Whoops! That Was a Waste of Marketing Dollars

0:00Hello, this is Mark Satterfield, and welcome to the Velvet Rope Playbook. Tonight's chapter, Your Business is Not as Complicated as You Think It Is. Jonathan had spent$42 ,000 fixing a problem that he really didn't have. I learned this approximately 12 minutes into our first conversation. Jonathan ran a successful advisory firm with the sort of clients most advisors would be delighted to have. Business owners, a few retired executives, several families with eight-figure net worths. He'd been doing this for nearly 20 years, had a beautiful office and an excellent reputation, and business had unfortunately slowed down.

0:43Not dramatically. There was no wolf at the door. There was no need to start selling the furniture. But new clients weren't arriving with the regularity they once had, and Jonathan had become increasingly concerned. So he did what successful people frequently do when something stops working. He started fixing things. First came the website. The old one looked dated, so a very impressive agency built him a new one. New photographs, new copy, new logo, new everything. Then came social media. Someone convinced Jonathan that he needed a more substantial presence on LinkedIn, so a content company began posting on his behalf several times a week.

1:24Then came the CRM, followed by a new email system, and eventually some work on his quote-unquote brand architecture, a phrase Jonathan admitted he didn't completely understand, but which apparently cost quite a bit of money. $42 ,000 later, Jonathan had a much prettier business. He didn't have many more clients. So what do you think I should do next, he asked. I told him I had no idea. This was not the answer he was expecting. But before deciding what Jonathan should do next, I wanted to know something much more important. Where was the process actually breaking down? This is where business owners frequently make things much more complicated than they need to be.

2:09When sales slow down, they look at the entire collection of things we now call marketing. Websites, social media, email, advertising, positioning, content, follow-up funnels, and conclude that the whole contraption needs an overhaul. Usually, it doesn't. Underneath all the tactics and technology, virtually every business is trying to accomplish the same handful of things. Get the attention of the right people, give them a compelling reason to become interested, establish enough credibility that they trust you, create enough desire that they prefer you to the alternatives, and make it easy and natural to take the next step.

2:49Attention, interest, trust, desire, action. Now, the details vary enormously. Selling a$5 ,000 service is different from selling a$100 ,000 engagement. A wealth advisor will probably find prospects differently from an architect. But the underlying mechanism isn't terribly exotic. Which brought us back to Jonathan. Are people finding you? I asked. Plenty of them were. Are the right kinds of people finding you? Yes. Are they interested enough to talk to you? Again, yes. Now things were getting interesting. Jonathan didn't have an attention problem. He didn't have a visibility problem. And despite the rather expensive websites sitting on his computer screen, he hadn't really had a website problem either.

3:39His problem appeared later. People were getting interested. They were scheduling conversations. They liked Jonathan. And then too many of them disappeared. That was the leak. We started looking at what happened between the first conversation and the decision to become a client. Suddenly, a business that had seemed extraordinarily complicated became considerably simpler. Jonathan didn't need another marketing system. He needed to fix one part of the one he already had. This is something worth remembering the next time you're tempted to overhaul your marketing. Don't start by asking, what should I add?

4:18Ask, where is the process actually breaking down? Are enough of the right people discovering you? Once they do, are you giving them a reason to pay attention? Once they're interested, are you giving them enough evidence to trust you? Once they trust you, are you making a persuasive case for choosing you? And once they're ready, is there a comfortable and obvious next step? Find the weak link before you start rebuilding the chain. This becomes particularly important if you sell a high-end service because unlike the people giving you marketing advice, you probably have another job. You have to deliver the service.

4:57You have clients to advise, projects to manage, houses to design, businesses to run, and problems to solve. You don't have unlimited hours to devote to 17 different marketing activities simply because someone on the internet announced that they're now essential. You need a small number of the right activities working together. There's one difficulty with doing this yourself. You're standing too close to your own business. You remember why the website has changed. You know why the follow-up works the way it does. You understand why a particular service was added. Every piece has a history, and because of that history, every piece begins to feel important.

5:38Someone from the outside doesn't usually have any of that baggage. They can sometimes look at the entire contraption and say, there's your problem. And that observation can be worth considerably more than another 37-point marketing plan. It's also one of the reasons I enjoy working personally with successful business owners and professionals. Quite often, my job isn't to give you more things to do. It's to help you figure out which two or three things actually matter, what you can stop worrying about, and where one relatively small change can produce a disproportionately large result. So if you'd like me to take a look from an outside perspective about your business, go ahead and visit getwealthyclients.com or comment coach or visit the link that's here on the page somewhere, and I'll send you information about working with me personally.

6:32Jonathan thought he had a marketing problem. Then he thought he had a website problem, a social media problem, a technology problem, and for a brief and rather expensive period, a brand architecture problem. What he actually had was a leak. And once you know where the water is coming from, you can stop remodeling the house. This is Mark Satterfield. I hope you found this chapter of the Velvet Rope Playbook interesting and helpful. I'll be back at you with something new shortly. And until then, bye for now.