks need to get done daily, weekly, and monthly in your marketing specifically. Not your business, not admin, not client delivery, not any of that. But I'm talking about marketing specifically. And when you're doing random acts of marketing, there's not really like a solid marketing plan that tells us exactly what you should be doing daily, weekly, and monthly. You might find yourself chasing leads or platforms or advice without a filter or discernment for how it applies to you or if it even applies to you at all. You might find yourself really busy in your marketing, but busy does not mean effective or profitable. What worked for you before could have been timing. It could have been that you were talking to a different audience, but it also is a lot of the market was responding differently, right? Two, three, four years ago, even five years ago, visibility was enough. And now it's just not cutting it. The marketing that got you here is not the marketing that's going to take you into your next season. The marketing that got you here is not the marketing that is going to continue to push you into growth or scaling. When the market changes, when audiences evolve or change, buyer behavior is different. Your marketing, your approach, how you run your marketing has to also evolve and change and adapt to how the market is shifting, or you will never survive. This is really the trend that we saw in like 2024. The market started to shift heavily at the end of 2023, kind of like all of 2023, right? And then 2024 was the year that we saw a lot of entrepreneurs close their business because they weren't able to adapt their marketing, and your business cannot survive without good marketing because you need revenue, right? To keep your business open. But in order to feed the revenue, we have to have the front-end marketing. You have the marketing has to consistently get you in front of more of the right people and

The Market Changed So Must You

SPEAKER_00 4:05

prospect and generate leads from the people who are already in your world. This is why the signature framework that I work within in all of my offers across all of my clients is attract, nurture, convert. In order to have a sustainable business, you have to have a system and know exactly what tasks to do where you're attracting, nurturing, and converting dream clients on repeat. And that's exactly the purpose of this particular episode, right? When you're operating with no direction, when you're operating on random acts of marketing and you're just kind of like winging it, right? And vibing out in your marketing, there's no predictable or reliable lead flow. And we can change that by putting into place systems and getting back to the basics of what is the offer? Who are you talking to? Who is the audience for this offer? And if you have not looked at your target audience in a month or two months or even longer, a lot of entrepreneurs haven't even looked at their target audience in probably three, four, five, six months. Your audience cannot be the same that it was six months ago because they have changed and evolved. What they're saying, what they're searching, what their problems are, what their pain points are. But you may have also shifted in who you find to be a dream client, right? How you deliver a service or a product, or maybe you've put out a new service or a product. That's all relevant information that needs to be looked at regularly. What problem are you actually solving? And this is kind of touching on what I just said of like you have evolved, right? So has it changed the problem that you solve now that you have ran the business for a little while? Is the problem you're solving different than it was three, four, five, six months ago? And is your messaging still clear in who it's for and what that problem you're solving is? And really looking at how has the messaging maybe stayed stagnant where it needs to evolve? Where has it gotten a little bit too creative and not clear? Do you actually have a funnel or are you just pumping out random content based on whatever your inspo is that week or whatever random posts you save from someone else in your industry? Almost every single client I work with at this phase in business is consistently pumping out content. So you're showing up on socials, you're sending emails, you have like all this really great content. You might even be writing a blog, doing your own podcast, you show up in networking meetings. But do you actually have a clear funnel and a strategy behind all of those assets, or are you just creating content based on whatever creative downloads, whatever trends, whatever random inspo you say from someone else in your industry? Just creating the content, like we said a minute ago, that did really well for you a few years ago. But now we have to clearly understand

