Omar Zenhom (0:00)

If you're a listener of the show, you probably own a business or looking to start one. So the question is, are you ready to thrive with your business? It's time to let Intuit QuickBooks take things like unpaid invoices and tracking expenses off your plate to take things to the next level. If you're a longtime listener to the show, you know how much I bang on about how important your finances are, getting your numbers in order, making sure your incoming invoices and expenses are all taken care of. That's where QuickBooks comes in. It's an all in one business platform that can help you with day to day tasks like invoice, manage and grow your business all in one place. Intuit QuickBooks your way to Money Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments, Inc. Licensed as a money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. It's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one you can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover you can get this Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show see terms@discover.com credit card hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. Practical business Lessons for the Real World. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. And in today's episode you will learn why your marketing is not getting you customers. I would say about 70% of every chat I've had with anybody who's seeking advice from me is asking me questions. Whether it's in a live event, a conference over email, on Twitter or X. It's all around why their marketing is not working, why it's not getting them customers, not getting them sales. They're putting a lot of effort into their marketing, but they don't see any profits or any revenue. And I wanted to address this topic on the podcast because it's such a prevalent problem for a lot of entrepreneurs. So I did a bit of research, did a little digging in my own experience of doing marketing for my various businesses in the last 20 years. And I want to give you a six part checklist, six reasons why your marketing might not be working and getting you customers. I'm going to give you real life examples of each of these reasons so that you can fully understand how to dissect your own marketing. Improve it, plug in the gaps and make sure you're getting more customers from like right now as soon as the episode's over. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So I want to start with the first reason why your marketing is not getting you customers. And this is the biggest reason. I would say over half of the people that have spoken to me about this problem are suffering from this. This is really the problem. And here it is. Reason number one is marketing is not sales. This point is so important. Let me say it again. Marketing is not sales. Marketing is one thing, sales is another. If you think that just because you're marketing, customers are automatically going to start buying, you're in for a rude awakening and a lot of lost money, right? A lot of spent money on marketing that is not really materializing or getting a return on investment. Sales has its own function. You need a sales system to turn your marketing leads into actual sales. Marketing's job is to attract and generate interest, to bring in leads, emails, phone numbers, however you reach out to your customers. Sales, on the other hand, is about converting those leads into paying customers. You can have the best marketing in the world, but without a solid sales system, a way for somebody to buy those leads won't turn into sales. Now, obviously there are exceptions. If you have a product that people are willing to give you their life savings for, there's just a huge demand for your product, then just the mere awareness that your product exists is enough. But that's not most of us. Most of us don't have products where people are going to bend over backwards and go through, you know, flaming hoops to get to your product and buy it. They need some education, they need some sales. They need to be sold to. And for some reason, in today's world, in the Internet marketing world, in the creator economy, people think that they don't need to sell. Like sales is not a function they need to do. But nothing could be farther from the truth, because now people have so many options, so many choices, so many ways to spend their money. So it's highly competitive. And they need a reason to buy. They need a reason to buy from you. Why you? And that's where sales comes in. Listen, I ran a software company, webinar ninja, for 10 years. It was a SaaS product where people signed up for trial. They did this on their own. And you would think, oh, if I just market enough people sign up for trial and then they'll become customers. No, there's a lot of sales elements in that process, whether it's bringing them on a webinar and giving them a demo, whether it's through the onboarding process of those two week trial selling them on the product, whether through email or through our customer success agent. Whatever it is, the point here is that we can't just forget about sales. Sales is important. You need to sell people on your product. For example, you can run a highly successful ad campaign that brings thousands of visitors to your website, but there's no follow up, there's no sales funnel, there's no way to capture leads. And then once you have the leads, you don't have a solid email sequence that sells them on it or invites them to a webinar where you can give them a demo and make an offer. There's no place for them to sign up for a phone call or schedule an appointment or a consulting session with you. You got to have a sales process in your business. Marketing gets you the leads. Sales make the sales. All right. Reason number two, targeting the wrong audience. Great marketing is about reaching the right audience, the people who are most likely to convert into customers. If your marketing isn't tailored to your ideal customer, you are wasting time and money. The best way to get the best return on investment on your ads is to only advertise or to market to people that are most likely to. Let's do an example. So we could just break down the math here. Let's