Episode Description:

“Who is your customer and what do they do?”

In this episode we explore strategies to help you cope with the seemingly infinite number of tricks, methods, and strategies you can utilize when marketing your business. There is only a few basic things you REALLY need to know before approaching any marketing strategy. Social media? YouTube? Facebook Ads? Google Ads? Print Ads? Email Marketing? Where do you start?!

Action you can take right now:

1. Write down and define your TARGET audience. (Average age, income, likes/interests, and any other pertinent demographics).
2. Explore the demographic statistics for each social platform to see which one is most aligned with your target audience.
3. Pick ONE marketing tool and take a few hours a week to learn it over a few weeks – then start using it, and use it consistently before moving on to the “next best thing”.

Episode After-Thoughts

The word analysis-paralysis pops up in this episode and I quickly realized it’s popped up in several past episodes, and several upcoming episodes by guests. Creating a balance between quality and pushing forward, vs. analysis-paralysis is a balancing act. Give something no thought and you will spoil customer relationships by failing to deliver quality, but if you spend too much time overthinking you’ll end up paralytic and fail to deliver ANYTHING to your customers.

If you find yourself hesitating over and over to push forward with something – you’ve likely ended up in analysis-paralysis and need to just push forward, but it doesn’t hurt to take a moment to review your next action once or twice for accuracy and quality.

Episode 22 Transcript:

In today’s episode of marketingandservice.com podcass, we’re going to give you 490 ways to double your sales in 30 days, that and more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast.

Hey, Justin Varuzzo here from marketing and service.com podcast. Thanks for being with me today. This is the podcast that helps you build your business by creating incredible customer relationships. In today’s episode, we are going to talk about being overwhelmed with marketing opportunities. Of course, that introduction was a joke.

I’m not going to. 490 ways to double your sales in 30 days. But you are probably aware that every time you listen to a podcast, including. You walk away with maybe one golden idea that you think, wow, this is the one thing I haven’t been doing that I’m going to start doing now to really take my business to the next level.

But here’s the problem. Many business owners I speak to and many marketers. Overwhelmed with all of the marketing opportunities available, you can spend the next five years listening to podcasts with all sorts of strategies to double your sales. The problem is most of them probably will work. And I think the stories are usually accurate and truthful, but you can’t.

Possibly do it all the biggest corporations in the world with unlimited checkbooks struggle, trying to keep on top of all the opportunities that are available out there. So on this episode, I want to talk a little bit about all the different opportunities and how do you decide which ones you should tackle and which ones that may be you back-burner for a little.

Date. So if you’ve ever listened to any podcasts about marketing or read any blogs or books, or you went to school for marketing, or you have a business background, you’re probably aware of all these different things you hear, especially in today’s landscape. You have SEO live chats. You can do email marketing, email automation, CRM, automation, you can do.

Bot marketing, you can do social marketing, Facebook ads, Google ads, YouTube marketing. Put yourself on video. Why not? It’s free. Get out there. Podcasting. Here I am. I’m podcasting. You could be doing a podcast about your business and building an audience through podcasting, right? Facebook groups for your business.

A lot of people utilize Facebook groups, some stick with internet forums, right? That’s a little more old school. Now you have clubhouse chats, right? You could do audio chats, you could do reputation management and response and be all over your customers everywhere they are and measuring that sentiment and making sure it’s addressed.

There are endless opportunities with coupon codes, shopping sites, omni-channel shopping experiences. It just goes on and on and on and on. Where the heck do you start? And how do you allocate the resources? Because as I said, you can not do it all. The good news is I hope that in this episode, I can give you just a few little strategies or things to think about on how to tackle this list.

And most importantly, the one thing that I think myself included, we’re all guilty of, not necessarily considering when we hear something really exciting, that’s new for the first time. Who is your customer, right? The demographics of your customer. What is your ideal customer profile? Because this is really, it’s going to determine where you’re going to get the most impact.

When you start to really try to market your business, you really need to know who your customer is, what the demographics are, and you have to build out a profile. Typical customer. And depending on the business you’re in this might be really, really easy, or it might be fairly challenging if you have a business that caters to all different types of people from all different socioeconomic backgrounds, all different age groups.

And that, that can, that can start to be a little more tricky, but chances are you’re. If you really take the time, you’re going to find that there’s a large set. Of your customer population that has some type of shared characteristics. And you really need to be able to define this because not only is this going to help you.

