Marketing Fundamentals, The Starting Point For An Awesome Marketing Plan with Tim Fitzpatrick
Table of contents
Don’t skip the fundamentals. If you skip the fundamentals, you’re gonna waste time, you’re gonna waste money. One of my favorite quotes about the fundamentals was from Michael Jordan, where he said, Get the fundamentals down, and the level of everything you do will rise.
About Tim
Tim is an entrepreneur/business owner with expertise in marketing and business growth. He has 20+ years of entrepreneurial experience with a passion for developing and growing businesses. That passion served him well in operating and managing a wholesale distribution company he co-owned for nine years. The company grew an average of 60% a year before being acquired in 2005.
Since then, he’s had failures and successes that have been valuable learning experiences. He started Rialto Marketing in 2013 and has been helping service businesses simplify marketing so they can grow with less stress. Most people overcomplicate marketing. It doesn’t have to be that way.
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Marketing Fundamentals, The Starting Point For An Awesome Marketing Plan with Tim Fitzpatrick
Tue, 9/21 9:08PM • 44:50
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
work, people, marketing, starting, plan, dentists, business, target market, fundamentals, focus, problem, selling, channels, website, ex presidents, customers, talk, clients, attract, ideal client
SPEAKERS
Tim, Roy Barker
Roy Barker 00:00
I’m your host Roy, of course, we are the podcast that brings you a wide variety of guests, I can talk about a large, diverse set of topics, we want to try to provide help and support for all of our small businesses, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs that are out there. And today is no different.
We have an awesome guest, Tim Fitzpatrick have been waiting. We had a schedule conflict or actually had a power outage last time we were scheduled. So I’ve been waiting for this for about the last three weeks. So Tim is an entrepreneur, slash business owner with expertise in marketing and business growth. He has 20 plus years of entrepreneurial experience with a passion for developing and growing businesses.
That passion served him well in operating in and managing a wholesale distribution company he co owned for nine years, then the company grew an average of 60% a year before being acquired in 2005. Since then, he has had failures and successes that have been very valuable learning experiences. He started Rialto Marketing in 2013, and has been helping service business simplify marketing so that they can grow with less stress. Most people overcomplicate marketing. It doesn’t have to be that way. Tim, thanks so much. Welcome to the show.
Tim 01:19
Thanks for having me. Right. I’m excited to be here.
Roy Barker 01:22
Introduction
Yeah, awesome. less stress. We’re all looking for that, especially in our marketing plan when we’re up at night ringer. Before we jump into the marketing aspect, tell us just a little bit. And I know I just read a little bit of your story, but kind of tell us how you found yourself here.
Tim 01:40
Yeah, so I’ll try to make a long story somewhat short. You touched on the fact that I, my first business that I got involved with was a wholesale distribution company that was actually right out of college. I was not one of those people that was like an entrepreneur from you know, a young age I wasn’t, you know, Hawking stuff at garage sales and selling baseball cards. I the only thing I cared about at that point was riding my bike and hanging out with my friends. So when I graduated from college, I still didn’t really have any idea what I wanted to do. I was a math major.
I was good with numbers analytical, and I figured a math is used all over the place. So there’s got to be something I can do. So I got involved in this distribution company that was selling wholesale. We were selling wholesale, we were selling home theater, equipment, speakers, TVs, receivers. I mean, it was like toys. And after the first three months of that I was man, I was hooked. I loved it, I was the first full time employee. And I ended up managing and running that company on a day to day basis.
My other partners were involved, but they weren’t involved on a day to day basis. And I learned more in six months of doing that than I did four years of college, you know, it was just real world experience feed on the feet on the ground. And I loved it. We We We were in it a good time we the company grew very quickly. After we sold I worked for the company that bought us for another three years. And then I actually stayed with them and moved from where I was in Northern California out to Denver, with the company. And this was in the 2008 timeframe. So we all know what the hell happened. Yeah.
And we got bought by a public company. And so in early 2009, they were starting to really freak out, they were starting to make decisions to manage, based on the quarter and the quarterly financials rather than long term thinking. They cut 30% of the branch locations we had across the country. And I got laid off. So they did me a favor. I wasn’t happy at that point in time, I took a little bit of time off, tried to figure out what my next step was going to be. And I had always been interested in real estate.
So I got my real estate license started selling residential real estate. And, man, I’ve learned a ton doing that I was putting myself outside of my comfort zone all the time. But I did not like it. It was not for me. It’s a great living for some people for me. I just reached the point where I was like, man, I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. Yeah. So I said, I gotta I gotta do something different. What’s the point?
