Honest Marketing

All I Want for Christmas - Marketing Edition

• Honest Podcasts • Episode 15

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The holidays are a great time for reflection and planning, so we're taking this opportunity to share some thoughts on making your business even better in 2023!

There are many different paths to success for businesses, but we’ve highlighted the five things every company should consider when trying to improve its own approach. From product value and leveraging your team to branding and engaging your audience, these are surefire ways to make your business dreams a reality. 

So listen and get ready for a new year of growth! 

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • Five things every business should want for Christmas
  • How to get team members more engaged
  • Strategic marketing tips to help you reach your goals in 2023

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And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

Travis Albritton  0:00  
What do you want for Christmas? This question has gotten a lot harder as I've gotten older as I imagine it has for you as well. When you're 5, 6, 7 years old, you know what you want. You want the new video game system, you want the new, you know, BB gun rifle from Christmas story you have in your mind exactly what you want. Well as business owners, it's easy to start picking and choosing. Oh, well, I wish this was different. I wish that was different. I wish this could get better next year. And if magically, you could just wave a wand and it happened. That'd be great. Well, in this episode, I'm going to break down the top five things I want for Christmas as a business owner, that I imagined you will want for Christmas as a business owner, to make sure that you have a healthy marketing strategy going into the New Year.

Travis Albritton  0:47  
Welcome back to the Honest Marketing Podcast where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. And this is the officially first Christmas episode of the Honest Marketing Podcast. I got my Christmas shirt on, I got whipped cream and cinnamon in my coffee, we're ready to rock and roll, listen to Jingle Bells in the background as you hear this episode. And we're gonna dig right into five things every business should want for Christmas to have a healthy and effective marketing strategy going into 2023. Because this is the time of the year where we're starting to reflect we're looking back at 2022, seeing what worked, what didn't work, what are we going to do, going into January and February that really crucial Q1 of the New Year. And these are five things, five things on a dream list for every single business owner, and entrepreneur. And the really cool thing about each of these things is once you identify, okay, these are the five markers of a marketing strategy, and a business that is growing and healthy. Now you can create specific targets and strategies in order to reach each of those things. And the best part is they're all within your control.

Travis Albritton  1:49  
Alright, so number one, the first thing I want for Christmas, as a business owner that you want for Christmas as a business owner is profitable products and services. It seems relatively straightforward, right? But quite often, it's easy to start getting to a price war with competitors, to start thinking about cutting pricing, especially coming off of Black Friday in the holiday season and all the sales that go on as a mechanism in order to increase sales. But ultimately, that is really short sighted. Discounting is not the way that you want to live and die, unless that happens to be the industry that you're in. And so when you think about every single one of your products and services, every single thing that you offer, are they profitable? Is every single thing you sell profitable? Is there margin in it? Does it cost less to make than you sell it for? And, you know, there's certainly a conversation to be had for loss leaders for selling things at a loss like the $5 rotisserie chicken at Costco in order to get people into your store to buy other things. But in general, you want your business to be profitable, you want it to be healthy, and your customers actually do too. They want you to be profitable, because they want to know that you're gonna be around in three to five years when they want to come back and buy something else from you. So you want to make sure that every single thing that you sell, whether it's a product oriented business, or service oriented business is profitable. And pricing, how you price your products and services is really about value, more than anything else. It's easy to look at other people and see what they're charging for their products and services and think, oh, well, if they're charging that, then I can't charge 2x that, 3x that, 10x that, because nobody will buy it, because they've already established a price for it. But ultimately, people buy things based on the perceived value they get from that product or service, you can buy a brand new Mercedes SUV, or you can buy a Toyota, Toyota Corolla, they both get you where they need to go. They both have five seats, one of them is priced 5 to 10 times as much. Why is that? Because the perceived value of that product is higher than the other. And so when you think about your products and services, how are you positioning them? How are you pricing them? And specifically, how are you communicating the value of those things to the people that are considering buying them? That is the game. That's the pricing game. And so there's the old adage, you can be one of several things good, faster, cheap. And in general, when it's within your control, you want to steer towards premium offerings, being the best at what you do. Because when you're the best at what you do, you can charge whatever you want to. With a reason, of course, because you were the best. And there will always be people that want to pay a premium to work with the best. Now you have to be the best, you have to make yourself the best at whatever you do. And that takes time. That takes effort, but it is certainly achievable. Fast is another way that you can differentiate yourself and people will pay a premium for speed or to get results in less time. But cheap is the one that I would steer away from if you're thinking about pricing yourself and trying to be competitive. Because you're not going to compete with Walmart, you're not going to compete with Amazon, at least long term. And ultimately cheap is just a race to the bottom. And so there's no, there's no advantage to being the second cheapest thing in your industry. You have to be the cheapest all the time or you lose the game. So decide to be fast or decide to be the best. And when you are one of those things, you can price yourself at a premium level, which allows you to have a healthy amount of profit and your products and services and serve people at a high level. So that's number one. The number one thing that I want for Christmas, is that profitable products and services.

