Announcer:
Welcome to the Marketing Guides For Small Businesses Podcast. In this podcast, you’ll get discussions and interviews 100% dedicated to helping small business owners tackle their marketing challenges. The Marketing Guides For Small Businesses Podcast is produced by the Marketing Guides For Small Businesses, a collection of four small business marketing consultants with over 60 years of combined experience in helping small business owners plan, execute and measure their marketing plans and strategies in order to grow their businesses at a rapid pace. Your hosts and panelists include Antonio Guerrero, owner of Systematic Marketing in Sarasota, Florida. Ken Tucker, owner of Change Scape Web in St. Charles and St. Louis, Missouri. Paul Barthel head web developer at Change Scape Web. Mark Fortune, owner of Fortune Marketing in Little Rock, Arkansas. So thank you for checking us out and please let us know how we can better help you grow your business.
Mark Fortune:
Definitely want to thank you for checking us out and please let us know how we can better help you grow your business. This is our very first episode in this episode of Marketing Guides For Small Businesses Podcast, we’re going to start where every small business owner really should start when they think about marketing. And that is with marketing strategy. Today, we’ll talk with each panelist about what goes into an effective small business marketing strategy, why it matters for every small business, what does at risk without a sound marketing strategy and what a well thought out marketing strategy means for small business owners in terms of execution and overall effectiveness of your marketing. So, with that introduction, let’s jump right in. So guys, when you tell clients and prospects that you start each engagement with marketing strategy, what do you mean by that? And really what I’m asking is what is marketing strategy for small businesses?
Antonio Guerrero:
Well, to me, the whole idea around marketing strategy is to really lay the foundation for what a good longterm engagement is all about. I think with marketing strategy, we have a couple of core components that affect the entire marketing campaign going forward. So those components to me are developing your core message. So what is your brand? What are you about? What’s your core differentiation? And the other key thing to me is building out your ideal customer persona. So who is it that we want to target? Once you have those two foundational elements, I think a lot of the other marketing comes into place.
Ken Tucker:
Yeah, I would add to that, that I think it’s really important to focus on the problems that you solve, because that’s going to give you really nice differentiation. It’s going to help you from a local search optimization perspective. And it’s also going to really help you build out your content marketing strategy. And I would say that the reason that strategy is so important is because I think it’s the best way to get the most out of anybody’s marketing budget, because you’re going to be focusing on the right things and you’re not going to be doing one-off throwaway campaigns that can’t build and feed off of each other. And it’s really easy to just jump in and do a tactic, not doing anything for a little while, jump in, do another tactic. And gosh, then you’re surprised that you’re not getting any results.
Mark Fortune:
Say, Antonio, how often do you have a prospective client that you engage with that has difficulties articulating who their target market is? Does that happen frequently in your business?
Antonio Guerrero:
That’s pretty often, especially with some of the service providers we work with because everybody needs my service, whatever it is. And I think what they don’t realize is that they may not necessarily want to work with everybody just because there is this perception that a large swath of the population might be a client and potentially a client doesn’t necessarily mean you’re well-suited to serve those people and those companies or individuals, whatever it is. So that really is something that’s humbling for a lot of the business owners that we work with. And I think the awareness that yes, just because somebody could be a client doesn’t mean you necessarily want them to be a client, really shifts that focus for them and helps them understand the concept of having an ideal customer persona a lot more.
Mark Fortune:
So, Ken, when you start working with a client or you’re prospectively working with a client, if you ask who their target market is, and they say something like everyone with a pulse or everyone with a check, how do you usually respond to that?
Ken Tucker:
How much money do you have? No, seriously, you got to make the haystack smaller because you’re going after needles inside of a haystack, the entire internet, even within a fairly small community, it can be very large. It can be very competitive. You’re going to have several other people who are out there fighting for visibility on or offline. So it’s really important to narrow that down. And if you don’t, you’re very likely to spend money, either that’s purely wasted or generating the wrong kind of business that’s actually detrimental for your business instead of focusing on getting business from your ideal clients. And so I think it’s really important. I define who is an ideal client and what paths they may take in terms of transaction value, converting into a lifetime value. That’s meaningful for the business.