Decide which thing you should be doing to promote PR to promote your business, but it’s also really going to help in the future for anything you do moving forward. If you listen to a few episodes back, we did an episode on Facebook ads and, and the, I mean the key. Fundamental key success to running Facebook ads and keeping it affordable is knowing your customer and really drilling down into the demographics when you build an audience for a Facebook ad.

Right. But the same thing applies for everything. If you figure this information out, once you will be able to reuse it, I promise over and over and over again, no matter what it is that you’re trying to. So you need to be able to answer that who is your customer? Once you have that down, it’s going to be a little bit easier to answer.

Where are your customers, where do they come from? If you have a physical retail store, where do they come from? If you have an e-commerce store, you’re selling services online, or your business to business, where are your customers? Where do they hang out? What platforms are they using? If you’re a medical supply company, trying to.

Catheters to the elderly. I can tell you right now, Tik TOK is not where your customers are hanging out. And it sounds silly to say it, but you get the idea where I’m going with this, right? There are demographics for each social media platform and even different social aspects of the internet, where there’s more likely to be people and less likely to be people depending on their demographics.

Right? So Tik TOK tends to be a younger crowd. Facebook is now becoming the older crowd, right? That’s the. Lineal and the gen X crowd, a lot of them are on Facebook where a lot of the younger gen Z people, they really aren’t into Facebook anymore. They’ve moved on to these faster, less commercialized social platforms.

So by understanding where your customers are, will help you decide what you need to do to reach them. And I’m not going to go through all the statistics about each social platform, but it’s out there. It’s really easy to find data. If you want to know. Who is the biggest audience on Facebook? Who’s the biggest audience on Instagram.

Who’s the biggest audience on Twitter. Who’s the prime demographic for those using Tik TOK. These are all things that you can figure out with data that’s already available. You can simply Google. What are the demographics for Facebook and Facebook themselves will tell you because they want you to run ads on their platform.

And yeah. Your target audience matches their prime demographic. You guys are going to be a match made in heaven. So we can take another example. And let’s just say coupons, right? Either digital coupons or maybe even paper coupons, coupons are very old school marketing technique. Right. But they’re still wildly popular.

But when you do a little research on the data behind coupon consumption, well, maybe coupons, aren’t absolutely the most critical necessity for your business. If you look at coupon demographics, you’ll find. Older people, baby boomers have the highest use of coupons, right? And they are also the ones most likely to be sitting, having their coffee in the morning and clipping coupons out of the newspaper.

It is extremely unlikely. You’re going to see a teenager, sipping coffee and clipping coupons from a newspaper circular that came in the mail. Doesn’t happen. So again, think about those demographics. It sounds obvious, but we want to keep building on these types of ideas until we can really narrow down who is your customer and where is your customer?

Another example that I can think of is, uh, adding a live chat element to your website. I just spoke with someone who’s going to be joining us on this podcast soon, uh, regarding a live chat program, which is what really made me start thinking about this. And there were some really amazing statistics.

Customer satisfaction with the live chat runs about 82% on average where email customer satisfaction runs about 42%. This means if someone has a question and they get this answer, 82% are going to be much happier with a chat while only 42% or happy with an email. And this makes sense because the longer anyone to wait for anything, the more difficult and frustrating the process is we live in a fast paced world.

We want the answer and we want the answer. Now we just. To get the answer to our question. We don’t want to pick up our phone. We don’t want to have to dial a number. We don’t want to have to wait on hold for 12 minutes. We certainly don’t want to send an email and hope to get a response. Within 48 to 72 hours.

I got my credit card out. I want to buy it right now, baby. Give it to me. I am ready if you got the live chat, you can answer my question and I can overcome this objection this second. Right now I am sold and I am not alone. Most people prefer that. But let’s think about this for a second, is live chat, something that you need to immediately implement on your website?

Well, that depends how complicated is the thing that you’re selling. And I know this is also a little subjective, but. How complicated is what you offer and what you sell. Are you selling highly technical products where people may have a lot of questions. There might be complicated integrations. It might be a software as a service.

There could be something that just makes it inherently more complicated than if you sell. Let’s say pottery, for example, uh, if you. Design your website. Well, you make it clear what your return policy is, what your exchange policy. If there’s a warranty on a product, you make sure the specifications for the product are clear on the website.

So people know the size, the dimensions, the shipping rates. There’s a good chance that you can answer every possible question. Or the bulk of the questions that someone might have without having to invest in a online chat system and deal with the technicals of that and learning all about that. Right? So we know this is a perfect example.