say you run an ad campaign and you spend $1,000 on this ad campaign. And with those thousand dollars you get 100 leads. And from those hundred leads you get 10 sales. And each sale is worth on average $100. So you break even here, right? You made $1,000 and you spent $1,000 on ads. But let's say you spent the same thousand dollars, but you really highly targeted the right audience, the audience that's most likely to buy. Maybe you don't get as many leads. Let's say you get 70 leads. But from those 70 leads, you double your sales and you get 20 sales. Now, you made $2,000 on an average revenue per customer of 100 and you doubled your investment, right? So you could see you might get less leads, but because they're targeted leads, they're highly likely to buy. A lot of people think they have a marketing problem when really they have a conversion problem. They need to make sure they're getting high converting leads. To illustrate this point even further, let's say you're selling high end business software, but you're targeting college students. You're not going to get a lot of results because it's a mismatch. College students can't afford your software, they don't need your software. So your efforts and your money are wasted. Reason number three, lack of clear messaging. Your marketing message needs to be clear and compelling. If a potential customer doesn't understand what you're offering and why it's valuable, they won't take the next step, right? They will be confused. They'll be like, why am I going to read your emails? Or click any buttons inside those emails? It's gotta be super clear on what they're getting, what value you're offering, and what to do next. At Webinar Ninja, we focused on clear messaging that highlighted how our platform makes running webinars easier and more effective. The challenge we found when we were doing this is we were so compelled to tell everybody about all the other features we do, all the other benefits, our amazing customer support. But that's overwhelming and it's not clear. So if you want to be clear, focus on your unique selling proposition, what you're all about. And for us, it's making it easier for small business owners to run webinars by themselves. And that's what we focused on in our messaging when we marketed. Reason number four Inadequate Follow up. Generating leads through your advertising is only the first step. You need a system that allows you to follow up with these leads and nurture them through the sales process. Most leads will not become customers instantly or in the next few days or few weeks. Some people are going to take months, even years to buy from you. So what do you do with them in the meantime? Just keep them on your email list? No. You continue to give them value and nurture them through some email automation sequences in your email marketing software. A very common mistake I found is that people are collecting leads and they do nothing with them. You need to set up automations in your email marketing software that provide value ongoing. Some people call these shadow newsletters, but basically, as soon as somebody joins your email list, they should be getting regular, valuable emails. One email after another, at least once a week, with great materials, with great resources. Continue to be of service until they're ready to buy. And of course, throughout the coming weeks and months, you're going to make offers to them. You're going to invite them to your webinar. You're going to invite them to a special offer or a launch you're doing. Are your kids struggling with homework? It could be incredibly frustrating to see them struggle. But of course it also feels bad that maybe you're not doing everything you can to help them. This is where IXL comes in. An affordable online learning program that covers math, language arts, science and social studies with interactive practice problems for kids from Pre K to 12th grade. Using advanced algorithms, IXL's questions adjust to the right level of difficulty for each student and they can practice on the computer or using an app, on a phone or a tablet. In almost every state in the country, the kids who had IXL are consistently doing better and IXL is used in 96 of the top 100 school districts. The numbers don't lie. As a former classroom teacher, what I love about IXL is that it's not a one size fits all. They understand that they need to create a system that fits each learner's specific needs. Not everybody is going to advance or understand things in the same way. So instead of forcing students to cater to a system, IXL adjusts to the students needs and abilities. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now and the $100 MBA show listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com mba Visit ixcel.com mba to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price it's crazy out there on the Internet. Going online without ExpressVPN is like driving without car insurance. You might be a great driver, but with all the crazy people on the road these days, why would you take that risk? It doesn't take much technical knowledge to hack someone, just some cheap hardware is needed. A smart 12 year old could do it. ExpressVPN stops hackers from stealing your data by creating a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet. And it's easy to use. I just fire up the app and click one button to get protected and it works on all devices, phones, laptops, tablets and more. That way you can stay secure on the go. For me, ExpressVPN is a must have, non negotiable. I have it on all my devices and I use it especially when I'm traveling. Because when you're traveling and you're hooking up to the WI fi, you're incredibly vulnerable. It's like the Wild west. Whether you're in the airport lounge, in your hotel room or some random cafe, I'm protected. And that's super important. For somebody like me who's running an online business who's constantly signing into different accounts on different devices, ExpressVPN's got my back. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com mba that's E-P-R-E-S-S V P N.com mba to find out how you can get up to four extra months free. Expressvpn.com mba Reason number five poor customer experience. Your marketing might be excellent, but if your customer's experience is lacking, you're going to have a hard time converting leads into customers. This includes everything from how easy it is to navigate your website to the quality of your customer service when somebody asks a question in your chatbot or via email. One of the things that we preached and taught our team at Webinar Ninja over the 10 years of building our company is everything is marketing. Every interaction with our customer is marketing, even when they are already customers. So that includes customer service. That includes customer success. That includes any page on our website. When they go to FAQs, the way they consume that information is a form of marketing. They get an impression of our business. When we run our webinar is marketing. When they see me on stage, it's a form of marketing. When they see me on social media, it's a form of marketing. You get the point. The point is that every interaction is marketing and you want to make sure that customer experience, especially as soon as they learn about you, as soon as they see your ad, as soon as they click on that link to go to your website, whatever it might be, or get your first email, they need to be delighted. They need to be like, wow, this is a special, special company. They really care about customer service. They really care about making me feel special. This is why you can never invest too much in your website. You want to make sure your website is user friendly, easy to use, easy to read, the copy is clean, it's not overwhelming. You want to make sure you have a seamless and positive experience that encourages them to buy. Reason number six not measuring and adjusting. Finally, if you're not measuring the results of your marketing efforts and making adjustments, you're missing out a lot of improvement. You're losing on a lot of sales because again, you're going to get more targeted customers that will convert into sales. You need to review your campaigns and look over how you can optimize them. If you don't have a team that's doing this for you, whether it's an agency or an in house team, then you need to take responsibility. Most people that I've seen that run advertising, that do any kind of paid advertising or even content marketing, free ways of marketing, they do it once and then they're just kind of like, okay, I did it, it's over now. Not sure. Should I keep on doing it? You need to analyze the results. You need to see, what did that campaign do for you? How many visitors did you get? How many leads did you get? How many of those leads converted into customers? And this goes into this idea of attribution. How do you attribute your sales to the actual marketing efforts you're doing? In the beginning, it's going to be a bit easier because you're just maybe doing one marketing effort, whether it's maybe running Facebook ads, but when you start doing other efforts like running a YouTube channel, doing a podcast, doing a billboard ad, running an event in person, you need to start now. Attributing sales to all these different efforts. It's important to track because you need to see what's working, what's not. We need to cut what you need to improve, what you need to optimize. We constantly track our marketing efforts, even just for this podcast. You know, we run a lot of marketing for this podcast. To grow it. We run ads on other podcasts, we use other advertising tools to make sure that people are aware that we exist. And we track all those metrics, we see how many people converted from those ads, and we double down on things that work and we stop doing the things that don't. This allows us to spend money in the right places, and this iterative process helps us maximize our marketing roi. All right, let's go through the six reasons again. The six checklist items you need to take a look at to understand why your marketing is not getting you customers. Number one, having a sales system. Marketing is not sales. Number two, targeting the wrong audience or not having a targeted enough audience. Reason number three, a lack of clear messaging. Reason number four, inadequate follow up. Reason number five, a poor customer experience. And reason number six, not measuring and adjusting. I hope today's episode was helpful. Got you thinking about your marketing in a different way. Has you looking at your marketing and reevaluating. You know what you're going to do differently moving forward if you found it helpful. The best way to say thank you is to subscribe to the show. Make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or on all the apps. Spotify, Apple, Overcast, every single podcast app. By hitting subscribe, you show that platform that you love the show and it gives us a chance to get more audience members. They give us more reach, the more followers we have. Thanks so much in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I love marketing. It's such an interesting science. I geek out it all the time, but at the end of the day, the best marketing or the best marketers are the best communicators. This is why I love it. It comes from my teaching days. The better you communicate, the clearer you communicate and the more selective with who you communicate with, the better the result. If I'm a fitness trainer and I like to train high level athletes, I'm going to have a better chance at converting them into a customer if they're training for some competition in six months. If they're a professional athlete, they're willing to invest in my training to get better versus somebody who's just looking to lose 10 pounds before the summer or whatever that might be. Know your strengths. Know who's best for those strengths, those valuable things that you offer in your business, and create the perfect message for them to track them. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Real businesses rely on Spectrum Business get the fastest, most reliable Internet, starting at $40 a month when bundled and backed by the Spectrum commitment. Find a plan that's made for your business@spectrum.com business restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas.