Title: Are You A Dabbler When It Comes To Marketing?
Featuring: Peter Wilson
Peter: Are you a dabbler when it comes to marketing? Dabblers suggest desultory or random habits of work and a lack of persistence. Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life.
Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. Hey, listeners. It’s Peter Wilson, the president of bizmarketing.com and the host of the Biz and Life Done Well podcast. Are you a dabbler when it comes to marketing? What am I talking about?
Well, what is a dabbler? According to Merriam Webster, some common synonyms of dabbler are amateur or dilettante. Well, all these words mean a person who follows a pursuit without attaining proficiency or professional status, dabbler suggest desultory or random habits of work and a lack of persistence. Wow. Pretty harsh words there.
This concept came to mind again recently as I was conducting a marketing review with a potential client. I was speaking with him and I said, hey, I was listening to him and talking about what they’ve been doing for their marketing. And I said, you know, don’t take this personally, but it sounds like you’re a dabbler when it comes to your marketing. There was a long pause and then I heard laughing in agreement. And the president of the company said, yes, we’re dabblers.
We admit it. We’ve been dabbling and we don’t want to dabble anymore. So the question I have for you is your business relying on random acts of marketing? What I mean by that is sending an email newsletter one month, then posting to social media for a few months, then hiring a new CEO person, then firing them in a few months. This is no way to run a professional marketing strategy for a business.
Maybe you’re not quite that bad. Here at Biz Marketing, we stuck to a few proven strategies for our own marketing, but didn’t do them consistently. For example, we didn’t consistently produce blog articles or podcasts nor did we even send out weekly updates to our email list. Later, I’ll tell you how we fixed that. But first, here’s a few more signs that you are dabbling when it comes to your marketing.
So the first one that comes to mind is no clear goals for marketing. So if there are no expectations or goals that have been written down, there’s no sense of urgency to make sure that the tasks related to achieving those goals get executed and things just kind of get pushed down the road. Another one that we see a lot is folks jumping from one tactic to another, kind of the shiny object syndrome. It’s tempting to do this, searching for the so called silver bullet. You know, once you focus on a new tactic though, the former one loses its favor and you’re probably not gonna put any time into it.
In baseball, there’s you know, there’s a batter that can try to hit over a home run every time they come to the plate and we call that swinging for the fences. Swinging for the fences might work in baseball, but it is not a good strategy for your marketing. And also in baseball, it leads to a lot of strikeouts. You know, one of the things that I’m gonna stress over and over again is that most marketing strategies take some amount of time and effort and persistence to optimize and produce results. Just to give you an example, SEO can take six months or more to show real results, and we have a podcast episode about that with Paul Lee, our SEO expert.
I’ll leave a link there for it. It takes time for the results to be achieved. And with online advertising, for example, Google Ads, we tell our clients it takes sixty to ninety days to optimize a campaign at a minimum. And that’s using machine learning that is basically the computer is taking data that we send it and it’s using that data to optimize the campaign. So it’s actually taking the AI and the machine learning that long to actually optimize the results.
Another thing is just inconsistent activity not consistently doing, for example, email campaigns. We run into this all the time with businesses that are sitting on a gold mine of current and previous clients that they could be sending relevant informative emails to on a monthly or weekly basis. It’s just not being consistent in that. So you may have an email list, you may have email campaigns, but they’re not consistent. Related to no clear goals is just not tracking results.
So we often see businesses not doing tracking of finding out how folks heard about the business or where they came from. You’ll get a new lead from a new customer. The first thing we want to ask is, how did you hear about us? And there are also some ways that we can do that using phone call tracking and other methods to see how people came to the website, how they came to the business, how they came to call you. And this is really important if you want to figure out your cost per lead, which is a number that we really focus on, which is how much does each lead cost the business.
Now we can’t control the close rate. A lot of that has to do with the proficiency of your salespeople and the offerings that you have and things like that. So we focus a lot on driving leads at a lower cost per. Now ideally, you’re gonna know the lifetime value of each new customer, and then you’re gonna be able to compare the cost per lead and cost per acquisition of a new customer to the lifetime value, and you can see whether or not what you’re doing in your marketing is actually profitable. So not tracking results is really a sign that you’re dabbling.
Another one is there’s no point person in the organization who is responsible for marketing. And sometimes we see this where a business will assign the marketing task to an individual in the organization who is already super busy And now they’re being asked to do just yet another thing. And it isn’t a priority generally and it doesn’t get done. So we actually had some of this internally and I’ll again describe how we fix that later. You need to have clearly defined roles in your organization.
So if somebody is responsible for marketing, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met with a business owner and said, who’s responsible for marketing in the organization? And they raised their hand, yet they’re already extremely busy just trying to run the business. So not delegating it to somebody with some bandwidth and expertise in the organization is a big mistake. The last thing that I see that I consider a dabbler is not investing enough consistently to get results. So for example, if you’re running online ads, you’ll need to be ready to spend at least the amount of money to generate one new lead per day that you’re running your ads.
So if a new lead for your business generated from online advertising costs about $50 then you’re gonna have to budget about $50 per day that you’re running your ads. If you’re running your ads every day of the month, then that would be about $1,500 a month. So that’s why it’s really important to track all this stuff so you can see how much you should be investing and you know what results you should expect. That’s really important. Now, again, I’m just gonna jump back to we know businesses are dabbling at their marketing.
We see a company website that’s not updated on a regular basis with testimonials and new content. Again, my ones I really harp on is email newsletters. They’re only getting sent out sporadically. Social media being updated sporadically at best. A company that has very few online reviews and no recent reviews, again, that’s a sign that somebody in that organization is dabbling when it comes to their marketing.
Now, one of the things that I can admit is that I’m actually a dabbler in a few areas of my life as well. And one area that recently came to the forefront was crab fishing. So we live in the Pacific Northwest here in the Greater Seattle area, And there’s saltwater here. And during the summer, we like to catch Dungeness crab by setting traps. And the way you do that is you set a trap.
It’s kind of this metal cage, and you put bait in it. Then you lower it down in the water on a rope, then you have a float on the top. You put it down maybe 5,100 feet of water. You leave it out there for a couple hours, you come back. Then you pull it up, and then you see what you got.
So in the past, we’ve taken out our crab pots, thrown in a few pieces of chicken for bait, and hope for the best. And honestly, the results were kind of hit or miss, generally more miss than hit. We would go out there and occasionally get a couple crab, two or three, but we couldn’t really plan a big crab feed with our friends if we were gonna get those results. So recently, one of my really good friends, Drew, bought what’s called a crab pot puller, which is a thing that helps us pull the pots up so we’re not pulling them up by hand. And that turned out to be a real game changer.
And that motivated me to wanna get hardcore about crab fishing. Rather than just put out a few pots and hope for the best, I went out and I got all my pots. I got four pots now. I’ve got weights them in them. I’ve got specific buoys for them.
We’ve got this pot puller. We have a thing to wind the line on. We’ve actually got very serious about the type of bait we’re putting in the pots. We actually marinate the bait. It’s kinda gross, but we marinate it overnight.
Sort of funny, I told my family we’re no longer going to half ass crabbing. We’re going to full ass it. So we did this, and what was really cool was it’s paid off. Recently, the fourth of July weekend, we went out and got pretty serious about it. We got eight keepers, not our limit, but that was more than enough to feed a bunch of folks that came over to our house.
And it was a lot of fun. And you know what? It’s a lot more fun when you’re catching something. Let me tell you that. So I can see how this can relate to marketing for a business as well in many aspects of marketing.
It’s just like catching customers. You’re trying to attract them with some bait. Okay. Bait’s probably not the best terminology to use, but you’re trying to attract them to you because you want them to initiate contact with you and crawl into the cage, so to speak. Okay.
That’s a bad analogy. But but you know, there’s very similarities. We if you’re prepared and you are systematic, for example, when we go out and set our pots, we’re not just setting them all in one spot now. We put them in different areas and then we try to determine where the crab actually are. We go back and we pull them within about an hour or two and then we put all the pots where we got the most crab because generally they’re gonna be in one area.
So we’re actually being very strategic about it as well. So we’re using some strategies to, do better than that. Another way we were dabbling, or that I admit that I’ve been a dabbler, was when it comes to marketing for our business. Now we’re a marketing company, bizmarketing.com. What the heck?
Guys Yeah. Everybody thinks, oh, you guys are great. But we weren’t always so great. We were putting out a newsletter periodically and we were not consistently creating new content for our audience. And our audience is really our likely customers, folks who listen to the podcast, folks who read our blog articles, referrals that people give to us.
They refer a friend. They refer somebody they know. The first thing they’re gonna do is come to our website and check out what we got. So we need to have relevant content, and we needed to step up our game. That was over two years ago that we decided to get serious about it.
So first thing I did was I spoke with our director of marketing, Emily Caddell, and I said, hey, gotta get serious about this, but I need somebody to hold me accountable. And she agreed to step up and be that person, to hold, hold me accountable. So we actually came up with an agreement where there was actually a little extra compensation for her for doing this, and, that kinda made sure that I had a little skin in the game as well. What we’ve done is we said we committed to putting out one email update a week and generating one piece of content per week as well. So that could be a blog article about marketing, could be a podcast, could be maybe a video as well.