No, no, my own business if I’m not loving what I’m doing. And that’s when I decided to get into marketing after I kind of took a step back and said, Man, what did I like about distribution? Because when I was in distribution, I felt like it didn’t work. I loved it. And so I started thinking about that. And I said, Look, I’m going to get involved in marketing. That has not been a straight path either.
But you know where we are today is we’re working with service based businesses, helping them simplify marketing. And we act as you know, a marketing consultant or an outsourced marketing partner for them and helping them actually implement. Okay, but what we really focus on first are the fundamentals because those have to be in place to have long term success.
Roy Barker 04:53
A Plan
Yeah, great. That’s kind of some notes I’d taken here where the you know, starting back at the fundamentals because so many Many times, we just don’t, you know, it’s like, I don’t know, I saw digital ad or I heard something on TV. And so we’re kind of off in that direction without really thinking about what is our overall plan. We’ll get into that for just in just a minute, the one thing you did bring up in your going through your narrative there was chasing quarterly results.
You know, I had the same experience when I worked for a large public company, as well as, like, we changed our focus from long term and to this, you know, three month period, and the bad thing is we would do anything in our power to save $1 this quarter, only to spend $5, next quarter, or, you know, or into the future. And so, you know, I think what we Yeah, we can probably extrapolate that lesson into our, you know, into our marketing and our fundamentals, because marketing is, I mean, we hope we can send an email out, or we hope we can put up an ad, and we get flooded with calls.
But just gonna say that’s not my experience, it’s, it’s a long term play, trying to build those pipelines. So taking this back to the fundamentals is really where you know, where we need to start. And so what, you know, another thing that we talked about, kind of with this fundamentals is actually taking the client and sitting down and talk with them. And so that’s kind of how you start the process, if I’m not wrong, is trying to find out who they are, what they are, where their direction where they want to go.
Tim 06:31
Yeah, we need to, in order to put a plan together of where some what somebody needs to do, you first need to establish a baseline, you know, understand where they’re at, and where they’re starting from, to determine what you need to do to get to where they want to be, you know, it’s no different than my GPS, if I’m trying to go to Denver International Airport, or Dallas Fort Worth airport, right, I have to first tell my GPS, where the hell I’m starting from, otherwise, it ain’t gonna do anything, right.
And marketing is no different. Frankly, there’s a lot of things in business that are no different, you have to establish that baseline. And then you can start to put the plan together of what you need to do to get to where you want to be and reach your goals. Yeah.
Roy Barker 07:16
That’s all you know, I will say, I’ll speak to the businesses and entrepreneurs. And that is a true honest assessment of where we are. And, you know, this is why I professionals that helped me I love to work with people who I like and who I trust, because I need to be able to tell Tim and his team, everything, the good, the bad and the ugly, you know about where we’re struggling and where we’re failing. Because if, if we gloss over that we’re probably going to have a subpar plan that you end up rolling out.
Tim 07:48
Right? We’ll think about it like this, here’s an analogy for you. Because it’s a great example. If if somebody’s sick, and they go into the doctor, you know, they’re having pain in their gut or wherever. And they go in and the doctor says, Well, you know, why are you here?
And they’re like, well, I don’t know, just, I want you to find out what’s wrong. Where, where’s the problem, right now start feeling around and tell me like, that’s never gonna work. Right? You got to tell the doctor what the problem is. So they can start honing in on it. You have to give them the information they need to do their job. And this is no different.
Roy Barker 08:25
Fundamentals
Yeah, yeah. And I guess the the kind of the next part of that is that the developing an avatar for the consumer, because that’s something else that I’ve heard some horror stories about in the last couple of weeks is like, well, who is your consumer? Well, I don’t know. He was the guy that walked through the door, you know, the last guy that walked through the door, he clicked on the buy link. And that’s, that’s the guy. It’s like, well. So tell us a little bit, you know, some things that we need to think about when we zero in on who is our client? Yeah, and and the whys of that as well. Yeah.
Tim 09:03
So the way I look at the fundamentals, the first fundamental is this target market question, Who, who are you going to serve? And how are you going to serve those people? Everything from a marketing standpoint, starts with your target market. If you don’t know who your target market is. And you just start acting, you’re putting the cart before the horse and you’re gonna waste time, you’re gonna waste money. There’s so many of us we look, I’ve made this mistake before tons of us have made this mistake. It’s like you get into business and who are you working with? Well, are you breathing?
