The number one common marketing mistake is not understanding your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) fully.  How can your marketing be effective if you your audience?

Marketing Mondays – Covering The Biggest Marketing Mistakes

Mon, Aug 14, 2023 3:56PM • 1:59:28

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

website, marketing, people, clients, digital media, sales, bowman, strategy, business, mistake, google, linkedin, focusing, prospect, company, ira, give, icp, fact, ideal client profile

SPEAKERS

Ira Bowman

Ira Bowman 

Hello, everybody, welcome to marketing Mondays with Ira Bowman that is me, I am here to help you today. Understand what are the most common marketing mistakes companies are making. A lot of people are making these mistakes. So if you hear something that you’re doing incorrectly, the My hope is not to chastise you or make you feel bad it’s to help you correct some of these simple mistakes so that you can increase your visibility online resonate better with your prospects and increase your sales.

Marketing and sales are like a hand and a glove. If you’re doing one incorrectly, the odds are the other is suffering. I spent 20 plus years in business to business sales. And one of the things that I struggled with almost almost every single place I went to was the marketing strategies were just not correct. So what I’m going to do today is help you figure out some of the things that I wish the companies I had worked for along my path had did better at Okay, so I’m going to do things a little bit differently.

Today I’m going to ask for you guys to participate more than I normally do. Right now people are putting in where they’re joining from which is really cool was actually one of my daughters, who is watching here from California. I’ve got somebody from Nigeria here. We’ve got people from Washington, DC. I think I saw one more. Oh, it doesn’t he didn’t say where he was from. That’s okay. But we’ve got people from all over. This is my son, which is it’s fun to have some family support. I gotta tell you, my kids, right man, Dad, I don’t always know what to say in the comments. However, I said just comment. That’s fine. It’s one of the things that I need you guys to understand.

Marketing is not all about the sales pitch. Pitch, it really isn’t. In fact, it doesn’t even start with the sales pitch. And we can get into that very much more. We got somebody here from Barcelona. Welcome Dominique. My, my wife is not home right now. So she’s flirting with me on my show. That’s wonderful. I will take it anywhere I can get it. All right, here we go. Is it okay to say, Yeah, I think that’s fine. You’re my wife. So you could say whatever you like, that’s great. All right.

Here’s the thing about marketing. It doesn’t start with sales. Whether we’re talking about your website, whether we’re talking about your social media strategies, the number one thing I need you to understand is that there’s more to it than just here’s my product or my service, here’s the pitch. And here’s the price. If you’re doing those three things, you’re I wouldn’t say going good company, but you’re actually you’re in the majority. Because when I look at websites, when I look at people’s social media strategies, when I look at their marketing materials, the number one thing that I see is too much about them too much about their offer, and not enough about the prospect.

The prospect is going to be how you either increase your sales or why you miss out on sales, and why they drive their business towards a competitor. You may not care about that so much. It’s called an opportunity cost. But it is the ballgame. So we’re gonna get into Yeah, hello from Uganda. Welcome, Rebecca. So we’re going to do is we’re going to get into what are some of the most common mistakes that people are making with their marketing today, this show is 100%. About that. But what I’m going to do a little bit differently, and I haven’t been doing this much is if you have a website, even if you want to look at a competitor of your website, just let me know if it’s yours, your competitors, because some of the things I might share might be a little bit different based on if it’s yours or your competitors. Might be a little nicer to you than your competitor, for example.

But anyways, we’re going to do some website reviews as part of this, because I want to give you some real world practical applications. Why are what people are doing, what the mistake is and how I would correct it. If I were in your shoes. And just in full disclosure, we do run a marketing firms called Bowman digital media. So after watching this today, you’re like, Man, I am out of my depth, I’m not really good at this IRA, can your team help? The answer to that, of course, is yes, we can. And what people love about Bowman digital media, we not only have our products and services listed, we also have product descriptions and pricing available. So you can do that. There’s no problem with having that on your website. We have all that on our website. So you don’t have to guess how much things would cost. But we don’t start with product services and prices. That’s not where we start. In fact, if you follow me on social media, which I’m assuming most of you, because you’re here on my show live, whether that’s on Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn, or simulcast on all three, no matter how or where you’re following me from the odds are, you’re probably following me. So you’ve probably noticed this, about the way I conduct myself on social media, and the way my business conducts itself on social media, we don’t pitch on social media. Now, that’s not the most common mistake. But that is a mistake a lot of people are making, they’re treating their social media channels like a place just to sell. And here’s the problem with that.

The problem with treating your marketing channels as simply sales channels is you have to develop a relationship with folks first. In other words, you’ve got to get them to know who you are like you and trust you to some degree, before you ask them to give you their business, you haven’t earned it yet. You got to you got to work on that relationship building. Now, how does that tie in to the most common marketing mistake? Well, what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to share my screen real quick. And I’m going to go over to Google, let’s make this bigger. Well, can’t do that one. can do that. Okay.

So I asked Google, and any of you could have done this. What is the most common marketing mistake? Yeah, developing a relationship before asking is extremely important. You don’t have the position of you don’t you’re not on the right footing yet. To ask for business until you have that relationship. They’ve got to know you a little bit. They’ve got to like you a little bit. They’ve got to trust you a little bit. Why? Because you’re not the only game in town. Just use my company. For example. Do you know how many marketing firm armster are in the world right now, there are over a million.

With COVID, there was a huge influx of new marketing companies, because one of those things, no offense to anybody, but it’s one of those things that you don’t necessarily need a lot of experience to throw your hat in the ring. And so a lot of people threw their hat in the ring. And that’s totally fine. This is really funny. So my name is Ira Bowman. But this is not me, this is actually my son. So it’s kind of fun. They’re supporting me. It’s awesome. All right. But here’s what I want you to do. If you go to what, what is the most common marketing mistake, there are actually quite a few answers in here. And you can you can look at them all. But I’m going to pull just a couple here. And the one that you’re going to see, more than anything, is something to do with this.

Now they’re gonna phrase a little differently in each of the answers. And I have this on my website, too, which I’ll show you in a second. But not knowing the audience is a huge part. But it’s not the only part of it. If I was writing this answer, and I have written his answer, I will go into just a little bit more detail. It’s not just knowing who your audience is. It’s also knowing what their pain points are, what they struggle with, what their budgets are, what’s the market that they’re in, there’s a lot to it. And so, in school, what we learned, and I’m gonna come back to this, but I’m gonna go big here for a second, because we’re still all all of this is all this is by way of introduction. And seriously, folks, if you don’t know that you’re not the only game in town, you gotta get your head out of the sand.

There are so many people and so many companies out there who do what you do, right? Even in niche markets, everybody’s got competition, even if you don’t consider them competition, let’s consider them alternatives. As opposed to competition, there’s alternative places where people can put their money, invest their money, trust that that alternative solution will get them where they want to go. So if you take the time, and you need to take the time to figure out who your clients are now, again, I was I was saying this in school, we learned it this way. We called them avatars.

Who is your client avatar? Well, what’s an avatar? Well, now in the world of you know, cartoons and stuff on social media, people have like their image as a cartoon, and they think that’s an avatar. And well, it is kind of an avatar, but what an avatar actually is. And another way to say it a new modern way to say this is ideal client profile, or ICP, because in marketing, we like to make acronyms at everything right. So ICP, you’ll hear this a lot, ICP. What is an ICP? Well, an ICP depends on what you do. And there’s a couple different ways to diagram it out. But typically, you’re looking at demographic information, and vertical market information.

