The Little Things Successful People Do

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Full Written Transcript of The Episode

The Little Things Successful People Do

MATT: How you do anything is how you do everything. I thought that line was a little cheesy the first time that I heard it, but it could not be more true, especially in the world of business. It’s the little things that make the biggest difference. We often brush off the little things. You know, I’m a business owner. I don’t have time for that. But it is these minor details, these minor adjustments and pivots that make the biggest difference in how successful your company is and will be. There are things that the most successful entrepreneurs all have in common.

There are little things that they all do. So it all starts with knowing which of these little things you should be paying attention to. In this episode, we’re going to break down the little things that make the biggest difference, because how you do anything is how you do everything.

MATT: Hello and welcome back to the Midwest Mindset, the podcast that makes marketing easy to understand and simple to do. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing.

Whether it’s your marketing or just your business operations overall, we are always just a mindset shift away from success from achieving those big, hairy, audacious goals that we set for ourselves and for our companies. It is a mindset shift that changed my trajectory. It is mindset shifts and usually it’s the smaller, the seemingly smaller mindset shifts that make the biggest difference or have made the biggest difference, not just in my own experience, but in those of the most successful entrepreneurs and business owners we’ve had the privilege and honor of working with over the years. Early on, when I was just contemplating leaving broadcasting, I had spent over 17 years in radio and television, and I kind of I was well past I was going to say I kind of hit my breaking point.

I was well past it. I just kept going back to it. I was like a glutton for punishment. I thought all this time it’s going to be different this time. It’s going to be different. And finally, it was in January of 2020. I remember I went out to my mom and dad’s house. They had moved me to a new station just literally that day. They said, Hey, you’re no longer on this station. Now you’re on this station.

MATT: I went out to my mom and dad and I said, Listen, I’m done. I got to figure something else out. It just felt stifling. I knew I contemplated of something bigger, something more. Right. I was I knew that something better was possible. And one of the biggest difference makers was reading this book called Micro Resilience.

Now, in this book, micro Resilience, there is a lot of focus on these perceived little things. They were trying to figure out the two authors in this book. They went out and they were studying elite athletes and they were trying to figure out what is the real difference between those athletes who are professionals, the best of the best and those who are elite. It’s a small percentage of these professional athletes. I mean, look at the NFL as an example, right? The NFL, if you make it into the NFL, even if you’re third string, you are you are the best of the best, only the best make these teams.

But then there are those elite NFL athletes, the greatest of all time, those players who just year after year, sometimes in Tom Brady’s case for what, 40 plus years, just keep delivering unparalleled results. We see this in the world of business just the same. And that’s what these two authors were looking at in this book.

Micro Resilience. What are the tangible little things that were the difference between a professional outstanding athlete and an elite athlete? And how could those things translate to the rest of us, not just in the world of business, but just overall with our lives? They found one of the biggest difference makers was one of the littlest things.

MATT: When I say little, I mean by we’re talking fractions of a second or a second or two at most of time. That was the difference in time between an elite athlete and how they recovered from a mistake or an error. And everyone else. They looked at tennis players.

The top 100 tennis players on the planet and all of these tennis players, they all had the same skill sets. They all had the same talent level. I mean, maybe it varied a little bit, but not enough to be a determining factor consistently in those who were elite and those who were just the top 100 best tennis players in the world. What they found was the difference was the tiniest of literally seconds of how the elite athletes responded to adversity and how the rest did.

The top 100 athletes who didn’t make it into that elite bunch, that small sliver of athletes who are just the best ever, the greatest of all time. They took seconds or minutes to recover from making a mistake. Those who made it into that elite group, they were able to shift in a fraction of a second or at most a second or two after making a mistake or an error being scored on. They just reset and moved on.

MATT: And that compounded over time being the biggest difference maker. I mean, if you think about all the things all the time that these athletes put into being a professional athlete, and you look at what and you try to decide what is going to be the deciding factor between a great athlete and an elite athlete. The difference of a couple seconds in how we respond to adversity would probably, probably not be the first thing we think of, but that was it. Literally the littlest of things make the biggest difference.

So they took that and they translated that to professionals in the business world. And little things like, you know, learning how to manage your time, learning how to give yourself an hour long break for dinner with your kids instead of just powering through the day. The idea that. Multitasking is actually a myth. We’re actually like 34, 40% less productive. Our quality of work suffers when we try to multitask. Those were some of the little things they found in this book that made worlds of difference to the regular business professionals, the entrepreneurs, just like you and I. That they took what they’d learned from these athletes and applied.

I want to give you a few real world examples of how these little things can make not just a difference, but the biggest difference. One of our first clients, in fact, I think they were literally our very first client, just sold their company for over half $1 billion a few years ago, sold their company for over a half $1 billion.

MATT: And I will never forget going into their office. You would never know that they owned a company worth that much money. They were sitting at a desk like a cubicle with everybody else.

They didn’t have a special office for the most of the time that we knew them. They were in this kind of rundown building. They had dogs running around everywhere. You know, it wasn’t until the last few years they moved into like a nicer office building like you would normally think of. And I’ll never forget walking in. And this one of the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve ever known.

This person would sit there and argue and just chip away at fractions of a cent and I remember thinking like, Come on, man. Like, it’s like we’re talking about pennies on the dollar here. And it is pennies. That turn into millions and in this entrepreneur’s case, billions. A recent example, we took over a podcast for a client and we went in and we transferred everything over to our podcast network.

