Why Does Your Marketing Suck? And Why Are You Wasting so Much Money on Marketing?

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Why does your marketing suck and why are you wasting so much money on marketing?

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We have a great guest who's going to help us with this today, a marketing revolutionary, sunny.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thank you so much.

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I'm so excited to be here.

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Why don't we start by you taking a minute or two to talk a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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Yeah, so I have a company Study, public Marketing, and essentially I focus on marketing, research, strategy and planning and it is like the hill that I'm going to die on my soapbox everything that I firmly believe that this is the key, core missing component that most people are missing.

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I like to joke that people write their own marketing prescriptions and they do.

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They come to joke that people write their own marketing prescriptions and they do.

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They come to me all the time and they're like I just need this and I just need this and I'm like that's like going to a doctor and saying I'm in open heart surgery, I've never had a scan or I just my heart felt weird.

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Today I really firmly believe that you have the time to reel it back, understand your customers, because at the end of the day, we're still speaking to people and I think we've lost that thought a bit.

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Yeah, I think sometimes you get caught up in the numbers and the analytics and lose the human side of it.

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We are ready to be inspired, so why don't you share a story with us about some of the marketing you've done, that you're the most proud of, the best marketing you've done?

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Sure, I think for me I say this all the time like I can do what I think is the world's best marketing, but if it doesn't move the needle, if it doesn't make an impact, it doesn't matter.

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And one of the client kind of success stories that I've had recently that's made me the most happy.

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They were a e-bike company and it's a franchise.

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They're based out of the greater Harrisburg Pennsylvania area and when they first came to me, they were like, sunny, we need to talk with Instagram.

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We want to up our Instagram followers.

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And I was like, first of all, it's not really what I do, but talk to me about what's going on really.

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And at the end of the day, they want what everybody wants when they come to a marketer, which is they want sales.

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So we started talking and I was like, hey, I'd really love if, instead of going this route, you let me take a peek under the hood.

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I want to look at all of your analytics.

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I want to get a sense of what your people are feeling, what your people are doing, how they're behaving, and I did a customer survey for them.

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I went through all of the data.

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I was scoping out everything from their Facebook platform and Instagram, all the social media aspects that they had been indulging in, and what I found was really interesting.

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I came back to him.

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His name was Mike.

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He's a fabulous guy, and I was like Mike, everyone who took this survey said they're like over 60.

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And he's like yeah, that's the most of the people that buy from us.

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And yeah, that's the most of the people that buy from us.

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And I was like okay, so why are we talking about upping our Instagram presence when almost everyone that's buying from us is older and saying that they love these bikes because there's a low swinging bar, so if you have hip problems, you can get your luck number?

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So we talked about this and I think the initial thought was we're going to captivate that millennial audience.

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The more that we talked about this, I told him my point of view, which is that A especially when you're looking for sales, you start with who your core customers are.

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That is the most important thing.

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Oftentimes, we start out thinking we're providing a service to one person and it turns out it's somebody else, and that's fine, right?

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Cargo is where the eyes go.

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We follow where the sales are, where the people who love our products and services really are.

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And then, secondarily, it doesn't stop us from widening our targeting.

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And all of that eventually.

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But the key thing to remember is that, especially that millennial audience he wanted to capture, and Gen Z they have a million choices and a lot of them are a lot cheaper and cooler and more fun and targeted towards younger people.

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Right, they're not buying our premise right now.

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So what we did from there is we created a strategy.

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It was really cool.

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It was.

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We did what is the little cameras that you get at GoCros?

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And we put them on bikes of people riding them and we showed, because so many people talked about how fun this was for them.

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It made them feel like they were still able to be active in all of this, even though in their older age they didn't feel like they could get around as well.

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And we use that as Facebook ads because a lot of these folks were on Facebook.

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We also did an extreme what I call like hand-to-hand local event, local network, local partnership play, and he was able to double sales year over year for that quarter.

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So he was ecstatic about it, because I think he had the perception that a lot of people have with marketing is that I'm going to throw darts at a dartboard.

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I'm going to invest in a bunch of ads, a bunch of email campaigns, influencers, all of that, and it's going to work for me.

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And I think the key thing is that it really always comes back to people.

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It always comes back to your customers.

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It comes back to understanding what they want and what they need and, ultimately, the most successful marketing is ones where you're actually connecting with people and listening to them.

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So I think, when I think about marketing I'm proud of, that's one for me, because it all started with the questions about the customer instead of just how do we sell more of this?