Antonio Guerrero:
I think this is really evident, especially in folks who are just starting out or just marketing for the first time. I think a lot of entrepreneurs when they’re starting their business, they’re hungry. They want to get into the action and they’re willing to take any client that comes their way. Any client who’s willing to cut them a check in essence. And I think veteran entrepreneurs could probably think back to a similar times in their business and some of the clients that they attracted, and they gag at the thought of working with those types of people ever again, and having that good, strong strategy that customer avatar, that customer persona, from day one will help you determine when you get these folks in that they go through a bit of a filter, which will just make your business far more enjoyable and fulfilling in the long run anyway.
Ken Tucker:
Yeah, one of the things I’d like to kind of drill into is the practical application of not identifying your ideal customer. And I think that that can be really expressed pretty easily with Google ads and Paul, I don’t know if you want to talk to that or not, but with Google ads, you can waste a heck of a lot of money. If you’re not really precise in what you’re trying to do.
Paul Barthel:
Yeah. A lot of times, what you see is someone wants to run Google ads and you sit down and start talking to them and they, “Well, I want to advertise for every service across this huge geographic area, and I have $200 a month” and it’s not realistic because you’re going to pay per click, and that’s going to depend on a lot of things, your competition, the keywords, how difficult those keywords are. And you really have to focus in. Sometimes you have to focus in on a small area in your most profitable service, or maybe the service that you don’t rank well far organically, but you want people to know that you offer that service and it comes down to targeting and you can’t target the whole world.
Ken Tucker:
And you can only target if you do strategy first.
Mark Fortune:
Well, so let’s dive into that for a second. So, Paul and Ken, how easy does Google make it for you to set up an ads account and start buying clicks if you want to do it that way?
Paul Barthel:
Oh God, they make it real easy. You’ll waste a lot of money, but you can have an account set up in a few clicks, but if you follow their defaults, any keyword you put in there by default as a broad match keyword. If you don’t understand keywords, that’s a whole nother area and keyword match types. If you don’t exclude certain areas, even though it’s only your… The way that targeting works in ad word, part of it is people are in my targeted location or showing interest. Well, just because someone shows interest in your location doesn’t mean that’s necessarily someone you want to having clicked on your ad. So you probably want to exclude certain areas as well, where you know that your ideal customers aren’t there. Maybe it’s just a neighborhood you don’t want to go to. So Google makes it easy to set it up, they don’t make it easy to get really good results.
Ken Tucker:
Time and time again, one of the biggest complaints that I hear from businesses, they’ve tried Google ads. They usually started with a free coupon that Google gave them spend $25, get an extra a hundred dollars with an ad clicks. Well, first of all, that’s not a big enough budget. Second of all, they didn’t do the work to identify the true targets and the strategy work upfront. And so they blow through that budget and they have a negative opinion because they feel like they wasted 125 bucks. First of all, that’s an expectation. But second of all, of course, you’re going to waste 125 bucks because that’s just not going to work to reach the right customers that you want to have.
Antonio Guerrero:
And Paul brings up a good point about the broad match keyword. And one of the examples I like to use with my clients, let’s say, is that pick a house painter, for example, if you are wanting to be house painter, Milwaukee and it’s broad matched, that starts bringing in all kinds of different variations of that, including free house painter, Milwaukee, cheap house painter, Milwaukee, that may not necessarily be the type of client. I mean, do you really want to engage with a client who is specifically looking for cheap house painting?
Mark Fortune:
And the other big one is house painting jobs, right? That’s another, then your ad will start showing up for people who are looking for work, which may or may not be anything relevant to your business.
Ken Tucker:
Or even worse painter.
Paul Barthel:
Yeah and that can happen with phrase match keywords, if you’re not careful as well, because with phrase match keywords, that phrase has to be in there. So if you have house painter, well, cheap house painter could cause your aunt to trigger, it’s kind of a balancing act because exact match keywords are really going to narrow down. When your ad shows, you’re going to get less impressions. That click is more likely to convert, and you also have to take into consideration search intent is house painting. They might be looking for information on how to do it themselves, whereas house painter the intent’s a little more clear.
