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.