Holistic Marketing Channels You Are Missing Out On - Ep 004

Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

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[00:00:00] Greg Marshall: All right. So what, here's something that I run into quite often, which is always confusing to me. Um, why is this such a big deal? But because it, to me doesn't make any sense. Which is devaluing customers that have purchased from you before, or even family or friends who buy our stuff because they like your product.

So,

[00:00:26] Blake Beus: so you're saying like, and you've, you've run into this where a business businesses mostly just focused on getting brand new customers. Correct. And they kind of disregard existing

[00:00:36] Greg Marshall: customers. So, and here's why this mentality is dated. This is kind of like saying, well, because I have my wife or my husband who already loves me now, I'm going to go ahead and just like, it's not that valuable.

I care more about other people who might want to date me. And you can imagine where your relationship is going to go with that mentality. Right. It's probably not going to work out. It's not going to work out very well, but for. If you think about the biggest businesses in the world, they actually have a different mentality, which is let's use Amazon because everyone pretty much everyone uses it.

They have a massive business and everyone can agree with that. Now I'm willing to bet they spent more time on how do they get Greg to spend. $18,000 more this year than last year, then just only caring about, you know, Sally down the road to buy a new $2 products. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because all the money is getting Greg to spend $18,000.

It's not in the one-time purchase of $2. Most business owners view their business in the light of, oh, somehow getting new customers that, you know, there's like this, you know, doing the air quotes, you know, there's this exciting feeling of I'm getting people who are buying my stuff that I don't know who have never bought from me before I get that feeling.

And there's always this like overvaluing of that individual versus what about the person who's bothering me 82 times in a row keys by for why are they not so exciting anymore? They're the ones that are actually paying your bills out, the person that buys once and leaves. And so that's kind of a subject I want to talk about is, um, changing the mindset to a more well-rounded business approach, where your point of focus is more about getting your customers to buy more from you, stick around.

And because in my opinion, by focusing more on those customers, you get much greater referrals. And you can grow from within. And so not only do you maintain your profitability because it's a lot cheaper to get the same person to buy over and over again, but now you're getting them to sell for you to bring you more people who are going to convert much faster than someone who has never seen or heard of you before ever.

And so that's, I mean, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, as a, as a business owner yourself, do you, do you ever fall into that trap of like overvaluing the new customer? Well, almost like feeling like, ah, you know, I already have them though.

[00:03:22] Blake Beus: Yeah, absolutely. I've 100% fall fallen into that. Um, and uh, I mean, everybody knows you hear this all the time that the new brand new customers are way more expensive to acquire than your existing customers.

Uh, I think, I think it stems from a place of fear, right? So if you're a business owner, a small, small business owners is mostly what I work with, but I work with some larger clients as well that have investors and everything. This tends to be a little bit more prevalent in small business owners. Uh, it's based on fear, right?

They, they constantly are afraid and I'm speaking for myself as well, constantly afraid that you'll be looked at as a failure, or you're just going to be another failure story, right. That business that didn't work. And, um, and you're thinking, well, I've got to get new customers. I need more customers. I need new customers.

And. We all make really terrible decisions when we're making decisions out of fear. We've talked about that before. I'm confident. We'll talk about that again. But the entrepreneurial journey is very much about the mindset and I know that seems like we will kind of out there, you hear a lot of gurus talking about mindset and everything like that, and it doesn't have to be that way for you, but you have to realize that fear based decisions.

We'll exist for you. You will have those and no one's immune to those, but you don't make good decisions based on fear. And that's where like an account manager comes into play to tell you to like, hold, hold, hold your horse out, slow down. We're going to hang, hang tight for just a bit. And then, uh, Circle up and make some sort of logical decision based, based on the data we have.

I think one of the other things too, especially for business, maybe just starting out and just diving into ads, they might think that they don't have any other products or services that their existing customers will want. So it's maybe more of a practical concern. Yeah, that's, that's a good point. But I think that solvable, because you're your own business, you're writing your own rules, just make another product or service.

