Marketing Works When You Make It Work

We challenge the belief that “marketing doesn’t work” and show how goals, tracking, and consistency turn scattered efforts into sales. From billboards and sponsorships to social media and websites, we share how to test, tweak, and align marketing with sales.

• marketing and sales as one system
• defining goals for each channel
• measuring ROI and attribution
• balancing branding with response
• billboard tracking and offers
• social media cadence and clarity
• website analytics and conversion paths
• mindset shift from guessing to testing

And if you ever have any questions, you can always reach out to me, themarketingbroker.com. I am here for you. You can also follow me on all social media

Chapters

• 1:19 Welcome And Setup
• 2:20 “Marketing Doesn’t Work For Me”
• 3:43 Marketing And Sales Are One System
• 4:32 Auditing Past Efforts And ROI
• 5:26 Sponsorships And Branding Value
• 5:59 Billboards, Tracking, And Offers
• 7:01 Social Media Consistency And Goals
• 7:56 Websites, Analytics, And Conversion
• 8:49 Test, Tweak, And Iterate
• 9:27 Mindset Shift And Action Plan
• 10:15 Resources And How To Connect

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:53

Hey y'all, what's up? Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Happy Hour Podcast. I'm your host, Shelby McFarland. So excited to have you again on another episode with me. I love doing these, and I think I say that every episode, but you know what? Whatever. Y'all know what I'm gonna say. So let's dive right on into today's topic. It's kind of like um a little rant, if you may. So it's interesting to me. I run into this a lot in my business, and I don't know if anyone's in marketing listening to this, and you understand, uh, you probably have gone through this. Or if you're a small business owner and you have said this phrase that I'm about to talk about, then I need you to really, really think about the things I have to say after um I tell you what this phrase is. Over the last probably two months, I have heard about, let's see, 12-ish times. I've heard the phrase marketing doesn't work for me. Let's just sit with that for a second. Marketing doesn't work for me. So what the hell works for you? That's what I really want to say. If marketing doesn't work for you, then what exactly are you doing to make your business successful? Right? And when people tell me that, I have started to ask a few questions. Like, okay, what type of marketing doesn't work for you? Or better yet, what have you tried in your business that to market it that hasn't worked for you? Then they'll be like, oh, you know, I've posted a few times social media, it didn't work out. Okay, this is a legit conversation I had. Okay, you posted a few times social media, didn't work out. Cool. So let's talk about what was your goal behind those few times, whatever number that is to them. What was your goal behind those few times of posting on social media? Well, they don't have an answer. Well, you know, I mean I just expected my phone to ring. Okay. Well, that's not how it works. So let's go back to social media is the way that you try to market, and you didn't see success from it because you expected phone calls. So now that I'm done bitching about that, let's talk about why marketing doesn't work for you, and then let's dive into things that can help you through marketing. But first, we have to know that marketing and sales hand in hand, y'all. Marketing, sales, sales, marketing, marketing equals sales, sales equals marketing. I don't do math, but that's pretty mathematical to me. Marketing equals sales and sales equals marketing. We have to make sure that they are one and the same. In our mind, they're one and the same. And in reality, they are one and the same. So if our marketing is stopped, our sales are stopped. If our sales have stopped, then our marketing has stopped. Right? So ultimately, when you're thinking about marketing, and I'm just gonna talk to you as if you're the person that says marketing doesn't work for me, you need to sit down and identify what type of marketing you want to do, what are the goals of those, and then also what have you done in the past that hasn't worked out for you? But why has it not worked out for you? Every time I sit down with a new client or potential client, I say, okay, let's talk about all the things in marketing that you've tried. Okay, I've sponsored my kids' team for baseball. Okay, so what was your ROI of that? Uh, well, I I got to give out three quotes to parents, or um, I made two sales of new shirts that I made to parents of the team. Okay, great. So, what was our money that came in versus what was our money that went out? But then you also have to think, okay, well, when we're sponsoring stuff, we're also branding. So that is another effort of marketing. So it's like having a billboard, but you're literally on your the kids' shirts, you're on the banner, you're branding yourself, which is another way of getting a return of your investment. We just can't put a dollar amount on it, right? So you kind of have those blurred lines of marketing that's like, eh, this is