And I was just going through the the routine, checking all the, you know, there’s all these different boxes on the back end you need to check. And I noticed there were a few things that just were left undone. Now you would look at this and you would look at things like setting my release schedule weekly, semi-weekly monthly for a podcast.

MATT: You would think that’s a little thing. Picking the right category to place your podcast in. You would think those are little things that don’t really make that much of a difference. They were averaging 416 downloads per day, and in a matter of literally four days, they went from that to over 1100 downloads per day, and they hadn’t released a new episode. This was all just checking off those little boxes, paying attention to those little things.

A third example I’ll give. This was a client who had been working with a previous SEO company last year and they came to us, just didn’t know what was wrong. They knew something was wrong because they were spending tens of thousands of dollars and had gotten zero leads. Now, this company was showing them, here’s all this amazing traffic that we’re bringing to your site. Thousands of people are visiting your website every day. What they had neglected to do, though, is point people to the right page. So they were pointing people to the wrong page.

They were advertising one thing, sending them to a page that featured something entirely different and losing people in the transition. So they spent tens of thousands of dollars for months on end and got zero leads. Not even like conversions or sales. I’m talking like zero leads, like just general leads, nothing. I bring up those three examples because that’s how much of a difference the little things can will and I guarantee you are making with your business right now.

MATT: So I want to share with you today some of the top little things that I have seen make the biggest difference in my own life with my own company and with those very successful entrepreneurs. We’ve had the honor and privilege of working with, being mentored by collaborating with and even having his clients first on my list here. It’s simple. It probably goes back to something our mom taught us when we were little kids Get up early and make your bed. Getting up early is one of two things I have found in my research.

Looking online here. I found every single elite entrepreneur the most successful of the successful. They all do this. They all start their day very early because that is when your brain is at 100% optimized efficiency. They get up early, make your bed. Why do I add Make your bed in there. Well, make your bed. It is.

I’m a big believer in quick wins, you know, getting a quick win to start the day. It has a huge impact on the rest of your day. It’s the same reason I’m a big fan of checklists. Sometimes this is how bad I am. I will make a checklist and I will put things on it that I just finished. But I just want the satisfaction of crossing something off the list. It does have a real tangible, measurable impact on the rest of your day and how successful your day is going to pan out.

MATT: So getting up early so you can start early, no distractions. You’re focused, you have energy. Your brain is operating at 100%. Making your bed. That’s just a quick win out of the gate. You know, establish quick wins right away at the start of your day. You know, you go upstairs, you have breakfast, do the dishes, wash the dishes, rinse them off. That’s a quick win. If you’re struggling throughout the day. You know. Take a minute. Take a minute and take the trash out. Clean your desk off. You know, dust off that bookshelf. Those are quick wins that can reestablish your day just as impactfully as starting your day. Establishing your day. Like making your bed does. My wife comes down now. Wendy’s like, Who are you? What did you do with my husband? Because I’ve never been a person who makes my bed.

Getting up early is number one and the second is journaling. Now, this was fascinating to me, those two things there. The first two I’m mentioning here are two that two commonalities I have seen with every successful entrepreneur. Why journaling and why at the end of the day, is it most impactful? Well, think of it this way. You start off your day, you get up early, you’re fresh, you have energy. Your brain is 100%. You make the bed, you do the dishes, you take out the trash. These little quick wins. You have added accelerant to your day.

MATT: Much higher likelihood of a successful day for you when you started off that way. Now, let’s fast forward to the end of the day, closing out your day when you’re journaling. What you’re doing is you are reflecting back on the day. And this is something that most successful entrepreneurs, in fact, I believe every single one of them do they reflect back on what they have accomplished, what they’ve gotten done. It’s too easy. And I think it’s just human nature to focus on that single negative. We get ten reviews. One of them is negative nine or positive.

Do we obsess over the nine positive reviews? No, No. Or social media comments, whatever it might be? No, we focus on that one negative. That’s just where our mind tends to go. It’s too easy. And I do this frequently and I have to kind of check myself with it because at the end of the day, we’ll look at the clock. Oh my God, I’ve been working for ten hours. I didn’t get anything done. I didn’t make any progress. Now, is that accurate? Is that true?

No. What does journaling do? It allows us to reflect on those things we got done, reflect on our accomplishment, accomplishments, and show gratitude for them.

Appreciation so that we can reset for the next day. It has an amazing impact on your mental state when you are about to go to sleep, when you are drifting off, you know, reading a book, closing out the day, journaling, those are ways you can close out the day in a very healthy, constructive, positive way as opposed to being on your phone, on social media or just, you know, and I’m guilty of this far too frequently eating ice cream, binge watching TV.

MATT: So getting up early, getting some quick wins and then journaling. At the end of the day, you can even get things like the Gratitude Journal is one. I’ve done that one frequently where you can you just list three things you’re you’re grateful for. You don’t even need to pay for the expensive gratitude diary or journal that you can buy online. You can just do it on a piece of paper. Write three things you’re grateful for three accomplishments of the day, and then three things you plan to accomplish accomplish the next day. It’s as simple as that. Writing things down has an amazing impact on our mental health as well. It just helps to physically write things out.