Ken Tucker:
Paul brings up intent, which to me kind of implies the customer journey and what you need to be doing throughout your marketing strategy as somebody is transitioning from first, finding out that they have a problem, then they’re looking for a business. And then to the point where they’re ready to buy, there’s a continuum there of things that you need to be thinking about. And that’s going to be set up, do your marketing strategy work.
Mark Fortune:
And I think that’s, that’s a good segue to sort of pull back a little bit from the Google ads discussion, which I’m sure we’re going to do another full episode on how to better use Google ads to generate the right kind of leads for your business. But let’s pull back from that a second, and go back to strategy from the standpoint of, I’ve seen this happen in engagements, many times where a client gets nervous that while we’re working on marketing strategy, all other activity stops, right? And they feel like they’re not getting marketing work done while they’re worried about trying to figure out marketing strategy. Does it really mean that in the way you engage with clients, does all other activities stop while strategy is until it’s somehow [inaudible 00:11:27] and does a hundred percent complete and ready to go?
Ken Tucker:
For me, no, I mean, there are some low hanging fruit things that you could certainly do. You could certainly start to do some really important online accounts set up, whether that’d be the directories. You’re getting the Google My Business page set up. You may not be able to have it fully set up an optimized, but at least getting it started so that if somebody doesn’t have a presence on directories or Google My Business, or even some social media, you can still work on that account set up. And I think that that’s a good kind of parallel task.
Ken Tucker:
And I think also a lot of businesses that we work with for a long time, their major source of business has been word of mouth or referral marketing, but they haven’t turned that into a strong online reputation by getting Google reviews or reviews on other important industry sites for them. So that’s another great thing that I think you can start to work on is getting reviews or even reaching out and getting reactivation of existing customers because they already are pretty familiar with what you do. So, unless you’re going to do something pretty radical in the way you’re going to change your business through your marketing strategy, I think those are pretty good starting points.
Antonio Guerrero:
I agree wholeheartedly with Ken, I think it’s a common misconception that strategy leads to no activity. There’s so much that needs to be done in parallel with activity and can really just blind eye them a great number of those things, including, and I think probably one of the most powerful is usually our clients come to us, they have an existing business, they have an existing database of customer emails and information. And using a reactivation campaign is something that day one month one can be very, very powerful and bring people back to the business that really needs a much shorter sales cycle now, because they’ve already used you in the past and they’ve already known you. So, it’s quick path to revenue and profits.
Mark Fortune:
I was just going to say, going back to what Ken and Paul were talking about earlier, I’m working with a local roofing client right now where there’s a lot of different strategic things we need to figure out for them because they’ve got different lines of business and all of that. But in the meantime, it was really easy to determine right up front, a very specific geographic area that they definitely wanted to do business in based on the types of homes and size of homes and the demographics of the market. So you can begin running Google ads if you know what you’re doing, to our previous discussion very quickly, while you’re figuring out, okay, overall core messaging is going to evolve to some other things, but it begins to get the phone ringing while we’re determining all of the messaging going forward, right?
Ken Tucker:
Yeah.
Antonio Guerrero:
Yeah, absolutely.
Mark Fortune:
So, we spend a lot talking about target market, and it’s because their an ideal client, so let’s stick with that for just a little bit longer. So how do you determine what a client’s most valuable target clients are? I mean, what is the process for narrowing down those personas or avatars as Antonio mentioned?
Ken Tucker:
I’ll go ahead and start. One of the first things that I like to do is look at their existing customers and kind of chart them out and say, “Are they profitable? Do they refer? Are they willing to write a review?” And if they are, then that may help me define who that ideal customer might be. If they are not profitable, then I want to take note and I want to try to understand why they’re not profitable. From there, I look at, really, the economics of the value of a customer. Some businesses are really transactional based. Others have the opportunity to build a pretty substantial lifetime customer value through a series of transactions, over a course of a number of weeks, months, or years. I like to understand what are the lowest risk, easiest ways to get new customers that will convert into great lifetime value customers.
