EP # 164 - 5 Most Telling Indicators Your Marketing Needs a Makeover

With today's episode, I kick off a five-part series focused on marketing. 
I talk about five indicators that will show you, your marketing may be ineffective, such as:

1. Lack of referrals
2. Weak online presence
3. Low engagement
4. Few inquiries
5. Attracting the wrong clients.

You'll learn how to troubleshoot each one and understand how important messaging is.
The episode aims to help service-based business owners evaluate and improve their marketing strategies to better attract and convert potential clients.

If you'd like to receive free resources with 50+ strategies sot increase your visibility, e-mail me at magge@stairwaytoleadership.com

And if you're ready to give your marketing a thorough makeover to make it strategically and consistently attract and convert only your ideal clients, book a sales call with me here https://calendly.com/maggie-s2l/discovery-call

Key Timestamps:

Introduction to the Episode (00:00:01)
Maggie introduces herself and the purpose of the podcast series on marketing.

Announcement of Series Start (00:01:36)
Details about the five-part series beginning on August 30th, coinciding with her son's birthday.

Definition of Marketing (00:02:40)
Maggie explains marketing as getting messages to ideal clients and building relationships.

Ineffective Networking (00:05:05)
Discusses the first indication of ineffective marketing: lack of referrals from networking efforts.

Online Presence Issues (00:06:12)
The second indication is a weak online presence, including low social media engagement and website visits.

Troubleshooting Online Presence (00:07:34)
Maggie provides four pointers for improving online marketing effectiveness.

Lack of Engagement (00:10:54)
The third indicator is low engagement despite having followers, signaling ineffective messaging.

No Inquiries from Audience (00:12:03)
The fourth indicator is having followers but no inquiries about services, indicating a need for better marketing.

Inquiries from Non-Ideal Clients (00:14:16)
The fifth indication is receiving inquiries from clients who are not a good fit, highlighting messaging issues.

Importance of Messaging (00:15:45)
Maggie emphasizes the significance of clear and compelling messaging for effective marketing.

Transcript

Maggie Perotin 00:00:01  Your business exists because you had the idea to start it. Everything begins in our minds. That's why your business results cannot outgrow your current level of thinking. Do you want to serve more clients, make more money without working more, or burning yourself out? Grow yourself first as a leader of your business because that's who you are as a leader. Even if you're the only person in your business right now, when you lead yourself first, the business results will always follow. My name is Maggie Perotin. I'm an international business and leadership coach, an expert in business mindset, strategy and high performance. I created the Diamond Effect podcast to help you elevate your thinking, expand your perspective and through it, grow your business without overwhelm. So let's get started Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome my leaders to Diamond Effect Podcast episode 164. So with this episode, we're starting a five by five series five episode, each of them talking about five critical points for your business. So today we're starting with marketing, and I will talk about five indications that your marketing isn't as effective as it could be, so that after you have listened to the podcast, you can actually look at your marketing and improve it.

Maggie Perotin 00:01:36  Before we move on to those five points, I want to tell you a couple of things. So the first episode of this series is coming out on Friday, August 30th, which is the 10th birthday of my youngest son, Jacob. So I just want to wish him happy birthday and I hope you can join me in that. This second part is that I will try to get my kids to create promotional reels remorse for five of those episodes, because I was just talking to somebody in my audience the other week who follows me and told me how they enjoy the reels when my kids create them. So I thought, okay, I will get them to use their creative imagination to maybe create that. So if you don't follow me on Instagram, do so. And my handle is Maggie Perotin dot esta L two is number two which stands for stairway two leadership. And for those of you who are maybe finding this podcast right now, and that's the first episode you're listening to, I want to talk about my definition of marketing that I have talked about in the previous podcast.

Maggie Perotin 00:02:40  If you scroll down, I'm sure you'll find it, but just to set the stage here for this episode. So marketing is really getting your message in front of people, but not just random people, but really people who are your ideal client and you can help them in the goal of marketing, and is put that message in front of as many of your potential clients as possible. So then they start to get to know you, and the more they are in your sphere, you start building relationship with them. So then then they can like you and trust you and then move on in their journey with you to then deciding that you are the one who they want help with and then get on the sales score. However you sell and buy from you, it's kind of a little bit like making friends or dating, right? You're showcasing what type of great friend you can be, right? How can you help your ideal client so they choose you over anybody else in your industry? And I always say there's a million ways to get to million dollars, which means there's a million ways you can market your business, and you don't have to do them all to achieve your goals.