We recall them better, we remember them better. That’s how I used to memorize lines when I was in theater and I did commercials and stuff. You write it out. You remember it much quicker that way. It sets in. So those are the first two tips. Your first two things, little things that make the biggest difference. The third here is one that’s an ongoing struggle, I think, for all of us, and that is being on time. As business owners, I think it’s important we remind ourselves we are not as important as we think we are.

MATT: You know, we think we’re super busy. We think we always have to be on our phone. We always have to be checking our email. Unless you’re the president of the United States, you are not that important. Okay? You’re just not. There is no email. There is no text message. There is no piece of communication that can’t wait for 5 minutes or 10 minutes or an hour or a day. We think and we obsess. I have to be on this. I have to be on this. And it’s just not true. And we allow that to distract ourselves from respecting other people’s time. People make time for what is important. And if you’re not on time, if you’re consistently late, this is the third. I put it number three here, because it is the third most common trait that I see with the most successful business owners and entrepreneurs that we’ve worked with. Those who show up on time show that they are respecting their team, they’re respecting their clients, those people that they’re meeting with, which commands respect from those people right back at them, those who don’t, the opposite happens. It has the opposite effect. And we could tell ourselves all day long, Oh, it’s a Monday. Oh, I’m late. Oh, I had this thing. Oh, I had to answer this email. I have to be checking my phone. None of that is true.

MATT: Those are just made up excuses. Being on time is how you show respect and earn respect. And it is not inconsequential. It has a very big impact on how you’re perceived and how you’re respected. Be on time. Number four, accountability. And by this I mean something specific in the world of accountability. I’m not necessarily talking about holding your team accountable. And that is important.

What I’m talking about is holding yourself accountable. In other words, if you have a member of your team who makes a mistake, are you scolding them or are you holding yourself accountable? You can’t blame someone on your team for a mistake if you haven’t taught them how to do it right. Take accountability for your own leadership. Who’s holding you accountable? Your team members are only going to operate to the highest capacity you allow them to. So blaming someone on your team.

I see this often. It becomes a scapegoat. Oh, well, that’s Tasha. It’s Bill. It’s Bob. But did you show any of them how to do it? Right? How you want it done Now, if you show them how to do it, you give them a checklist. You have processes and procedures in place, your standard operating procedures, and they continue to do it. Then yes, you want to hold them accountable. But too many entrepreneurs and business owners, we don’t want to hold ourselves accountable because that means we got to actually step up. Number five, this one is broad, but I think it’s very important.

MATT: It is reading books and learning. When you’re reading books, when you’re learning, this shows you are willing to be coached. I have yet to meet a let me let me rephrase that. None of these successful entrepreneurs, the business owners, the multi millionaires, even, you know, close to billionaires that we’ve worked with over the years. None of them had said, you know what, I know everything. I don’t need a coach. I mean, look at it this way. Lebron James, Michael Jordan, you can argue all day long who’s the best.

And we all know Michael Jordan obviously is. But that’s aside. If the best in the world have a team and a coach. What makes you think you don’t need one? Those who are coachable, those who are willing to be coached and are willing to learn have the most growth potential. You are never at the best you will ever be. It is a lifelong pursuit.

So to recap here today, the five little things that make the biggest difference.

Getting up early. Get those quick wins. Make your bed. Journaling Close out your day by recalling and reflecting on what you have accomplished. Number three, be on time. Don’t be late. It’s that simple. It means more than you think it does. Trust me, we’ve all been on the other side of that, where you’ve had to wait 15 minutes for a zoom call and you think, okay, obviously they don’t respect this.

MATT: Why should I? Number four, holding yourself accountable. And number five, reading books and learning. In other words, are you coachable? If you do these little things and you do them on a daily basis and then you surround yourself with people who also do all these little things friends, peers, colleagues, mentors, you will see success. This is the way to quote the Mandalorian randomly. This is the way. This is how you do it. We can look up all the clickbait we want on secrets to my success. And if you do this one thing.

But it really boils down to these simple little things. Do them. Do them consistently. Stay disciplined and you will see the results. Thank you so much for joining us here today on Midwest Mindset. Now, if you would like some help, we have put something together to do just that. The link is in the show notes for you to download our free daily planner. Now, you don’t have to go out and buy the gratitude journal or a diary. I mean, you can if you want. They’re cool. I’ve used them.

But this is free. You can print it off every day. It’s reusable. It is a simple daily planner worksheet that has helped me. It has helped countless other successful entrepreneurs, and I know it can help you too. It is 100% free. The link is in the show notes for you to download now. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you on the next episode.

MATT: And that’s a wrap.

The Secrets to Paid Digital Ads

This is a written Transcription for the episode: The Secrets to Paid Digital Ads

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The Secret to Piad Digital Ads Transcript

Matt: I am so excited for today’s episode because I know this is a major pain point for nearly every business owner. Paid digital advertising. How much should I spend? Which platform should I run ads on? How do I get the results I actually want? From Facebook to YouTube, Google Pay per click and every other digital advertising platform in between, it is far too easy to take a step in the wrong direction.

That not only doesn’t bring in new business, it literally costs your company money. Today we are joined by our paid digital advertising pros from Refine Marketing to give us the secrets of paid digital advertising. Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that makes marketing easy to understand and simple to do.