Now, if I’m speaking above your head, I don’t mean to do that. Okay, so I’m going to break this all down, like your five year old, not because I’m trying to offend you not because I’m trying to insult your intelligence not because, you know, I don’t know what your base information for marketing actually is. And because this is such a common issue. I want to make sure people understand it is extremely, extremely important. By the way, this is my daughter, Lizzie, that most of you have been praying for for years. She is still struggling. She’s back. She’s at the doctor right now. So if you could continue to pray for her. I really appreciate it. We could use prayer, she’s having some kidney troubles, she’s having a lot of trouble. She’s she’s been regressing. But if you could lift her up in prayer, man, I would really appreciate that. Okay.

So what I want to do is I want to keep looking because I think this will help you again. So it’s not just coming from me. But you’re you’re seeing this, you know, from a variety of places. So we’ve said not knowing your target audience. Well, we’re going to get back to the rest of that list because it’s really good. But here we go. This is a better answer. Not defining your customer first. I love this. Arturo, thank you so much. He said I’m a five year old. Yes. I’m talking to you then, Arturo. I’m talking to everybody. That that’s like you. Yes, God absolutely does. He’s been with us every step of the way. Through the journey. It’s been a struggle. It’s been the fight of our life, but we’re not giving up one thing about Lizzie is she is a fighter and I tell you my wife is fighting, fighting to. Hey, thank you, Lizzie. back there’s a picture of Lizzie and Mama when she was struggling even worse. So there you go. All right.

Well, let’s get back into this. Okay, so not defining your customer versus you need to really, and I mean really put a lot of effort into this. Because the number one thing that I hear from people When I ask who’s your client? Or who’s your prospective client? They give me like really, really superficial answers. I have somebody even say, like, everybody, everybody’s my customer or could be. Well, okay, that might be true. But think of it like a bell curve, this might help you like, I like visuals. I like analogies. Okay? Little James is a baby that we watch. And he’s clapping for me. He loves me and I love him. Sometimes I wonder if he he loves me more than my kids? I don’t know. He’s like nine months old. So he’s really cute.

All right. Thank you very much, guys, for for all the supportive comments, I really appreciate that. Okay, well, let’s get into defining your customer. If you think of it like a bell curve, what I want you to do is think about that middle point, the middle point in the highest part, right? The arch, the Ark of the bell curve, that’s really who I’m talking about. So let me break it down for you for BIM and digital media. Like, I’m going to give you some examples, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, my ICP, because I spent a lot of time working on it. Why? Because it is the foundation.

Like before you create your first piece of content, before you know where to market at what type of strategies to employ. You really need to understand who your prospect your your ideal prospect is. What kind of pain points they have, where they are, where do they hang out? Who do they trust, what their competitors are? Right? Who are they? Where are they? What money are they spending whatever are they making, you need to understand this, because if you can speak intelligently, to an ICP, again, an ideal client or customer profile, if you can resonate your message with them where they are, and focus on the pain points that they have. And speak to the solutions that you prevent, you will not really need to be a great salesperson to get their business as long as you don’t go straight for the throat. And what I mean by that is you don’t shove a proposal down their face, the first 30 seconds of talking to them. And you’re talking to them whether you realize it or not marketing, advertising, social media posts, emails, Billboard signs, wherever it is that you are communicating with them. If you start the conversation with the sales pitch, they are going to throw their guard up and block you out so fast, you don’t even have a chance. You don’t.

So part of why I do what I do. In sharing personal information in sharing stuff that I do, you know, as a hobby, or you know, like a lot of you know, I’ve been walking, my wife says I walk too much. She’s probably right. But why do I share that? I share it in part because I want people to see me not only is Ira, the SEO nerd or the marketing nerd, which I am, there’s nothing wrong with people seeing me that way. But there’s more to me than that. I have a family. I have struggles with, you know, mental issues, anxiety, depression, anger, I’ve had those that struggle, right, I shared openly that I went to therapy I share. Look, I started walking to try to lose weight, and I’m still trying to lose weight, which has been going pretty well. But I liked the walking so much because it helps me with some of those mental struggles. In fact, I have a book coming out next month on mental struggles. But why do I do all of that? Why? Why is it that all that’s happening?

Well, part of it is so that when people see my posts, they’re not just seeing Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing. Now, some people in marketing would think that what I do is a mistake, and I’ll gladly debate them. Because the people who follow me the people that that know me on social media, for as well as they can know me on social media. Part of that is the humanization of IRA. So they see me as a person, not just as a corporate machine.

But what I can tell you specifically about my clients at Bowman digital media, my ideal client profile is that they are typically 30 to 50. They’re typically service based, they’re typically in the United States. They typically have 10 or less employees. They typically have a website that is not performing well. They typically have a marketing budget of less than $2,000 a month. They typically are not on the first page of Google, they typically don’t have a very good social media presence, if one really at all for their business, and they typically are in industries, where they have a lot of competition. They could be coaches, authors, speakers, lawyers, accountants, H-vac, all kinds of service providers. Yeah, this is this is part of the strategy, right? I’m not doing it to be inauthentic. Quite the opposite. I do it to show my humanistic nature. The fact that I’m fallible, the fact that I’m not perfect. The fact that I make mistakes, I’m still learning.

I read like a crazy man. I’m reading right now, it might seem self serving, but I’m reading my own book, we put out a book, let me switch this up. We put out a book, it’s on Amazon, if you want to read it. It’s called business tips from the trenches, expert advice to start your small business side hustle, it’s me and 12 of my friends, we each wrote a chapter it’s on Amazon is selling well. But why do I read I read so much I don’t really like to read. Let me just be very clear with that I don’t like to read. But I’m constantly trying to learn. And in this book is a perfect example of ways I’m trying to learn.

So each one of these authors is a business owner in their own right. And what we did is we shared three business tips that we wish we had known before we started our own businesses. And a lesson learned, in other words, a mistake that we made after we launched our business, that we didn’t let it kill us. But it definitely slowed down our progress. But you take those lessons learned in your prime, if you take all the tips from this book, and you absorb them, and then you apply them as a new business owners, someone starting a side hustle, you’ll get a lot farther faster than we did, because you’ll benefit from the information in this book. Now, this is just one book.

I’ve got 12 more up there, that I’m somewhere in the process of reading. Some of them I’m almost done. Some of them. I haven’t flipped the cover open yet. Right. So I’m in the process, but I read a lot. Why? Because we need to learn. That is. I’m not I’m not the world’s foremost expert at anything. But I can take information that other people share, assimilate it, apply it, and then be better for it. Yeah, see, this is it. This is what I want people to see. So I’m not you know, it’s not a Photoshop life. Look, I’ve been using Photoshop for 15 plus years now. I love Photoshop. But the fact is, sometimes it’s okay to let people see the scar, the wrinkle, the wart, the imperfections, that’s what actually makes us human. And if your marketing is completely photoshopped, and everything looks perfect, you may be missing the mark. Because that imperfection, those missteps, those things that set you back, sometimes that’s the thing that people are gonna resonate with. Love, love it when people are showing their struggles. Okay?

I won’t go for days on content, as personal growth strategy shows that you believe what you put out there. I do believe what I put out there. This is one thing that makes me a little bit unique than most people. I’m very open about the mistakes that I make. Not because I want to glory in the mistakes. But look, mistakes, aren’t failures. People say, you know, learn you What is it was there’s a there’s a saying, win or learn, right isn’t losing, the only time it’s losing when you when you make a mistake, or a misstep, or a strategy you employ isn’t effective? Is if you don’t course correct. So another mistake that’s made a ton is not tracking your results back. Let me put that up on the screen. Right?