Travis Albritton  5:15  
Number two, a full pipeline of healthy leads. What is a pipeline? Why are you using plumbing analogies on a marketing podcast? So you think about a pipeline as all of these different inputs into your business, all of these different ways that people are discovering you. They're discovering what you do, how you help people, whether it's in an email campaign, or social media, or paid advertising, or whatever it is, sponsoring your farmers market, and there's all these different ways that people are discovering you and coming into your business. These are all the pipes flowing into your business. And what you want at all times is to have a full pipeline, meaning there's a consistent stream of people of businesses that are coming to you, that are discovering you, and considering working with you. And you want that full stream, that full pipeline, because then that allows you to do the kind of testing and tweaking that you need to do in order to become more effective at selling what you sell. And if you haven't yet listened to the episode where we talk about content marketing, the title is The First Piece of Content Every Business Needs. In there, we break down the five stages of buyer awareness, you want to be guiding people through that process going from unaware to problem aware, to solution aware, to product aware to most aware, you want to be guiding them through that process. So that way, they're coming to you as an informed lead, as an informed prospect. So that's what I mean by healthy leads. It's not just, you know, somebody in another country that you don't do business with happened to land on your website, that's not a healthy lead. A healthy lead is someone who's qualified, who needs what you have, and has the the capacity and the ability to purchase that from you, that has a healthy lead who's showing intense, and showing that they're interested in what you do. You want to continue to foster and cultivate that as much as possible. And so if you're not getting new leads and prospects every single month, coming to you even if you don't make any sales, just getting that constant stream of traffic coming to you from the variety of platforms that you're marketing on, that is something that you want to adjust, because that is really going to fix not all of your problems, but many of your problems, if you are always having people showing up at your door, asking you about what you do. And so whether it's paid traffic through Facebook and Google Ads, whether it's organic traffic, content marketing with blogs, podcasts, YouTube, affiliate relationships, whatever it is, you want to look at all the different ways people are discovering you and your business. And then make sure that every single month you're getting a healthy stream of those new people. You can optimize sales conversions with no traffic at the end of the day. So the second thing that every business should want for Christmas is a full pipeline of healthy leads, the right person coming to you at the right time.