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Yeah, I think that's a great example, because Facebook is definitely an older demographic than Instagram, and I like the strategy of using a GoPro to make people feel that excitement of being on a bike and that they can still do it when they're even when they're older.

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that's great see all of the assets that they were using on social media or anywhere were like from the franchise over these super young, fit models and that's not who is wrapping their bikes.

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So we put together an automation sequence that was all aimed around like a test ride.

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But what was interesting is I used the family story in that, like, they were like a family that were super athletic.

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That's why they got into biking.

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They found e-bikes.

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They thought it was awesome, so they wanted to do this together as a family.

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Like that matters to people, right?

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The people that you're buying from matter.

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People that you're buying from matter.

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And one of the things that I thought was the most interesting is that their Google reviewed were full of people just like over the moon about the experience they had going into the shop.

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Again, this is not a millennial who doesn't like does everything online.

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This is an older person who likes going in and talking to people, and so we really just reframed everything about what they already loved and made it a way to find more people like that.

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And it works right.

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Like it works when you listen and it works when you ask questions.

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I think the idea of marketing strategy in this case is that you gave people a certain feeling and used the GoPro and the experience of being on the bike for that.

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I did that last week myself.

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I went to Turks and Caicos and I went parasailing and I was wearing the Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses and I could just take a video with the sunglasses and so I took a video of that and it really captured being 300 feet up there above this turquoise blue ocean it was the wind was blowing and capturing that feeling, a lot of that and it really captured being 300 feet up there above this turquoise blue ocean the wind was blowing and capturing that feeling a lot of times is a really good marketing strategy.

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But talk to me a little bit about you've worked with a lot of brands, a lot of clients across the years.

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Marketing strategy helping people grow it's a little bit of a buzzword.

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So how do you cut through that with people and help drive results for them?

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Yeah, I joke that this goes all the way back to like art of war, right, you don't just go willy-nilly into battle without any kind of strategy.

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I think it seems overwhelming to a lot of people, but in reality I think, if you take it back like I question all the time of what really is marketing, it's like one of those existential options, like no airline.

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But I like to think, and I believe that marketing is about creating amazing connection, because we know marketing is not sales.

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I think marketing is creating connection between what it is that you as a brand stand for and have to offer and the people that stand to benefit from it the most.

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What I feel very strongly is that a lot of people have taken marketing to be.

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Let me just push out as much messaging about this and hope that I catch people.

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It's just like the kid with that giant butterfly net, right, let me hope that I catch something.

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People are exhausted, like I think they say the average person receives some marketing 8,000 and 10,000 marketing messages a day and only about 25% of that is even relevant to them.

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And then you also have to add on to that the fact that the average person makes between 35 and 38,000 decisions every day and most of them are subconscious.

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It's brushing my teeth, what time am I going to the gym?

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What am I going to wear?

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All of those questions, right?

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People are exhausted and they're not in a position where they're like jumping up and down to buy your products.

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Most time, you have to find ways to think about them first and connect with them first, and I think that's what strategy is in its essence is it's taking the questions of what is it that I want to do, how am I going to do it?

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And getting super hyper focused on who it for and what they need, because if not, you're just shouting into the void with a megaphone, hoping that those sales kick up and all of that, and it's a waste.

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You have the opportunity everybody does to be so much better than that and to do what I call great marketing, because I think so much of marketing right now is vanilla.

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It's foreign, it's the same.

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People are taking the same five tactics, repeating them on.

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It's like rinse and repeat over and over again and wondering why they don't work.

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So even the GoPro thing that was literally out of that survey where everyone was talking about.

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I had no idea how fun this was until I kicked it up to 20 miles an hour and I was whooping and yelling like a kid and that made me feel young again.

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That is the thing that they're buying this for.

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So it's like you understand them that, right, there is strategy.

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It's how do I tap into these people love this product?

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Right, so it's not just sometimes you think of marketing.

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It's like that ew, like they're just trying to find ways to make you buy things.

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No, it's tapping into what you love.

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It's tapping into what makes them happy and how this bike ultimately could be something that makes them have a better, more enjoyable, healthy lifestyle.

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So I like to say strategy can be done by anyone.

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It is best done in the hands of an expert that understands the market and kind of gives that outside perspective, but all it is planning before you start wasting money, because the thing that chills me the most is every time I talk to new clients, usually they tell me how much money they've wasted on marketing.

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That doesn't work.

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Yeah, I think it's a noisy world, like you said, and that does lead to.

