From Dry Shampoo to Strategy: Keeping Your Marketing Fresh Every Day

Strategy beats shortcuts as we map a simple, repeatable system to keep your marketing fresh, measurable, and effective. We set clear goals per channel, define ROI by context, and build a 30‑day review cycle that reallocates budget toward what works.

• hair-wash analogy applied to consistency and planning
• setting specific goals per channel and asset
• defining ROI for booths, leads groups, and ads
• reading analytics and measuring what matters
• social media as SEO fuel with strong CTAs
• 30‑day review cycles and budget reallocation
• prioritizing strategy over last‑minute marketing

If you need help with any kind of social media stuff, I do have a DIY social media webinar on my website, themarketingbroker.com

Chapters

• 0:53 Welcome and Hair-Wash Analogy
• 2:32 Don’t Mask Weak Marketing
• 3:20 Goals Before Tactics
• 5:10 Measure ROI Across Channels
• 7:17 Social Media, SEO, and Signals
• 9:34 Review, Optimize, and Reinvest
• 10:18 Make Strategy First, Resources Offered

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:27

Hey y'all, what's up? It's Shelby McFarlane here, the marketing broker. Thank you so much for tuning in again to the Marketing Happy Hour podcast. I love talking to you every single week about marketing your small business or big business or maybe your side hustle, whatever you're working on. I love that you come here to learn more about marketing in all facets of your business. So today we're gonna talk about something kind of funny. Maybe it'd be more um if you don't have hair, you're not gonna really understand. And you're like, what if you don't have hair? Um, but it these I wanted to compare a little bit of marketing to a hair wash schedule for a woman. Okay, ladies, let me talk to you for a second. If you have long hair, you know that your hair wash schedule is kind of important, right? We have um our first day that is clean, then the second day, then we're like, eh, do we push it the third day? We use a little bit of dry shampoo, um, make it look a little better, maybe we put it in like a hair twisty or a bun, or we're kind of trying to curl it again. I know from personal experience that I've gone a few extra days on my hair when I really should have washed it. And sorry guys, that was kind of out of the loop from what you probably know of, because you probably wash your hair every single day, and I think that that is very commendable, good for you. But ladies, we all know the real truth over here about us women in our hair washing days. So you're like, how does hair wash schedules go with marketing? Yeah, I love when random ideas like this come up because um I like to compare it to real life things, and maybe uh this can kind of help you get a better idea of what your marketing should be like. So we have a hair wash schedule, so we want to make sure that we also have a marketing schedule, right? But let's think about our hair wash schedule. We have a good um day, then we have the next day, it's okay, and then the third day, we're like, ooh, that was a little bit rough, right? So let's not be like hair washing days when it comes to marketing. I want you to always be on top of your marketing. I never want you to have to use dry shampoo on your marketing efforts. When you are running a small business, a side hustle, maybe you have a product that you're trying to launch, you need to make sure that your schedule is on point, that you have a strategy. Whenever you walk around with dry shampoo in your hair, like yes, it looks kind of okay from a distance, but it's not gonna look great close up. So when you're marketing your business without a plan or a strategy, it looks eh, it looks okay from a distance, but then when you get to the nitty-gritty of things, like, do you have a return of investment? Like, are you selling things? Does your content turn into leads? Um, does your ability to go out in public and be able to market yourself, like, are you actually building a brand online so that way when people then look at you online, they can also be validated that hey, this person's real. So when we're doing our website, we want to make sure it looks professional. We want to make sure that people are educated about who we are and what we do and um how we portray ourselves as a brand or a company. Like, are you reaching that target audience? When we're posting on social media, it's strategic. We want to make sure that we're educating and inspiring and adding value with a little bit of sales in there too. So when we are marketing our business, I want you to focus on what is your strategy behind it? How do you create a strategy? Um, what is your ultimate goal when it comes to marketing? You're like, well, does Shelby, I want to make money. I mean, yeah, we all want to make money, but like when we're marketing our business, what do you want your numbers to look like? When you're posting to social media, what is your goal in mind when you're posting? Do you want to have engagement? Do you want to have people call you? Do you want to offer a free service or download? Or do you just want to make sure that your your numbers, your impressions are increasing all the time on social media? So when you break down your marketing for your business, what are your goals for each individual thing? And then that's