I’m Matt Tompkins of two brothers Creative, where we passionately believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. We are always just a mindset shift away from success. And this is the Midwest mindset. I’d like to tell you, I’d like to share with you the story of Bob, the business owner, because I feel like this is a common journey we see often, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

As we’re going to hear from Ann Marie Faraday and Matt Falken of Refine Marketing. Our guest today on the podcast to give you the secrets of paid digital advertising. But here’s usually how the story goes. Bob, the business owner, he’s on Facebook, he posts a video and he sees that little blue button that says Boost.

Matt: Post says, What the heck? So he boosts it, spends a couple hundred bucks, he gets thousands of views, but no new business. He thinks, well, I got a lot of views.

Obviously it worked. I just need to do more of it. So now Bob starts spending hundreds, even thousands of dollars, still getting more views, more heart emojis, more likes. But he’s still not getting any business. No new revenue is coming in. So Bob thinks, well, I’m not a social media expert. My nephew, though, he’s on social media all the time. I’ll just I’ll just have him do this. So he gives his nephew thousands of dollars. He says, Go out there, run some ads. And they do. Again, they get a lot of traffic to their website. Even they get more heart emojis, more likes, more views, but they’re still not seeing that bottom line move.

They don’t know why. What are we doing wrong now? Bob is running out of money very quickly. This was money he didn’t have to spend in the first place. And it could put a major, major damper on any business and the success that you’re trying to achieve. This is all too common because paid digital advertising is far too easy, as I mentioned in the open to take a wrong step. These social platforms want you to spend money on ads. They want you to boost posts. They’re not going to give you the roadmap, though, on how to do it effectively.

AnnMarie: I think that what it really requires you to take a step back and look at the entire customer journey and that purchase funnel, if you will, because the content that Bob might be putting out could be really engaging. It could be really entertaining, but maybe it’s not content that’s going to close the sale. It’s all plays a role though, in the entire customer journey.

So I think it’s important to take a step back and think through what are the different steps that we want a customer to take to to learn who we are, to engage with us, to identify that we’re credible, but then also want to make a purchase. And so there are different ways that we can utilize paid media throughout that entire journey to close that sale.

Matt Falcon: Yeah, I think he was knocking on the door. Right. You see the difference if you go from 20 views to 3000 views. So like Marie said, then it’s just about honing in on, okay, am I on the right platform and am I giving the right message to to lead to ultimately value to the business, not just the view inflation.

Matt: Now our guest today, Matt Falcon and Anne Marie Faraday of Refine Marketing are who we partner with for paid digital advertising because it really is a skill set and specialty in and of itself in the world of marketing. And we partner with them because they understand content marketing, which works hand in hand with digital marketing. We have seen too many businesses though, who don’t have the right experts on hand to help guide them through this process, and they end up losing tens of thousands of dollars without any results to show for it. So let’s start off with the basics. What is paid? Digital advertising.

AnnMarie: It can be really anywhere that somebody engages with your brand. So we can use paid advertising to engage people who have never heard of your business before because they’re engaging with content that’s similar to what you offer. They might be searching for something that’s that’s similar to something that you provide. So I would say Google Ads is one great tool for paid advertising. That can be a search ad, that can be a display ad more and more if you’re on YouTube and that little commercial that pops up that 10s before you can watch the content, you’re really there to listen to. That would be considered a paid ad. Social media does a great job of weaving paid advertisements into your newsfeed, into your reels, into your stories. And so there are lots of different platforms, as you mentioned earlier, be it on TikTok and Twitter and Facebook, Instagram.

Everybody is trying to monetize the content that we’re all creating. But I think it’s just figuring out what’s going to be most effective in driving people to your website and engaging with your brand and then eventually in closing that sale. So those are a couple. Do you have any others to add?

Matt Falcon: No, I think that’s that’s a good overview of what paid ads are. I think to your point about finding the right platform, it’s really all about thinking about the behaviors that people are exhibiting on that platform. So everyone’s on Facebook, for instance, right?

But with a paid ad, you can target just 30 to 35 year old moms if you want, say, right. So you can find your target audience on almost any platform. But when you’re choosing a platform, I think it’s important to think about how people are behaving on that platform and what you want them to do when they see your content.

Matt: I want to put an exclamation point at the end of what Matt just said, because that is so important to consider and most businesses don’t factor this in. You need to know why people are on each social platform in the first place. If they’re just looking for a few seconds of a laugh or an entertainment, they’re swiping on to the next video and your ad pops up in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the wrong message, you can run the risk of turning off or alienating people. They’ll leave them with a negative impression of your business, which is the last thing you want.

AnnMarie: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I would say the old school marketing rule that it takes somebody seeing your brand 7 to 20 times before they’re ready to take action. So consider them, you know, maybe taking a few seconds to to watch that video as a win. How can we leverage then

that that those those metrics and to retarget that person again and again until they are ready to make that purchase decision? We love to use first party data in all of our paid ad strategies. First party data would be people who are currently following your any of your social media platforms, people who are coming to your website. And then what we do is we take that data and we model it to find other people that look like them.

So even though that person who scrolled through didn’t make a purchase that day, it’s it’s still a win, right? Like, we know who they are. We know what they like. And we can go find other people like them to continue to get our message in front of again and again and again until they’re ready to to make that purchase. It’s like that annoying pair of shoes that are always show up in your feed and you’re just like, okay, fine, I’ll buy them, you know?

Matt Falcon: So because it’s not just finding other people who look like them, but it’s staying in front of those specific users over and over if necessary. Until you get that.

