Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: This is a question I think every business owner has asked at some point. Why is it my marketing working? It’s far too easy today in the age of the algorithm to waste time and money on marketing that doesn’t deliver results. And it’s common to see business owners give up entirely out of frustration. But that just isn’t an option. Marketing is mandatory for your business’s success. So what are we doing wrong with our marketing and how can we do it right? In this episode, I’m going to give you the three most common reasons why your marketing isn’t working and how you can quickly Turn it around.

Matt Tompkins: Hello and welcome back to the Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the big agency secrets to marketing. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. Now, before we get to the three most common reasons why your marketing isn’t working and how you can turn it around pretty quickly, we need to address why you need marketing in the first place. To illustrate the importance of marketing, I want to ask you a question.

How much does a world class violinist make? The answer is about $1,000 per minute. I know, right? We picked the wrong line of work. I really wish I had stuck out those violin lessons in the fourth grade. Now, I doubt if I had stuck it out. I would become as successful as Joshua Bell, who in 2007 was part of a social experiment that The Washington Post did.

Now, Joshua Bell, he was playing to packed houses all over the world, playing concert halls. He’s just a a world renowned classical musician. He was also playing. Perhaps the best sounding violin on the planet. He’s playing a Stradivarius violin. It was built back in 1713. Over 300 years old.

Worth a mere $3.5 million. But this violin, it is renowned to be the most beautiful sounding violin ever created. So they had the world’s best violinist, and he was playing the world’s best violin.

Matt Tompkins: At the height of his career, he was approached by The Washington Post to do this social experiment where they took him and his violin to a local subway, and they had him play the same set list he would play in these concert halls, all classical masterpieces.

He played for an hour with thousands of people passing by. So can you guess how much the finest violinist in the world playing the best sounding violin in the world made in that hour? $32. He had his violin case out and he made $32. Just a couple of nights later, he would play a concert hall and make $60,000 in one hour. The only difference between him playing in the subway and him playing at a concert hall is marketing how he was marketed. He was marketed as the world’s most renowned violinist, playing the world’s best violin in the concert hall.

And they sold tickets $100 a pop in the subway. There was no marketing. He was still the best. He was still playing the best. And yet he didn’t. Well, he made $32. I guess he technically turned a profit. It’s not quite what he made at the concert hall. Now, this illustrates the point that just because you have a a great product or service, you cannot live without marketing Your business can’t survive without marketing.

Matt Tompkins: It is crucial. It is the lifeblood to your business. And so when we get frustrated because our marketing is not producing results, it’s overwhelming, it’s intimidating, it’s frustrating, and we get annoyed to the point of maybe hating all these social media platforms we’re told that we have to be on.

We throw our hands up in frustration and we give up and we don’t do anything. Listen, giving up is not an option. And if you’re an entrepreneur or if you’re a small business owner, then I know you have the drive. I know you have the passion, and I know you are willing to put in the hard work because it is hard work.

It is relentless. So I know you’re willing to put in the work, but you may not have the tools to do your own marketing and you may not know which tools to use, which free resources are out there for you. And trust me, there’s a lot and you may not know how to use them.

So that’s what this podcast is going to do. And even if you hire a professional marketing agency, which we recommend and encourage hiring a professional, an expert, a pro, I mean, we hire a professional to do everything else right? I’m not fixing my own toilet, at least not again.

Matt Tompkins: That was a bad idea for everyone involved. No, I’m going to hire a plumber to do that because they know what they’re doing. So, yes, hiring a professional and expert to help you with your marketing is highly recommended, but we also don’t want you to be taken advantage of.

And we have seen this firsthand with far too many companies, far too many people, businesses where they are, they are just ripped off. There are a lot of modern day snake oil salesmen out there using acronyms, throwing things around with SEO, with marketing. And it is easy to be overwhelmed and intimidated by that as a business owner when you don’t know what they’re talking about.

So this podcast is here to help you either do it yourself or know what they’re talking about so that you can protect yourself and get the most out of your marketing and in the end, honestly, be a part of your marketing. Feel proud of your marketing. How would that feel for a change?

That’s why I and our crew here are so excited about this new season of the podcast, focused on helping you with your marketing. And it starts with this episode here today, figuring out why your marketing isn’t working. And today I want to focus on the three most common mistakes that we see people make with marketing.