Right? Think what that is. Sit down, maybe talk with one of your customers about what is it that now that we're helping you. Like, is there anything else that's that you're struggling with or you're you want or whatever, and then make that next best product. That's where the real money is in the second, third, fourth

[00:05:36] Greg Marshall: products.

Yes, I, and here's the other thing too, like w w w I've actually found resistance from clients where you're like, We, we use this as you know, I'm going to use that word. He views in, uh, several episodes, a holistic approach, right? Where you're thinking, all right, well, if I want to make more profit than the most profitable people are the people that are already paying.

For whatever it is that I have. T-shirts if it's, you know, services, whatever those people have already demonstrated that they will get their credit card out and buy. And so it only makes sense, like you can essentially make money at will. If you just keep focusing on that list while simultaneously you can bring new people in your business.

I'm not saying never focus on that. What I'm saying. The right balance, in my opinion is acquisition is just, don't even bother looking at acquisition as a way to make money. Look at your current customer basis. That's the money that you're going to put in your pocket. So if you want to make more money in your pocket, focus more on.

And not as much just on acquisition,

[00:06:46] Blake Beus: right. And acquisition then becomes just an operational expense. Exactly. Right? Yep. Exactly. And it's not only shifting that mind frame, not only helps your business out, but it shifts the stress, anxiety or anxiety a little because you're not trying to make your most expensive marketing channel profitable.

[00:07:03] Greg Marshall: Exactly. And in my opinion, advertising, if used correctly is not. Really designed for that anyways. Right. You have to spend money to get the people to come in and you've got to convince a complete streets. So want to go ahead and, you know, get into your business, right. Start dating your business. And we know that takes time.

It takes effort. That takes money. That takes a lot of things. But once you actually have the people that are part of your list and they like what you have, assuming that they like what you have, um, you can get them to buy more and more and more. And that's where we're most businesses make their money. So I feel like.

By valuing actually your customer lists more and looking at acquisition as a way to just build that up is the, the real road to profiting. So if you want to make more profits, use that model, if you want to really stretch yourself. Try to make money only on acquisition and completely ignore. And that will get you not only stressed out, but it's going to make you like, not be able to sleep at night and you're going to lose a passion for your business.

And you're going to lose confidence in your business because you're, it's like, you're, you're setting yourself up for failure by only focusing on that. Right. And not focusing on like what you remember. You've also invested in these people already know. So like, Get your return, your return on investment.

You get a customer and he paid for them last year for 50 bucks, but they bought 10 times right. Between last year. And this year, your true return is actually. 20 40, 50, a hundred at your,

[00:08:46] Blake Beus: your lifetime Rolex, right? Like, and that's people, people need to think about that. Now, one things I'd like to shift gears a little bit and talk about specifics.

Okay. So we've talked about the concept. We've drilled that in. What does, what does that look like? Should like a small business, a big business. Yes. Uh, cause everybody's at a little bit of a different stage in their business. Yes.

[00:09:11] Greg Marshall: So what that looks like, I'm happy you asked it in that manner because this cause sometimes when I hear a podcast, cause I like listen to this.

I, I, I can't, I don't love, I won't say I can't say I, I don't love when I listen to, but I don't have any like, concrete, like, so what do I do? What does that mean? Like what actions do I take? So here's the action. The way I view folks on your customer is incorporating email marketing. Okay. Text message marketing.

Retargeting ads and any other way or form of communication that you can have with your current customer base, a Facebook group, you know, your own chat forum that you created online. Just look at it as how do I communicate with my customers more often on different channels and the number one objection that I get when it comes to this is I don't want to annoy my customer.

Or get them upset because I'm talking to somebody and here's, here's the news flash. All right. Um, you most likely won't because you're making the assumption that people are thinking about you all day long, which they're not right. They, you know, w we've got families, we've got businesses, we've got jobs, we've got responsibility.

We've got all these things that were already occupied at times.

[00:10:32] Blake Beus: Well, you, and they're also assuming that peoples they're consuming everything you put out there. Not like I don't consume every email I get from a person. I just, I just don't. And so I get to choose which ones I open and which ones I don't.