Offer Audience Messaging And Funnel

SPEAKER_00 7:05

that every single piece of marketing content that you create has to serve a purpose at some point in the pipeline. I'll give you a great example. I was just working with a client, she sent me an Instagram reel for reviewal, right? So she sends over the reel, it's a video and a caption, it's a really great piece of content, but it wasn't really in her area of expertise and it didn't have a clear purpose for me watching it. So I message her back and I say, hey, like what do we want to get out of this? Because this is not your normal content topic, and I don't understand how it feeds your primary goal. Like your primary goal is to bring in this type of client, and this content doesn't speak to them. And she's like, Well, I just thought it was like a cool, you know, fun thing, and it's something I'm passionate about. So we had to rework it to make it relevant to the type of people she was looking to create, and we had to make it relevant to her actual zone of genius and her area of expertise. It has to make sense with your actual marketing goals, right? We have to be done with the random content because it's just a waste of time. You can build that predictability back up in your business by revisiting, everyone says pick a lane and stick to it, right? But revisit what your lane actually is. We talked about that a minute ago. What are the metrics that actually matter right now in your marketing? And it can't be revenue, okay? So I want you to think about what is your primary focus? Do you really want to build your email list? Do you want to build your listenership to a podcast? Do you want to build visibility on your Instagram? Do you want to book more sales calls? Do you want to get more opt-ins to a certain intro offer? If you're running something like a webinar, do you want to just focus on registration? What is the primary KPI, right? Key performance indicator that you want to focus on in your marketing and figure out what metrics actually feed that. So, great example. If you uh really rely on a landing page to send people to your website, you have a landing page and then you want to convert from the landing page, you absolutely positively have to be tracking the traffic to that page and the conversion and making sure that you're increasing traffic and not just getting a whole bunch of more traffic and not converting. We want to make sure that's actually converting, right? If you really want to focus on your email list, are you actually growing the number of people on your email list? Are they actually opening? Are we actually increasing the click rates? This is where really looking at your marketing like a CMO, I'm gonna, I'm gonna beat that, beat that into your head in this in this podcast. Is how can you look at this more systematically like the chief marketing officer, right? And how can you create a sys simple, repeatable system? So you know, I'll give you a great example. This is a lot of my online service providers. They do a lot of really great networking, relationship building, all the things, right? And then they take that networking and they send people to a platform like Instagram. Then from Instagram, they create content for the more warmer audience, right? To stay top of mind, to educate, to really build their expert positioning and to create sales content so that all this visibility they're getting from speaking or networking, podcast guesting, whatever it is, then that audience is seeing the nurture content that actually gets them to make a buying decision into an intro offer, right? Or directly into a paid offer. Some of my clients, and this you'll probably change this every once in a while, but if you're an online service provider, your uh focus this week might be into a freebie, right? Then maybe for two weeks of the month, your next focus is to build like a low-ticket masterclass,

Pick KPIs And Build A System

SPEAKER_00 10:55

right? Or a low-ticket digital product. You can promote different things at different times, but it's a it's still a simple system. Networking and speaking, they come to Instagram, and then from Instagram, they enter the sales funnel, which usually includes email marketing, it could include text marketing, and then there's some kind of follow-up, there's some kind of sales conversion event. So when they enter the pipeline through an intro offer, typically, then you're saying here's the sales conversion event. So it could be a webinar, it could be a landing page, it could be a sales call. There is gonna be some people, there is gonna be some segment of your market that just goes front-end marketing right to the sales conversion event if they're you know warmed up and hot enough from your content, which is perfectly possible. But you have to understand every single step of this in order to create the system. And then when you understand every single step and how every single step is feeding the pipeline differently, you can then spend your marketing efforts more high impact, right? You can have a more high impact use of your marketing time, is what I was trying to say. By understanding, like, okay, cool, I know I get visibility from networking, so I need to book my networking, right? I know that most of my sales calls are booked from my Instagram content. So I'm gonna then focus on not just saying Instagram, but what type of Instagram content is actually moving the needle forward, right? So I'll give you an example for myself. I know that my carousel posts are trash vanity metrics, right? Low engagement, low content, uh comments, low likes. But nearly every single carousel gets a lead into my DMs or directly into an inquiry form or booking a sales call. So I know when I'm focusing on Instagram content, I'm not just saying I'm focusing on Instagram and picking random content to create based on what I see performing well for other people. I know that I am going to start with my carousels and pump those out first, right? And then I know talking head is also really good for my expert positioning and really just nurturing my audience, educating, perspective shifting. So then I focus on that second. The more trendy reels, like the comedy reels, the lip sync, the b-roll, those are all still really great for build like those are really great for me. I'm using myself as a personal example. Those are really great for like colder audiences to call them in and get their attention. So I usually do those last. They're also relatively easy to create, but it does require, you know, some planning and strategizing and being camera ready and all the things. So here's the important takeaway. If your marketing is feeling like it is just lacking direction, it's just not letting you up anymore because it feels like a whole bunch of work that's not getting you anywhere, right? It's feeling unreliable, unpredictable, unprofitable. It's time to go back to the drawing board of really reevaluating what it is you're offering, who that person is that you're offering for, what problem you solve with your service or your product, getting back to the messaging. The messaging is so, so important. And that's 99% of what people come to me for is like, Sarah, I need help with my messaging. I need help with my positioning. But we can't look at your messaging or your positioning if we don't understand the offer in the target market in such detail. So it's not just saying that you work with moms. That's one bullet point. We need to take that one bullet point and we need to make it like 10 or 12 long, right? It's not that you just work with overwhelmed, tired, stressed entrepreneurs. That's only two bullet points. We need 10 more. I need you to get so specific in who this target market is. And like we talked about in the beginning, if you have not revisited this in a few months, it's time to really look at who is the audience and how have they evolved, how have you evolved and where is the intersection? So then you can look at your messaging and messaging and your positioning and where you're creating content, whether it's podcasts, blogs, emails, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, threads, TikTok, it could be Reddit, it could be Pinterest. It doesn't matter where you're showing up. You have to look at what is the system, right? Where are we bringing in new people? How do we get them onto a platform so we can stay top of mind so they can consume the content, build the expert positioning, build the value positioning, right? Really warm them up to then move into a sales funnel through that could be an email list, it could be a text list, it could be a private free community. I have a client who does a really awesome free community on Telegram as a way to like build her list because she knows the emails do okay, but the the interaction, the engagement,