Ken Tucker:
And that may be a priority that you set. And then also looking on the flip side, who are your best ideal customers from the get-go based on typical customer lifetime values. And I don’t look at that just as what the customer spends, but factoring in how much that particular customer might refer you to other business. So, it could be golden geese, referral sources. If you’re a painter, maybe an interior designer is somebody that is actually somebody that you… They’re not going to buy from you, but they’re going to refer you like crazy, potentially. And so they may carry a tremendous amount of potential customer lifetime value with them.
Antonio Guerrero:
Sometimes depending on the clients start a little bit negative and that I want to know who you don’t want to work with. I want to know about those was traumatic customers who chewed you down in negotiations and then became a pain in the neck in essence to support. I think when we start looking at ideal customer, and it could be very a wide net that we can cast to bring those potential clients in customers have a hard time kind of wanting to narrow that down. But if we start with, okay, let’s define absolutely who we do not want, it makes the process of coming out with who we do want a far more easy and efficient.
Antonio Guerrero:
And I think that really helps cement in the client, a bit of a backbone when it comes to turning down business, which is always a scary thing, which is always the thing you want to try to avoid. Nobody wants to pay for advertising and marketing and have to turn down business. But when you have that ideal customer filter and you’re very strong on who you don’t want and who you’ve had bad experience with in the past, you’ll be able to see those red flags pop up right away and move on before getting baited into a situation that’s going to suck up all your time, energy, and money.
Mark Fortune:
So we spent a lot of time talking about personas and avatars and target clients. Let’s shift a little bit to messaging and differentiation, which is, I think we all agree sort of the next component of a sound marketing strategy. So this question seems obvious, but let’s dig into it a little bit. Why is differentiation so important to a small business and to their overall marketing strategy? Ken, you want to start with that one?
Ken Tucker:
If you spend time working on strategy, as a small business, you’re probably already well on your way to differentiating yourself from a lot of your competitors. If you take it seriously and you do well. Clarity of message is really key. It’s really got to be about the customer. It’s not about your business. It’s about the problems you solve for potential customers, and then helping them to understand why you’re different. That you have a plan that can call them to action to achieve success or avoid failure. I mean, ultimately marketing is really about moving somebody from a before state, which is probably some level of pain or discomfort or displeasure to an aspirational state of where they want to get to. Looking at the before and after really understanding how you can deliver somebody from that before state to that after state is, I think, the essence of differentiation.
Antonio Guerrero:
Yeah. Again, I have to agree with what Ken is saying there, and that’s the power of making you not a commodity, right? Fighting that commodity battle. Especially if you look at service businesses, what makes you different as an accountant? What makes you different? We’ve been using the house painter for an example, the roofer, if I don’t have any for differentiation, I’m left to my client or prospect shopping me solely on price. So what is the value add that I bring to the engagement? What is it that makes us a little special that makes us worth a little bit more than the person down the street, who’s given a proposal for $300 less than what we think we could possibly do that work.
Antonio Guerrero:
I think when you have your core message, it’s, it’s a firewall and it’s a firewall against being commoditized. And that’s probably one of the most important parts of creating that so that you can charge more, earn higher margins than the other guy, but you’re going to give them something for that. And it doesn’t have to be a physical service, or product that differentiates you, but it’s how you operate or how easy it is to transact with you or communicate with your team or whatever it is that is your special sauce. I think that really needs to be communicated with because we’ve all bought something that’s a little bit more expensive because we got something that’s a better quality of some way or easier to work with that company, for some reason, then to deal with the stress of the person who might be yes, 10, 20% cheaper, but it’s always a nightmare situation or we’re going to get horrible, or we’re just going to be frustrated with every other thing we do with them.
Mark Fortune:
I think you’re right, and an example we use with clients pretty consistently, especially when we’re just beginning to talk to them and because differentiation can be hard to kind of get your brain wrapped around, is the website test, right? We’ll take your website and your two closest competitors websites we’ll cover up the logo and see if we can tell the difference between which business is which, and seven times, eight times out of 10, you can’t get. Everybody says we paint houses, or it’s a really pretty picture of a well painted house in the hero image of the website, but I don’t know why I would pick one versus the other based on what I’m seeing there.