Travis Albritton  7:47  
Number three, the number three thing that every business should watch out for Christmas this year is an engaged team. What does it have to do with marketing? What does your team have to do with marketing? Well, somebody's got to do the marketing for your company. Typically, that's your team, right. And really, when you think about having a team all working together on the same sheet of music, marching to the beat of the same drum, it's being on the same page about where you're going together. That's what I mean by an engaged team. So it's not just that they are only working for your company, you don't have side hustles. It's not that they're working their full hours every single week, it's that everyone knows where you're going and you're going there together. And a concept that's really helpful for understanding and breaking down how to do that, how to get a lot of people on the same page without having to micromanage their tasks, which is always the balance there is something called commander's intent. And that's something that a concept from the military where rather than saying, okay, we're going to take that building, and here's how we're going to get there, you're going to go down this street, and then you're going to cut over here, and then this person is probably going to engage with you here. So that's how you're gonna get over that obstacle. They don't tell them any of that. They just say, here's where we're starting, here's where we need to end up, get there, by any means necessary. And so the general, the commander lays out the intent of the mission. This is the goal of the mission, this is what we're trying to accomplish, but then leaves it to the boots on the grounds, the people actually carrying out the mission to decide in real time, what is the best course of action. So they're not like, hey, we ran into a roadblock, this street doesn't exist, let's run it up the chain of command all the way to the commander be like, hey, your plan doesn't work. What do you want us to do now? And they just sit around waiting for the commander to make a decision with imperfect information. That's not how you want your business to run. That's not how you want your marketing to run. You want to empower the people actually doing the work to make decisions based on your intent. Where are you going? What are your goals? What are you trying to achieve? So having that commander's intent with your marketing team allows them to be engaged not just with their skills, but also to know what they need to do based on what they know. And the data they're sitting in front of them in order to get to that commander's intent. So you want that really clear. Where are we going? And we're gonna talk about goals actually, next week on the podcast, what do healthy business goals look? Like you want to healthy delegation and reporting frequency, that's another piece of having a engaged team, you don't want people every single hour having to chime in and say, this is what I'm working on, this is what I'm doing. Because now you have a lot of wasted time, you have a lot of wasted activity, you don't want to just create meetings for the sake of creating meetings when an email will do or a status update, at the end of the day will do. And you want people to be equipped to do the work that they that you've asked them to do, that you trust them. And that comes to healthy delegation that when you hire somebody to do a job, or to do a role, the natural tendency is just to say, okay, here it is, good luck. Let me know if you have any questions. But we don't actually take the time to bring them up to speed and make sure they actually have all the knowledge and the resources they need in order to do the job well. And then as a business owner, head of marketing, it's frustrating when you're like, I asked you to do this thing, and you didn't do it the way that I, I thought that you would do it, that I intended for you to do it. And they're sick, and you never told me what to do. You just threw me in the deep end and said swim. And so if you want to engage team that feels like they're in the best position to succeed, to use their expertise and their skills to really help shape and craft that marketing campaign and that strategy, be able to make audibles on the fly in order to get to where the stated end goal is that commander's intent. You want to have a healthy system of training and delegation, healthy expectation for what reporting back looks like, whether it's to middle management, upper management, C-level executives, whatever that frequency is, make sure it's not disruptive, but you're getting enough information that you can spot problems as they're happening, rather than getting 3, 6, 12 months down the road, and then discovering oh, something really went awry, and nobody caught it. You don't want that to happen. But you don't want to overburden people with micromanaging their tasks in their day to day, okay. And then really helping people feel like once you put them in a position to do something that you trust them, you trust them with that role, and what you're asking them to do. So you want to have an engaged team. That's number three. 

Travis Albritton  11:56  
The number four thing every business should want for Christmas to have a healthy and effective marketing strategy going into 2023 is a diversified marketing campaign. Alright, so this is gonna sound super obvious, but virtually nobody does this, myself included. Alright, so I'm preaching to the choir here. It is so easy to become overly reliant on the traffic source or the marketing strategy that we are just naturally the best at. And say, well, as long as this keeps working, there's no need to fix anything, there's no need to change. Let's just rewind the clock back to five or six years ago, Facebook Ads were all the rage, everyone's doing Facebook Ads, everybody's making money on Facebook Ads. Why? Because it was still a new and growing opportunity. And there were entire businesses built on Facebook Ads, you give Mark Zuckerberg $1, you make $3 back and you do that trade over and over and over again until the end of time. Then guess what happened? Costs changed. Apple comes in and says we're not going to allow you to track users on their phones. Now, Facebook's attribution is all out the window, and everything gets more expensive. So then all these businesses are built on the premise of Facebook Ads until the end of time, are now in crisis mode, because they become overly reliant on the thing that helped them get to where they are. Same thing happened with Amazon affiliates. There were a lot of blogs, and businesses that use affiliate links in order to generate a significant amount if not all of their revenue. And then Amazon comes out and says actually, we're cutting all of our affiliate payouts in half, because we think all these people are gonna come to Amazon to buy this stuff anyways. So we don't feel like we need to pay you to remote Amazon, they're gonna come here, regardless of whether they use an affiliate link or not. So before we're giving you 4%, now we're giving you one and a half percent as an affiliate commission. So then imagine you're a business that has really leveraged Amazon in order to grow, whether it's an e-commerce business or something like that. And now half of your revenue disappears. Because you were overly reliant on one traffic source or one way of growing your company. You don't want that to happen to you, even if the going is really good right now. And it doesn't seem like anything's gonna change in the near future, the one constant on the internet is change. It is always changing. It is always adapting. It is always shifting. And unless you have multiple different ways that you are driving traffic to your business, you are compromised. You are in a position where you are at the, you're really putting yourself over a barrel and putting yourself at the expense of things that are outside of your control. And so Facebook Ads are the main way that you're driving traffic, consider diversifying to Google Ads, and vice versa. If you were just doing paid traffic acquisition, you need to branch out into organic content and content marketing in order to start building awareness and site authority there. If you don't have a social media platform, consider starting to post there. Now, social media is a whole another beast. But it is still vitally important to have a presence on social media so people know that you're a legitimate business. If it is affiliates, make sure that you don't just have a single affiliate or ahandful of affiliates that are supplying your traffic but the you are really broadening the reach of the number of people that you have connected to your company. So again, it's not about, you know, having to do everything, but you don't want to be overly reliant on one way of generating traffic for your business. So you want a diversified marketing campaign with lots of different things that are all working together. That's number four.