And therefore I kind of manage my own level of annoyance with very rarely am I annoyed by the emails I get, um, because I can just ignore them or I can unsubscribe them or, you know, if it's really that annoying I'll unsubscribe and that happens. I, you know, I get unsubscribed to every time I send out an email, that's fine.

Yeah. Um, people aren't consuming every single bit of content out there, but some people are slow laners and fast laners, right? They're ready to buy the slow laners takes them a few weeks, maybe a month to buy fast. Landers are ready to buy right now. Some people are in between. Some people prefer different communication channels, text, email ads, Facebook group, whatever.

Um, and, and. And then we got to give them those. I don't think it needs to be overwhelming though. Especially if you're a small business owner, maybe a solo business owner, whatever, trying to do all the things will burn you out and maybe pick a core two or three channels and try to do really well on those.

And

[00:11:43] Greg Marshall: here's, I'm happy you brought that up too, because I'm a firm believer in stacking, right? Meaning you start off let's, let's say you just start off with a retargeting ad to make it easy. Right. And then you go, all right, I'm going to add another channel. I'm going to add email. Right? So that list, and then when you get good at that and you, and it's systematic and number one burnout, a lot of times comes from.

Not getting the results you want, right? Like if you were doing sales calls and they were guaranteed to make you $10,000, every time you pick up the phone, I highly doubt anyone will get burnt out because you'll be making so many calls to get $10,000 that you want to get burnt. So a lot of it just has to do with, you're not seeing results, right?

So if you do one channel at a time and you start to build the confidence that you're getting the. It's a lot easier to add another channel without feeling burnt out. So yes, I agree. Do one at a time and stack on top of them versus trying to do them all right.

[00:12:38] Blake Beus: Yeah. And you can also repurpose content.

This is actually something I teach in my membership. Um, so let's say email email was one of these things for the longest time for me and my business, I was like, oh, I need a ride, an email. So I just wouldn't and, and, and I've hired copywriters to help me write emails and things, and that, that's actually a great way to go if you don't have time to write your emails.

Um, but recently I kind of relaunched one of my memberships and I was thinking, okay, I have this nice email list of very qualified people. I'm going to just dive into this email marketing thing myself and figure it out. And, um, here's the thing with email. I really. It doesn't have to be a long email. No, it could be like, it could be four sentences.

Yes. It could be four sentences and it could work or it could be a paragraph if you're feeling like extra

Um, but it really, once you sit down and kind of get over the mental hurdles, you can send an email out to your list every day. And like 10 minutes and it doesn't have to be super salesy. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to have the perfect headline. It's more important that you're communicating and you're offering value.

But with repurposing, once I've written that email, I can just dump that same content into a social media post. And you might be thinking, oh my gosh, people are going to see both. Yeah. So most people won't, but if they do, is that, that big of a deal? It's not because they're consuming all sorts of other content.

That's,

[00:14:07] Greg Marshall: you know, That is funny. Cause that's another objection that you have is like, well, I already created this video and didn't everyone already see it already. And it's like, do you remember? I mean, I got people that I follow religiously a lot. Okay. I love their content and I don't remember what they posted last week.

No, versus today, first couple of hours, because we've got so much content coming at us that the memory is going to be so low. That you should never worry about, well, they are a made this video, so I can't use it again. And instead you should view it as well. And how many times we've done this, you see there's videos that I've watched or articles that I've read or books or movies that I've watched them 2, 3, 4 to get a deeper understanding of.

Right. And so there's value in like, yeah, it's the same video, but if I watched it five times, The fifth time I'm going to receive a different piece of value versus the first time I watched it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I think, you know, being afraid that, well I've already did this, or I prayed to that. Aren't people gonna really, once again, it comes back down to fear, right?

Everything is driven by fear. I don't want people to get mad at me. I don't want people to get upset and here's a very unpopular opinion that I'm going to share. You're doing it right? If people are either a making fun of you or be saying something that you know, is, is less than nice to you. Right. And the reason for that is because, you know, you're getting enough consistency that people are seeing it consistently.

If they don't see you consistent. You're going to get inconsistent results, any consistent results equals and inconsistent business that doesn't last very long. So you have to look at it as I'm going to do. Forever. And I'm just going to keep doing it and that there's no end to this. There's no, like I hit a finish line.

It's just, it's part of the,

[00:16:10] Blake Beus: yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm going to piggyback on Greg's unpopular opinion and share a popular opinion in that. Uh, I, I'm confident everybody's sick of politics, the politicians, and I don't want to like get into politics and political views, but one thing I do look at. Um, is how politicians market.

Yes, they have, uh, they have some of the best and highest paid marketers on staff always. And so watching their marketing strategies can be very valuable. But if you notice, uh, you, you sign up for any high ranking, uh, Political figures, email lists, you get an email consistently. It might be every day. It might be every two or three days, but you're getting those emails.

They work it's because they work. Um, and, and the, a lot of those emails have a very direct call to action, make sure to donate to my campaign, which is another thing, a lot of. Clients are hesitant with, they don't want to make a call to action on every email because they don't want to annoy people. And, uh, but here's the thing, these political emails that they do and they work and in one of my recent clients, I helped them build out a 90 day, drip, drip email sequence.

So someone signs up and for the next 90 days, they get three emails a week and they were super worried. They're like, we're going to annoy these people or whatever. I only want to put maybe one call to action in a week, you know? Cause I. Let let's let's middle ground. Let's put a PS call to action on the value-based emails and then put a call to action on the others.

And they're booked calls for demos. Went through the roof. They just weren't leveraging these email sequences. Well,

[00:17:52] Greg Marshall: I have to share this with you. Let's do it again. So you just said something that I convinced this one camp. To do this and their sales have PRI I don't know the percentage, but I bet you it's like a thousand percent and I'm, and I'm dead serious.

Um, we send, and we measure this. This is part of our holistic marketing system. We send 23 emails a month, every month. They used to only send one. Okay. We sent 23 emails and we have measured this now for months, almost six months now. And we have seen an unbelievable increase. In fact, they've had their busiest months and their history in the last three months when the last three months seasonally is the slowest.

Oh, interesting. Okay. So think about that. Their biggest. Have happened during the slowest season of the year, three months in a row. So it wasn't a flute and all we've done was increased our emails to 23 emails a month. And when I first proposed this idea to the business, they basically laughed me out of the room saying this ain't going to work and people are unsubscribed, but we'll try it.

But now they see that at work. They're trying to incorporate more even so that right there should show. If you're looking we're into, if you think about why you're in this, you're in this to grow your business, right. You're not in this to just be popular. Okay. It might be more popular and quote unquote, cool to sometimes email your list and not that much and play cool that way.

But if you're in the grow your business, The example I always use is bath and body works. My wife gets an email for them, like three times a day. So you can imagine how much money she spent on a bathroom. If, if they can do it. See, here's the thing we can't allow as business owners, we can't allow our own egos to get in the way and believe.

That people need to hear from us once, but these large corporations they're being seen all the time. Right? What makes us think that our marketing and our business is anywhere near as influentials is apples and Coca Cola. And all the other guy goes somewhere that we're not anywhere near. No. So we have to understand, like, there's a reason why they're doing it because it

[00:20:26] Blake Beus: works.

It totally works. And it could come from, uh, you know, on the flip side of ego, it could come from like a point of insecurity, too. Sure. Right. Like, uh, I, I see that a lot. I'll, I'm honest with it. I feel imposter syndrome, which we could talk about later. All the time, all the time. It's been very much a part of my professional career.

Uh, but there are times that you're just like, well, my product's not good enough or my business not good enough, so I'm not going to sell it or I'm just, or even, I'm just trying to milk my email list for money. Well, here's the thing. If you have a, if you have a, you know, something that adds value. People want more of that because you're solving a problem where you're giving them, giving them something that they want.

You're not milking the list. You're not raking people over the coals. You're not taking, you're giving. Yup. You're, you're giving and you're helping. And that's what it is. Even if you're even if your product is, is, is something, uh, silly, like, uh, the worst example ever. But it's what comes to mind is those truck nuts.

Okay. The guy that came up with those, some guy based in Utah and in the first year he did like a million dollars. Silly product crazy. I don't own them. I never will own them, but there were people that loved them. Yup. Yup. And it wasn't taking advantage of people. He was offering a product that people, that people loved, they wanted it, they thought it was hilarious and he bought

[00:21:47] Greg Marshall: it and they bought it.

Yeah. Well, and I think to, to go back to the, to the egos thing, cause you're told that's a fair point. It could also be the opposite, right. Fear of just, you know, looking bad or not, you know, not having a good product, et cetera. I use the ego, um, angle, because I literally have had business owners say, everyone knows who we are.

And I remember thinking like, whoa, like who. Okay. If I asked that lady across the street, if she knows who you are, she will she now. And so it's like, you know, there's

two,

[00:22:24] Blake Beus: before you reached out to me to help you with this, I had never heard of your business before. So as sample size of one, you see what I mean?

That's not

[00:22:32] Greg Marshall: true. That's funny. So, so you look at it from both sides, but there's a commonality in both sides, which is.

[00:22:40] Blake Beus: And our mind, uh, and, and, uh, it's time to get over it. Yeah.

[00:22:44] Greg Marshall: Where's the, and we're the ones causing the very, very, the irony is the very issue you want to get rid of you're causing it. Yeah, totally.

And when I say you're meaning me too, like we're all causing our own problems. We just need to get out of our own way. Right. There's a book called isn't it

[00:23:04] Blake Beus: probably. Okay. So I do want to talk about specifics before we wrap up and we didn't talk about specifics. We talked about email lists. We've talked about frequency of emailing, uh, text messaging.

There's lots of, lots of ways to handle that. There's lots, there's lots more rules surrounding what you can can text and how you can gather that text, phone number and stuff. So, uh, but if you sign up with a legitimate text messaging, marketing service, I know my email and some email lists are now starting to add this.

My email provider, drip.com has a text component to it. So I could just gather that. Uh, and they make sure all the requirements are met. Uh, but there's some others out there. Have you worked with any specific platforms that people could use? Because I get asked this question a lot, because this is feels like new for a lot of people.

Well, I've

[00:23:45] Greg Marshall: used easy texting.com is good. So if they want to go ahead and sponsor us as great, the other one is a, I always say this wrong, but, uh, Klaviyo or Clavio. Okay. That's another text. My sisters where you can implement both. They do email. Yeah. Email and texts. Yeah. Um, The way, you know, you, there are different rules of text messaging, right?

So you have to have the opt-in. Um, so there, especially Cleveland's very strict on this. Um, they have to consent that they're willing to be on the list. Um, but you could build. Uh, text messages often form just like you do email with great success. We've had, um, similar opt-in rates with text minutes, which has actually surprised me because I thought people would be a little more guarded, but with text message and email

[00:24:32] Blake Beus: opt-ins interesting.

I didn't know that I thought, I didn't think it would be the similar opt-out.

[00:24:37] Greg Marshall: And I was surprised because I thought people would guard their phone numbers a little bit more, but, and maybe it's the one variable that could be is just the offer. Like maybe the offer we're giving them is like, Hey, you know, we're going to give you 50% off.

If you give us your phone number for text for texts. And so maybe it's just the offer that's causing an interesting, that's something definitely that you should test is just to see what causes a greater Optum. But I think texting. You don't want to get crazy with it. Right. So, so that's one platform where I would recommend, you know, once a week, probably maximum twice.

[00:25:12] Blake Beus: You got to understand though, the open rates on text massages are like 90 to 95%. Were the open rates on a good email list with good headlines is about 20 to 30. Yes. So, um, even though you're only texting once a week, almost everybody in enlist is going to

[00:25:28] Greg Marshall: see it. And I've, I've had examples, uh, with clients.

They send out a text message and within minutes, so thousand $2,000 worth of product, really. And when I say minutes, I'm talking like the text messages went out, we checked eight minutes later. And we add a thousand dollars on sale. Wow. And that's very common. And the, and the text messages, this wasn't even that big.

It was like 2000 people. Really? Yeah. So it wasn't like they had like 10,000 phone numbers. It's literally like 2000 people on this list and that's what happened in return. So what that tells you is messaging matters. And if you can reach the person. You will get better results, which text message allows you to reach them more effectively.

Right? Because you're literally getting just as many clicks as you wouldn't email with like one 10th, the size, because of the open rate of huge and people are on their phones. So they see something that's compelling. They will click it right there and take

[00:26:30] Blake Beus: a look at it. I mean, I literally every single text I get, even if I, if, even if it's spam.

Yeah. I open it to like mark it as spam or something. I open every. So,

[00:26:40] Greg Marshall: yeah. So I think to kind of wrap this up, what do you got Blake?

[00:26:43] Blake Beus: Well, I was going to, I was going to go down to, well, probably just one small tangent of some nonconventional ways to communicate with your customers and ways people don't think about that.

I've seen work, uh, that you just have to be a little creative with. So, uh, the first one, and this is probably the most common one is messenger bots. Is probably the most popular one. You have to get people to opt into that list. Um, but many chat is, is a good way to communicate with people via chat bot. Uh, if you want a more organic way I've seen, I've seen people use telegram that, that have you seen that I use it.

You can create. Groups. That's like a one-way communication and you can have people subscribe to that group and you can communicate and send out like a daily motivation reminder.

[00:27:26] Greg Marshall: So I think what's interesting is I use that app with clients personally on a one-to-one. I didn't even know you can do that.

[00:27:31] Blake Beus: You can do groups and it doesn't cost you. People, and you can actually create a little, just a single link to subscribe to the group. It doesn't cost you anything. It doesn't cost them anything. And you can send out this, this one to many kinds of group message. Um, and it's not, they can't necessarily message you back.

So it feels a little bit like a text or like the email. I mean, they can email you back, but, but it's this one, one way kind of communication, but it's a way you can keep in touch with people. Uh, you talked about Facebook groups. That's a good way to do it. I personally hate Facebook. A lot of people. They just don't work for me because face Facebook, I don't know.

My feed is just full of crazy distractions, distractions, but I've seen a lot of people use that with great success. So if you're more, um, not dedicated, but if you're less distracted than I am, uh, then, then go for that. And then I've seen people use slack groups. Have you ever used slack? I've used

[00:28:21] Greg Marshall: slack minimally.

So. But I do know of clients that use slack, particularly just within their own, like, you know, the business, right. They've got different departments and they've got plans and stuff like that. That in Trello, those are like two ones. People use, but I haven't used

[00:28:37] Blake Beus: it. And so you can set up slack for free. Uh, it has, uh, some limitations, but it's pretty capable and you can have up to, I think, 500 people in there, but it's, it's a chat application where it's a lot of like collaboration and things, but I've seen people use that, uh, in lieu of like a Facebook group or something that gives you that kind of, that kind of communication.

Um, so that's, that's been another. When I've seen people use, and then there's like these one-off platforms, I'm actually using one right now called circle. That is kind of like a social media clone a little bit. And it's where I host my paid membership. But you can, you can host free memberships and things inside of that as well.

But there are several other platforms out there like that, that, uh, people are used to using as well. So I just thought I'd throw out some of these other nonconventional options that you can use to communicate and connect with your ideal, you know, with your customers and. You know,

[00:29:31] Greg Marshall: make things happen well, that's, you know, so if you pick anything up from today, it should be, you should love your customers who work with you and value them very highly.

And you should communicate with them in as many different ways as possible, just because any valuable relationship that you have, you probably talked to them on Facebook and Instagram and on the phone and in person and all these different ways. That's how you build more. Uh, relationship. Right. And so you almost want to mimic that with your customers and use all the tools and different ways to keep communicating with them because yes, they are valuable

[00:30:11] Blake Beus: and yeah.

And, and we've talked about attribution and everything before some of these marketing channels, you have no way to. Attribute sales to those, but they work. And so it's just one of those things. The more you do it, it's like content marketing, right? If you have a blog or whatever, the more you do it, the faster you grow, it just, it just does.

You just need to connect with people and don't worry about trying to measure it or whatever. Just, just hop in there and do it. And if people are finding value, then it's going to be.