where you can come in and create a strategy to then reach those goals, right? We want to create that marketing strategy to reach the goal of your marketing. And when we're marketing and having that strategy and following along, so you're like, okay, Shelby, I've already done the strategy. Like I've had it, I'm trying to do it, but it's not really working. Okay. Well, review it every 30 days. Review your strategy. Is it working for you? What's the ROI? What do the numbers look like? You have to boil it down to what your analytics are. Every single thing that you do in marketing needs to have some kind of return of investment. When I go and set up at places like a booth, if I'm going to a vendor booth or vendor fair and I'm setting up a booth, my ROI is gonna be the collection of information from the people at that location. So the people that come by my booth, when I'm getting their email addresses, their phone numbers, their names, whatever you want because you're giving away something. That is the ROI of that event. When I go to a leads group meeting, I want to make sure that my ROI, it's a little bit different. I want to make sure I'm getting money from that, right? I want to make sure I'm getting leads from that. What's my goal when I go to the leads group? What's my strategy? What am I talking about? What kind of leads am I asking for? And then what's my return of investment on that? I really want to dig deep into return of investment of your social media. Your social media, uh, we're not seeing engagement. And people are just scrolling, scrolling, they're not liking, they're not sharing, but they're seeing it. So when you look at your analytics for social media and you're like, what exactly is my ROI? Your ROI for social media is gonna be when people are seeing your posts, so the impressions, we're building that brand, and then everything feeds into the SEO. So everything feeds into search engine optimization for your business. We want to make sure that when we have our social media stuff, that it is being focused on keywords, and we want to make sure that there's a call to action to your website that's gonna be professional looking. Um, that everything that you're posting on there is gonna be feeding into Google and answering a question that maybe somebody that is a future customer of yours is gonna have. We want to make sure we're educating because when Google is picking that up, they will see like these people are the professionals in their industry. This is exactly who I'm gonna send everybody to. I'm gonna add this to the AI summary at the top of it because they know what they're talking about. We can't control what that does, but what we can control is the strategy behind our social media content, behind posting. How often are we gonna post? When are we gonna post? What are we gonna post about? And then the ROI from that is gonna be the impressions, the visits to your website, the um amount of people that are seeing your post, the amount of times that it's feeding into Google and that's increasing your SEO. So let's not use dry shampoo on our marketing, guys, okay? I don't want you to just try to dress up a pig, is what they say. I really want you to boil down, sit down, and talk to you or your partner or whatever about what is your marketing strategy and what are your goals. And I can understand marketing strategies kind of seem overwhelming and you're like, I don't really know what I'm doing or where I'm supposed to start or anything like that. But I know for a fact that when you have a strategy and you follow that strategy and you really go back and look at what your return of investment is on each little thing that you're spending marketing on marketing dollars on, then you will go back and be like, okay, I need to redo this. Okay, we need to put more money in this way, okay, we need to do this. It's just like when I'm running ads for a client, and after 30 days, I look at like, okay, these two ads, I have two different ads, and this is how much money I spent, which one got better results? And then the second 30 days, I'm gonna put a little bit more money into the one that had better results because that's the one that's actually giving them an ROI, right? That's the one that's getting calls, that's the one that's getting leads, and then we'll go back another 30 days, okay. Well, the other one's still not doing great. We're just gonna put all the money into this one ad to see if that's what people are actually responding to, and they're gonna actually have a better ROI. So this week I want you to focus on strategy of your marketing. Stop wasting time on marketing, stop wasting money on marketing. Um, a lot of people do marketing last, and marketing should be first, and that's why I like to compare it to washing your hair on the days that you need to wash it because we don't want to put dry shampoo on your marketing. We want people to see the professionalism, we want people to understand that you are the expert in your industry, and the only way to do that is to be effective with your marketing strategy. And if you need help with it, always reach out to me. I can give you some free downloads, free resources. If you need help with any kind of social media stuff, I do have a DIY social media webinar on my website, themarketingbroker.com. And I'll catch you next week, guys. Bye.