Cut Busy Work Start Lead Work

SPEAKER_00 15:55

the open rates, the response rates are so great in the Telegram. And she also just owns, she doesn't own Telegram, but she owns the group, right? And she still has their contact information. So when you understand all of those fundamental things, and it's not that you don't know about it, you've learned all these things, you've gotten the education, you've done the courses, you've gotten the coaching, you've just gotten a little a little bit strayed from those tried and true things that work in your marketing. So, how can you go back to what works? How can you go back to simplifying it? And then having a higher impact use of your time, sit down and look at based on the offer, the audience, the system, the funnel, where you need to show up strategically in order to attract, nurture, and convert clients. You are going to then sit down and figure out what are you doing daily, weekly, and monthly in your marketing to make sure that it is the highest impact use of your time. We have to be done with productive busy work, okay? Updating your website is not productive marketing time, right? Doing a whole bunch of Canva graphics for three, four, five hours is not a productive use of marketing time, right? Going and creating a new offer, creating a new freebie, um, building out an entire course. Those are not productive uses of marketing time. The productive use of your marketing time are things that are going to directly build your visibility or build your lead pool, right? Your revenue generating activities are things that directly make you money. So things like the sales calls and the follow-ups and all those things, right? But the lead generating activities are the things in your marketing that will actually move the needle forward to say, hey, that I just discovered you. I just found your page. I love your content. Great. You see my content for a couple of days, it directs you here, you make that decision, you move just seamlessly through the funnel, through the pipeline. I promise you, this is going to give you an immediate feeling of direction in your marketing. It is going to make an immediate change, not only in how you feel and how clear the marketing feels for you, but it's also going to start to bring those visibility to the new eyeballs, getting those lurkers off the fence, getting people in your DMs, on your calendar, filling out the contact form, whatever that next step is. It won't be overnight, but I guarantee that when you go back and you revisit these things and you start implementing them, from the time you start implementing, you can't just like sit there and strategize and think about it and be like 30 days. But from the time you start implementing these things consistently and more strategically and cleaner and more dialed in messaging, you will start seeing more visibility and more leads within 30 days. Guaranteed. You can take me to the bank on that, okay? I want you to really sit with this and I want you to re-listen to this episode as many times as you need to to really

Final Takeaways And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 19:05

drive this home in your brain and to really start using more discernment about what applies to your business and what doesn't. 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 follow the show so you don't miss any more episodes. And if you're really ready to tighten up your marketing strategy and to create a plan that actually works in generating leads consistently with dream clients, check out the free resources or book a clarity call using the links right in the show notes. You'll find everything you need right there in the show notes to get you started with your marketing. And remember, you're already the CMO of your business. It's just time to start thinking like one.