The Expert Podcast

So how do you do marketing for your business? This is the lifeblood of all businesses. A lot of people think that sales is the most important part of business, which in some ways it is, but sales can't happen unless you have marketing success. So, what are the three types of marketing? There are only three marketing segments that you can do, and you have to be successful at one or more of these. Not all businesses need every one of these to be in place; you can actually survive and thrive on using one of these. But if you don't have marketing, meaning that you don't have leads or phone calls or eyeballs on your website, you can't do sales. You could have the best salespeople in the world, the best product, the best service, but if there's not people coming to your door, you're not going to be able to sell anything. It's like having an ice cream stand in the middle of the desert that nobody knows about. Anybody in the desert would want ice cream, but unless they know you're there and show up at your front door, you don't have it. So what are these three methods of marketing?

The first one is paid marketing — direct paid marketing. Those are things like Google Ads, where you put ads on the internet when people type in a search for "I want to buy a swimming pool," and your ad comes up. That's an example of paid ads. That's probably the most common paid ad method right now. There are also other versions of this, like Facebook ads you can buy, or you can buy ads directly on websites. There are also podcasts and video ads you can buy online. The other type of paid ads are offline, where you could do things like postcards, mailers, or billboards, which is called display or out-of-home. You have electronic media, like TV commercials and radio commercials — those are paid direct ads.

The advantage to that is you are buying a very specific type and number of eyeballs. If you buy a billboard, you know that that billboard has 50,000 people driving by every day. If you buy Google Ads, you know that you pay per click. You pay for every person that clicks on your ad and goes to your website, so it's quantifiable and you know what you're buying. The downside is, by definition, a paid ad is paid for directly and also doesn’t guarantee a sale. Unless you're very carefully monitoring where you're putting these ads, you may be paying for customers who aren’t qualified, not interested, or have a lower closing ratio. They may not match your sales style. You might have customers that you're paying for that are really aligned with your business, but if your selling type, sales staff, or user experience on your website doesn't match those kinds of people — maybe it's an age thing or demographic — you might not sell to them. Plus, you're burning through cash; you're running the clock on your cash. You have to get a return on that to make it worthwhile.

How much do you have to benefit from it? Well, if you pay $1,000 for an ad, you might say, "Well, if I get a $1,000 back in sales, it broke even." That's not true. Think of what your bottom-line business secured retention is, meaning that your net profit — if at the end of the month, or the year, your net profit is 20% on sales — that means that for every $1,000 you sell, you only keep $200. So, if you spend $1,000 on an ad, you need $5,000 in new sales that you wouldn't have gotten elsewhere just to break even. And that's to break even, which wouldn't be good because you went through all that trouble, all that extra work, all those employees' efforts, just to get back to zero. You need really a 7-8 or 9-times return on an ad paid for to make it worthwhile. So, if you buy an ad for $1,000 or send out $1,000 worth of postcards, you need $9,000 of new, fresh, unique sales from that to make it worthwhile.

Number two is content marketing. Content marketing is where you're creating content; it could be a webpage, a blog post, an article, or a video like this one. It might be a podcast. You're creating content for people to consume, to find based on a Google search, or looking for something that's not necessarily a sales pitch. It's content about your business. So, a lot of people do YouTube videos about how to fix your sink, how to change a filter, how to do things, and that content is free. People do a search, they find it, maybe they watch a how-to video, or they download a form, and that gets people to your website.

The downside is maybe they're not directly buyers, but the upside is it's very inexpensive; it's just really time. You don't have to spend a lot of money or any money, for that matter. There was a business that we are familiar with, that goes back more than 10 years, that used content marketing as their business model. It was called iFixit. They were based in San Francisco, California, and what they did was they got the instruction manuals and repair manuals for all kinds of electronic devices, cell phones, cameras, computers, and they put them online, along with some other content that they created themselves for people. If they were trying to fix, you know, an old Nikon camera, they could find the instructions. They had exploded views of the diagrams, and they had some of their own checklists and instructions. They made some videos, and it was free. People could find that stuff for free. How did they make their money? They sold parts. They sold components, so when people were trying to fix something, in theory, they would need to buy some parts. Their whole business model was based around content marketing.

Go back even further. In the 1980s, there was a newspaper in New England, in Connecticut, called The Bargain News. The Bargain News — and this is before the internet — at the time, classified ads, like if you wanted to sell a car or sell a lawnmower, you would actually pay your local newspaper, like the New York Times, a fee to place your ad in the newspaper. And some of you people that are younger can't even imagine having to pay to sell something. Now you have Craigslist and all these things, but in the past, you had to call up your local newspaper and pay a fee — five bucks, 10 bucks — to put your car for sale in the newspaper so people could see it for sale. Well, The Bargain News flipped the script on that. What they did was they said, "You can post your ad for free in our newspaper, but the newspaper you have to pay for." So, The Bargain News was for sale for a dollar or $2 at newsstands, or convenience stores, or wherever it was — bookstores — but all the ads were free.

So, if you were selling your car, boom, you called up The Bargain News, you just told them what you had to sell, and they would put it in. In fact, they went even further. They called up people who had ads and paid newspapers and said, "You know your ad you're running in the Boston Herald? Do you want us to run that for free in The Bargain News too?" Yeah, of course, and they would read it back to make sure there was no change, and they would put it in the newspaper. That was content marketing. So, you can do content marketing for your business as well. A lot of times you can do it in-house. You can have an expert or a salesperson just talk like this freely about a subject, and now it's content. It goes on YouTube, it goes on Facebook, it goes somewhere else.

The only problem is you need high volumes to do this. You can't do one video a month or two a month. You have to do large volumes. Gone are the days where you could do one video and get, you know, tens of thousands of views guaranteed. There are some people who do it, but there's so much content flooding the market on YouTube that it's very difficult to get that traction. You know the cute cat video that goes viral that gets a million visitors? You're probably not going to get that. So, you have to do large volumes and get a few hundred on each video, but if you do a lot of them, you now have thousands of people that are seeing your name and your website. The other thing you can do is, if you record a video like this one, once it's recorded and uploaded, you can then take the audio from that video and extract out the audio, and now that becomes a podcast. No more work, no more effort. It's already recorded. Just use tools you can use to extract the audio and post it on a podcast.

You may not get a lot of traffic, but it's out there. Then take that audio and do transcription. There are tools you can use that will take the audio, the words that I am speaking, and it will put it into a Word document or text document that will have all the words written on a page. You can take those words and now put it on your website as an article or a blog post. So, one spoken video that maybe takes eight or nine minutes can become three types of content: a YouTube video, a podcast, and a blog post. In fact, you can put that video elsewhere, too. You can put the video on Twitter, you can put it on LinkedIn. So, you can cross-post it. It takes work, it doesn't take money, but if you're a startup and you don't really want to put out a lot of cash for paid ads, this is something that works.

And then number three is referral or word-of-mouth marketing. There's an old saying: "If you’re not getting word-of-mouth, then you’re not marketing." And it’s true. If you're a restaurant and you're not getting good reviews, your food is probably bad. And that doesn't mean necessarily just "good" or "bad" food; it could be about the ambiance, the experience. You may have bad service, and you might be getting bad reviews, but your restaurant could still be busy, and that’s because people are going to restaurants based on their friends’ recommendations, social media sharing, or word-of-mouth marketing. So, if you don’t have a great reputation, you don't have a shot at building long-term clients and customers who keep coming back.