Mark Fortune:
So, I think Antonio had a good point. it’s those stories, it’s that problem solving value proposition that you’ve got to get out to really have your business stand out at all. And yes, it can be hard to get down into five words in the hero image of a website that you’ve got to try, because otherwise, like you said, you’re sort of doomed to compete on price.
Ken Tucker:
Just because you say you’re the best painter in such and such community doesn’t make it so, because all your competitors are probably going to say that same thing.
Mark Fortune:
Sure. And [crosstalk 00:21:16] when I ask clients, what makes you different from your competitors? They all say, “Oh, great quality, great service.” But the important part is what does that mean? Right? What are the stories behind it? The examples that we could use?
Ken Tucker:
And how does that help the customer.
Mark Fortune:
Right? Because odds are the customer is not buying, getting their house painted. They’re buying, is it cleaned up on time? Was it done on time? Was it done at a fair value? Was the service experience good? I mean, what’s the old saying people don’t buy drills, they buy holes.
Ken Tucker:
Yeah.
Antonio Guerrero:
Yeah, you don’t need a drill you need a hole.
Mark Fortune:
Yeah. That’s exactly right. Okay. So, as target markets in differentiation becomes clear, Antonio, let’s start with you on this one. How does one set strategy as it begins to evolve and emerge? How does that inform the rest of your marketing work when you’re working with small business owners?
Antonio Guerrero:
Well, at that point, we are now going to focus on the customer journey. I think once you have an idea of who you want, then we can start building out the road that’s going to get them from not knowing that you exist to becoming a raving fan of your business and want to transact with you. So, I think the customer journey now becomes the most important part of strategy with those two elements because you can’t design a customer journey until clearly who you’re going after and clearly what you want to sell them, and what makes you different that’s going to attract them to come into the fold essentially. Right?
Mark Fortune:
Certainly. Ken, how does this kind of strategy play out as you get into an engagements with clients?
Ken Tucker:
I kind of look at it as helping us to understand where there’s opportunity. So that could be, as Antonio said, the customer value journey, also looking at maybe some competitive landscape analysis to see what your competitors are doing, what they’re doing well, where they’re not doing well at all, and where that creates opportunity for you. And honestly, where it may be really difficult for you to compete in certain areas, whether that’s through social media, share, or search rankings or whatnot. I think those two combined really start to work on driving, laying out a content strategy.
Ken Tucker:
We do a lot of work with, with SEO and paid advertising Google, Facebook ads, for example, and knowing how the customer naturally buys and what content they want to see at the stage that they’re at through the buying cycle helps us align consequent strategy. And also how you use that content whether it’s paid or Google ads or organic SEO strategy, or whether it’s a social media component and really build from there.
Mark Fortune:
It will. Sort of building on that, Paul, when you’re working with clients, how much easier is it to get an online presence built and campaigns built, and websites develop when you have an idea as to what their differentiation is and what their core messages really are?
Paul Barthel:
That’s a really good question. It does make it easier and everything, I don’t care if it’s organic or if it’s some kind of paid media, everything starts with awareness. People have to either know you exist in the first place, or they have to be able to find you that goes back to visibility. And whether it’s organic or paid, even with Google ads in an ideal world, you would have a campaign for awareness. You would have a campaign for informational types of things, and then you would have a campaign for transactional. And the reality is most businesses, most farmers just don’t have the budget to do that. And that’s where paid and organic can help bring everything together. Quite often, when I look in Google analytics and I look at that conversion paths, quite often, the first interaction someone has with that business as a paid ad.
Paul Barthel:
Now they may not convert. They’ll go from that paid ad. Maybe they’ll go to their Facebook page, they’ll go to their website, they’ll go back to a paid ad, and they’ll go back to the website and then they’ll finally contact the business. Something we sort of touched on, but haven’t really gotten into is there’s a lot of information out there. And by the time someone contacts a business, they’ve probably done three quarters of their research. You’re on the shortlist now, at a point where, okay, I’m probably going to buy this product or service. I just don’t know who I’m going to buy it from.