Do you have the money to pay me? Are you somewhat interested? Cool, yes, I will work with you. And what we find when we do that is not everybody that we work with is great, right? They we may not like to work with them. They may not be profitable clients. We may not do great work for them. There’s some clients that we do great work for and there’s others that we don’t We need to hone in on that. So that we start to attract those people that we really want to work with. So the easiest place for most existing businesses to start with this. You’ve got if you’ve been in business for a while you’ve got existing customers, you got past customers, I like to start by asking three questions. The first question is, who do you enjoy working with?
Why the hell do you want to amend owning a business is hard enough? Why do you want to pound your head against a wall working with clients that just make it difficult? To Who are your most profitable clients? If we’re going to stay in business and make money, we have to work with profitable clients. If we work with clients that aren’t profitable, not only are we doing ourselves a disservice, we’re doing our clients a disservice, because we’re not going to be in business to help them right. And the third question is, who do we do our best work for?
Who do we get great results for it? If we saw the group of those clients that we answered positively to those three questions, that’s where you start to identify your ideal client types. Most businesses have 123, ideal client types, I don’t think you should have more than three, because I think you’re gonna dilute your focus. Okay. So if you look at that subgroup that you answer positively to those three questions, now you can start to look at that group and start to look at the demographics, right, the numbers.
Where do they live? How old are they? What kind of jobs do they have? Those types of things are demographics. And then you’re also going to look at the psychographics, psychographics have to do more with the feelings, you know, what they are like, as people? What are their goals? What are their aspirations, their dreams? Common problems do they have that you can solve? Those are the psychographics. And when you pull the demographics and the psychographics, out of that group, inevitably, what happens is subgroups come from that those subgroups are your ideal client types.
Okay. And now, when you know who your ideal client types are, the next thing you can start to do is look at, okay, where are these people? Where are they online? Where are they offline? So let’s look at an example. Let’s say, I looked at my, my clients with Sam, we have a CPA. Okay. We have a CPA firm, and that we work with, and they have two different ideal client types, dentists and veterinarians. Okay, great. So we’re trying to attract dentists? What associations do dentists belong to, you know, the American Dental Association, or whatever those may be? What, what manufacturers do they commonly buy from those manufacturers who already have existing relationships?
Right, maybe I can start to build referral partner relationships, some of these manufacturers, what websites do they frequent? What influencers? Do they follow in the dental space? What podcasts? Do they listen to? What YouTube channels do they follow? What groups do they belong to in fate on Facebook or in LinkedIn? Right? These are all examples of areas that we can look at to start to create a list of where those dentists are. And once I have that list, now I know exactly where I need to be, to put my message out there to get in front of those people. That’s, that’s how this whole process starts to unfold.
Roy Barker 13:34
Where Our Audience Lives
Yeah, and I think that’s the it’s kind of a, it’s a major part. But it’s a part I don’t think we think about it’s like, what Who is this person that we want to sell to? But the other great thing about that is you find out like you said, Where do these people live? Because that’s, you know, where do they live online, basically, because that’s where we’re going to want to target our dollars.
Because, you know, us I don’t like to pick on Pinterest, but we’ll pick on Pinterest for a moment that, you know, it’s like, you know, if I’ve got a b2b, that’s not really where I’m probably going to want to spend a lot of my dollars unless I’m, I think it’s more focused on you know, women, and I’m not gonna mention their age group, women of a certain age, so I don’t get any getting any bricks or something on the other corner here, but you know, and so I think that’s, that’s another great part of that is you find out where, you know, helps us to zone in and where we really want to focus those dollars.
Tim 14:31
Otherwise, if we don’t, we waste time, and we waste money, right? Because like before we jumped on the air here we were, you mentioned YouTube ads. Well, if I know that I’m trying to attract dentists, and I want to take advantage of YouTube ads. Am I going to get to start randomly putting YouTube ads up on on any video? No, absolutely not. Because I’m just going to waste time and money, right. I’m going to identify what What up youtube channels do?
Do dentist frequent, and then guess what I’m going to put my videos, my ads on their videos that is much more targeted, you’re going to get much better results. And the message you communicate is much more targeted to those people and you’re naturally going to attract those people and get better results, right? It’s a very simple example. But this happens all the time where people are like, yeah, I’m trying to attract I work with small business owners. Well, that’s great.
