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Foreign and welcome back to the Kate show. It's episode 278 and today I have to share some laughable marketing tips with you. I hope that you have not fallen prey to these, but if you have, consider this your day of liberation. If you have been trying different marketing tactics and you're like, why isn't this working? Why are things worse in my business now than before I tried these things, there might be a good reason for that. It's not often that I'm confronted with marketing advice that is just so wrong it's hilarious. But I'm also immediately sobered by the fact that I've seen my own clients businesses be harmed by following this advice. Something that I've heard a little too often from clients is I was paying this coach thousands of dollars, so I thought she knew what she was talking about. Now, let me be clear. Business coaches, I know a lot of them, a lot of them are amazing. But they are not marketing professionals. And marketing professionals are not business coaches. As a marketing professional, I have been asked to provide coaching numerous times and I will always continue to say no. Why? Well, because merely running one or two successful businesses does not qualify me or anyone else to be a business coach. And being a business or branding coach doesn't mean that person knows anything about marketing. They might know a lot of other things, but not marketing. This topic is pretty personal to me. I've read too many sad emails from clients who were given advice that resulted in some of their worst, least profitable years ever in business. Now if you're like, what is this advice? Well, I'll give you a few examples. This is not a comprehensive list, but it's just a few examples. Stop blogging and email marketing. That's just for newbies. But nobody is ever above marketing or consistent. Client communication like that is utter hogwash. Or you need to sound more elevated. No, you just need to align with your ideal client better, be personable and talk to them consistently. Again, no one is above communication. Or another bad piece of marketing advice is rebranding will solve your problems. Now this is a band aid approach that costs you, the business owner, time and money without addressing the actual problem, which is almost always a financial problem. So before I get into a bigger list of marketing tips that are harming a lot of businesses in the home industry. And before I get into another list of tips that are actually excellent, really, they're more mindset shifts that will help you make better marketing decisions, I just want to say that again, I work with and have connections with A lot of great business coaches. So if you're like, okay, I want a business coach that will not steer me wrong. I want a business coach that will truly help me holistically in my business. Not just give me a pricing strategy, not just give me what worked for them, but give me, like, the more universal tactics of it. Here is what works. Because of X, Y and Z, I do have several coaches that I could refer you to, and a lot of it will depend on your budget, how you prefer to be coached, personality. So if you're like, I need a referral to a good business coach who specializes in female entrepreneurship or the home industry, please reach out to me. I'd be happy to refer you to them. All right, guys, let's get into the meat of today's episode. Laughable marketing tips that you should avoid. All right, guys, let's just dive right into it. The marketing tips, phrases, or hacks that you have probably heard many times before and been told you should implement will be something like this. People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. Nonsense. People do not buy why you do something. They buy it if it will help them. So your job as the service provider is to explain to them through your marketing, how your services will benefit them in particular. And that's why it's important to have an ideal client, because you cannot target everyone. You can't be the solution to everyone's problem, but you can be the perfect solution for a specific type of person, problem, or project. That's. That's marketing. Marketing is being able to communicate that effectively. All right, so another piece is, I work with who to create what, because I believe that. Why? So if you were an interior designer, you would fill this in with, I work with homeowners to create beautiful spaces because I believe that everyone should have a beautiful, comfortable home that reflects their personal style or supports their lifestyle or whatever. Okay? The problem with this is anytime you say in your marketing, I believe or I feel or I think, it weakens the message. So this whole idea is being pushed forward as your philosophy. But the truth is, people don't care about your philosophy. They don't care what you believe, what you feel, or what you think. And if your marketing is focused on those things, it will always fall flat. It will never hit the mark. It will not resonate with the type of client you want to work with. So get away from the idea that you have to share your philosophy. Even again, as an interior designer, nobody actually cares about your design philosophy. They want to know can you create a beautiful, functional space? Can you do it in a way that won't make my life hell? And have you done work like this before? Okay, so if you can cover those things and, and answer their questions before they're even asked, you're going to build trust. Speaking of trust, there is another little cliched phrase out there that has to do with marketing, and it's trust the seeds you are planting. Now, to a certain point, I can agree, like, especially when you're new in business, you're doing a lot of planting, but not a lot of harvesting. You're trying to get the right contacts, you're trying to meet the right people through networking events, you're trying to get your website set up, you're trying to plant all these little seeds. But the problem is you should not trust that those little actions are going to result in anything. If you don't nurture them, if you don't follow up with them, if you don't put those potential referral partners on your mailing list and then follow up with them every two to four weeks, they're going to forget about you. So it was just like when you're planting a flower garden or a vegetable garden, you can't just throw seeds on the ground, walk away, and expect to come back at harvest time and reap the benefits of whatever grew because the chances are that next to nothing will have grown. So I don't like the idea of trust the seeds you're planting. That's not where you should be putting your trust. You should be put your trust in God first, foremost, and singularly. But you should also make sure that you are nurturing whatever you are planting. All right, the next piece of advice, and this is more about branding that just drives me nuts, is your brand should reflect you and your vision. You've probably heard that before. There are tons of little graphics on Pinterest with these trite, cliched phrases all over the place, and it's nonsense. Your brand should reflect your ideal client, not you and not your vision. Your brand should reflect how you help your ideal client. Your brand should reflect on what your ideal client strives to be or do or feel. It is so narcissistic. And, I mean, we have a very narcissistic culture here in the US Right now, where it's all about, you know, do what makes you happy. Your brand should reflect you. It's all about you and your vision and what you believe and what you think and what you feel. But all those things can change on A daily basis. Like every single one of them. None of them are absolute, none of them are concrete. And you can't build a brand off something that will be consistently changing. Like, that's the only consistent thing about it. It will change all right onto the next piece. A lot of people will say metrics are everything. If your follower count or website traffic isn't constantly increasing, what you're doing is not working. Now, you guys know I'm a big believer in just looking at analytics, especially Google Analytics, because if you're like, I feel like my website's not getting a lot of traffic, it's like, okay, well, you feel it or you know it. Because there is a big divide between those two. And you should be looking at metrics and analytics. However, you have to look at them in context. So if you're trying to get more traffic to your website, but you're not doing anything to facilitate that traffic. So let's say you're blogging, but then you're not sharing those blog posts anywhere, why would you expect your website traffic to increase? Like, that doesn't make any sense. So you have to look at it through the proper context. The next piece of bad marketing advice. This is something I fell prey to early on in my business, be vulnerable in your marketing. So I found a copywriter on Google who. Her name. Her name is Lisa from make your copy account.com. she had this informative and hilarious blog post about it. So I'm just going to quote a little bit from her. It was all about different marketing advice. You should ignore the things that you shouldn't ignore. And she had something in here about this very topic. She said that she hates the advice of be vulnerable. And I'm just going to read exactly what she wrote. You do not need to bury your soul on social media to get sales. You do not have to share your past traumas or talk about your health struggles or. Or tell the world every time you're having a bad day. You can do these things if you want to. You can share these things if they're relevant to your business story, but you don't have to. And I'd argue that most people shouldn't. Sharing your struggles might get you a lot of engagement. It might get you a lot of messages of support. It might even inspire or help other people who have the same challenges as you. But will it get you more business? I doubt it. If you share a post about how you're struggling to stay organized, keep missing deadlines, need a break, will potential clients feel confident Trusting you with their business. Probably not a Nobody wants to hire a spaz. The thing is, we're all human. We all know we're kind of a mess behind closed doors in some way, in some capacity. And that doesn't mean we have to air it out. So there is a fine balance in marketing. Be authentic. So what you do, show people, make it be real and genuine. But don't feel like you have to air out the dirty laundry or put the skeletons that should stay in the closet out on display when there's really no benefit to it other than, you know, some people, most people air that stuff out purely for attention. But attention likes comments. DM's email replies do not mean you're going to get clients from it. I, I once, I don't know why I was on this mailing list to begin with, but I once got an email from a lady who was trying to sell some sort of business. Not coaching, but like advisory services. And she's like, I'm hosting a webinar on. And she started listing out some very specific bodily issues and medical problems. And she's like, register now to hear my story. And I'm like, why would anyone want to hear that story? I would feel bad about myself even registering for a thing, much less listening to it. And that was her way of trying to get people's nosy interest to sign up. But like the blog post I just quoted, yeah, you can get attention, but attention doesn't translate into clients because now all these people have the impression of this person as being a. She really airs it all out. Oh, my goodness. So if I work with her and if I tell her anything, is it going to end up in her next email? Because she's comfortable spilling her own stuff. So now it's like, very questionable. It made me laugh and horrified me all at the same time. But I know I've also made the same. Well, not that like the same, but I've made similar mistakes in trying to be vulnerable, because that's what I was told to do. And I didn't know any better. But then I learned. I learned real fast. You don't need to be that type of vulnerable in your marketing. There is another terrible piece of marketing advice I'm going to cover, which is nobody likes to be sold to, so don't sell to people. The thing is, we don't mind being sold to. We click on ads. I know I do. Especially around like, Black Friday or something. So my social media algorithms know what I like. Like right now I've Just got a bunch of, like, pregnancy, postpartum, and baby stuff because my phone knows everything and knows that I'm pregnant. So it's like, this is what I get. But we don't mind being sold to if it's something relevant. If I see an ad that's relevant to me, I'm like, oh, cool, I'm glad I saw that. Maybe I'll get that. Maybe I'll check it out at the very least. But what we don't like is service or a product being pushed on us that has absolutely nothing to do with us. So going back to, like, a social media ad, for example, because, like, my husband and I are on the same WI FI network, anytime he's googling something, he loves to research things a lot before he buys them. So he was looking at new hunting gear because he's a deer hunter. So suddenly I have all these ads in my Facebook feed for First Light gear, which is, well, I'm not even gonna get into what it is. It has nothing to do with me. And I'm like, oh, this is so annoying. Give me the baby ads. But if it's something that's relevant to people, they don't mind being sold. So if they're like, man, this house is driving me nuts. It's so, so cluttered. And then they get an email from you, a professional organizer, saying, hey, why don't you book us sometime in the next quarter? Here are the dates, here are the spots we have available, and these are the rooms we focus on. And here's how we can help you. Perfect. You are the solution to that person's problem. And, yes, you're selling to her. And how else are you going to make money as a business? You have to sell to people. But there is a tactful and a smart way to go about it, focusing on the relationship, not just on the exchange of money. All right, now I'm going to go over a few other things that that copywriter from makeyourcopycount.com said, Because I think, well, obviously she's a pretty good writer and she's kind of funny. So one thing that she said is she hates it when people say, keep going. It just takes time. Show up daily. Be authentic. Don't be salesy. And she's like, people who follow this all the time still aren't getting results. And, you know, they're being told, keep going. Don't lose faith. All the hard work will pay off. You just need to give it time. Now to a point. Some of this is True, but if you've been doing these things for like a year and you're not getting any results, then either you need to do something different entirely, or maybe you just need to adjust what you're currently doing. So we don't want to fall into the trap of just blindly repeating the same thing over and over. Blind repetition does not equal success. In fact, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting to get different results. And it can take some discernment to know whether or not you should stick with a certain marketing tactic or whether it actually needs to be adjusted because it's truly never going to work. So a lot of my clients have this light bulb moment with social media and they're like, you know, I've been posting so much and now I'm so sick of posting, I don't even know what else to say. But none of it's helped anyway. And that's why I really have no desire or inspiration to continue. And I say to them, well, let's look at metrics, let's look at your ideal client, let's look at your messaging. What have you been posting? And also, what are you really expecting to happen here? Would you hire someone if they posted a bunch of canva graphics? Probably not. Would you hire someone if all they did was post other people's work and tag them? Probably not. Would you hire someone because they had the most amazing social media feed, but there was no evidence of them being able to understand you and help you and solve your unique problem? Would you choose the person who had a next to no social media presence but could do those things versus the one who looked amazing online, but it wasn't clear that you could trust them to help you? I mean, it's a no brainer. Like social media is good in some cases, especially if you're selling retail products, but when you're trying to sell high end luxury services, which pretty much all of you listening are, it's just impractical. And it's, it, it puts you in a situation of having to solve an unsolvable problem. How to sell high end services through Instagram, for example. It doesn't make sense. It's. It's like setting up a lemonade stand inside a fancy restaurant. Who, who is going to do that? It's the wrong clientele. Or, you know, even the reverse is more likely true if you're trying to sell fancy food off the sidewalk where everyone walking by can't even afford an entree. It doesn't make any sense. So you need to go somewhere else to sell your services. All right, so let's go on to some marketing mindset positioning that you should write in lipstick red lipstick on your mirror. I love some of these things. I. I mean, I like a good cliche if it makes sense. And this one is no exception. It says, follow your plan, not your mood. Oh, my goodness. I can't tell you how many times I have started my workday and I did not want to record a podcast. I did not want to answer emails. I. I did not want to work on strategy. I did not want to do a darn freaking thing. But you know what? I did it because this is my career. This is the commitment. This is my calling. And I am following my plan, not my mood. Because my mood changes every single