We know online chats are amazing conversion rates go through the roof, but there might be a lot of other things that can benefit your business right now. For you go down that road. So this is why it’s important. Again, who is your customer and where are your customers really got to nail that down. Now, another thing to think about are long-term marketing strategies and short-term marketing strategies, right?

For a lot of people, especially if you’re a new business, you, you need cashflow, you need customers right away. You’re looking for short term strategies. Now that doesn’t mean you ignore it. The long-term strategies, but if you decide to open a business next week, and your only strategy is to create a podcast, to try to bring new customers into your business.

I can just tell you right now, that’s a terrible idea. If you search podcast. Statistics, you will find that podcasting is a long term marketing plan. If you want to grow an audience through a podcast, it is going to take hundreds of episodes, hundreds of hours, and possibly years to build a strong audience through that platform where running a Facebook ad might immediately get your product or service in front of a lot of interested people in a very short period of time, and maybe create that interest and awareness to get you those gigs, to give you the cashflow and the time to start the podcast.

Does it make sense? You want to balance your short-term and your long-term strategies. And obviously the more successful you are, the more you can look out a little bit further and say, okay, I have this base. What can I do long-term now to build upon it. And that’s where things like email marketing, email automation, email marketing.

There’s tons of podcasts about email marketing and how powerful it is and how effective it can be. Well, if you’re a brand new business and you literally have no one on an email list, then email marketing is a complete waste of time for you. Uh, if you somehow have 20,000 people on an email list and you’ve never sent an email, then you.

First thing you need to do right now is stop listening to this podcast and sign up for an email marketing service, like a MailChimp or constant contact or any other mail service, and just get some emails out to your customers because you’re missing out on a big opportunity, right? So you see how this kind of links together.

And again, I think, you know, Mo, I I’m definitely guilty of this. Uh, and I think we’ve all had the experience. Even outside of business. Let’s say you buy a tool or you buy something that you want for yourself that you hope is going to solve some problem in your life and you get it. And it’s one of these things that ends up.

You use it once it sits in a box, you were so excited to get this one thing, but then you never actually used it. It didn’t really solve any of your problems. You’re not even necessarily disappointed in it, but for one reason or another, by the time he got it, the thrill was gone and you just weren’t that interested any more and it didn’t really serve the purpose.

You thought it would on the other side of the coin, I’m sure there’s been a time you’ve bought something that you thought maybe was stupid or wouldn’t be too helpful. And then somehow it just clicked and boom. Now suddenly it was life-changing and you cannot go without it. I know for me, it was an iPad.

I was adamantly against iPads when they came out. Finally, I just got one and I started using it before I knew it. It became my primary device right after my phone. And now I couldn’t imagine life without it, but I think we’ve all experience this one way or another, whether it’s in business or in our personal lives, uh, you buy something to try to solve a problem and it just doesn’t do it the same applies for all of these marketing strategies.

Right. Everyone wants to sell you some type of marketing service. And they all seem really alluring and they all can potentially solve major hurdles and major problems. But again, it’s endless and you could easily go broke trying to do all these things. And a lot of these things require a lot more holding than you think.

So the joke is whenever you’re planning something like a business expansion, or even your initial business plan, everything is always twice as expensive and takes twice as long. Then you think it will. And that that’s kind of just, anytime you do any planning, just assume whatever you think it’s going to cost.

And however long you think it’s going to take, or you’re told it’s going to take, it’s going to cost twice as much, twice as much and take twice as long and the same applies to all of these things. I can sit here and tell you, you can be up and running on MailChimp and 10 minutes, sending your first email out to your 20,000 email list.

The reality is it’s going to take a lot longer. You have to create the account. You have to import your contacts. You might want to tag contacts. You might want to segment your audiences. You’ve got to figure out how to do all these things. And once you do it, you’ve got to actually build the email. And that’s no walk in the park.

It’s not like just click a button. And now your emails created. You’ve got to think about the content you’ve got to. Pictures to use. You have to decide on the layout and a layout may not necessarily be an easy thing while there’s a lot of templates. Chances are, you’re not going to find the template that gives you the layout that’s in your head.

So now you might want to explore building a custom template. And before you know it, you’ve spent three weeks studying MailChimp and you still don’t have an email out, right? This is very common. So my advice here is once you know who your customer is and where your customers are, Pick one thing, right?