But Jesus, they’re everywhere. What like, what types of small business owners? Are you trying to attract? You know, that it needs to be specific enough? Where when people read what you’re saying, they can at least say to themselves, you know, what Roy is talking to me. Right? If so, it has to be that specific. It doesn’t have to be, you know, we work with, you know, underwater basket Weaver’s that are located in Dallas, Texas, it doesn’t have to be that specific, right. But it has to be specific enough where they read it, and they go, Oh, my God, he’s, he’s talking to me, or she’s talking to me, or they’re talking to me. If if you’re good if, if that happens,
Roy Barker 16:08
right, right. Yeah, and it’s so big. And that’s the, I guess the the breadth of this is so wide, you know, we have to narrow our focus, because nobody has just enough money to throw it to all corners of the world. And so you know, some of us with very limited budgets, we’re definitely trying to narrow that focus, where we get the biggest bang for our buck.
Tim 16:29
You you hit the nail on the head, I use Amazon as an as an example for this all the time. They they didn’t start out selling everything to everybody. They started out as an online book seller. And after they nailed that niche, they started to expand. Right? Well, they can target a lot of people now because they have more money than God. Yeah, you know, but most small business owners do not have an unlimited budget, right? You have to make sure you have to hone in because if you’re trying to target everybody, you need to have a huge budget in order to do so. And if you don’t, then you have no business trying to do that. Yeah.
Roy Barker 17:06
Choose Your Clients Well
And it may be it’s a little different, I guess, in in a product environment a little bit not quite, but I can the service business you brought up a good point is that, you know, we want to work with people who we want to work with. I know in the beginning, sometimes we take on people we may not. But the reality is that there are some people that are slow pay to no pay, there are people that really suck all of your time and energy that you know, you have this scope of work, but it just never seems to end and nothing worse than having to fire a client.
You know, it happens all the time. But I think this, this also helps us to say who do you really want to work with? Are you know, like, in my practice, do I want to? Well, you know, like the CPA you’re using, if if they know the ins and outs of the dental industry, then well, by far I can talk to the dentist in an intelligent manner versus you know, maybe a a offshore drilling company that’s like, well, I don’t even I wouldn’t even know where to begin talking with them about, you know, their business structure and their write offs and how we do all this stuff. But if you kind of hone in on that niche, it’s a much easier conversation starter as well.
Tim 18:21
And you can start to use language that’s familiar to them, right? You know, like dentists don’t call their business, a business. It’s a practice, right? Even just that simple thing can make a huge difference, you know, so there’s a lot of nuances and when you when you understand your target market, your ideal clients well enough where you can start to enter the conversation that they’re having in their head. They’re gonna say, Oh, my God, Roy is speaking to me. Yeah. Well, Tim is speaking to me. That’s what we want to have happen.
Roy Barker 18:54
Yeah, and you mentioned the psychographics for a minute. We don’t have to get too deep but it’s important and I think about myself when I go by car because me and Terry, my partner were very different in this aspect. I don’t need to touch it, smell it, feel it, I don’t need to fall in love with it. I need something that is got four wheels and engine hopefully it’s all in close where I don’t get wet when it’s raining. heaters nice and air conditioned even better. But you know, she is more on the Oh, it’s red.
You know it has this and it has that she is more of that person that you know you really need to talk and like, you know, I’ve got a lady I’ve been dealing with for years. That’s why I love her because she doesn’t call and try to give me that stuff. I mean, we had this conversation the very first car bought from her about 15 years ago. I was like, I am not going to fall in love with it, I don’t want to hear all that. Give me the this model with these features. Best priced. Bottom line. That’s all I’m looking for.
Tim 19:54
Psychographics
Yep. Yep, absolutely. This psychographics To me, the same psychographics are equally if not more important than the demographics because the psychographics are what really get people hooked into what you’re saying. And that’s what gets people to buy. It’s the psychographics is the results, they’re looking for the problem that they have. Super, super important. So you don’t want to skip that aspect of
Roy Barker 20:22
Yeah. Yeah. And that, that’s another thing is, you know, we’re trying to solve problems we’re trying, you know, we think about it in this way, like a guy was telling me one time, you know, he had a posthole digging company. And he’s like, I structure my advertising. For people who need holes in the ground, not people that need a posthole digger, because they don’t need a posthole digger, they need a hole somewhere in the ground. Yes, they do. Yeah. So, you know, trying to really get to the root of what problem are we trying to solve? Or what benefit do we have for the individual that we’re selling to? I’m sure that’s a very important part of this.