Not tracking your results is a huge, huge problem. In fact, on my website, I just want to share this with you guys real quick. So if you go to Bowman Digital media.com. I want to I want to show you guys something. Now in this view, it’s chopping it off. But when you go here, full screen, the very first thing you’re gonna see is the name of the company what we do. And then this question right here, need more sales? Why is that important? You know why that’s important. That’s important. Because my ICP, my ideal client profile, my avatar, the people that I’m trying to get to continue to consume the content on my website. The number one issue that most of them have is they are not selling enough. Now, that’s not the thing that I can do for them directly. I could, but that’s not what my company offers.

It’s not The service we provide, we don’t do sales work, we do marketing work. So why don’t I say need better marketing? Why do I say any more sales? Here’s your first real world example, from my website. The reason why we don’t say need better marketing, or will make you number one on Google, is because most people that I talked to don’t understand what marketing really is. And they don’t understand the power of Google, I can tell you that if you’re ignoring Google, you’re making a huge marketing mistake. But my ICP, when they read it, the 30 to 50 year old business owner, who needs more sales is not necessarily looking to spend a bunch of money on SEO, until I can make the case for them, that the SEO is exactly what they’re missing to drive sales up. And I can make that case, in a lot of cases, in most insist instances, if you spend more money, focus on a better SEO strategy, your sales will increase.

They have exponentially grown. For me at Bowman digital media. When I first started for the first year, we spent all our resources 16 hours a day, six days a week, I’m not exaggerating, ask my wife or my kids during the comments, they’ll tell you, I work more than most people. And I spent all of my time working on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. That was a mistake. Why? Because of the math. Google has way more volume in one single day, then all of social media does combined for the entire month.

So by focusing all my effort on social media and ignoring Google, I was counting the pennies and watching the dollars fly by you understand, you need to pay attention to Google, you need to have an SEO strategy. I’m not saying ignore social media, I don’t ignore it. You see it. I’m here right now. But I don’t spend all of my time on social media. Because it’s a mistake. It is absolutely a mistake. And it’s you have to learn as you go or hire somebody like me, who can help you. Alright, so why is this here? It’s here because it resonates with the pain point. The number one problem that most people I meet with, identified for themselves was they need more sales? I hear it every single day. Ira, I just need more sales. If I could get more sales, then I can hire you to do all this other stuff.

But how do you get the sales? Well, one of the ways to get more sales? And here it is. We help drive more traffic? What does that mean? It’s a little bit convoluted. If you don’t know marketing, and you don’t understand that I’m talking about website traffic. Now traffic over on, you know, highway five, or highway one or whatever highway you have in your area, right? I’m not talking about getting in your car and sitting in traffic. I’m talking about the opposite.

This is a good thing. You want your website to have a lot, a lot, a lot of visitors why because the more visitors you bring the higher chance you have of making sales. Now, can people come to your website? They’re the wrong audience? Yes, they can get people come to your website not find what they’re looking for and leave? Yes, they can. Can you pay for expensive ads and have a huge bounce rate, which basically means people come they don’t stay? They don’t do anything? Yes, you can. So just getting people to your website is not the only criteria. This is again, partly why we need to identify the ideal client profile, the ICP, because once we get them there, we want to do something just like I did right here.

I don’t mean this in the physical sense, but we want to smack them in the face. We want to ring their bell, we want them to go. Yes, that’s what I’m looking for. And we want to do it right at the top, right out of the gate. In in the print industry, which I spent 20 plus years in industry of printing. There’s an expression called above the fold. So on your website, you want to have one clear, gotcha. Statement, idea question. That when they see it, they can’t help but go. That’s me. This is where I need to be. Because if you can catch them in that first Just a second or two, and grab their attention, the odds of them scrolling down of playing the video, notice the video is right here. By the way, we’re gonna get to that in a second.

But why a video is so important is because of this, you have to understand consumer behavior patterns. Consumer behavior patterns are not universal. But they some of them transcend the demographics, and some of them don’t. But I will tell you this across the board, out of 100% of all people who go online 80% It’s an insane number really. But 80% of people are going to click on a video, they’re going to land on a video, they’re going to surf the web, the internet until they find a video, that’s interesting. And they’re gonna watch a video.

So if you know that, and you can get at the top of your website, what we call above the fold a question or a statement that catches their attention that they resonate with. And then you’ll have a video that backs it up, what are we going to talk about in this video? Looking to increase sales is in the title. What do you think I’m talking about in this video? I don’t even have to play it for you. You can see it right there looking into increased sales. What am I asking them need more sales? I’m driving the point home in a video. Okay. Oh, that was just by way of introduction. So we help drive more traffic to our clients websites to increase their sales want to rank higher on Google. This used to be the title that I had right here. But you know, I had changed it. It was a mistake. But I changed it. I updated the strategy to help resonate better with my clients.

Now, why did I have that before because, frankly, about 50% of what we do around here is all Google based, like the strategies for Google are at least 50% of what my company is focusing on for clients, because it can have the biggest impact for them and their business, and help them increase their sales. But by saying want to rank higher on Google, I was missing the mark. Because even though people should get it, most people still don’t get it, that Google is a huge opportunity for them to increase their sales, drive sales into their their sales pipeline, or, or the opportunity cost is you’re going to lose out to the people or the companies who are focusing on a Google strategy that works. You understand I’m saying most, I’m gonna say like this, I think I feel 100% confident in saying this.

Most people who get a lot of business aren’t necessarily the people that are the best at what they do. They’re simply the ones that have the best marketing and sales strategies. Because it takes volume, you can get all your business from referrals. That’s not great. You might think that’s great, you might feel really good about that. But what that tells me is if you’re watching this, and you’re going well, I get all my business from referrals. You feel great about it. But you should feel bad about that. Because what that means is, there’s not enough people who know about what you do. And you’re only getting what it should be the cream of your business.

The very top of course, it’s awesome to get referrals. I love referrals. But the fact is, there’s not enough people out there referring me to help me grow at a at a rate that’s going to get me to my end goals. I have goals for my business, I’m sure you have goals for your business, or where you would like to see it grow to and referrals only. There’s just not enough volume. Now you might have really small goals and you’re like, Yeah, you know, I can hit my goals with just referrals. Okay. Maybe then part of your problem is to step outside of your own way. Don’t be a roadblock and dream a little bigger. I have really big dreams. I work too hard to have small dreams. I work hard. I expect a lot. I work really hard to bring them home to fruition to make them come true. But part of what that is then if you’re going to have big goals and you want what’s the difference between a goal and a dream, a dream is a dream. Right? You’d love to see something I would love to be a billionaire.

Okay, well, what’s your plan to become a billionaire? Okay, then if you have a strategy, and you’re employing the strategy now that’s a goal, right? So I don’t dream about things, I get an idea of something I’d like to accomplish, and then I create a strategy to get there. So here’s an example of something that I corrected. This used to be here, the word sales wasn’t up at the top at all. But I changed it because my ideal client profile the people that I’m going after, this is what they’re telling me over and over and over again, I’m looking for sales, I need more sales, I need to increase revenue, I needed more money coming in the system. Okay, well, we’re going to help you do it.

But all of this is just come down here. Avoid marketing mistakes, if you don’t recognize what this picture is, what this picture is, it’s a Google Analytics sheet. And if you’ve never seen this before, it doesn’t have the graphics over the top that I added. But what you’re looking at the solid bar here, the solid bar is their current website traffic, the dotted line is what their traffic was the previous day, the previous time period. So in this case, in the graphics, we have showing seven days, look, they had 26 users, 20 of them were new, but look at the percentages, session over session down 40%, down 45%, down 40%, time of engagement down 31%. I see this a lot. I’m not going to tell you the company that I used, but it was somebody that reached out to me, they said, hey, we’d like you to take a look at what we got going on and see what ideas you might have for us and what services you might recommend that we sign up for instead. Okay, great.