day whether I'm pregnant or not. And some of my clients who are not type A because, like, type A people, you know, I'm one of those, we tend to ignore our feelings almost to our own detriment. But people who are more in tune with their feelings tend to follow their mood. Like, well, I didn't feel like writing a newsletter today. I didn't feel like telling you which one I wanted today. So I guess one isn't gonna be sent. I just can't seem to, quote, unquote, make the time. But the truth is, anyone who says they can't make the time to do something is really just following their emotions and not their plan. And that is why most marketing falls flat. The next thing is there is the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. So pick your pain. I have experienced both, and I'm sure I will again. But the pain of discipline is at least rewarding. It's the good hurt. It's the good pain. The pain of regret is just awful. It sucks. So if you've been following your mood instead of your plan, you can change that right now. And then you don't have to live with the pain of regret, just the pain of discipline. Saying no to yourself. No, I'm not going to go scroll social media right now. I'm not going to go switch laundry in the dryer right now. I'm going to sit here until this task is done, and then I can go do something else. The next thing, and this applies personally and businessly. Marketing. The words you speak become the house you live in. Now, I will let you figure out what that means for your personal life. But in your business, if you keep saying, my business is struggling, I don't know how to market. This is so Hard. I don't know if I'm ever going to get clients. They don't take me seriously. Okay. All those things that you speak become the house that your brand lives in. And it will become evident in how you attempt to market. For example, if you send out an email saying, oh, there's a Black Friday discount on my services, do you know what that reads as? Desperation. Who wants to work with someone who is desperate? Only people who want a good deal. Good deal seekers are rarely good clients. Okay, so the words you speak become the house you live in. Make sure you're building the right house. It doesn't mean you lie to yourself. If you're not making any money, you don't have to sit there and say, I'm making so much money in my other life in an alternate universe. No, you just say, I am working towards something great here and I'm figuring it out. I'm praying for wisdom. I'm hiring the right people to help me and that's all you can do. Do what you can with what you're given in that moment. The next piece of advice that I love is don't make the logo bigger. Make the story more meaningful. The story doesn't have to be like once upon a time, blah, blah, blah. The story is just, I'll tell you mine. My brand story is that people who work with me, women who work with me, end up becoming confident in their marketing. They have peace around what they're doing to get new clients and they have results, actual ROI on their marketing. They know that when they send out a newsletter, they get clients directly from that newsletter. They know when they're blogging their SEO is increasing because they can see it in the stats. I give people marketing confidence. That's really what we all want. If I just went around saying, I help you with email and help you with blogging, people aren't buying that. They're buying the way it makes them feel and the way it helps them, or in this case, helps their businesses. So what are you doing? What is your brand story? Your brand story is not about you. It's about how your ideal client feels. And that brings me to the next piece. Branding is about how you make people feel like it really is. It is not narcissistic. It is not self centered or self focused. It is outward focused all the time, constantly. Lastly, I'll end with this. The four principles of creating brand trust are consistency, personality, transparency and credibility. So let's just break that down quick. Consistency. So are you switching up your visuals? Are you changing fonts and colors? Are you constantly tweaking your logo? Are you consistently like changing who you're focusing on? Oh, I'm, I'm worth focusing on this type of work? Nope. Now I'm not on this type of work, man. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. Is the personality of your brand changing? Sometimes when you send out an email or a social post or a blog post or what have you, are you super casual? And then the next time you're like really elevated and, and almost disconnected, you have to be consistent. And then there's transparency. So that could be transparency of pricing. So what's your starting at price? Transparency does not mean sharing all your vendors. It doesn't mean passing along your trade discount. Transparency means telling your clients the things that they need to know before they have to ask. And then credibility is, you know, have you done your due diligence to get past clients to write reviews of you on Google? If you haven't, do it. I recently started doing this because Google Business now lets businesses with no physical location have a Google Business listing, which is fantastic. So if you are not gathering those reviews, and really you don't need to gather them anywhere but Google Business, then how are you going to establish credibility? Now if you're a brand new business owner, that's going to be hard. It is hard. But as soon as you get that first client, if it goes well, ask them to write a review. All right guys, that is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for watching, for listening and if you haven't yet, I would encourage you to rate and review the Kate show on Apple podcast and on Spotify and give it a thumbs up and a subscribe on YouTube. I hope you guys have a wonderful week and don't forget to keep your marketing simple, your message clear and I will talk to you soon.