Tim 21:04
super important, right, which leads kind of leads us into that next marketing fundamental, which is your messaging. There’s, there’s so many people that make the mistake of focusing their message on their business. And you just kind of touched on this, our, our customers don’t care about us, but what they care about is how we can help them solve the problem they have, and help them get to where they want to be. So our messaging needs to focus on that, right. It also needs to be clear and engaging. If it’s not clear, right?
If we confuse people, we’re gonna lose them. We are so short on attention spans at this point. If I land on your website, and I can’t quickly without scrolling down the page, understand, have a general idea of what you do and what the benefit and working with you is. I’m moving on, right. And, and so many people make that mistake, and it doesn’t. It doesn’t need to be that way. Yeah. So how do we fix that? We use a storytelling framework. I did not create this ROI.
But it just works. It makes sense to people. And it gives you a playbook that from a messaging standpoint, you can come back to each and every time, so you’re not reinventing the wheel. So if we look at how our most story structure, there’s a hero or main character, they have a problem, right? without a problem, there is no story. So there’s got to be a problem. They need a guide. The guide knows exactly what they need to do because the guide was in the hero shoes.
They know how to solve the problem. So they call them to action. They give them a plan that calls them to action, so that they can avoid failure, and they reach success. So let’s see what that looks like. One of my favorite movies is the original point break with Keanu Reeves. You ever seen though? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So he’s an FBI agent. He’s green, he’s a rookie. The problem. The EX presidents is this band of bank robbers robbing banks in Southern California. The guide is his crazy FBI partner, Gary Busey.
He’s been there, done that, you know, seasoned. And he says to cure to reverse. He’s like, Look, I believe the ex presidents are surfers. So the call to the plan is you need to learn how to surf so that you can befriend these guys and infiltrate them. The call to action is you’re going to learn how to surf. So that hopefully we avoid failure, which is the ex presidents get away. And we reach success, which is we catch them the they go to jail. Okay, so that’s a simple example. How do we apply that to our business?
What we do is we take that same framework, and we’re inviting your customers who are the main character or hero in the story. And you are the guide? Why is the key Why aren’t you the guy, you’re the guide, because you know exactly how to solve the customer’s problem. The customer is not looking for another hero, right? They’re looking for a guy that knows exactly what they need to do. So we use this framework and start putting in these elements that position you as the guide and them as the hero.
Then every time you need to create a message, you come back to the framework and you pull the elements you need. And you move forward. And it helps you eliminate those two common problems of make it difficult for people to understand what I do, and I don’t focus my message on what’s going to help my customers survive and thrive.
Roy Barker 24:42
Solve a Problem
That’s it. Yeah, and I think you know, you mentioned this earlier about it’s not making, you know, we want to be the hero to solve the problem, but it’s not making it all about us. And you know, I’ll just say that that’s a big turn off for me is when the message is all about how great you are not about this. Solution Are you know how much I’m hurting with this problem less? That’s what I want to know. I want to know that you understand how bad that I’m hurting and I need the solution.
Tim 25:08
How have you ever seen? I think we’ve all seen these videos where you know, our ads where the person that’s there is they’re talking about themselves, right? It’s like, hey, look at, I’ve looked at all the things that I’ve done, here’s my million dollar house, here’s my frickin boat. yada, yada, yada, right? I don’t know about you, but when I see that stuff, I’m like, Oh my God, what a blowhard. Yeah.
I don’t give I don’t care. Yep. You know, and I think look, then obviously works with a certain subset of the population. But I also think maybe that just works for the type of people that you want to attract. I’m not that type of persons ideal client, because I see that and I’m totally turned off. Right. So but that’s also part of understanding your target market. You don’t maybe their target markets totally respond to that.
Because that’s, they want that, yeah, I look at that, I just go well, okay, that doesn’t mean that you do a great job, right? It just means you’re a great salesperson. Exactly. So or, or it could mean that you just rented that whole thing and shot that video, and now you’re going somewhere else, I don’t know. So you got to understand who your target market is. And then your message has to focus on how you can help them, you only talk about yourself enough to position yourself as the guy right.
And guides have two qualities, they show empathy. I understand what it’s like to be in your shoes. And they have credibility and authority. I don’t need to talk about myself a ton. I can use two or three testimonials, I can use logos for certifications, awards that we’ve won high profile clients we may have worked with, those are always to help establish and position yourself as the guide because you don’t need a ton of it to do so. Yeah, it’s
Roy Barker 27:01
always better to have somebody else telling people how great you are versus you. That’s exactly right. I learned that raising kids. Well, so let’s talk about the integration for a minute. Because, you know, we’ve kind of, we’ve got our path, we’ve got our messaging our target market, but you know, we, we want to build a plane, oh, unless we find somebody that just lives in one space, most of the time, we may have to go over three or four channels.
