You Don't Need More Marketing Ideas, but You Do Need This

We break down why your marketing feels scattered even when you’re showing up consistently, and we draw a hard line between strategy and tactics. We share a simple framework to evaluate every marketing move so you can stop guessing and start creating predictable lead flow. 

• defining marketing strategy as the plan and tactics as the supporting actions 
• spotting the signs of a missing strategy, like chasing new platforms and advice without data 
• separating marketing activity from marketing progress using KPIs and key performance indicators 
• choosing metrics that matter, like clicks, leads, opt-ins, booked calls and conversion rate 
• fixing the real issue behind “post more” by tightening messaging, positioning and calls to action 
• using the attract nurture convert optimize framework to pick smarter tactics 
• building a connected marketing ecosystem where each channel feeds the next step 

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Transcript

Random Marketing Creates Random Results

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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 your business actually needs. I'm your host, Sarah Gimmel. I'm a marketing strategist and consultant helping small business owners to build marketing ecosystems that actually create predictable and reliable results. Around here we talk about what it really looks like to step into your role as a CMO, to start seeing the big picture, to lead your marketing with strategy, and to stop wasting time on productive, busy work that isn't actually getting you anywhere. This is no fluff, honest conversations with potent strategies and practical insights that you can use right now to make your marketing work smarter. I already know that you're not new to the game. Okay, you've been around the entrepreneurship streets for a few years now. You've been marketing and selling and figuring this ish out. And it's not that you don't have ideas, it's not that you're not showing up, right? You show up. You are getting yourself out there, you are creating the different assets for marketing and doing all the things. But even with your greatest ideas, somehow your marketing still feels scattered. You're posting, you're networking, emailing, trying all these different things. You've tried outsourcing and delegating and hiring, yet it still feels unreliable. It still feels unpredictable. It still feels like you're guessing. And that's because you don't need more marketing ideas. You need a tighter marketing strategy. And the biggest thing we're gonna cover today is the difference between the two. Because it's not that you're not smart, it's not that you don't know what you're doing, it's not that you're not good at marketing, it's just that oftentimes you don't see the difference between the tactic and the strategy, right? And really understanding what each one is and how they work together. Right now, your random acts of marketing are creating random results, right? You're randomly showing up here, you're randomly sending an email just to check off the list that you nurtured your email list this week. But there's questions that we need to be asking in every single thing we do in our marketing to make sure it aligns with

Strategy Versus Tactics

SPEAKER_00 2:18

the overarching strategy. And that's what we're gonna do. I got you covered. So make sure you grab a pen and a paper. You already know if you're not taking notes, I'm not doing my job. Okay, I see this all the time when I work with business owners in their marketing strategy. So I am a marketing strategist and consultant. We do done with you and done for you. But in this like strategy and consulting, we get people who are like, Great, I need help with my marketing strategy. But what they actually come for is like, tell me what to do next. What should I post? Should I start a podcast? What should my subject line of my email be? Right? Should we run ads? Those are not bad questions, they are tactical questions. And the biggest difference between strategy and tactics is the strategy is the plan, and the tactics are the actions that support the plan. So we have to make sure that we first focus on what the overarching marketing strategy is before we can implement any tactics, right? So if I gave you an example for me, okay, I'll I'll use my own self as an example. The strategy is around becoming the go-to expert for established business owners in support with their marketing. That's the strategy, right? Or the plan. The tactics to get us there to become known as the go-to expert is this podcast. It's all the networking that I do, it's the email newsletters that we send, it's how I show up on social media, it's the workshops that I teach. But the podcast, the networking, the social media, the workshops, all of those work cohesively to position me as the go-to expert to build the visibility and the brand awareness to the established business owners who need support in their marketing. So where you're stuck right now, when you're feeling like marketing is just all over the place, it's random AF. Right now, you are stuck choosing tactics before you've established the direction through the marketing strategy. That is why your marketing feels hard. That's why it ebbs and flows so dramatically, where some months are so amazing, you feel like a badass bitch, and other months are like I need to go sell pictures of my feet. Right? The biggest signs that tell me a business is lacking the marketing strategy has nothing to do with volume or consistency. I'll be

Signs You Are Missing Strategy

SPEAKER_00 4:44

perfectly honest with you, right? Consistency might be relative here, right? So how consistently are we doing the same thing, but you are consistently showing up. So symptoms of or signs that tell me a business is lacking marketing strategy is trying something new every month, right? Following random pieces of advice and having different tactics for different platforms, right? So this person's teaching me YouTube, this person's writing my emails, and we're taking advice from a lot of different sources, jumping from platform to platform, making decisions on what to lean into or what to change, what to abandon without data or metrics, or making that decision too early, starting a lot of new things, but not really ever seeing them fully through. And this has nothing to do with who you are as a person. It has nothing to do with your character, your motivation, your discipline, your consistency, your expertise, nothing. Why this happens is because every tactic sounds good in isolation, right? So for example, if you hear that, you know, this person over here grew to a million followers on YouTube in three months, and those, you know, a million followers turned into $20,000 months, and I'll teach you how to become YouTube famous in just 30 days. That sounds really great by itself. But the problem is you're not looking at how it's connected to the rest of the things that you're doing. How does it complement what you're doing on Instagram or TikTok? How does it feed the email list, right? Is it reaching the right people? None of these things are bad. That's really, really important here. It's not bad to say you're focusing on YouTube or TikTok, or even if you said to me, Sarah, I want to focus on marketing on Snapchat. That by itself is not bad as long as we understand how that tactic feeds the strategy. There's a big difference between marketing activity and marketing progress, right? Marketing activity is the stuff you're doing day to day or week to week.

Activity Versus Progress And KPIs

SPEAKER_00 7:01

This is the posting, the emails, the networking, the updating, your website, all that stuff, right? The marketing progress is actual KPIs. So your KPIs are your key performance indicators. Your KPIs are the predetermined metrics that you choose to track the success of all the marketing activity, right? So increased visibility, actual number of leads, right? Are we converting higher percentages on the website? Are we getting more opt-ins to the email list? Are we growing a following on a certain platform? Are we booking more sales calls? Are we getting more downloads on a freebie? Get where I'm going, right? The important distinction here is that activity measures effort. You're not low on effort. The progress is what measures actual movement. And this is usually the piece that I see missing, even in established businesses, right? So instead of asking how much content did I create, ask how how many more ideal clients actually found me, right? A great example of this. I had a client recently, she did really, really well on Instagram. She went viral, got a lot of new followers very quickly. That vanity metric is great. We actually don't care about that at all, right? She does have a goal to hit 10K followers for a whole nother reason. But outside of that, really we don't care about how many followers. On the back end, we were asking questions like, cool, this video went viral, the views were high, we're getting a lot of new followers, wonderful. How many of these new followers are actually clicking on to the website? So we track profile activity and website clicks. We track how much traffic is going to her actual website. Then we wanted to look at like how many of them are downloading a freebie, how many of them are filling out an application to coach with her, how many of them are DMing. We track DM volume to say how many of them are DMing to have a conversation to say, yes, I'm interested. How do I work with you? Same thing goes for networking. Instead of saying how many networking events did I attend, ask how many of those conversations and relationships actually led to opportunities and not just a sale, right? This is a whole nother conversation that there's other podcast episodes on. You can find a lot from me on this topic. Networking is not sales, but think about opportunities. How many uh more rooms did you get invited to? How many new collaboration partners, referral partners did you get invited introduced to? Being busy does not always equal being effective. And as you step into this next season of your business and your marketing, it's really important that you distinguish the difference, right? Being busy is not your problem. We need to make sure that the volume you're putting out is actually giving an ROI. You don't need to do more marketing, you don't need to put out more content. We need more effective marketing, more effective content, right? How can we take what you're already

Real Examples With Better Metrics

SPEAKER_00 10:03

doing and make it perform better versus simply just focusing on putting out more volume? Another really great example of this, I was working with a client a few months ago, like closer to the beginning of the year, and she comes to me and she's like, Sarah, I'm gonna start posting on Instagram three times a day, because that's what she had heard someone recommend, and I don't know who she was listening to, but she's like, I need to post on Instagram three times a day. And as her marketing consultant, I'm like, why? Why in the world do you need to be posting on Instagram three times a day? And she's like, Because that's how I'm gonna increase my reach, my website clicks, the traffic to my actual site, and ultimately that's how I'm gonna get more sales. And we looked at how her existing content was performing, how her website was performing, all these things. We also looked at her capacity. Is it really realistic for you to be posting on Instagram three times a day sustainably? And at the end of the day, what we ended up finding was that volume was not at all her problem. Her content was fluff, respectfully, right? The messaging was way fluffy and vague, it wasn't very specific. She had a product-based business, a lot of her content wasn't even about the products. So when the the reason why I say this is because it's not a volume problem, it's the quality of what's being put out problem, right? We need to tighten up the messaging and the positioning. We also need to make it clearer of where to go, when to shop, right? Have it to have stronger calls to action. Here are the four questions that I want you to be able to answer regardless of what your marketing campaign is, regardless of what your marketing focus is. And these four questions are all built around my signature framework of attract, nurture, convert, and optimize. You can catch this in another podcast episode, but this is the framework that we run any marketing strategy through, any client, any industry, whether we're doing done with you or done for you, we always look at marketing through the lens of attract, nurture, convert, and optimize. So for attract, I want you to ask yourself who are you trying to attract? Right? Who is your ideal client? What do they care about? What problems are they actively trying to solve? Where are they already spending their time? Whether it's literally or digitally. Under nurture, the question for you to ask is how are you building trust? How do people actually get to know you? How do you stay top of mind for your target market? How do you demonstrate your

More Volume Is Not The Fix

SPEAKER_00 12:46

expertise? Don't just talk about what you do, show it. Right? How do you help your target market to make a more informed decision about purchasing with you? Under convert, you're asking yourself, how are you turning interest into actual revenue? I talk sometimes, and this is something to listen to in the other podcast episode that really dives into attract, nurture, and convert. Convert is obviously converting the sale, but this also includes the micro conversions that come before the sale. For the purposes of this conversation, we'll look at converting the sale. What is the next step? Are your calls to action diverse? Are they strong? Are they clear? Is your messaging clear, right? Is the offer clear and obvious? Are you making it easy for people to buy? Or do they have to go 17 clicks before they actually complete the purchase? Or the even just the application or booking the sales call? And this is one that is so important and so missed is the optimization. The question to ask under optimize is what is working and what is not? It seems so simple and so obvious, but when is the last time you really tracked the performance of each individual marketing channel? When is the last time you really sat down and looked at traffic and conversion and clicks? Where are your leads actually coming from? Right? What's converting and what's not? What are you really wanting to lean into because it's working really well? And what needs to shift because it's not working so well. If you're putting a lot of time and energy into TikTok, but it's not giving you any type of leads, that's something to know, right? If you're spending a lot of time on email marketing but you're not getting any clicks, that's

Attract Nurture Convert Optimize Framework

SPEAKER_00 14:38

important to know. It's honestly equally as important to know what is working. I'll give you a great example. I was talking to a client recently. She had uh she's doing like a special service day. She had four spots open for this day. She came to me, she had one filled, she needed to fill three more. I talked to her like a week later, and she had three spots filled and one left. So she did a great increase. She went from like 25% filled to 75% full for that day. And when we were looking at marketing, a lot of times what I'm doing is I'm reverse engineering successful stuff, and then how can we repeat that, right? So when we reverse engineered, it's like where did these three out of four of the slots that were filled, where did these three people come from? 100% of them came from one referral source. Now, do we want to put all of our marketing eggs in one basket and rely solely on referrals? No, absolutely not. But what I do want her to do, and this is something that she's actively working on, is how can we nurture that referral relationship to really reward them and say thank you and show gratitude and really want like incentivize them to want to continue sending those referrals? How can we make it easier for them to send referrals? Is there some kind of like uh documentation that we can give them? Is there something that we can do to make it more streamlined, right? Is there something that we can do to make it even easier for them to share? Because this is a great referral source. We want to make sure we're keeping it fed. The other thing that we looked at in this example, we're talking about what worked, but what wasn't working was her social media, right? So it's like you're spending a lot of time on social media, but all the leads came from a referral source. How can we change the social media to start performing like the referral sources? What changes need to be made in the messaging, in the customer journey, right? And how you're showing up, where you're sending people. So obviously, we've only been together for like 15 minutes. This is not going to be a perfect system yet, but I want you to really walk away from this feeling more clear and more confident in how to evaluate each tactic that you're doing through the lens of strategy. And of course, if you need more help, you already know I got you covered. You can go to the show notes and all the things. Shameless plug. I obviously am here to support you in your marketing if you need it. But how can you start to ask questions like, which part of my strategy does this support? Is this something that is under attract, nurture, convert, or optimize? If you can't answer that question, or if it doesn't make sense when you do answer it, then don't do it. Right? Ask yourself, what problem am I trying to solve? Do I need more visibility? Do I need more trust? Do I need more conversions, or do I need better retention? Because different problems require different solutions. And it's important to be self-aware and to really truly understand what your problem is. A lot of people think visibility is their problem. A lot of people think they need more eyeballs, more traffic, more, more, more, more, more, but you're not building the trust and converting for the eyeballs you already do have. So if you pay attention to who's watching, who's you know engaging on social media, who's opening your emails, who's engaging with you privately, all these things. If you pay attention to who those people are, if they fall within your target market and they're not buying, it's not a visibility problem. It's a trust and conversion problem. Or if you notice every time you sell something, it's the same few people who are, you know, signing up, buying, if it's the same people you're having conversations with, then you're selling to the same people, then maybe it is a visibility problem. Third, I want you to ask yourself, how does this fit into the larger ecosystem? We want to make sure that everything you're doing works cohesively together. This is really important. If you're gonna start a podcast, where is the podcast gonna lead people to? Right? What happens after someone attends a workshop? What are we gonna do after someone follows you on social media? Where do we want to invite them into? Everything should connect and feed each other. When everything is more connected and more cohesive, it becomes more profitable, but you also don't have to work nearly as hard. Because all of your marketing efforts should feed each other and ultimately feed the customer journey. It needs to guide them from discovering you to purchasing. The last one I want you to ask yourself is how will I know if it's working? Right? So, what metrics are you even tracking? What metrics do you really care about? What results are you expecting? This is really, really important because it's not about what's trending, it's not about vanity metrics, it's not about any of this. You're gonna start adopting tactics because they actually support the strategy and we actually know what metrics to track. So I'll give you a great example. If we're doing uh social media, it's just an easy, easy one, but I'll give you a few. Social media. We're not tracking followers, likes, comments, you know, uh views. Those are all vanity metrics.

