The Expert Podcast

So of course, as a small or medium business, you want to have more customers, close more deals, and achieve more sales. But before sales can happen, you have to have customers to talk to, and that comes from marketing. Many times, you hear businesses talk about "sales and marketing," when in reality, those phrases should be reversed—it should be "marketing and sales" because marketing has to come first. But where do you start? Obviously, you're not surprised by the fact that marketing is important. It's not news to you.

Maybe you call it advertising. Maybe you do Google ads. Maybe you’ve tried SEO or even paid some SEO guru thousands of dollars to move your website. Why didn’t that work? Why didn’t anything you try work? Obviously, you want to grow your business, and the primary expertise you need to grow your business is marketing. Even if you improve your closing ratio from 10% to 15%, that’s only a small improvement. What you really need is massive amounts of traffic—more people in your showroom, more people on your website, more people calling you up. That all comes from marketing.

But where do you start with marketing? Most of the time, companies try to throw money at the problem. They hire a marketing guru, a social media expert, a digital marketing agency, or some SEO guru. How did that work out for you? Probably not too well. What you want to do is try to take control of it for yourself. Don’t avoid the sore subject of marketing. Don’t think you won’t be good at it. It’s not a black box or a mysterious effort. You can do these things internally.

How do you do it? Again, the question is: where do you start? Marketing is about getting eyeballs. Eyeballs come to you from a number of places. It could be people looking for you or just someone seeing your ad or your company out in the wild. For example, TV commercials are not targeted. You're watching TV, streaming, or YouTube, and an ad pops up. It could be a commercial for Geico, a car company, or a medical service. Those companies aren’t waiting for somebody to search for them—they’re putting it out there. You can do the same thing, and you can do it for little or no expense.

Where does it start? It starts with content. You’ve heard of content marketing and maybe even dabbled in it a little bit. But what you need to do is approach it in a way where it has very low costs so you won’t give up on it. If you do content marketing and it costs a lot of money, and it doesn’t pay off right away, you’re going to quit—and that’s not good. You have to experiment a little. You may find that the direction you initially take doesn’t create a large volume of customers but creates some. Then, you need to ramp up the volume. Or you might discover that your content isn’t hitting the needs of your audience, and you’ll need to adjust. That will come with time.

Content marketing really is the only kind of marketing. Even paid Google search and SEO are forms of content marketing. The good news is you can do it yourself for free. You don’t need to be a marketing genius or expert; it’s just about putting content out there. So where do you start? If you’re an executive or manager in a company, you’re probably comfortable talking—whether it’s to employees, customers, or others. If you can talk for 10 minutes a day, you can do content marketing. By talking for just 10 minutes a day, you can create thousands of new visitors to your website, business, or phone lines.

Start by talking for 10 minutes a day. It doesn’t even have to be at the same time every day. If you have a 10-minute gap, you can do marketing. You can generate a content marketing campaign just by talking. Sure, you might need some people in your company to spend a couple of hours a month working on related tasks, but it all starts with those 10 minutes of talking. The details? We’ll follow up with another video to break down the math. But if you talk for 10 minutes a day, it can turn into 240 advertisements a week. Each of those ads generates eyeballs.

You don’t have to be like Taylor Swift, with millions watching your video. All you need is a handful—five, six, or seven people watching each ad. That adds up. Thousands of people will see your ads each month, and hundreds will contact you by phone, through your website, or in your showroom. Talk for 10 minutes a day.

Here’s a teaser: 10 minutes a day gets you a fully-formed content marketing campaign. In 48 hours, we’ll have another video to walk you through all the details and numbers. We’ll explain how to take those 10 minutes of talking and turn them into blog posts, podcasts, articles, and social media content—all with minimal effort. It might cost you a few hundred bucks a month in employee time, but you’ll have an expansive content marketing plan.

This is the first step in business development. Start with 10 minutes a day. If it gets you more sales, you can ramp it up to 20 or even 30 minutes a day. Start small and grow. Everyone, no matter how busy, can spare 10 minutes. Talk about whatever comes to mind—it doesn’t have to be specific or scripted. Just talk for 10 minutes, and watch your business expand.