So we want to make sure that we get the exponential benefit from that. Because, you know, if we spend our money correctly and have the right campaigns, we should be better off. For you know, for each dollar we spend across these, we should get, you know, a higher return than just porn, it may be into one.
Tim 27:53
Refferals vs Other Lead Sources
Yep. So I want to post something out that you just said, because I think it’s really, really important. I think you or your business is very vulnerable. If you’re generating all your leads from one channel. Like there’s a lot of small businesses that build their business on referral in the beginning, and it’s a great way to build your business. But if you’re 100% referral, it’s a very vulnerable place to be I think you need to be generating business leads from at least three if not four or more channels.
I think your business will be much more predictable. If you do so. That’s the first thing. Now when it comes to putting a plan together, I like to keep things simple. To me people overcomplicate things, you know, if the beginning of 2020, you would have spent 1000s of dollars on a one year marketing plan. Come March, most of us would have burned it or put it up on a shelf to collect dust. I think our businesses are evolving quickly and our marketing needs to evolve with that.
And so the way I look at marketing plans is in 90 day sprints. They’re short, Sprint’s we keep them simple. The plan and the template we use and by the way, all the resources that we’ve been talking about, your listeners can get for free. We’ll talk about that later. But okay, I don’t I don’t keep any of this stuff secret, okay. But there’s six steps in this 90 day plan. First step, who is your target market? At a minimum? I want you to have a paragraph for each of your ideal clients. Who are they? What are statistically What are they the demographics and then get some of those psychographics in there? What type of people are they? Okay?
If you have a paragraph on each of your ideal clients, you’re ahead of most businesses because most businesses do not have that down on paper. It’s on the plan because I want it to be top of mind of who you intend to attract. The second step is What’s your goal? What’s my goal for the next 90 days It needs to be specific. It needs to be measurable, it is time bound, because this is a 90 day plan. So maybe my goal is I intend to bring on 10 new clients in the next 90 days. That’s specific. It’s measurable. I know, I either hit it or I didn’t. It’s not arbitrary. The set the third step is what’s my budget? And what are my resources?
Do I have $500 a month to invest? Do I 5000 a month to invest in my marketing? From a resources standpoint? I’m talking about staff time, like, Do I have time to invest in this? Do I have other people on board the halftime to invested in it’s also capability. Just because, you know, genome, my staff has five hours to dedicate to social media each week? Does she understand social media enough to do that work? If she doesn’t, then that’s not going to be a good fit. So we have to, we have to look at all of that stuff. From a budget and a resource standpoint. And that gives us an idea of what we have to work with.
The fourth step is what’s my current marketing plan? And when I say that, right, I know that a lot of people don’t have a current marketing plan. That’s okay. We just need to get down on paper, where we’re starting from it’s that reference point. It’s that baseline. And when I look at where we’re starting from, I look at eight main marketing channels, all the tactics can go into any one of the one of these, Okay, so first, you have strategy or your fundamentals, your target market, your messaging, that’s where everything starts. Your next channel is your website, then you have content. am I creating a blog?
Do I have a podcast doing my doing video? Then you have Seo? Right? helping you get found in search results? Social media, I’ve got email marketing, paid advertising, like Google ads, or Facebook ads, and then offline marketing? Am I doing speaking, networking and referral group? Am I doing direct mail advertising? All those types of things? All I want you to do in this phase, just write down? Do you have this dialed in? What are you doing? Are you not using this channel, you don’t have to have be in every one of those channels to be successful. We just want to get an idea of where you’re starting from.
And then in the next step, the fifth step is what am I going to focus on the next 90 days, what you focus on in the next 90 days is going to depend on where you’re starting from, and the budget and the resources that you have. If it’s just me, and I don’t have a budget, and I just have my time, well, I may only focus on one channel and getting that up to speed. If you don’t know your target market, and you don’t have good messaging, you have to start there, you know, you must, from there, you’re going to you got to have your website, okay, and it’s got to have good, good content, clear calls to action, telling people what you want them to do when they’re on your website. And then from there, you can expand.
One of the tools that is in the free resources is is a checklist that I call the evolution index checklist that looks at businesses in three phases as you start to grow. And it looks at each of the channels we talked about. And there’s just a checklist of Hey, if you’re in phase one of your website, these are some of the things you should think about having in place. So it gives people kind of a guideposts that they can look at. Okay, I’ve done these these things. Here’s the next logical step for me, if I want to focus on my website, or I want to focus on my social media, because that’s a really common question people ask is okay, well, I know where I’m starting from, how do I know what to focus on in the next 90 days?