Matt Tompkins: These are the top three reasons that your marketing isn’t working, your marketing isn’t producing results. And on the flip side, these are the three crucial elements to any successful marketing campaign. And those three things are market message, message, media.

The first reason why your marketing isn’t working is that you aren’t speaking to your target market. Do you know who your target market is? If I were to ask you who your ideal customer is and you were to answer everyone. Well, you are in good company. Most business owners say that when I ask that question, they say everyone. The reality is that this means no one saying everyone is our target market. It’s just not true.

Everyone on planet Earth is not your ideal customer. So we need to narrow this down just a little bit. On the face of it, though, I get it. Saying that everyone is your customer or you want everyone to be your customer. That seems logical. However, this is a major marketing mistake. You have a limited amount of money to spend on marketing.

You have a limited amount of time if you focus too broadly, if you try to reach everyone. Your marketing message, it will become diluted and it will become weak. You’re going to have a vague message that may reach a large group of people, but it’s not going to resonate deeply with anyone.

Matt Tompkins: What you want your marketing to accomplish is to peak your potential customers attention and then connect with them so that they say, Hey, that is for me. We’ve all had those ads, those commercials, those podcasts, those books that make us think, Oh my God, this was made just for me. It’s the 1 in 1,000,000 test that your business needs to pass.

So in order for us to craft a message that is effective. And by effective, I mean that it resonates like that. We must know who exactly this specific person is that we’re trying to connect with. I would encourage you, if you haven’t already, to build out an ideal customer profile or an ideal customer persona. Get specific. Give them a name. A specific age. Give them a specific annual salary if they’re married. Single kids. How many kids? What are their fears? What keeps them up at night?

What are their pain points? What is it that drives them? And how can your business serve those needs and desires? Now there is an exercise that kind of simplifies this process and it really helps. We do this with all of our podcasters who go through the exact same process of identifying their ideal listener. And we have them list out as many of your current customers and clients as possible.

Matt Tompkins: What are three things that most of your customers have in common? What are three commonalities? Start there and then build that out into your ideal customer profile. You’re going to be surprised to find how many you know those three things.

How many of your customers have three things in common? It could be they’re all. Men over the age of 45. They all. Work in a specific industry. If you’re worried about narrowing down your target market because you don’t want to exclude any potential customers, trust me when I tell you that excluding customers is actually a good thing.

It’s a good thing in marketing narrowing down or niching down the focus of who you serve is actually how you will make more money. And ironically, it’s how you’re going to reach the largest customer base for your business. There are riches in the niches, as my wife has told me many times. Knowing who your ideal customer really is is the first step towards effective marketing for your business.

When we know who this person is, then we know where they are, where they spend their time online, how we can reach them with your perfectly crafted message, which we’ll get to here in a second. Now, if you.

Have many different services, many different product lines with dramatically different ideal customers for each of them, you know, that’s not terribly uncommon. I know our business is similar where we have a lot of different services that we do, but you really want to dial in a couple of things, couple of things to keep in mind there.

One is what is your company’s one thing you really want to be known for one thing so you can own that one thing. Even if you do all these other things, people will still hire you for all those other Things. But when it comes to marketing your business, your company overall, focus on that one thing. And the second thing is with your marketing campaigns, you can run specific marketing campaigns for each one of those services that target a specific customer base.

Each service could target 2 or 3 different ideal customers. So you could have I have tires for this one. I have tires for this ideal customer. I have brakes for this ideal customer. I have brakes for this ideal customer. You always want to get specific, though. You want to have a specific ideal listener and a specific message that is crafted just for them.

Matt Tompkins: Now that we know who your ideal customer is, it’s time to reach them. It’s time to connect with them with your message. And this leads me to the second most common reason why your marketing isn’t working. Your message isn’t working. Now, this could easily be because your message had previously been reaching the wrong target market.

But now that we know who your ideal customer is, we can craft a message that resonates deeply with them. Now, with messaging, we want to be specific and niche down as well. For small businesses, the concept of mass marketing to large groups of people, aka everyone, simply doesn’t work.

I hear people say things like, Well, I’m getting my name out there, you know, I’m putting myself out there, I’m posting on Facebook and Instagram. I got 15 likes yesterday.

Well, I don’t Know where there is. I don’t know where this place called there is I don’t know what’s supposed to happen when you get your name to this mysterious place. But the theory is that if we send out a message enough times to a large enough audience, there’s a chance that we’ll reach a few of our prospects and maybe some of them will do business with us.