AnnMarie: We’re hitting them hard on social media. But how can we find them in other platforms, be it on YouTube or when they’re searching for content or they’ve come to your website? And so we now know who they are so we can retarget them with ads across the Internet.

Or maybe we have their email address and we can start sending them emails or better yet, their phone number and we can start texting them. I mean, we don’t want to get annoying, but at the same time, I think the more we can surround them with relevant messages that are timely, the more likely we’ll be able to convert them to a customer.

Matt Falcon: And you’ll know if you are getting annoying because you’ll see your unsubscribe numbers start to start to increase. But we almost never see that. I mean, I think to your point, it’s it’s hard to overemphasize those calls to action.

Matt: Another question that I think business owners ask frequently at this stage in the process is, can I do this myself or do I need to hire an expert? Yes. I highly encourage you to hire an expert you can trust. And trust is the key word there, because I understand and we see this; unfortunately, it feels like it’s the norm. Sometimes we see marketing agencies and gurus and experts, so-called experts, just flat out ripping businesses off, taking advantage of small businesses, taking their money, not producing results, and manipulating the analytics to show all the web traffic in the world. But again, no conversions, no sales, no increased revenue at the end of the day.

So you need to find an expert you can trust. That is key. I highly encourage, especially with specialty niches like this, paid digital advertising. It takes someone with skills and experience that most business owners just don’t have. So hire an expert you can trust. The next question that’s often asked is, Well, how much money should I spend? Am I a business that could even benefit from paid digital advertising?

Matt Falcon: Basically, every company has at least some applications for digital marketing, whether it’s at the lowest hanging fruit of just paid search. Right?

If someone is actively seeking relevant services that your business provides, you want to make sure that you’re showing up near the top of that search engine results page that’s useful for almost every company. But then even if not that, whether it’s a YouTube ad or or Facebook, I mean, we’ve talked about some other tactics already today. I think there’s almost always at least some application for enhancing your voice online.

AnnMarie: And I think there is a misconception that it’s going to be wildly expensive and it doesn’t have to be. I mean, that’s the beauty of digital media, and that’s why we also recommend media like mass media, like TV and radio for certain clients. But the reason we love digital so much is because it’s so scalable. I mean, you can spend $100, you could spend $100,000. I think that what the key is, is identifying what does it cost to get a new customer and then how many customers do you want in a particular month?

And that can help you kind of determine your budget. If it only if you only need one new customer, maybe you only need 100 bucks. So I think but to your point to utilizing professionals who understand where you’re going to get the most for your money, I think is going to save you in the long run because we’re not going to be wasting dollars testing things that we already know don’t work for a particular vertical. But yeah. Any company, regardless of how big they are, regardless of if they’re just starting or if they’ve been in business for 20 years. You know, there are effective ways to use paid advertising anywhere in the journey.

Matt Falcon: I also think it’s helpful to think of a marketing professional as someone that’s there to kind of protect you from Facebook and Google. If you just log on and want to boost a post, create a simple campaign. These tools have come a really long way in enabling really any even moderately digitally savvy person to to do that, right? They want you to spend the money so they make it easy to spend the money.

This is where really the tracking comes in and having an expert kind of tracking template and making sure that you’re understanding where your money is going and what that is accomplishing on your back end of your website. That’s what protects you from just wildly overspending because Facebook made it easy and you’re seeing a lot of impressions and clicks. If you have that tracking in place, you can make sure that you’re making a sound investment.

Matt: Now I understand entirely. That is, it is easy for me to say find an expert you can trust. Hire an expert you can trust. But how do I actually do that, Matt? Well, let’s get into things you should be looking for with a paid digital advertising specialist. And really, anybody in the world of marketing, you want to be able to trust them and to build trust with a company that maybe you’re not familiar with personally. It all starts with honesty and transparency.

AnnMarie: One of the key foundational pillars of our business is, is really providing transparency into your analytics. The first thing that we ask a customer, I mean, obviously beyond what is your business objective is do you have Google Analytics on your website?

And then can we take a look at what that is and what’s going on in the back end? Because we want to be we want to bring our customers along with us on that journey so that they can be part of the decision making process throughout. We take a very conservative approach when we are utilizing paid advertising because we want to make sure that we’re understanding what’s working before we tell our client to put more money. So you’re.

Matt: Multiplying it? Yeah.

AnnMarie: Yeah. So it’s like, what are the tactics that are working? And we will actually show you on the back end the analytics that support that and really illustrate and educate them on how you get back to that return on investment. How are we how am I going to prove to you that the money that you put in, whether it’s 100 or 100,000, is generating more income for you? And that’s like the key component of us working with a new client?

Matt Falcon: Yeah, I think a helpful step if you’re vetting a marketing professional would be to ask for a sample of what reporting will look like and if that report is full of a bunch of stuff that you don’t understand, that’s a good sign right there that, you know, things aren’t maybe totally transparent. Yeah. So it’s really it’s not that complicated, right? Like, you should be able to get a report that is meaningful and demonstrates ultimately I gave this amount of money via management or hard costs. And this is what I’m getting and I think it’s actually valuable.

Matt: Being transparent is not something that I think many marketing agencies like to do, at least not fully transparent, because when you are fully transparent and you are genuinely honest, that includes telling customers, Hey, I made a mistake. I mean, we’re human. There are going to be mistakes.