Use the evolution index checklist to give you some some ideas of where you may want to focus. And then the last step in this plan is the metrics. What metrics Am I going to track? The metrics give us an idea of whether the actions we’re taking are actually having an impact or not? Yeah, keep it simple. Don’t overcomplicate it, I was a math major, I can dig into the weeds, but there’s so many vanity metrics when it comes to marketing, right? You don’t want to have X amount of people on my email list, or I have these number of followers on social media. Who cares? How many leads are you generating?
And how many of those leads? Are you converting to customers, right? That’s what you really want to know. I think you can start to get more sophisticated and advanced as you move down the road, but keep the simple focus on you know, one to three metrics initially, that are going to give you an idea of where you need to go. But when you do this, and you put this in place, all you do is at the end of 90 days, you look at what worked, what didn’t adjust your plan moving forward, and you wash, rinse and repeat. It keeps you focused, so you know exactly Hey, the next 90 days, these are the actions that I’m focusing on right.
So that now Next week when somebody says, Oh my god, Tim, you have to be on clubhouse it is the newest hottest place to be, you’re missing out on leads, and bla bla bla bla bla, I have the discipline and the focus to be able to go, you know what, I may have some interest in that. But right now until I get these other things in place, I’m not going to focus on that, or at least if I choose to focus on that, I know, I can adjust my plan, you can adjust your plan, that’s okay, this is not set in stone. But in the absence of having a plan, everything that comes across your desk is going to look like an opportunity.
Roy Barker 35:35
I was just fixing to say that is that, you know, I think part of the plan is the value of that is to keep us from being you know, like the squirrel and the shiny object is like, you know, it’s like somebody because we talked to people and they’re like, Oh, this worked for me, okay, well, I’m abandoned. And, you know, three weeks in or two weeks into what I just started, I haven’t given it a chance to work, so I’m going to abandon it. And I’m moving to this next thing, which I will probably give two weeks abandon.
Move on to the next thing. The other thing that you mentioned, I like to talk about, you know a little bit is the metrics and a couple things, the vanity metrics, we kind of be so careful, because, you know, I kind of tell the story that one time, I posted something I got 1000 likes, and that evening, we went to the Mexican restaurant to celebrate and we ordered some, you know, Margarita is and a big plate. And then when the lady brought the check, I’m like, oh, here, I’ve got 1000 likes, I’m gonna trade those in for, you know, for this meal that we just had.
And she’s like, Yeah, well, that’s not gonna work. So we’ve got to be able to think about these, you know, what actually makes us money? The, I guess the vanity part of it is good, because we’re getting exposure. But it’s not the end all be all, you know, maybe it gives us a point to look at the kind of content that gets people’s attention if it’s in a good way. Because, you know, my reality is, you get 1000 likes and no phone calls, it doesn’t matter. You get one lakh and one phone call. That’s the magic right there.
Tim 37:03
Yeah. Think about how empowering it is, if you know, let’s say I know that for every five leads, I generate one of those converts to a customer. Now I’ve got a really actionable information. And I can start to focus on Okay, well, what types of things can I do to generate five leads so that I get one customer, right? Most people have no idea what that number is for their business.
When they know that, it becomes a very empowering thing to figure out. And once you have that, then you can start to work your way backwards and figure out okay, well, can we start to tie the number of leads we generate to website visits or to email lists, signups? If you can do that, all these numbers start to come together? And, and things become a lot more predictable. When you can do that.
Roy Barker 37:59
Sales and Marketing Communication
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, in big corporations, we talk a lot about silos is that you know, there has to be communication between sales and marketing, because the reality is, marketing can be doing an awesome job and driving tremendous traffic to us. If they’re not our buying public, it doesn’t matter. And you know, I kind of use the example of if you’re selling adult beverages and marketing puts on this awesome campaign. And we’ve got, you know, 12 year olds ring in our phone off the hook. You know, it’s been a successful campaign in the fact that we generate a lot of interest, but we didn’t generate dollars, which is really what we want to do.
And kind of taking that to the smaller businesses. I always tell everybody, don’t be afraid to ask Where Where did you hear about us? You know, why are you calling in? You know, we can say it a little nicer than that. But basically, we want to know, where did this interest come from? Keep a checklist of that, because it’ll get more important not just to know where the traffic is coming from, but we can also tell, okay, we had 100 calls from, you know, Facebook, that turned into zero buyers. We did this thing on Instagram, we had 50. But we got five buyers, you know, you can really start to see the picture much more clear, not just on, you know, is the phone ringing.