You can yeah. Jot down the notes every time you hear a podcast with something exciting, you say it’s a great idea. Well, this, this helped this person boost their sales a hundred percent or a sales doubled in 30 days because of X, Y, or Z. Pick one thing, don’t get overwhelmed with all of it. Just if you’ve got an email list, start with the most basic email marketing, don’t get too caught up in the templates.

Don’t get caught up into segmentation. Yes. All those things are really important. But they’re not more important than simply getting an email out in the first place. So my point is that there can be a lot of analysis paralysis when you’re learning a new platform. So it’s really important that you just do one thing at a time and really understand it.

You want to make sure that whatever the one thing is, and in this case, we’re talking about email. So if we talk about MailChimp and you’re going to start paying for this service, you want to make sure you’re going to get everything out of it. It provides you. And if you don’t have the time to learn about segmentation and you don’t have the time to learn about tagging and importing your customers and how this might integrate into your website or integrate into your CRM system, then you’re not really going to have a lot of success with it.

But you’re going to keep it and you’re gonna pay for it. And then you’re gonna move on to the live chat and you’re going to play with a bunch of different platforms, and you’re gonna try to integrate that with your CRM. Uh, but you’re gonna be so busy. You’re never actually going to be able to man the chat.

So most of those chat requests are just going to go to email anyway. Uh, and before you know it you’re paying for that every month. Uh, but now you’ve upset customers, but you want to get new customers. So you decide to run Google ads. But you sign up for a Google ad account and you’re completely overwhelmed with the gazillion things in there.

So you can see where this goes. Just one thing leads to another leads to another, and it’s just so important that you take the time to learn one thing. So let’s talk action items here. What can you. Right now. Well, I’ve already said it probably seven times, and I’m going to say it an eighth time. You need to know who is your customer and where are your customers?

Where are they hanging out on the internet? What platforms are they using? What’s their average age group. What’s their average education. What’s their average income because all these things can. You to decide by using the data that these companies make available. If whatever you’re about to do is going to best connect with that audience.

And that’s what’s most important now there’s of course overlap, right? There’s no, no demographic is perfect. We’re not all the same. Everyone’s an individual, but if you look closely, there’s usually. Always some common threads that you connect your customers together with. And that’s how you’re going to decide what to tackle and whatnot.

So action items. I want you to pick one thing, one marketing thing right now that you’ve thought about. Maybe you heard about it on this podcast. Maybe you heard it on a different podcast. May be read it on a marketing blog. But one way or another, you thought to yourself, Hey, this thing is really cool and this could potentially be big in, in boosting business or boosting sales or improving my funnel, improving conversion rates on my website.

Getting more listeners to my podcasts, getting more views on my YouTube channel. Right? There’s so many things here, but you pick one, focus on it, give it your complete attention. And again, depending on what it is, is going to determine how much time you’re going to spend with it. Uh, email marketing. You got to learn MailChimp, or you got to learn constant contact.

These are not impossible things to learn. They’re not highly technical. They’re not really difficult to use, but there are a lot of features built in and you want to understand what it all does. So if you’re going to spend some time learning a platform like MailChimp, you might want to take maybe an hour.

Every other day. Uh, so maybe two or three hours a week for three or four weeks, you, you try some things, you run some tests, send some test emails to yourself, play with some templates, right. And you will be shocked when you actually go live. How much more comfortable you are with that platform than if you just immediately sign up and immediately start trying to send emails.

So take your time, learn the thing. And this, honestly, this happens and a lot of different entries, not just business as a, as a guy with a music background, I can tell you that anyone who’s into recording music and just musicians in general, we buy gear. We love buying gear because there’s always a piece of gear that’s going to solve some problem.

It’s always a piece of gear. That’s going to make us a better musician. There’s always a piece of gear that’s going to help us sound like the people we want to sound like. Right. But the reality is almost none of it matters. And the most famous music in the world was usually recorded on pretty terrible gear with some cheap microphone in the middle of a room.

And, and, you know, the Beatles are iconic now because of that. And they didn’t need this $5,000 piece of gear to be the, make it, or break it for their musical careers and the same applies here in business and in marketing and probably everything in life. We get caught up in thinking all these things we need.

And we kind of gloss over the very fundamentals and basics. For example, you could do all of this. Let’s assume you could do every single digital marketing thing known to man, and you do a perfect, but you have just terrible, terrible product and you drive gazillions of people to your product and everyone returns it a week later, then it didn’t matter.

So like fundamentally I see this a lot with that. People want to copy Apple’s packaging. They want to copy their support systems. They want to copy their graphic design. They like the looks of the website and yeah, it’s all really great. Of course we, you know, we, we would all love to take a page out of Apple’s playbook there, you know, obviously a very wealthy, uh, cash rich company.

Right. But the thing is, is that they also make really good products. If you’re into that, they make really, really good products. Right. If you use their products, if you have an iPad, you know, it’s awesome. You absolutely love it. If they put a crappy tablet inside a beautiful box with all the service and all the support and all the glitz and all the glamour and all the beautiful retail stores and the lighting and all, it wouldn’t make a difference.

It would still suck. You’ve got to tackle the basics first and then move on to these marketing strategies. And I have to reiterate and people get upset when I say this Jr. Hire marketing people to try to do fundamental things for you, because they’re not going to be able to help you in the ways you think they will be able to help you.

I would love to tell you as a marketing coach, I can solve all your problems overnight, but the thing is I would need a lot of your time to really understand. And process the nuances of your business and the problem it is. I think in a lot of instances, you’re overwhelmed. You’re out of time, you’re tired at the end of the day, you’ve got a million responsibilities and you think, oh, I just don’t have time to deal with email marketing.

Let, let me just hire someone to do the email marketing aspect. And of course, outsourcing is a great way to save time and to save money. But you have to realize that someone else can’t just make up emails for your customers, you know, your customers and you know, your business better than anybody. And unless you’re willing to take the time to share everything, you know about your business with your marketing person, you’re not going to have a lot of success.

They’re going to try a lot of the. Mainstream kind of a monthly plan type corporate things that you see online. Uh, they’re going to try to fit you into a box that they try to fit everyone else in because it’s mostly automated. They punch in some keywords and you know, a beautiful email pops up. It’s not going to connect with your audience the same way it would if you did it personally.

Now, if you want to bring someone on to help you with the technical aspects of it, that makes a lot of sense, but just keep in mind, you still have to write the email. You’re still going to have to approve the picture. You’re still gonna have to read the text. You’re still responsible ultimately for proofreading.

It there’s all these things that are going to be involved. And by the time you’re done, you’re going to be left wondering, well, what am I paying to outsources for? I should have just did it. And again, I’m not saying that these services are useless. If there’s a lot of things that marketing people can help you with.

There’s a lot of obviously many businesses employ, uh, marketers of various capacities to help them market their business. So I’m not saying you can’t. Find people to help you with marketing. But my point is that you need to have an expectation that you cannot just pay someone and make the problem go away.

You need to be able to work with that person and ensure that that person, because it’s only fair to them. That you give them every tool at your disposal and all the content they could possibly ever need to make sure they can do their job and have the biggest impact. And this is where most of the relationships break down between businesses and marketing coaches or marketing consultant firms, uh, especially in the small business arena, because the first thing a good marketing coach or a marketing consultant is going to ask.

Tons and tons of questions. And they’re going to need a lot of your time. And they’re going to ask for content, they’re going to ask for assets, they’re going to ask for photos of products, they might, and maybe you don’t have these things and you need to have these things. So now you have to hire a photographer before, you know, it, you, you, you realize there’s a lot of things missing, which is why that marketing person can’t do their job.

So again, be very cautious, know your customer and know where your customer is. Pick one thing and take your time. There’s no rush. And if you try to rush these different marketing assets out, you’re probably going to do mediocre on all of them. And they’re all going to result in failure. You’re better off being the expert at email marketing and forget about the live chat, uh, then to not then to try to do both and be terrible at both because you haven’t taken the time to really learn and under.

So I hope this helps if you have any questions, always reach out to me. That’s J U S T I N  at  marketingandservice.com. I would love for you to be part of the conversation. Join me on the marketing and service.com podcast, Facebook page, right. It’s right on the front page of the website.

You can jump into the conversation and I want to hear what’s going on with your business. And I want to hear how I can help. And I also want to hear what are your challenges? And of course, if you really want to do me a huge favor, follow subscribe, even consider leaving interview, it means so much to me, it keeps me inspired and that’s why I do this.

I just love doing the podcast. I love being behind the microphone here. And I hope that what I am saying is providing you value and, uh, and helping you along your journey until the next step. Keep working hard. Keep putting up the good fight and we’ll see on the next one, have a great day. .