Travis Albritton  15:22  
Number five, the last thing every business should want for Christmas and 2022. To have a healthy and effective 2023 is exciting and tangible goals. Exciting, meaning that you're enthusiastic about it, you're like happy about the prospect of hitting this goal. It's meaningful to you, but not just meaningful in the sense that you're going to be able to just kind of keep on keepin on. But it's something that will really generate excitement for you and your company when you hit it. And then tangible, meaning it's actually like a concrete specific thing you were aiming for. So saying we want to grow is not tangible. We want to make more money is not tangible. We want to hit seven figures in revenue for the first time in our company's history. That's tangible, and exciting, potentially, right? So you want to clearly lay out where are you going. It could be revenue based, it could be profit based, it could be how big the company is, how many clients you have, how many reviews you have in Capterra. Right? Where are you going? And then how will you know when you've arrived? How will you actually know you've gotten to where you want to go, so you can celebrate and be excited with the team. And speaking of the team, when you set these goals for your business, does your team understand the role they play in getting there? That's really key, going back to an engaged team, commander's intent. When you set these exciting and tangible goals, for your marketing, for your business growth for whatever it is that you're trying to optimize, and focus on for 2023, to get better as a business at what you do. Does every single person on your team, understand how their day to day tasks connect to that goal? Because that's a really powerful thing. When you can talk to somebody who's not in sales and say, here is how you doing your job is going to help the team get to here. This thing we're all really excited about achieving together. When you can make that connection for people, now, their day to day purpose is not just punching a clock, doing the tasks clocking out. But it's I am a part of this incredible team, that's all working together to get here, to reach this new mountaintop, this new destination we've never been to. And so when you set those exciting and tangible goals, make sure that you can communicate to your team, the role that they play in helping you get there. And then also make sure that when you're setting those goals, for your marketing, for your sales, whatever it is, is it something worth celebrating? This is something to consider. Because it might be worth celebrating to you and you might have personal goals for ways that you want to grow, but is it something worth celebrating for everybody? Or your clients going to celebrate? Or your is your team going to celebrate? You want this to be a big win, when you're thinking about your wish list, things you can magically wave a wand and it just happened. It would be having goals that you can actually pursue that everyone's excited and enthused about, and they know exactly where you're going, tying back commander's intent again.

Travis Albritton  18:12  
Alright, so those are the five things I want for Christmas, you want for Christmas, in order to have a healthy and effective marketing strategy going into 2023. Let's run through them again. Number one, profitable products and services. Make sure you're making money with everything that you sell. Number two, a full pipeline of healthy leads and prospects. Number three, an engaged team. Number four, diversified marketing campaigns and strategies and number five, exciting and tangible goals. So look through these five things, identify the one where you're the weakest, where you have the most work to do, and make a plan to tackle that in the first quarter of 2023. And don't worry about trying to do everything at once. Just pick one thing at a time. Go after it. Once you've addressed it, move on to the next thing. Now if you're wondering how to create exciting and tangible goals that are really meaningful to you, specifically, as the business owner, the entrepreneur, the person in charge of your marketing, important to your company, but also rooted in a reality, rooted in the real sense of this is actually going to make a difference in the day to day life of me, my company and my customers. You definitely want to stick around for next week's episode, we're going to talk about How Small Your Company Should Be in 2023. So have a wonderful time celebrating the holidays with your family and with your friends. We got one more episode this year, and then we'll blast off into 2023 to continue to grow and continue to help our companies serve people at a high level. Thanks for listening. And as always, be honest.