Tim 39:18
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you bring up a really good point about that handoff between marketing and sales. You know, I’ve never understood in some companies, sales and marketing are almost adversarial. In some companies. It’s just, that’s never gonna work. You know, when we talk about like our marketing message, that message that we use to attract people needs to filter down into the sales process, the sales conversations, and frankly, after that, it needs to go into customer service.
All those departments should be saying the same thing, right. Otherwise there’s no consistency and you know, somebody gets in trouble. From marketing, and then if some buddy in sales is is hitting on a different problem versus like, what the hell? I thought you solve this problem? Yeah. You know, so all those things have to be in concert. Right. But it starts with marketing. Yeah.
Roy Barker 40:15
Yeah. And you know, one thing that that dialogue is, you know, because I’ve been on both sides of that coin. And it’s like the, you know, sales is always like, you send me these people that have had to call 12 times and they, you know, you send me the hardest people. But, you know, we saw that dialogue has to be constructive. And it has to be inclusive, where we can, you know, we we want to look at it as solving problems, we want to bring all those groups to the table to say, our end game is to sell this product or service.
Now we’re How can we tweak all this? Because, you know, especially in marketing, you can just say, Well, I just developed a very awesome, most awesomest plan ever. So don’t tell me it’s not working. If you know, if the phone’s not working phones aren’t ringing, or if we’re not selling anything, it’s not.
Tim 41:03
Yeah, I think all the departments need to be open minded and have an open line of communication, because sales can give marketing, awesome information. You know, it’s like, hey, the leads that you’ve been bringing in from this campaign, they’re fantastic. Here’s why. Here’s what’s happening. And it’s like, Okay, great. Well, how, why why was that the case? And how can we recreate that in other channels?
Like, hey, these coming in? They’re not good, right? And here’s why. Right? And then marketing can take information and make better decisions about where the money needs to be invested to improve that.
Roy Barker 41:42
Right. Right. Now, that is so true. So true. Well, Tim, I know we are running long on time, anything, any other points you want to leave us with?
Tim 41:56
You know, I would just say, Don’t skip the fundamentals. If you skip the fundamentals, you’re gonna waste time, you’re gonna waste money. One of my favorite quotes about the fundamentals was from Michael Jordan, where he said, Get the fundamentals down, and the level of everything you do will rise. Bat professionals, professional sports, players make things look easy. Because they have the fundamentals nailed. You don’t see Michael Jordan shooting free throws for five hours, you know, but because those fundamentals are in place, everything that they do on that court or on that field is better.
It’s the same thing with your marketing, so don’t skip them. You will waste time and money if you do. So, I would just like to leave people with that. Yeah. And you know, if if they want more our website rialtomarketing.com free consult button there, be happy to chat with you and help give you some clarity on where to focus. And we did put that resource together with a free resource from our for the marketing fundamentals, which is that rialtomarketing.com/the-business-of-business.
Roy Barker 43:13
Okay, awesome. And yeah, we will be sure and put that in the notes. And so,
Tim 43:17
Wrap Up
yeah, if people want more information, they can go to our website at, Rialto Marketing.com, that’s rialtomarketing.com. Okay, if they want those free resources that I touched on earlier, to help implement those marketing fundamentals we talked about, they can go to rialtomarketing.com/the-business-of-business, okay, if they get stuck, they’re hitting roadblocks with their marketing, just hit the get a free console button that is all over our website.
Be happy to chat with you for a few minutes and hope you gained some clarity on where to focus your marketing efforts. All right. All right, great, man. Thanks so much. Really appreciate the time.
Roy Barker 43:56
Hey you bet. Thanks for the great information. It’s always good to things start at the beginning. And then also, it’s that whole iceberg thing that all the work is underwater. It’s those, you know, the end results are what we see on top, but there’s a lot of work that goes into that. So anyway, y’all reach out let’s see how Tim can help you and increase your marketing increase your customers and hopefully have a lot of success.
So that’s gonna do it for another episode of The Business of Business Podcast. I’m your host Roy. Of course you can find us at www.thebusinessofbusiness podcast.com. We are on all the major social media networks as well as the major podcast platforms, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Spotify, we’re not a one that you listen to please reach out I’d be glad to get you added and video of this will go up to when it goes live. So until next time, y’all Take care of yourself and take care of your business.
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