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If people don't do that planning and come up with creative ways to approach it or a strategy, as you said, it's pretty easy to waste money and to not be able to stand out, and that's what bad marketing looks like.

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Yeah, I can't tell you how many times, like I've gotten to know someone and I see all the things that they've done or are still doing and I'm like why are we doing that?

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That makes no sense.

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Someone told me, like I think there's these buzzwords out there, right, there's like SEO and digital ads and email marketing, and you look at what you're sending out and you're like you're not doing this well and you're sending something just to send it.

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So why are we doing this?

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It's not working and you're spending all this money on it and having people do this that just aren't doing a great job.

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And I think it's hard because a lot of people feel like it's again one of the kind of irky points for me.

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A lot of people feel like they don't understand marketing, and it's fair, because we use a lot of really fancy words and we're talking about customer profiles and avatars and all of these things and click-through rates and CTR and the ROI.

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It feels inaccessible.

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But when you think about it in its actuality, we're literally just the translator between your brand and the customer, and I think that's the important miss.

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That's happened a lot.

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I also think that marketers are responsible for making sure that the offerings are amazing.

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Like I talk about this all the time with customers.

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A lot of times they want, they're like we're not worried about this and that, just keep going.

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And I'm like that's what I call lipstick on a paint marketing.

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That's make it pretty marketing and it doesn't work because ultimately people get the product or service, they're not happy with it.

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And it doesn't work because ultimately, people get the product or service, they're not happy with it and you're not going anywhere, you're going in circles and you're wasting people time.

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So I think that, again, if you allow marketing to be that ultimate go-between, you have the ability to really transform your business.

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Marketing is a very broad topic.

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There's a lot of different channels and tactics that you can do, so I think that's why it's a bit overwhelming for a lot of founders and business owners is because there's so much potentially to it and I think people get overwhelmed by the volume of things you could do.

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But my thesis behind this whole podcast is that 99% of the marketing out there is pretty mediocre and we try to celebrate the top one and most people don't aspire to be remarkable or in that 1%.

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And when you don't do that, then that's when you just 99% of it is not very good and doesn't drive results and then creates a pretty bad stigma for marketing, like you're saying.

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Creates pretty bad stigma for marketing, like you're saying.

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But the good news is it is possible, like with the example you shared and the advice you gave, that it is possible to come up with a plan, to be creative and to do things that create an experience and drive response from people.

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Right.

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Yeah, and it's.

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It literally is just so simple.

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We're talking to people, even right now.

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I want to say the shiny object syndrome of AI is everywhere.

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Every client I talk to, we'll just get AI to do this.

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We'll just get AI to do this.

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I'm like, oh my God, because I love the ability.

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Don't be wrong.

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There's so much that is remarkable about the use of artificial intelligence right now, especially in marketing.

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And people don't want to read your blogs that are made by a chatbot.

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People don't want to read your content that's not created from you.

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It's gross, it's weird.

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I saw online Victoria's Secret is using an AI influencer and I'm like what in the heck?

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This is a company that also went under the gun about their the ideal woman image and everything like that, and you're going to put AI influences.

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It makes no sense, right?

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Why would you do that?

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I think what you have to remember at all times is like people get distracted easily and they think this is what everyone else is doing, so we have to do this.

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They get this idea in their head of this could do everything for me.

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I don't have to worry about it anymore.

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I always go back to think about the humans receiving it when you think about the customer more than you think about yourself.

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That, to me, gives you good strategy.

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That, to me, informs that I'm not thinking about this from the ego of I have the absolute best thing.

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I'm thinking about it from the perspective of what's best for the people using this.

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How am I changing their life for the better?

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Even if it's toothpaste right, you have an ability, an opportunity and I think like a need to think that way and I think if you lead your business with that kind of integrity especially like I think a lot of what you were talking about is like that mediocre marketing, especially millennials and Gen Z that is not enough for them.

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So if you're looking for long-term success and you're just resting on this has been fine to date, like you're in for a rude awakening because that is not going to persist.

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So I think, if I can have people leave this podcast with anything that they remember, it's just please remember the people that are buying from you first, because that is something that truly does not go out of style.

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If you can understand them, exceed their expectations and really give them great messages that inspire them and make them entertained and excited, you win.

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That's how you get out of the mediocre marketing area.

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I love it.

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Great advice.

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Start with the people who are buying from you and understand what they really want and need.

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I love it.

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I'm going to link to your website so people can easily get in touch through the show notes and just reach out if they like to learn how to do great marketing, and we really appreciate being on the show today.

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Thank, you Awesome.

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Thanks, Eric.