branding, it's a little blurred, but I do know that it's up there and the bucket's getting filled up every time I do something like that. Okay, let's go to another one. Um, I did a I did a billboard for three months and I didn't get any phone calls off of it. Okay, so let's break that down. You spent probably about 450-ish,$400 on the billboard, depending on where it was. So that's$1,200. So that's what you had going out, but then you said you didn't get any phone calls, okay? So did you ask every single person that called into your business where they heard from you? No. Okay. Did you put in a specific ad or coupon or sale or something that could identify those callers from that billboard? Did you put that on there so you knew who was calling you? No. Okay, so that's where we can see the difference. That marketing in their mind did not work for them. In my mind, we could have tweaked a little bit to make it work for them, but then also the billboard has a little bit of those blurred lines of we're gonna put that into branding. Okay, let's break down social media. Uh, I made like three posts in the last couple months and they just didn't really work for me. Okay, well, what was your goal? Uh well, you know, I want people to call, I want people to use my business, I want people to buy my product. Okay, great. So if you've only posted three times in the last few months, which I'm assuming is three to four months, then how can people know what you sell? How do they know what product you have to offer? How do they know you solve their problem? They don't. So how we would tweak that is we're gonna do 12 posts a month. We're gonna educate our followers, we're gonna engage with our followers, we're gonna tell them who we are and be consistent online so that way they know, hey, these people do this, and I've seen their post several times. Well, now my washer's out, so I can go and call them. Right? Okay, awesome. So that's social media. Well, I I have a website, but it just doesn't work for me. Do you know it doesn't work for you? Or are you just saying it doesn't work for you because you haven't really had time to look into it? If a website works for you, you need to go on the back end, or to know a website works for you or not, you need to go on the back end and look at the analytics. If you have someone that does your website for you or actually like SEO optimizes it and all that kind of stuff for you, then they should have the analytics for you at any time that you need them. What do those numbers look like? How many visitors do you have? What pages do they go to? Where do they stop and where do they start? Where um what's your call to action from social media to your website? And once they get to your website, does it sell more for you or does it sell less for you? So these are just a few examples of marketing yourself and getting out there, but tweaking your mindset. That's all marketing is. We've got to tweak our mindset and know that marketing is a game, right? We've got to try different things, we've got to see what's working for us, and then we have to tweak those things, just like I've just talked about, and those just very few marketing techniques. All we had to do is tweak it a little bit to make it work a little better for us. So I really hope this helps change your mindset if you're the person that's like marketing doesn't work for me. That is like that never should ever escape anybody's freaking mouth ever again as a small business owner. Your mindset should be marketing will work for me, period. You just have to figure out which side of marketing you need to be on, and you figure out which techniques you need to use for your business so that way it will work for you, and you will see the sales on the other end. It's gonna look different for everybody. Marketing is not cookie cutter. God, I wish it freaking was because man, I'd put people in a freaking funnel and be like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, they'd be millionaires overnight. Hell, I would be a millionaire overnight. But marketing is not cookie cutter. We have to make sure that we are willing to spend money to make money, as well as we gotta be able to play with some of the strategies, play with some of the techniques, and see what works best for our business. So when you get done listening to this, I want you to kind of think about like, okay, these are the marketing things that I've been doing. What was my return of investment? Take 10 minutes, just like I did, break it down. We did a billboard, this is how many calls we did. We didn't, or we got, we didn't get as many calls, but we could have done this on the billboard instead, so we knew exactly where the people were coming from. So those are just a few examples, and I hope it helps you change your mindset about marketing because marketing is amazing, it's the way that your business is going to be successful. And if you ever have any questions, you can always reach out to me, themarketingbroker.com. I am here for you. You can also follow me on all social media. There's all kinds of tips and tricks on there, but I'll catch you next time, y'all. See ya.