So they gave me access to their Google Analytics, I pulled it up. And I thought, Man, this is not going to be hard for me to make a positive impact. Because what they’re doing simply isn’t working? Well, I looked at the website, and I’m not going to bring up their website, because I don’t want to know who it is. But when I when I looked at their website, what I saw, it was just like mistake after mistake after mistake, the way they set up their website.

So let’s talk about some of it. All right. So again, the number one mistake that people are making, they’re just not understanding their target audience. And what I mean by that is not like okay, well, I know I’m selling this group or that group, you might have some basic understanding, but I mean, some real in depth marketing research, what social media platform are they on? For example? Who are their competitors? Where are their competitors getting their business from? These are some of the keys to really being successful, you have to understand the key words like what is it when they go to Google, and they do a Google search? What is it? This isn’t the one I wanted to bring up? We’re gonna get there in a second. But what is it that they’re putting? Now we call this a query?

You might call it the search, but whatever it is, what are they putting in the search bar and hitting go? What are their prospects? Searching for on Google on a regular basis? What is the terminology that they’re using, because here’s another mistake. So I went to school for Business Administration, I learned a lot about marketing. And through it, like ICP, for example, ideal client profile avatar, there’s these terms, these expressions, as you’re learning about whatever it is that you do, there’s probably some expert vernacular, some jargon that you use inside the industry or acronyms that you use, it has become so common for you, you know, this information so well, that you will fill out your website with all the technical jargon. And the problem with that can be is right here. What you should have on your website, the content that you should be using, the phrases that you should be using is not necessarily what it is you do and how you do it, from the way that you’ve learned it from that technical perspective.

The acumen that you got the education that you got, could be hurting you. And here’s why. Because your clients, your prospective clients whose prospects may not be using that terminology. Now, they may be using words that are like it, but not the technical terms, and you need to focus on what they’re using, so that you can increase what we call SERP. And SERP is simply an acronym that stands for this. It’s your search engine results page. I don’t like the page in that acronym. I think it should be position or place. But they call it page. But why is that so important? Again, we come back to knowing your audience, knowing who you’re going after. I believe it was Pew Research where I got this, but 75% of people on Google, when they do a search like this, will not come down here and hit next page, they’re just going to look at the results on this first page 30% of people are going to click on this first spot, another 30% are going to click on a combination of these two spots.

So 60% of people are going to click just on the first three results on the first page of Google, you got to get the rest of the people that are going to click on these for the most part, why? Because like I said, three out of four people are not going to come down here. And it’s less than 10% of the people that don’t make it to page three, and it’s less than 1% of people will make it past or to page four or after. So if you’re not on one of these first few spots, you’re essentially giving up the clients that you could be earning by getting to these spots. Well, how do you get to these spots, there’s a lot that goes into it, there is absolutely a lot that goes into it, I’m not going to be able to describe it in the next 17 minutes. But here’s the thing that you need to know if you can identify your true prospect base, figure out what type of terminology they’re using, and putting in the search bar of Google. And then create content, your age tags, your metadata, create content on social media, all that uses that vernacular, your odds of going up on these pages will shoot through the roof, especially if you’re looking at your domain authority and working on building those backlinks. So that your domain authority goes up.

Google calls it this calls it eat. And most of you don’t eat because you’re not eating properly. And what does eat stand for? Well, Google defines eat as this expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The trustworthiness is going to come when you use words or phrases that resonate with your clients. So for example, need more sales? Yes, that’s what I need to do. Okay, great. I got them. They’re starting to trust me, because I’ve talked to their pain point. I understood their pain point. Now, what is the expertise? Well, that’s what you’re showing them with all the content that you provide, right? Here’s expertise in motion right here. Here’s common mistakes that you shouldn’t make by avoiding these common marketing mistakes, you can increase your chances of success. It’s 100%. True. I’m giving this away to help show my expertise. So when people read it, they will trust me. Okay.

Authoritativeness, where does that come from? Authoritativeness comes from primarily in the digital space, this thing that’s going to be really hard for me to show you here, but I’m gonna turn it on so you can see it. So there’s a couple of places that I trust. One is called Moz. The other is called. I’m gonna put this up here. Okay, I have something called an A Moz. Chrome extension, a browser extension on my website. All right, now I have a domain authority of 54. That’s a score from zero to a 100. The average website out there on the planet right now is anywhere from eight to 13. Just depends a little bit on what vertical market you’re in to know where it is for your vertical market. Okay, but it’s somewhere between eight and 13. So when people who know what they’re looking at see this domain authority 54, they go, Okay, this is website that’s got some serious gravitas. It’s not just a new website, it’s not a website full of fluff. There’s absolutely depth and substance to this.

How do we get these scores? Well, how we get these scores up is by getting other websites, not your website, but other websites to point back to your website via what we call a backlink or a hyperlink that says, hey, if you want to learn more about SEO, you want to learn more about marketing. You want to learn about social media strategies, you want to least learn how to increase your sales. You want to learn about LinkedIn you want learn about these things. You should go learn on learn about this on Bowman digital media. And we’ve got 955 different websites right now that are pointing back to Bowman digital media’s homepage. That’s not all the links pointing to my website that Just the amount of websites that are pointing back to my homepage. And I have links from some websites that are pointing to other pages on my site. Okay? Page Authority, you don’t necessarily need to worry about so much. But in this case, my page authority again, zero to 100 to score is a 40.

All right. So this is one of the things that a lot of you aren’t paying attention to, what is the domain authority of your website? It matters? Why does it matter? Because if I show you this tool, I want you to look at these links to scores. The very first one result has a domain authority of 50, the second 189, the third 160, look at the fourth 113, it probably has the same regurgitated information that this one has, but it’s in fourth place instead of first place. Well, I told you that 30% of the people are gonna go here, another 30% of the people are gonna go here, this is 60% of the overall volume for this search is gonna go to these first three spots. So this guy is suffering, how could he jump these guys, he could build his domain authority up from a 13, somewhere in the 50 6070 range and start jumping knees. And how’s he going to do it? Well, one of the ways he could really do it, is if you were to add more links to his website, in other words, get other websites to start to show that on this topic, this is the company this is the website that we trust, to recommend to you, our visitors go here for more information, we trust them. That’s why it’s so important. Okay.

My audience is way bigger than I think this is my mom and my brother there on a cruise. It’s a rough life. Alright. insightful. Thank you very much. We’re gonna go long today, because I still have a lot to cover. All right. So what are some other mistakes, once you’ve identified your client, the target audience, this is one of the biggest marketing mistakes that businesses make. If you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, you can’t create marketing messages that will resonate with them. And this is the key word to it all your material needs to resonate with them. So take time to research your target audience to understand their needs, wants and pain points, I’m telling you, this is something that you should invest in. If this is not your jam, if you don’t know how to do this, if I’ve said this, and you’re like, I don’t even know where to begin.