Maggie Perotin 00:03:54  You need to do enough, given your resources and the time you have to create those opportunities and put as many potential clients in the funnel meaning on their journey with you to then convert them to enough paying clients. And if you're maybe just starting your business and you have no idea what to do to market. I have some free resources. And as I'm recording this podcast, I just didn't have time to create a link for you to download them so you can email me if you're listening right now at Maggie at Stairway to Leadership. Com and Stairway to Leadership is one word and I will send those resources to you. But if you're listening to that podcast, maybe a few months from now, that link might be in the show notes. So check the show notes. Okay, so now that the stage is set, let's get started on the five indications that your marketing may not be as effective as it could be. The first one is especially if you're networking, whether it's online or in person doesn't matter, or whether you're using your personal network doesn't matter how.

Maggie Perotin 00:05:05  But if you're networking, going to events, doing coffee chats, and you aren't getting referrals that good quality referrals to people who could either be your potential clients or their would be interested in your services, or at least the people who could be your, I call them strategic referral partners. So people who could refer ideal clients to. So if you were doing a lot of networking and not much is happening, clearly your marketing and messaging isn't effective. Now, what I want to point out here is put a little bit of disclaimer. If you just start a networking and you've done that for a week and went to three networking events or maybe even a month and nothing happened. Networking. You need to give a time, right? You need to find groups of people that you resonate with that are effective, that work with how your network. So you need to give it a couple of months, like I would say, at least a 5:45 months to really know if what you're doing is effective. But don't wait till six months to decide nothing is working.

Maggie Perotin 00:06:12  You should be seeing some progress each month. One of my very first episodes of this podcast actually, was episode number six talks about secrets to authentic and effective networking. So I highly encourage you to go back to episode number six and listen. If you have a network margin, you don't know what you're doing, I'm sure it will help you. The second indication that your marketing isn't as effective is that your online presence isn't attracting many people, and that could be in the form of following on your social media account or visitors to your website. Or let's say, even if you're doing some form of traditional marketing. You're distributing flyers and door hangers or whatever that is. You're not getting any inquiries or you haven't heard from anybody about that. Here, I'm not saying that you need to go viral, that you need to have thousands and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, or hundreds of thousands of visits to your website. But if you have a social media presence and you have a website and you're promoting marketing it and not much is happening, or you're following very slow or very minimal, of course your marketing isn't as effective.

Maggie Perotin 00:07:34  Now I will give you four pointers of how to troubleshoot and figure out why that's the case, because there could be different reasons. You could have all of them. You could have one of them or a combination of a couple. And you want to know what they are. So you know what to fix. So the first one and one of the of course, most common root causes is your messaging isn't clear. Your messaging isn't directly speaking to your ideal clients, to their problems and how you can help them. So it's the social media content or the website, the copy of the website, right? Or even if you have on the flyers, whatever you wrote in there, it's just not speaking to your ideal client. The second root cause, and that's especially for social media, is that maybe you don't understand the platform and how it works, right? What are some viral features like if it's an Instagram, maybe hashtags or TikTok, like the amount of content you need to be creating tip and grow so you don't understand the basics.

Maggie Perotin 00:08:34  And again, I'm not talking here of you being a pro and influencer. It's just knowing enough to get some results on the platform. In terms of your website, maybe you created it on your own and you haven't thought about SEO or some other things that the websites need to be somewhat findable organically, but also if you're not promoting it and on top of it, your SEO is not great, then it's very hard for people to discover your website. The third reason could be your marketing strategies are wrong, you're on the wrong platform, or you're doing things that doesn't really match where your ideal client is, who they are, and where they hang out, right? The thing about marketing is doing not just what you like. And regardless of whether your ideal client is there or not, it's just meeting your ideal clients where they are. And again, you don't have to meet them in all million places, but you need to know where they are and to pick ones that work best for you. And then the last root cause could be especially in show me their online space.

Maggie Perotin 00:09:43  But even in networking is that you're not engaging. You're not building relationships. You're for example on social media, just post and ghost and never come back whether it's a social media so the online space or whether it's networking more in person, it's all about building relationships. So building relationships is two sided. It's not just you talking to your ideal clients, but you also listening to them and engaging with them, asking them questions, having conversations so that also, if you're not doing it could be the reason why you're following is not growing and you don't have an audience that growing. And if you don't have an audience, of course nobody will buy from you. The third indicator that your marketing isn't as effective as it could be is where you don't have engagement at all. So maybe you have some followers, but they're not engaging. You don't have any comments, no conversations, or happening nothing or nobody's mentioning even to you, that they're enjoying what you're putting out there in your marketing. And you might be getting followers to hear.

Maggie Perotin 00:10:54  You might actually have some following, but again, not much is happening. As I said, it's not about going viral pod. If there is no engagement at all, that means that people don't resonate. And if you try different things and it's still not happening, you got to really look at what you're putting out there. Because when people resonate, they will some of them, even if it's not all of them, some of them will show some sign of it, whether they will comment or they will like, or they will save a post share or they will come to you if you know them personally or in the messenger saying, hey, that really spoke to me. And of course, when we, for example, share something personal or celebrate a personal win, that those are the posts that tend to get most engagement for many people, especially for me, if I look at my social media presence whenever I'm sharing something personal or celebrating something, those post gets most Engagement, whereas my marketing of my services and kind of more direct call to action posts get less engagement, but they still get something, some less, some more.