You’re going to collect data and figure out what is working and what isn’t working. So you can right the ship. I think what our clients appreciate is if there is a mistake or if there is a new way of doing things, that we’re transparent and honest with them about it so that you can correct that and improve the services you’re delivering to your clients.

AnnMarie: We want to make sure our clients understand that of their total marketing budget. What part of that is a management fee and what part of that is actually going into Google or Facebook?

I think there are a lot of other marketing businesses in this business that will just kind of lump everything together and the client doesn’t really know how much of that’s going to the agency to run the campaign versus actually going into the market to find new customers. And so I think that’s another big red flag that clients need to be aware to ask that question.

Matt: That’s a good point.

Matt Falcon: Yeah. Any time. I think you should be able to request either an invoice that’s broken out by that that line item or to see the actual invoices from Google or Facebook or whoever, because it’s super important to understand how much of your money is actually going towards that.

Matt: This one is surprising, but it is kind of a red flag. If your marketing agency or your marketing expert is not willing to give you a monthly at least, or even a weekly standing appointment for them to review all your analytics, all the numbers with you so you fully understand where your money is going, how it’s working, what isn’t working, and what the next steps are. That is a giant red flag.

That is a giant red flag. If they’re just sending you a report, a PDF that’s 50 pages long and not giving you the respect or the time to go through it in detail.

AnnMarie: As a business ourselves, we’ve tried to come up with a standard format of a report that we can deliver to every single client because it’s easier for us to do on a monthly basis. And what we found is that’s just not realistic. Every single one of our reports is custom based upon that business’s key performance indicators or KPIs. And really also where they are in their business. Are you are they the owner of a countertop company and they don’t necessarily want to get in the weeds of how many impressions were delivered on every single platform?

Or maybe they’re the marketing director of a larger business that that’s really important to them. So I think it’s working with your marketing partner to determine like, what do you want delivered to?

Matt: It’s important as we talk about digital advertising to understand it is not a content marketing versus paid digital advertising strategy or options here that we’re talking about. You need both and they both complement and support each other in many different ways.

Matt Falcon: One of the big differences I think, is the audience that you’re reaching. So this doesn’t apply across all platforms. But take social media, for instance, right?

Anything that you post organically to your social media is basically going just to the people who already follow you, maybe some hashtag traffic or something, but essentially it’s people who are already familiar with your brand have made the decision to follow you and expect to get some kind of helpful.

Content out of out of that following you with the paid, it’s often your first introduction to a new person. So the messaging can be really different with that is a big critical difference there on the social media front.

AnnMarie: In terms of resources, it’s hard to say like what percent, but I would say that they definitely both need to coexist because you’re organic content is what’s going to establish credibility. We might be able to pay for a click, right? We can pay to get a customer to your website or we can pay for somebody to find your social media profile. But if there’s not great content there, to then capture that person’s attention and establish you as a credible expert in your service or the products that you offer, then that was a waste of money.

So I think one of the things when we start, people will hire us for a paid campaign and the first thing we say is, whoa, like let’s take a step back. Let’s look at your website. Is this even a place we want to send people and that and like and that that really is a testament to their organic content building, which takes time.

And it’s hard to whip all that up. So people will come and say they just want to pay for all this traffic. But like I think that that’s a waste of money if you haven’t spent the time and effort in building that foundational organic landing page.

Matt: I like to use this analogy that paid digital advertising. It’s like your paycheck, all right? As long as you’re working every week, you’re going to be collecting a paycheck. Just like as long as you’re running these effective ads, you’re going to be producing results.

You’re going to be making money and content, organic SEO content, blog articles, podcasts, video content, even content on social media, your content marketing strategy that is like real estate to your investment portfolio. It takes much longer for it to pay off, but once it does, the return is far greater than anything you could ever pay for. You need both. You need a weekly paycheck and you need a long term investment strategy. Continuing that analogy with your marketing call.

AnnMarie: On Friday or a prospective client call and they said, We need SEO, we just want you to come in and like fix the back end of your website. And I was like, Great, you know, we can definitely do that. It’s kind of like a one time thing. We’ll come through, we’ll kind of clean everything up for you.

But then I was like, How are you doing? Any paid ads? And she’s like, Well, no, we don’t want to invest in that right now. And I’m thinking, it’s going to take a really long time for people in Google to organically find your brand new website without us just paying a little bit to show up. I mean, I think that you can get there a lot faster if the proper benchmarks or best practices are in place. If you just put a little dollars behind getting it.

Matt Falcon: Yeah, the opportunity cost of waiting for your organic only strategy to pay dividends I think can be a lot higher than the cost of just investing in the.

Matt: The last question I want to address here is a big one, and that is how much should I spend? How much money should you spend on paid digital advertising.

Matt Falcon: And start small, especially on on social boosting a post you can get some decent response for 50 to $100, right? And so that’s what we like to recommend too, is just starting conservatively, finding what works and then building from there so you don’t have to go in with $100,000 investment.

You can go in at a number that makes you comfortable identify what’s working. That goes back to the tracking set up and then reinvest from there.

AnnMarie: It also comes back to, though, what is the value of a lifetime customer to your business? I mean, if if the value of a lifetime customer is a couple hundred bucks because they’re buying some gizmos or gadgets from your retail site, that’s that may not require as much. If you’re looking to $100,000 a new B2B client. Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s going to take a lot longer, a lot more nurturing. And what is that sales cycle? And so I think that those are all things that you need to take into consideration.

But what we love to do is go through the exercise of like, how do we take that lifetime value and back into all the way to the cost per click and how many clicks you need to get to your website to then convert a lead. How many times do we need to get rid of that lead to get them to be a customer?

And then how many purchases do we need that customer make to get that lifetime value? That’s where we start geeking out over return on investment. But and that to your point, Matt, is where the the analytics need to be in place in order to get to that point. And that’s where I think working with professionals that know how to implement all that is, is really valuable.

Matt Falcon: Yeah, that’s how you avoid just throwing stuff at the wall, right? Yeah, just burning money like is making sure that everything that you’re doing is trackable and you can really tie the value back to your bottom line.

Matt: And that’s just one of the many reasons why I recommend you find an expert you can trust. And that is key. That is crucial because marketing is foundational, it’s fundamental. Your business will not grow without effective marketing, and that marketing can come in many different forms.

There are many different ways to get to the same end goal, whether that be organic content you’re posting on social media or SEO content you’re posting on your website or paid digital advertising. Like we’ve talked about today on the podcast, it may just be referrals going to a networking group or talking to your grandma who loves spreading the word about your business.

Grandma Nola loves to promote all of that is marketing. It’s just different tactics to accomplish the end goals for your overall marketing strategy. And that is why it is so important that you do it right. You can’t afford to miss with your marketing.

You just can’t afford to miss. It’s going to cost you far more money in the long run than simply doing it right from the start. And we hope you learned a lot. Took a lot away from this podcast here on Midwest Mindset, on paid digital advertising.

I appreciate Matt and Marie of Refine Marketing. They are experts that we trust. I know you can trust them too. We have their link and all the details to contact them in the show notes.

Thanks so much for joining us here this week on Midwest Mindset and we’ll see you on the next episode.

How to Kill Your Business

This is a written Transcription for the episode: How to Kill Your Business

Transcript

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

How to Kill Your Business Transcript

MATT: 51% of all businesses will fail in their first 3 to 5 years. Yet we don’t hear many people talking about why that happens. Everyone wants to talk about how to make your business succeed, but we don’t hear many coaches or gurus or self-proclaimed influencer experts telling us how to kill your business.

Knowing how businesses fail might be important because if we know how it happens, one would think it would be much easier to avoid. So today we’re going to talk about one of the major reasons why businesses fail when it comes to their marketing so that you can do the opposite. So let’s dive in and learn how.

To kill your business. And welcome back to the.

MATT: Midwest Mindset, the podcast that makes marketing easy to understand and simple to do. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative. And on today’s episode, yes, we are going to learn how to kill your business. I agree. That sounds absurd, as I say it out loud.

Who on earth would want to learn how to kill their business? I think it’s important, though, to know how it happens because too many businesses don’t. And that is why over half of all businesses will fail in their first 3 to 5 years. That’s a national statistic. It is also a Nebraska statistic. It is true nationally and it is also true here locally. They align. If you don’t want to fail, if you want to succeed, you need to learn how to avoid that happening. Marketing is one of the major reasons why it does happen.

Marketing is crucial. It is. It is foundational to the success of your business. You cannot succeed without marketing, without successful marketing, and you may be thinking of marketing as just advertising or social media posts. And those are different tactics in your marketing strategy. Marketing is everything. So you could tell me, Listen, I haven’t spent a dollar, Matt. It’s all been word of mouth.

You know, people telling people. That’s referral marketing as an actual term for that people are referring anybody finding out about your business, no matter how they did that, is marketing any type of word that is being spread about your business, that is marketing.

MATT: So whether it’s grassroots, it’s just word of mouth or it’s, you know, paid pay per click Google ad campaigns or social media posts, all of that falls under marketing.

Even your sales falls under marketing. Sales is closing the deal. Sales is the end of that relationship or the beginning? I guess, you know, you have your relationship you get from the initial enlightenment stage to the building, the trust and and then the commitment stage is where they, you know, sign the deal, become a paying customer, you close the sale, but that all falls under your marketing. So if we’re talking about how to kill your business, we have to be talking.

About marketing, specifically how businesses kill themselves when it comes to their marketing. Now, what I’m about to reveal to you here today is one of the easiest and most common ways that, honestly, you can kill your business. I hope that you won’t do it. I am a fan. I am cheering you on. I’m trying to help you with this episode in particular, but this is probably one of the biggest mistakes that small business owners make when it comes to their marketing. It is at the heart of why most small businesses marketing just fails.

Now, if you’re a small business owner, you’ve probably put a lot of effort or thought at least into your marketing, into your advertising. And when you take your approach, when you make your decision, the most common way people go is by looking at large, successful competitors in their industry and then imitating what they do.

MATT: And it seems logical. I get it right. It seems like the logical thing to do. I want to be as successful as this company, so therefore I should do what they do. Right. And I’ll get the same result. Unfortunately, this is one of the fastest ways to fail. And here’s a few reasons why. Okay. If we’re looking at these large companies. They have a completely different agenda than we do. Large companies, they’re not serving their customers necessarily. They’re serving their board of directors. They’re serving their shareholders.

They are satisfying their superiors. They are hitting their quotas. Making a profit may be actually last on that list. I mean, yeah, they do. They want to make a profit, but. Their marketing priorities are different than yours. Because, let’s be honest, the only priority you have is making a profit. You don’t have shareholders, you don’t have people that you have to appease. You just need to make a profit to survive, to stay alive. Large companies also have a very different budget that they’re operating with.