Mark Fortune:
Yeah. Those are all excellent points. We should dig up the stat and include it in the show notes about how much research is being done before they’ve ever bought from you. And how many different touch points are there? There’s lots of stats about that that are out there. So as we sort of begin to wrap up this first episode, let’s just go back to sort of the original question from our point of view, as small business marketing consultants, why do we start with marketing strategy in our work? I mean so many times, most of the times a prospective client will just want to dive right in with either building a website or running ads or some other tactic. Why don’t we just go along with it and start there? Anybody want to dive in on that question?
Antonio Guerrero:
To me, I think is you want to be good stewards of their financial investment in you, I want to treat their $1 like $5, and I can’t do that. If I’m using a shotgun approach to marketing, just trying to cast that wide net, again, we’ve kind of been talking about this the entire episode, the more defined we can get, the easier we can find that targeted traffic that’s ultimately going to make them happier. Yes, it may take a couple more weeks till some of the sexier parts of a marketing campaign is engaged, but you’re going to enjoy the results far more. And I can guarantee you when we look back at other clients who have used different marketing agencies in the past before they came to us and they’ve gotten essentially burned by them, we start asking them a couple of strategic questions. We start asking, a very good indicator is customer lifetime value, for example. And when they can’t answer those questions and they’ve had any marketing firm prior to engaging with us, this is where we can tell you where the campaign fell apart.
Antonio Guerrero:
The other thing to me and the other very, very important reason why we start with strategy is it’s a defense against shiny object syndrome. And Ken touched on this a lot earlier is you don’t want to be moving from tactic to tactic. And I’ve certainly had clients who, earlier in my career, before I built up my own tolerance for it, refused to do the strategy. And it seems like every other week, and that’s maybe even being conservative, they wanted to move on to a new thing or tweak something or adjust something further. And we never could get anything off the ground because there was death by a thousand changes here, and nobody had the courage of their conviction to let the campaign run its course.
Antonio Guerrero:
And I think that’s very, very important. So if you find yourself making a million different changes or changing tactics on a very regular basis, I would say that the root cause of that is you never had a strategy to begin with because once you have your strategy in place, it will be clear how you’re going to attract those ideal buyers and the traffic sources you use become clear whether they be Facebook, LinkedIn, Google ads, and you’re far less tempted now to make any changes, because we did the research upfront. We don’t know if, for example, you being a roofer that Pinterest all of a sudden, because you heard a seminar on Pinterest is the way to go, right? So, I think that defense against shiny object syndrome is very, very powerful.
Ken Tucker:
Yeah. I would just say that in my mind, it’s hard for a lot of businesses, small businesses, to really differentiate and vet a lot of the marketing companies that are out there. But I think fundamentally the way I look at it, we’re a marketing consulting focused agency. We’re not tool vendors. We don’t sell pre-built packages. Now having said that, I mean, we have a set of things that we know that can package together that work really well on the implementation side, but we’re not going to walk in the door just to sell you something that’s good for us that may not be good for you because…
Ken Tucker:
And you can only do that if you spend time doing strategy and understanding what’s important to the business and how does that lay out across the messaging, the ideal customers, the target markets and all of that. I think fundamentally it comes down to trying to understand when you’re working or potentially working with a marketing company, are they a consultant, and strategy driven or are they just literally trying to sell you a package that’s probably good for them because it’s easy to implement, and highly profitable for them, but may not be the best thing for you.
Mark Fortune:
I think that’s a good way to sort of begin to wrap up this between the defense against the shiny object syndrome and just the tool vendor, that can’t even explain really the data they send to you on the reports that they get. I mean, I see that all the time with clients that hand me a stack of paper and they don’t understand at all what information their vendor has been giving them. That’s usually where you can tell there’s been no strategy work done whatsoever, and the vendors just selling their pre-configured package.
Mark Fortune:
That’s probably a good place to end today’s first episode. And we certainly want to thank all of you for taking the time to listen to today’s episode. Please be sure and subscribe to the Marketing Guides For Small Businesses Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love for you to rate and review us wherever you can, that will certainly help other people find out about this. Hopefully very valuable content for small business owners. And please don’t forget to visit our website, which is marketingguidesforsmallbusinesses.com, for more episodes, free resources and links to set up free consultation calls with any of the folks that you heard on this podcast. Thanks again, and stay tuned for more episodes.
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