That was over two years ago. Fast forward, two years, we’ve never missed a week. So in that time, we’ve generated well over 100 pieces of content, sent out at least 100 email updates to our followers and picked up several clients in the process. And we’ve been able to help a lot of businesses as well, which is our primary goal. So I’m not thinking, oh, just because we don’t get a 100 new customers out of this, it’s not paying off because it really is helping us.
And I’ve seen it pay off, a consistent strategy pay off for other businesses as well. About ten years ago, we had a new client, a professional services company come to us. They were asking for some help with their website and with their SEO. And I did some research and I discovered that they didn’t show up for the names of the people in their organization. Now, this is professional services organization.
If you Google the name of the people and their professional designation after, you would expect to have that show up in the Google search results. They were only getting about 300 visits to their website a month at the time. Now this is about ten years ago. We worked, first of all, on a new website that would get searched by Google a little better and also was much more pleasing to the eye. And it had a place to put content and associate the content or the blog articles that, we had the professionals write alongside their profiles.
Fast forward to today, we’re consistently seeing five to 7,000 visits to the website each month, primarily driven by people finding the content that was created about topics of interest to their potential clients. So clearly that strategy is working. And what’s interesting about that, it’s 100 organic. That content keeps on producing results. There’s a few articles in particular that have generated a massive amount of interest and traffic and clients as well.
Now recently, we set up a YouTube channel for this client as well. They do a lot of webinars. So now we have a way to put that content out as well. So that just goes to show that if you get serious, get consistent with your marketing, and stop dabbling, then you can see real results. Now, you’re probably wondering, so, you know, how do you stop dabbling and get serious about your marketing?
Well, I told you our story. We designated a person in the organization to be responsible for making sure it got done. And I gave them the authority to task people with doing things that they had to as well as their part in the organization. The first thing to get serious about your marketing is to come up with some specific goals. And here’s some basic goals to think about.
And they have to be very specific. So for example, a specific number of leads generated via your website each month. So if your website has a contact form on it, you could consider those to be leads. Obviously, you’d wanna take out spam from time to time. People spam on those forms, but just consider them to be qualified leads.
What is the number of qualified leads you wanna see generated from your website each month? Another thing would just be very simple. How many visitors are gonna come to your website each month from your geographic area? I don’t care if people came to your website from out of state if you’re only doing business in your state. So I really would focus on the number of people came to your website from your area, again, you’re a local business.
And another metric might be specific number of email sign ups each month. So one of the things that’s kind of shocking is occasionally I’ll talk to a business and I’ll say, How many people came to your website last month? They don’t even know that. I mean, that is pretty basic. So you gotta get some of this real basic blocking and tackling done and have some basic goals.
And you’d be surprised how having some goals and then tracking those goals or tracking those results each month really steps up the focus on the marketing. So once you do have those goals in mind, you need to track the results each month and write them down and share them with your team and have a shared spreadsheet or a Google Doc that tracks these each month. And each month just add the new results and see what’s happening. Are we going up? Are we going down?
The beauty of doing this is you’ll begin to see the seasonality of your business as well. I mean, obviously, you feel it with the number of new customers you get each month from year to year but this will help you understand how your digital marketing or your marketing is impacting that as well. Third thing I like to do is I like to recommend just picking one strategy and committing to sticking to it for twelve months. And I would pick a strategy that is something that is easier for your organization to do or if you have some marketing company helping you, something that is within their forte as well. So for example, you may like doing podcasts like I do.
So that would be one strategy. And if you stick to doing it for twelve months, you’d be surprised at where you end up at the end of twelve months. Maybe it’s just commit to put out a newsletter each month. Okay? Pick a day each month to send that out.
Get out a calendar and figure out what day you’re gonna send that out for the next twelve months and what it’s gonna contain for the next twelve months. And that’s a great way to get started. But just pick one strategy and execute it for the next twelve months. Another thing is having a clear defined role in your organization and know who is responsible for what as it relates to marketing. Again, in our organization, it’s Emily.
She’s our director of marketing. And she is really responsible for making sure all the pieces that come together to get this content out each week. The last one, if you really wanna stop dabbling and get serious about your marketing, call in the professionals. In the same way that you’re most likely an expert in your field, a marketing coach or a consultant can really help sort out what’s working, what’s not, and give you sound recommendations for achieving your marketing results. You know, if you feel like you’re a dabbler, you know, don’t feel guilty.
The reason I did this podcast was not to make you feel bad, but just maybe help you recognize some things that could help you grow your business and improve your marketing and get better results. If you would like to chat about your marketing, you can contact us. We have an email. It’s feedbackbizmktg dot com. So if you like this podcast episode, you can just give us some feedback on that.
And if you’ve got some topics you’d like to hear in the future, let us know as well. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you soon. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms.
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