Measure What Matters Then Adjust

SPEAKER_00 19:52

To track the success of your marketing when you are marketing to run a business is how many people actually clicked the link in your bio. You can track things like your DM volume, how many people are DMing you to ask questions or to learn how to work with you, right? When you have a sales call and you're saying, Where did you find us? Make sure you're asking and see how many people are booking the sales call with you because they saw you on social media. That is far, far more important. I have had so many posts on Instagram specifically where they perform like absolute trash and vanity metrics, but they are getting a thousand dollars or more in revenue per post because behind the scenes it moves someone into a buying decision, right? Another example is um uh let's do website. So this is kind of obvious, and this one is simple, but a lot of business owners don't track it. For your website, we want to track traffic and conversion, right? So a lot of times business owners are just looking at conversion, or they're not all the ones, they're not looking at anything at all. But what I want you to track is how many people are actually coming to the website and then how many of them are actually converting. This is really, really important for you to know because that'll give you a percentage. So you might see like, well, two people converted, and that sounds low, but if four people visited the website and two converted, that's a 50% conversion rate. That's insanely high, right? So it's important to understand those metrics. For something like a masterclass or a workshop, there's a few different metrics to track, right? It's not just how many people sign up for the workshop, it's how many people actually attend live, how many people stay for the whole thing, how many people convert after into another offer. You are not struggling with your marketing because you lack ideas. You are struggling with your marketing because you have too many ideas, and no framework really for understanding how to make the decisions of where to focus, right? So, hopefully, from this episode, it helps you look at your

Focus Creates Reliable Lead Flow

SPEAKER_00 22:02

marketing through the lens of strategy instead of tactic to help create that focus. Because the focus is what will create consistency, not in the volume and how you show up. We talked about this in the beginning. I don't need you to be more consistent in, you know, post once a day and send an email once a week. You're already doing that. We want to create consistency in where you're showing up, what campaign you're focused on, what offer you're focused on, right? We want to keep you consistent in the actual focus area of your marketing, and that consistency will create consistency in the lead flow, right? When you do random acts of marketing, doesn't matter how much volume there is, random acts of marketing will always create random lead flow and random revenue. When you create consistency in your system and your strategy, it creates consistency in the lead flow. And, you know, behind the lead flow is of course the revenue. Instead of asking yourself, what should I do next? Start asking yourself, who am I attracting? How am I nurturing them? How am I building trust? How am I converting them? And how am I optimizing everything that I'm doing? Because once you can answer those four questions, the right tactics become much easier to identify, and you can start working smarter, not harder. That's a huge key in everything that I talk about. Effort is not the problem. We just gotta tighten you up, right? We just gotta tighten it all up, clean it all up so that it works together cohesively and profitably.

Follow The Show And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 23:38

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, make sure you go ahead and follow the show so you don't miss any future episodes. And if you're ready to really tighten up your strategy to create a marketing plan that actually works, if you're ready to be done with the random acts of marketing, go ahead and check out the show notes. I'm dropping a bunch of different links in there, different resources for you. You can also find the link to get on my schedule for a free clarity call to discuss what a partnership between you and I could look like. You'll find everything there. And just remember that you're already the CMO of your business. It's time to start thinking like one.