Well, you’re in the majority there too. You should invest in some company to do the work for you. I don’t care if you hire Bowman does or not, don’t Bowman digital media, to do this work for you or not, frankly, hire somebody, get somebody who knows how to do this, get them to do it for you right away. Because you could be missing the mark, just because you’re aiming at the wrong thing. You’re using the wrong terminology. I know it because I’m looking at your websites. And I see what you have on there. And I’d be happy to point that out to anybody who wants a free website analysis. I’ll do it live right now. Put your website in the comments, and I will get to it for you. All right. So once you know who you’re marketing to, and what their pain points are, you need to create a clear marketing message because a lot of you don’t have one you’re focusing on maybe the thing that makes you the most money, the thing that’s the most profitable, or maybe you’re focusing on the thing that you think is trending the most.

But sometimes you make more hay by focusing on something with a little less competition. That’s a big deal when we’re doing what we call keyword research. But again, if the message isn’t clear, what is it that we are going to do at Bowman digital media, this SEO SEO agency, what are we going to do? We’re going to help them get more sales by driving traffic to their websites. That’s a clear message. You’ll see that repeated throughout my website over and over and over again. Because I want them to know one very important thing. If they want more sales, they need more website traffic, it is so true. But once they come to your website, if your message isn’t clear, you’re gonna miss them. And you know that not very many people will go back to your site a second time, especially if they went there the first time and didn’t find what they were looking for.

You’ve got to get them that first time. You’ve got to hook them in. Okay, we have a volunteer she’s brave. I love it. Here. We’re gonna go where you are going to check this website out. Alright. Since she was brave, I’m gonna go easy on her butt. Alright, right motivational keynote speaker Caroline speaks. Okay, one thing I will tell you right off the bat I I don’t love this photo for this, because this makes you look aloof. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say for example, I don’t know you, okay? And I’ve come to your website and I see the photo, and you’re not looking me in the eye, I want you to look at the difference between yours and mine.

Now, the little things in the way, but I’m looking right there, and I’m gonna scroll down a little bit, I’m looking right there, I’m gonna scroll down a little bit more, I’m just going to show you, okay? I’m looking, even though my head’s tilted, my eyes still right at you. And I’m actually pointing at you to submit it right? Looking at you. This is the first time you see me not looking directly in your eyes, and I’ve got my little photo there that’s looking in your eyes. So that one, if it was the only one would be a problem. But when you’re looking at pictures of people on a website, especially in that infancy stage, where you’re trying to develop that report, you want to make sure that you’re looking at them, and I definitely would recommend getting a video up on the top.

Let’s see where your first video is. Now, this is much better, I would take this one and put it here. This is a great picture, right? Because you’re looking at him. That’s a great picture. Because you’re looking at him and you’ve got a warm welcome smile on your face. Now this is a video, I’m going to recommend that you reorder your stack on your website and get this video up here, especially if it’s right on message. Now, here’s another problem. I’m not 100% Sure.

What this is, make a free call is great book now is great. But the problem is I don’t know what I’m I don’t know, what what is it that I’m booking? I don’t know yet. Because you haven’t told me? Does this mean? You’re a motivational speaker? Does this mean that you’re going to train speakers? So are you a coach? Are you speaker for hire? And maybe you do both. But let’s get it here. But instead of just saying speaker for hire, or I will coach you to speak, what I would recommend is then you say instead something like this? Are you looking to be a better motivational speaker?

Do you need help with your onstage presence? Something like that? What is the question that are what is the problem that you solve? What is the question that they have? What is the thing that again, it’s the pain point? So go to that, okay, and put it up here? I’m not saying you have to take this off completely. What I’m saying is, this is not a great title for you. Because it doesn’t hit the point again, what are my prospects need? They need more sales. So you could say something like, Are you looking to be a better motivational speaker? Something like that, right? We’d have to work on that a little bit. This is just off the cuff. Okay. Now you’ve got something here.

That’s which is interesting, but the way you’re displaying it, so it says watch video. The problem is, what’s the video? What’s it about? Why do I want to watch it? Watch video? What video? Right? Give me more information. The reason why I have YouTube videos on here is actually more there’s more than one reason the company that owns Google owns YouTube. It’s an it’s an a Google algorithm booster, as best I know. Okay.

Question and Answer or problem and solution strategy. Yeah, I mean, you’ve got to speak to their pain points, you really do. Okay. So I like the way these look, I actually don’t have a problem with this at all. You might slide it down to add some of the other stuff up at the top to change some of these things out. But I have no problem with that. This but but this one I do have a problem with I see this so much. Now curling you are probably a an awesome person. I have no doubt you look very friendly. But the fact is, you are not the client, the client or the prospect when they come to your website, especially for the first time, especially for the first time. They don’t care about you. They don’t care where you went to school. They don’t care how long you’ve been doing this. That’s irrelevant to them. They have a problem. They want the solution. So if you focus and I call this my friend Allison to Ford coined this term, it’s called the wheeze. And yes, we’re talking about out. We always like pee pee. Right? If you Oui oui oui oui oui oui oui, oui we have a little dog. He likes to pee on things. It’s not great, but it is what it is. He’s cute dogs will give him. But. But if you pee all over your website, about your company about you about how long you’ve been doing it like your credentials, you’re going to lose most people, they’re not even going to read it. I’m not reading it. I don’t care. Because why I came to your website because I want to be a motivational speaker. I didn’t come here to figure out you know how you got into it.

Now, I’m not saying you don’t have that on there. If we go back to Bowman digital media, and you slide down here, but look how far you gotta go. It has a little bit about me there. Right? It does. And I have a media kit, you can go check it out. But the fact is, look how far down I am. I’m three quarters of the way down. And it’s just a very tiny little bit. Okay. I’m not really talking about me here. The reason why I’m not is because again, people don’t give a crap. They came here to find out how you could help them. So what do I do instead? Look at this, what our clients say read this. Ira is a miracle worker. He’s helped me make my LinkedIn post smarter and better. He has made my website and posts effortless. He is fun to work with. What more could you want? I recommend Bowman digital media for an industry or occasion project.

For the past two years, we’ve hired IRA and his team to handle our walkathon event pages and social media page traffic event day participants final product results photography and videography. I admired their genuine interest in ensuring a successful event iro at Bowman digital media always went above and beyond to exceed expectations. Just over and over again. Here’s my friend Michael O’Connor, Ira Bowman and his team at BDM deliver quality and work hard to improve their services every single day. BDM can really help with branding and visibility in a number of ways. And they do what they say I strongly recommend BDM to anyone who needs help with their digital marketing and SEO.

And it just goes on, right? Why is this better than this? Because this is speaking about you. This is speaking from a client’s perspective about how we help them. And that’s what they want, after they know what you can do. Now they want some proof. Like I don’t want to be the guinea pig, right? Nobody does. They want to know that you’ve done it over and over and over and you’ve delivered good results. So what you want to do is get people to do stuff like this, right? This right here is if you I’m gonna get out of this for just a second, if you go and you search Bowman digital media, which most people aren’t going to do, by the way, they’re gonna search for, you know, a marketing service near me, an SEO company to help with whatever right like helped me boost my my website traffic, something like that. And I want to come up in the results. But what you want to have your clients doing the people that have hired you, after their the work is done. You want them to go onto Google and leave a Google digital review. This is kind of like a referral only it’s the digital version. And you want people to leave reviews. Now I’ve got 12 reviews. That’s not a lot. But it’s better than nothing. And the fact is, all of them have been five star reviews, which is great for me.

Okay, but read this IRA is a value driven business man with integrity and a vast amount of knowledge and expertise to outshine others, he stays on top of the ever changing industry and therefore paves the way ahead for business owners to receive. I love that. But what’s great about that is I didn’t write it, somebody else wrote it. And there’s somebody else, when I put this, which I eventually will, on my website, down here, or on my review section. The reason why that’s so important is because now I’m validating the claims that I’m making above that resonate with my clients needs with what not, it’s not even the needs. It’s the once I might know better than my client, what they actually need to improve their marketing. But the fact is until I can get them to want it. They’re not going to pay for it. They might accept it if I was willing to do the work for free, but to actually get them to invest in it. I’ve got to get them to understand the need for it. So I don’t lead with needs I lead with wants, what do they want? Again, every single day, they want more sales. If I came to you Kirlian and said, Hey, do you want more sales? What would your answer be? Yes or no? Right? Somebody comes to me and says, Hey, Ira, do you want more sales? Yeah, I do. Okay, that’s, this is the pain point that I am pushing on.

Wednesday, a business owner comes to my website, or somebody that works for business comes to my website, and they’re checking us out. What’s the number one thing that they want? They want more sales? The rest of it is just how do we go about accomplishing it for them? Okay. So I’m going to continue with this some of the other mistakes. So not having a clear marketing message that right there, curling, no offense, I’m not trying to be rude to you. That’s something that you need to address on your website. What you’re saying how you’re saying it, so it resonates better with your prospects, your visitors when they come? It’s less about you. It’s more about them. So think about FAQs, your frequently asked questions. What questions are you dealing with in prospect meetings all the time. And I want you to think back to the way that people are actually phrasing these questions. Because that that will give you the insight on what kind of content you need to build and what kind of terminology you want to use. Because these words that you use are super important.

Okay. So I’m glad that you love the feedback. And I’m sorry, it was painful. But I promise you that it will help if you do what I’ve suggested, and I’m going to give you something that I wasn’t intending to do. But this is what I want to do, I want you to send me a direct message, I’m going to send you my calendar calendar link, I’m going to give you a free 30 minute consultation on some of the things that you can do. Okay? Because you were a good sport, I’m going to do that for you. So I’ll help you make some tweaks some adjustments, and you’ll see an immediate impact. You’re gonna get more clients faster, just by taking me up on that free 30 minute session. And I’ll give it to you. And I’m happy to do it.

All right, well, I’m gonna keep going. Alright, so what’s next, not using the right marketing channels. I see this all the time, I gave you an example about me. And my strategy of bombing digital media that first year is pretty much a solo flyer, I had a couple of people working for me by the end of the year, but it wasn’t a very big group. Okay. And the mistake that I was making was that I was focusing mainly on LinkedIn, and not focusing enough on Google. It was in the wrong place. I was it was in proportionate, at least, I’m not saying that I don’t need to spend some time on LinkedIn, I have a fairly large pool of my ICP do use LinkedIn. So I have not abandoned that strategy. I simply adjusted it based on the reality of the demographics.

Because how many people are using Google every day, there’s 7 billion plus searches that happen on Google every single day. And a large portion of those people fit my client profile. So by focusing my strategy on Google, and getting traffic directly from Google, my website traffic went up. The number of client or customer prospect meetings went up, the number of closed sales went up, my revenue went up just by fixing my strategy. All right, I’m glad you like that. Can we use LinkedIn profile reviews as well? Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, this is this is what I would tell you. Let me show you guys another one. I just learned about this. My buddy Mike actually shared this with me. It’s called Trustpilot. So there are all kinds of different places that you can go so if you go Bowman digital media search, I’ve got two of them on here. And it’s a little frustrating to me because I have two reviews are both five stars and I got 3.8 trust score.

I don’t quite get that but it is what it is. But if we if we click on this, we can read the reviews. Okay. Ira is a standout in the digital industry is driven by integrity and excellence in fields. He’s in front of expansion and then changes our business ahead of the curve. I 100%. Recommend BDM to anyone who needing so here’s a public review of my company. I absolutely can take this copy it, paste it over on my website as a Client Testimonial. I absolutely can do that. I should do that. I haven’t done it yet, because she just did this recently, right? Here’s another one from my friend Mike, who happened to be the one who told me about Trustpilot in first place. But Ira Bowman and his team, they do their thing, right? It’s there. So I could take that, and I did this right here is right there, I copied it, I pasted it over. And then what did I do? I gave this guy watch this, if I click on this, it’s going to open a new tab. And it’s going to take you to his website. So I rewarded him, he gave me a review. I liked it. I rewarded him by giving him an active backlink from Bowman digital media with a domain authority of 54. Over to his website, now look at his website, his domain authority is 57. He’s got 17,000 backlinks to his website. Okay.

This is how you build your SEO strategy. Again, I know that’s a little bit probably more technical than a lot of you understand, I totally get it, it’s fine. All right. But here’s the thing, you have to understand where these people are. So that you can create a marketing strategy that gets yourself front and center in front of your target. prospect, you always hear people talking about the right people, well, who are the right people, the right people are the folks that you have identified as your ideal client profile. Now, if you have an ideal client profile, I had a client is actually a couple years ago now. But when they onboarded, with Bowman digital media, I asked them straight out who is your ideal client profile? And they gave me an answer that went something like this 50 to 65 years old, ready to retire, looking to sell their company? There was a few more details in there. But that was the basic synopsis.

And I said, Okay, well, let’s look at your clients, and see how many of them actually fit that profile. So we did a review, we went through every one of their clients. And we wrote it down the demographics of the owner. And you know, what was funny? There, ICP was wrong. The ICP they had was what they thought their clients should be not actually who was purchasing from them. So all the marketing stuff that they had developed over the years, was aimed at that, who they thought their ideal client profile was not who actually was. And just by making the shift, and changing the marketing strategy to address the audience that was actually hiring them. Their sales increased their domain authority on their website went up, they got a lot more engagement on social media, because they changed the message to match the actual ICP. So not using the right marketing channels is a derivative of one or two things. Either people are doing it based on their personal preferences. And this happens a lot. Especially with LinkedIn.

I love LinkedIn. All right. But here’s the thing. When I talked to most people, and I asked them what social media platforms they’re on for their business. They tell me, it’s LinkedIn only. And I asked why. And they go, Well, it’s because that’s the only social media platform for business. It’s the one I like, and they go, are you the client? Are you the prospect? And they go, No, I go, So why the hell does that matter? That’s irrelevant. Your personal preferences on social media should not factor in to your social media strategy for your business. It should be centered around your ICP. So if you and your strategy is not centered around your actual ideal customer profile, then needs to change. And the number one thing I can tell you is you might be shocked. Because I hear this everyday too. I’m not on Facebook, because you can’t generate with fake business on Facebook. Let me tell you something. I’m gonna tell you Look at me. Or look at me. Grandmas. Look at me. It’s a thing. It’s a thing my family does anyways. I generate a bomb in digital media, more business right now on Facebook than I do on LinkedIn.

I have 183,000 some odd followers on LinkedIn. I have a much larger profile on LinkedIn than I do on Facebook. I think on Facebook, I have 2100 followers, but I get them more revenue derived from my efforts on Facebook right now than I do from LinkedIn. Now, there’s a couple of reasons why that’s true. I’m not going to get into it because I don’t want to get kicked off LinkedIn. But that’s the fact. Do I like Facebook? Not really. I basically have gotten myself off of Facebook, until I launched my business. And I came back. Because I don’t like it. But guess what, I’m not hiring me at Bowman digital media. My clients are hiring me. My prospects are hiring me. They become clients. They’re finding me more through Facebook, why?

A lot of it has to do with the engagement that I get. I get a lot more engagement on Facebook than I do on LinkedIn. Again, with a huge, huge disparagement, discrepancy disparate agency, I can’t say that word anyways, there’s a large difference. There’s a huge gap, like I said, 2100 versus 183,000. Followers. On the two different platforms, I have 145,000 followers on Instagram, I generate as much business on Instagram, as I do on LinkedIn. I have 2123, something like that. 23,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel. I don’t drive a lot of business from YouTube. I use it to help me in a variety of ways to reach my audience. But I’m not landing clients because the YouTube videos, understand I’m saying, so if you asked me, I wrote, where are you focusing your attention on social media for Bowman digital media? Well, I’m focusing in on Facebook, I’m focusing focusing on Instagram. I’m focusing it on LinkedIn. I do make YouTube videos all the time, content all the time.

This video right here is live on YouTube. And I’m happy to be there. Okay. But I don’t put all my eggs in one basket. And my primary focus right now is Facebook for social media. And it isn’t, because it’s my favorite. It’s probably my least favorite. I don’t like x, I’m not a Twitter fan. I’m not really a fan of tick tock, although it’s growing on me, because they’re starting to show me stuff that I’m actually interested in, as opposed to things that, you know, cause problems for me. So I’m not, I’m not a tick talker, per se, right? I really liked this product threads that Instagram put out, I’m not generating any business from it. So I’m not focusing on it. It just doesn’t work for me yet. And it isn’t because it couldn’t. It’s partly because I haven’t figured out the best way to use it yet.

I haven’t developed a strategy that works yet. I will overtime, I’ll figure it out. I figure them all out. It’s part of what I do. Okay. You can generate business anywhere you’re willing to do the work and where your clients are, well, this is a big part of it where your clients are, right? Go where the money resides. It’s true, right? It shouldn’t involve personal feelings or preferences, right? It should mostly be about where are they hanging out. But it isn’t necessarily just them directly, I’m gonna tell you that Facebook, I get a lot of work. Business derives is derivative derivative of Facebook posts.

But it isn’t necessarily to my direct client or prospect, what happens more is this, I educate the people on Facebook, people on Facebook, who really know me and like me, get to know what it is that we do and how we help they see people that they are familiar with that I’m not and don’t have direct access to who need what we offer. And then they will connect us somehow, a lot of times it’s through a message or a group, or they’ll put my information, they’ll tag me in the comments and say, hey, just talk to IRA, he can fix your website, he can do your photography, whatever, right? And so I get a lot of work from Facebook that way, it isn’t because somebody saw my post, it’s because my friends who understand because they educate in my posts, what it is we do and how we help.

They’ve kind of got it now. And when they see people who need it, they tag me, that used to happen a lot for me and LinkedIn, it doesn’t happen so much anymore, for whatever reason, for whatever reason, it doesn’t even matter, right? But make sure you’re using the right marketing channel. Okay? This is a huge one. If you’re in marketing, and you’re not tracking results, you’re not in marketing. Okay? Because what do we do in marketing? We take data, we take what we know, we create a hypothesis, we develop a strategy, we implement the strategy, then we monitor the results. And then we revise the strategy based on the results. And that never stops. We keep doing that over and over and over again. So if you’re not tracking your results, you’re not a marketing. You’re just guessing.

You could call it sales. And I don’t take offense to that. Because like I said, I spent over 20 years in business to business sales. And that’s what we did. Right? We We took a little bit of what we knew we and we developed a sales strategy. And we ran with it. But the data, tracking the results, pinpointing what is working, what isn’t working, making the adjustments, doing it, again, tracking the results as you go. You If I asked you, what’s your domain authority this month, you should be able to tell me the number mine right now is a 54. You asked me what was my domain authority last month, I could tell you it was the 16th on Moz. Okay, I can tell you every month, what my domain authority is, I can tell you my traffic, I can tell you how many new clients I got, I can tell you how many posts I put out on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Twitter, I can tell you all of that stuff and a hell of a lot more.

Because we track it. How do you know where to invest your time? How do you know where to invest your money? How do you know if a vendor or a service that you’re paying for is actually working? It’s got to be tracked. And if you’re, if you have hired a marketing company, that’s not giving you any of those reports, giving you the data on a regular basis, whether that’s, you know, weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever is they’re not giving that for you, then you probably need to have a conversation with another company. My business is a lot about reporting data, we analyze it, we track it, we put it in a report, and then we review it with our clients.

So they know what’s happening. And that’s one of the reasons why we don’t do long term contracts involving digital media. If what we’re doing isn’t working, we don’t want you to stay with us, we would rather you find a company who can get you what you’re looking for what you need. And then so I turn away business to by the way, because sometimes I’m talking to people, and they have expectations that don’t match their budget. And I know it’s not realistic. And I just say I’m sorry, but it’s not going to be a good fit, because we cannot deliver what it is that you really want. And I would rather tell you that upfront, and have you waste some time and some money on it. That’s why when you go look at all our reviews, anywhere you go, they’re always great part of that is because I understand that understanding what it is that they want, and what they’re willing to invest in it.

And the timeframe that they’re willing to allow it to happen are all major factors in me accepting an assignment, or saying I’m sorry, it’s not a good fit. You’ve got to be good at that part too. Okay. All right. Another thing is, oh, my gosh, I worked for a company. It’s not being consistent with your marketing, but I worked with a company, it was kind of a joke, they would come out with a new marketing, specialty program, something focus on this this month. And so we would hit it for 30 days. But just as we were starting to get some momentum with that, then the next month, brand new month brand new campaign. And now all of a sudden, we’d have to grind to a halt on everything that we were doing switch gears, and now focus on this. And what’s funny is if they had just like picked one or two a year, and hit it, it would have, they didn’t give it enough time to matriculate, right enough time to let it soak to build our reputation, our credibility, our awareness in the community, that this is what we’re good at. And so it used to drive us nuts.

In fact, it got to the point where we, some of us, myself included, stopped focusing on the marketing message of the month, because we knew we had been burned by so many times. Like we had a quota that we had hit in sales, you’ve got a quota, you got to hit it, or you get fired, because that’s the sales life, right? There’s a lot of pressure in it. So it’s one of the reasons why I wanted to get into marketing in the first place. So man, they would just hire me to do their marketing. Instead of the sales, I can help the whole company sell a lot more. Every sales guy, every salesperson in that company would have appreciated a better cohesive marketing strategy, a consistent marketing strategy that endured past short intervals, because you might be doing well I changed it every three months. Well, that might still be too frequent. The vertical market, the audience that you’re talking to, doesn’t need to get fatigue. Again, imagine you’re a client of mine when I was working at that company, and every month I came into with a new sales pitch for a new thing. We had never talked to you about it before.

And now all of a sudden this is a focus of ours. Good night it’ll wear you out If you don’t want your clients to get worn out, okay, your prospects to get warmed up the internet is horrible. Everywhere sales are hard marketing is harder. Well, I don’t know, sales never were hard for me. But the reason why I was always good at sales is because I understood how important the relationship was. And it’s the same with marketing, marketing and sales, you can’t separate them, they are hand, hand and glove, it’s really a lot of the same thing. The marketing, focusing on the messaging and the strategy behind it, the sales are going to go out and try and close the deal. Right? Once people are aware of your offer, they’re aware of your service, then the sales team is gonna go out there and try and get the contract signed.

But what makes it hard is when people are not building that relationship, or they don’t understand the audience, you’re really got to do both. The very top of the show, what did we say? We said, the number one mistake that people are making is they don’t understand their audience. It isn’t about you, it’s about them. And I don’t care if you’re a solopreneur, working by yourself, or you work at some major company, the audience is not internal. That’s an HR thing. That’s a management thing. You need to get people in line and onboard to see the vision and communicate and work together. 100% you do. But those internal internal clients is not what your marketing campaign as a whole should be about, especially not for your external marketing, your internal marketing. Like I said, it’s not unimportant, your HR team needs to work with marketing, to make sure that your internal team is happy 100%. But if you have a marketing strategy, that the understands the client that understands the problems, and is providing the information in terminology, on channels that your client is on, you resonate with them, you’re going to find that sales happen much easier, you’re gonna find that marketing results are improved. If you’re just taking money, and throwing it in, you know, seeing what sticks.

That’s not really marketing. It might be marketing, efforts, marketing campaigns, but isn’t really marketing, because you have to understand who you’re you’re going for, you have to have a message that resonates, then again, you got to track the results. And then you got to adjust the strategy. From the theory of it, that we developed in, you know, our marketing lab versus the real world results. And okay, well, we thought it was going to be this but it was actually that. So we’re going to change and pull this part out. We’re going to add more videos or whatever, we’re going to spend more money on ads. So we’re going to buy some backlinks, we’re going to do whatever we have to do to get this up, right, we’re going to focus on Google instead of LinkedIn, for example.

You know what I mean? Those are things that will help. But being consistent with your marketing message is there is a reason that some people are making. They’re not having success, because they’re so busy. It’s almost like, Oh, I’ve got an example. I don’t necessarily want to call them out. All right, I’m gonna give you an example. One of my clients love this guy to death been working with him for years. Right? So he had this idea that he was gonna have an intuition masterclass, right. Now, he knows how important intuitive leadership is, and coaching people on how to be more intuitive, so that they can win in business. The problem with this strategy was, when we looked up the search volume, for the word intuition, or intuitive or intuitive coaching, leadership with an intuition, any of the any of those combinations, there was virtually no traffic for any of it. But he was certain that that would work. So we developed the page for him. Here it is, it’s got all the stuff on it. And what he found was, and it was no shock to me, but after two months, it just wasn’t working. Like he wasn’t getting a lot of traffic for this.

He got some, but not a lot. And it certainly wasn’t enough to get him what he was looking for. So what did we do instead? We said, Okay, let’s go back to the drawing board just a little bit. And let’s figure out what is it that people are actually searching for? Right? Well, these are the things that they’re searching for leadership coaching and business consulting. So achieve business growth, you only dreamed of stellar Insight will help you discover, define and deliver lasting results unleash energy that accelerates your business and your team. Right. And so we developed content around this and it worked much better. Now when we started this. His website domain authority was A 12. And now he’s at a 19. He’s got 11 132 links, that’s other people pointing back to his website. So there’s an example of just changing slightly, the strategy to adjust to the audience, the target audience that he’s actually trying to have hire him. Right. And part of that was looking back through his existing clients going, okay. Why did they hire you?

Why did they hire you? Why did they hire you? Oh, here’s who they are. Here’s why they hired me. Okay, well, I’m seeing a theme here. Let’s go to the theme. And that’s how it works. Okay. So again, if you are not being consistent with your marketing, or you have a marketing message, that’s not clear. Or you don’t understand your target audience, these are all common mistakes, and they will lead you so far astray, you likely will be missing out on a lot of sales. And who are the sales going to, they’re going to your competitors, who have taken the time to figure all this stuff out and put together a cohesive marketing and sales strategy that resonates with the target audience in and is delivered on the channels wherever they are. That could be television, that could be radio, that could be billboards, that could be car wraps, that could be LinkedIn, that could be Google, that could be anywhere. I’m not saying that the the right channel is the same for all of you. It depends on who you’re going after.

If your demographic is, you know, 10 year olds to 18 year olds, you’re probably going to be in different spots than if your demographic is 35 to 50. Like my, you get it. Alright. Here’s another problem. Oh, my gosh, there are people out there in business who are not spending a single penny in marketing. They’re not investing in it. They’re not. They’re just throwing some stuff out every once awhile and hoping that’s efficient. They’re managing their own website, or they’ve got a kid doing it. It’s like their little brother or their cousin, or their grandkid. No offense. But really, how inspiring is that to your clients? When your website goes down? And you go, Hey, man, I’m sorry. But my kids, you know, in school, they’ll get it up eventually. Think about that. Right?

I’m not investing in I don’t I don’t have a LinkedIn business page. I don’t have any Google reviews for my business. I don’t have a real website. And no offense to those of you on Wix Weebly and GoDaddy. But you don’t have a real website. You need to have a real website. What does your competition have? Because here’s the next point. There are people who are not investing in marketing, and there are certainly even more people who are not keeping up with their competitors. Do you even know who your competitors are? And I don’t mean this facetiously. I’m like being serious. Do you know who Google thinks your competitors are? Because you can find out right now for free. I can show you any website in the world. Like for example, we want to go back to our friend curly, right, curly, who is who are your competitors? Do you know? There are all kinds of tools you can use. This is one of them. Sem rush, I’m actually not a huge fan of them. But I like the I like the reports they send. So right here, if I come here, what’s gonna tell me my authority score is two that’s out of 100. That’s not very good, right? organic search traffic, this is a huge problem.

It’s saying you have no organic traffic. All right. Now, come down, just scroll down. These are keywords. We’ll come back to that in a second. But main organic competitors. Look, this is who it’s saying your main organic competitors are and you can view the details and find out more. But what you want to know is where are they getting their traffic? What do they have on their website? What content? Are they talking about? What are their best performing pages? What social media channels are they performing well on? Why do I want to know all that stuff? Here’s why. Because if they are investing money in marketing, and they’re driving traffic to their website, which all these are because these are what we call your main organic competitors. If you can figure out what it is they’re doing that is successful, and mimic it, then you should expect that you will see positive results. In fact, you might even start siphoning off some of the prospects that would have went to them.

They’re now going to come to you instead. See what I mean? Hugely important, but so many people When I asked them, Who are their main competitors, they can’t tell me. And I’m like, Dude, that’s a problem. It’s a huge problem. It’s common mistake. almost everybody’s making this. I don’t understand why. To me, it’s one of the most obvious things, you got to know who your competition is. All right? Yeah, it doesn’t again, it doesn’t matter how you view them. This is a problem that we have over and over and over again, I see it every single day. Right?

Don’t think of it from like, I’m the only one who does this, or well, they don’t do that part. So they’re not really competition. Like, no, they are your competition. Because the web’s the internet, the people that do what I do are these tools. Alright, so we have a refs is a good one. Moz is a good one, sem rush, I don’t really like these guys, but I like the way they report their stuff. It’s user friendly. Okay. So with a refs, and Moz, you kind of have to be a little bit more technical, probably more with a refs DeMoss, frankly, but you can go on any of these tools, I’m showing you free stuff, I’m not showing you any stuff that you have to pay for.

I’m doing that on purpose, because most of you are not marketing. And you’re probably not going to spend $100 a month on a tool that you don’t understand anyway. Right? I understand that. But you can find this information for free. Why does it matter? Because you’re losing website traffic to these people. Whether you consider him competition or not, you are losing traffic to these folks. And by the way. Again, this is painful. But it’s telling me that you’re getting no organic search traffic, which means you don’t have any keywords that rank on Google on the first page. So one of the things that we need to do on your website, when we’re doing this review is figure out what’s in your metadata. Do you have a schematic report?

Do you have a robots report? Do you have a sitemap? What are your H tags look like? Because I promise you the answer to organic traffic, forget even what’s on your website is going to be found foundational. There are five basic components of SEO, I’m going to show them to you just so you guys know if you’ve never seen this before. Super, super important.