Now, today, in the age of social media, it can be very challenging because social media is very deceiving. You can have a post, a video that gets a lot of likes, a lot of views, maybe even a lot of shares. But are they delivering on what matters new customers, new sales, new revenue for your business? And if they aren’t, then it is time to dial in your message and niche down for businesses on a budget niching down. Our messaging is honestly, it’s a requirement to produce results.

We don’t have this Coca-Cola sized marketing budget to do generalized branding to millions of people. We can’t afford a Super Bowl ad and we need to get the results out of every single dollar that we invest in our marketing. So if you’re on a budget, the answer is niching down, niching down.

Matt Tompkins: For your marketing, it simply means that you are defining a specific portion of a sub category. So let’s say I own a mechanic shop that has a wide range of services, from brakes to tires, oil changes, transmissions, engine engine repairs, etcetera.

So if I run a generalized marketing campaign with a vague message like, you know, at Matt’s mechanic shop, we do everything for everyone. It’s not going to be very effective. Instead, an effective marketing campaign would focus on one specific category like oil changes. And then I utilize my ideal customer profile.

That tells me 70% of our oil changes are for moms in their mid-forties with kids. So now I can craft my message to be for her specifically 30 minute oil changes for moms who need 30 minutes of peace and quiet. Now, a message like that has a much higher likelihood of resonating with that target customer, that target market with a specifically crafted message.

Full disclosure I am not a mom in her 40s with kids, so I’m assuming that that would resonate. But you get the idea. Stop running vague generalized ads. Stop with vague Marketing because It just isn’t going to produce results. Really an easy way to look at this. An easy test that you can perform is would you buy this? Would this connect with you? I mean, put yourself into the shoes of your ideal customer and think about that. I mean, we’re all bombarded with ads.

There was a study I saw that said we were the average person sees 3000 Ads Per day, which sounds ridiculous. But when you consider that the average American spends 2.5 hours per day on social media alone, and that’s just the average, there are a lot of people that spend a lot more time every day on social media than that. It’s not impossible.

It’s probably likely So we’re hit with a lot of ads. So when you see an ad that stands out to you, that connects with you, they’re targeting you. You’re you’re their ideal customer and they have a message that they’ve crafted for you. So ask yourself, would this. Connect with you if you were.

Matt Tompkins: In the shoes of your ideal customer? And that’s why we build out that profile, because it helps us put ourselves in the position of our ideal customer. So we have our ideal customer. We have our crafted message. The third most common mistake that leads to a marketing campaign not producing results is using the wrong media. Now, media is simply the vehicle that you are using to deliver your message to your target market, to your ideal customer. And media comes in many forms. I would argue today it comes in too many forms and that’s part of the problem.

There are too many options, too many ways.

Matt Tompkins: For you to get your message to your target market. But it doesn’t really matter what the form of media is. This question is universal, and you should ask. It before you get on. Any of these channels, any of these forms of media. Is this an effective way to deliver your message to your ideal Customer. To your target market? Is your ideal Customer Even watching that show, listening to that station on that social media platform.

Social media is actually a really good example Here because As small business owners, which I can totally relate to this, we have little to no marketing budget, we have no money. And on the surface, social media appears to be free, easy to use, and we see everybody else using it, every other local business and our big companies that we idolize, they’re all using it. So we need to be on it too.

And because of those things, because it’s seemingly free, we we don’t ask this basic question is our ideal customer on this particular platform And is this an effective way for us to get our message to our ideal customer, to our target market? It doesn’t matter what form of media it is. We still have to be able to answer that basic question just because social media is new. Just because the latest social platform of choice is cool in the moment, that doesn’t change the fundamentals of marketing social media. Every platform is Just a tool. It’s a tool. It’s a tactic for us to use to successfully implement our marketing strategy.

Matt Tompkins: And so to tie this all together, I would say. That the number one reason overall why our marketing isn’t working is because we don’t have a marketing strategy. We don’t have strategy. And that’s what these three things today that we talked about in this episode will help you create. How do you create a marketing strategy?

Well, you first need to know who your target market is. Then you need to craft a message to reach that specific target market, that ideal listener. And then you need to pick your form of media that you are going to use as the vehicle to deliver that message to your target market.