So a large company is going to have, I don’t know, ten 100 x the budget that you’re working with. So they can do different strategies. Now, we’ve talked about these different tactics, right, that don’t work for small businesses. This getting your name out there approach, you know, I don’t know where there is that we’re getting it out to, but people say, well, I’m going to get my name out there.

MATT: I’m just going to post, post, post, post, post, post post every social media platform. Because that’s what I see Coca-Cola doing. That’s what I see Pepsi doing. That’s what I see. All these big name brands doing Nike, Adidas, right? If they’re doing it,

I need to be doing it. And what happens is we don’t see the results that we thought we were going to see because it is our job as a business owner, a small business owner, to find our niche. There are there are riches in the niches. You need to find your niche. You need to find your target market and you need to be as specific as possible because you don’t have the budget of these big, large companies. And so you need to make every dollar you spend count. And if you’re saying, Man, I’m not spending any dollars, I’m just doing all my social media management myself, that is still costing you money because your time is the most valuable asset you have as a business owner.

How much is your time worth? If you’re spending ten hours, 20 hours a week on social media, honestly, it requires 30 to 40 hours per week to effectively manage 3 to 4 channels. It’s a full time job. That’s why people hire full time social media managers.

MATT: That’s why we recommend finding a company that can manage your social media, even if it’s just 1 or 2, your primary and secondary channels. It’s important because it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of expertise. And while I know it’s tough to find a company you can trust to manage that because I agree there are a lot of snake oil salesmen in our industry who will sell you the the insights.

They’ll sell you how many views it got, but they’re not really going to work to produce results. They’re not going to really focus on conversions or the conversion rate of all this content you’re putting out there. You know, we like to focus on on leads, qualified leads and then closed sales. Like how how is this actually impacting your bottom line? Are you making a profit with our efforts?

Let’s quantify the lifetime value of each customer and then let’s add up how much we’re spending to acquire that customer and see if it’s worth it. You have to be a metrics based company when it comes to your marketing.

Absolutely. Metrics based and find someone you can trust, someone who’s going to explain it all to you. And we’ve talked about that before, But I think it’s important to just reiterate, I understand and I empathize with the struggle to find a company that’s not going to take advantage of you, that’s going to focus on your best interests, and that isn’t going to overcharge you.

MATT: That’s a priority to us and there are many other companies where that is the priority here locally. I know them personally. They are out there, but there are a lot where that’s just not the case. Their priority is their own bottom line or their own shareholders or their own investors, whoever it may be. So when it comes to the money that you’re spending on this, your time is invaluable.

You can’t just discredit the amount of time you’re putting into it. So it is costing you money. So every hour you spend, every dollar you spend. That is, you have to see a return, right? You can’t just gamble. You can’t just spray and pray like a shotgun approach. You need a sniper approach. You need to be laser focused in on your specific ideal customer. Who are they? Where are they at? How are you going to speak to them? What is your message? How are you going to resonate deeply with that person? Are you going to connect with them?

Focus on getting one person, not a thousand. The thousand will come when you get that one. It really is is crazy. It seems counterintuitive, but I see this with every business we work with. I see this with every podcast we produce for companies where when they do focus on that one person, they reach the the widest, largest audience. The impact is huge.

MATT: It resounds.

Those who just try and do mass appeal do not branding and mass marketing. It is ego based marketing and that is the domain of large companies because they can afford to fuel their own egos. They can afford to spray and pray because they have far more money to waste than you and I do.

So strategy. From an outside observers perspective, strategy from an expert you can trust is vital because they’re going to tell you, at least I hope they tell you, because this is simply true. You must focus on your specific ideal customer, Focus on your niche. The riches are in the niches. If there is one takeaway in this episode, it is this Do not do what everybody else is doing. That is a recipe for failure. And that is why many businesses fail. So if you want to know how to kill your business, do what everybody else is doing. Trust me, it won’t work because you aren’t everybody else.

Don’t do what the big companies are doing. They have a different agenda, a different budget. Don’t do what your competitors are doing because we don’t even know, even on a local level, we don’t know if that’s actually producing real results. You need to do what you need to do what is best for your company. And we want to help you. In the show notes, you can click on a link and download our Free six Step marketing plan.

MATT: It’s all condensed down in one page because our goal on this podcast is to make marketing simple. Step one is identifying who your ideal customer is. Step two What is the message you’re going to use to reach that ideal customer? Step three What is the media?

How are you going to get this message to your ideal customer? Many different tactics social media posts, LinkedIn campaigns, Direct messaging. Email marketing. Step four Establishing what your lead capturing system is. How are you getting people into your ecosphere, into your sales funnel? Step five What is your lead nurturing system? So let’s say they’ve given you their email address. How are you going to follow up?

How are you going to continue to build that relationship? You know, those three steps of that relationship, You know, first you’re going to get their attention, right? Then you’re going to enlighten them and eventually you build towards commitment and that is step six. What is your sales conversion strategy?

These are all vital steps in the process of getting someone who is a prospect into your business as a paying customer, hopefully for life. The six step marketing plan is free. It’s a PDF you can download right now. The link is in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us here today on this episode of Midwest Mindset. I hope you enjoyed it. My name is Matt Tompkins and we’ll see you on the next episode.