Maggie Perotin 00:12:03  And I say learn what is better, right? Like I try to get better at it, but I can see they do. And I'm also getting feedback from my followers, even if it's not directly on the post that they enjoy it, that it does resonate, that they feel heard and understood. So that's what you want to have in your marketing. Because also one thing to understand is that for one engaged person, there is probably 10 to 20 others that resonate in the same way. But they don't do anything. They don't show you that they're listening to you and so on. So yes, there are people who don't engage, but there are people who do. So if you get some engagement, you know that there's way more people who resonate. If you don't get any, you gotta look at your messaging. The fourth indicator is when maybe you have followers and you have engagement, but then no one reaches out to you to inquire about hiring you and working with you. So unless you're building an audience just to be an influencer, that's not good, right? That's not the point.

Maggie Perotin 00:13:11  The point is of your marketing to, as I said, take your client through a journey to once they get to know you, like you, and trust you, they make a decision to work with you because your ideal client has a problem that you can help them with, and they want that problem solved. So why shouldn't they reach out to get help from you and not somebody else? And I always say that it's better to. Let's say you have a thousand followers and ten clients from it, than 100,000 followers in one client from it. Right? So it's again, it's not about going viral and having a lot of followers. It's better to have less. Who are the right ideal client and then who? Take action. If that's not happening, you have some work to do. My philosophy is you're selling at every touch point, so your marketing needs to have an element of selling. It should be selling to. It should bring your clients on a journey step by step, for them to feel safe enough and confident in your ability to help them.

Maggie Perotin 00:14:16  Because once that happen, they reach out and they want to hire you, work with you, buy from you. Whatever you have to offer that they feel is best for them. The fifth indicator of your marketing being not as effective as it could be is that when you are getting inquiries, you go hopping on strategy calls, sales calls, or, you know, exchanging in messages through chat. However you sell, it's happening, but you're realizing that most of those inquiries are not from your ideal client There are people who are not willing to pay your prices, who are kind of cheap, or they're never buy, and you're conversion rate is really, really low. Even with those clients who buy, they seem to be difficult. You're not really somebody you imagined you would like to work with. If that happens, that has everything to do with your mass messaging, because somehow in your messaging you're speaking to those people there are coming instead of the people you would like to attract. So you have to hone down on your messaging, and you want to figure that out while you're still doing organic marketing, because amplifying messaging that doesn't convert through paid advertising, let's say Google ads, Facebook ads, TikTok ads, LinkedIn ads, however, is not going to help you.

Maggie Perotin 00:15:45  So putting a message that doesn't resonate in front of more people is not going to bring you more clients. If you think about it, zero times ten is zero, zero times 100 is still zero, right? So you want to know first that your messaging converts that organically. You can attract your best ideal clients. And then when you do that and you have a proof of that, you can amplify it by paid marketing to put that message in front of more people. Imagine like you have eight clients through messaging. Yes. If you now ten exit, then it's going to be 800, right? Or let's say you have 100 followers and from them you sign some great clients. If you're going to grow that following, even through paid advertising by ten, your clientele will probably grow by ten as well. But until that happens organically, no point investing in ads. And of course I can help you with that. With my clients, I help them create marketing and sales strategy that really attracts their ideal clients.

Maggie Perotin 00:16:52  Because through that strategy, we also work on messaging, making it clear and compelling. So when they put it out there, it actually converts. One of my private clients, Stephanie, when she started working with me, she spent some time and money and creating funnels, and she bought this course and I think Facebook ads or whatever, and she put them together. But then they never worked for her, and it's because the course didn't help her clarify the messaging. And then when we work together, the moment we change that and really honed on her messaging and she implemented that in her email sequence, the leads that she had coming into that funnel started converting pretty much right away. Okay, so messaging is critical. That's why I'm talking about it so much. So if you've been trying to figure this messaging out for a while, and you're already frustrated and you don't know what else to do, or you don't want to go through the frustration and months and months and end doing something that doesn't work. I can help you book a sales call with me through the show notes, and let's talk about how I can help you double your business without adding more work.

Maggie Perotin 00:18:07  Thank you for listening and see you next week. Thank you for listening today. If this podcast resonated with you, please come back. Also, you can leave a review on whatever platform you're listening, and if you have a suggestion, question or a topic you would like me to talk about, let's get in touch via email. Email me at Maggie at Stairway to Leadership. Com. See you in the next episode.