Skills: Why Most Small Business Marketing Fails (and How to Do It Right)

On today's episode here's the Core Topics Covered:

• Common mistakes small business owners make with marketing, such as hiring unqualified interns or outsourcing without a clear strategy.
• The importance of creating a marketing plan, determining your messaging, and consistently delivering content.
• Why consistency and measurement are critical to building traction in digital marketing.
• The value of starting small, testing strategies yourself, and hiring experts only after establishing a proven model.
  - Actionable Steps for Founders:
  - Build a marketing plan aligned with your business goals.
  - Determine your messaging and select a platform to focus your efforts.
  - Be consistent in creating and sharing valuable, non-salesy content.
  - Measure results to refine your approach and understand what resonates with your audience.
  - Scale efforts by bringing in experts or a team once your strategy shows results.
• Recommended Resources:
  - Justin Welsh's "The Saturday Solopreneur" newsletter, visit: justinwelsh.me 
  - Insights from Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro.
  - The Digital Marketing Assessmentt:  for a custom 6-month plan to improve your online presence and audience engagement.

Takeaway Message: Growing a business through digital marketing requires patience, consistency, and a willingness to adapt. It's a long-term process, but with the right mindset and resources, you can build a strong, sustainable brand.

TRANSCRIPT:

In this episode, Janet Bartoli discusses the importance of digital marketing for startups. She provides practical tips and resources for founders to effectively build their brand and attract customers online. These include creating a strong social media presence, utilizing SEO strategies, and understanding the value of customer feedback. She also encourages listeners to take a digital marketing assessment and connect with her on LinkedIn for further support.

Next episode, she will dive into the mindset required to succeed in digital marketing.

1. Develop a marketing plan and determine your messaging and the content you'll deliver on your platform of choice.
2. Be consistent in delivering your content and measure the results.
3. Once you have a working model, look for experts to help propel your growth.
4. Resources: Justin Welsh's weekly newsletter, Rand Fishkin on LinkedIn, and the Digital Marketing Assessment by the speaker.

You are a small business owner looking to grow your brand. To achieve this, you need to master skills, develop an entrepreneurial mindset, and have one-on-one conversations with others in the industry.

Today's skills episode is about finding and working with the right partners to help support your business. This can include virtual assistants, bookkeepers, and marketing consultants or agencies. The author recommends vetting potential partners through referrals and being willing to let go if they are not a good fit. They also advise against

If you're a small brand, maybe it's just you and a partner or just you.

Maybe you worked in the corporate world and decided that life isn't for you there any longer. So maybe you need to build a business of your own to serve a specific group of people you can help, but you haven't got the massive budget or the resources to get your brand out there. So how can you do this?

Welcome to a founder's lab. I'm your host, Janet Bartoli, a 20 year search marketing veteran, business consultant and founder. In this podcast, we explore the three pillars of success mastering skills, cultivating the entrepreneurial mindset, and learning from one on one conversations with industry experts and fellow business owners.

Today's episode is a skills episode, and before you decide to skip out on this one, I'm going to give you the three most useful steps that you can take in. In getting real traction this week of course, you can go to YouTube or sign up to some entrepreneurial newsletter on Substack, or join a free webinar where they'll tell you how they amassed their first seven figures or their second seven figures, or whatever. What they did to get there involved all the core elements that make up this podcast skills, leadership, organizational management, all those kinds of skills mindset. The way you think about yourself and your business will reveal itself.

For example, your business is a direct reflection of you one on one conversations. There isn't a founder ally that just started up their business and got successful all alone without speaking with anyone.

Whether those conversations were sales related or mentorship related, there were conversations you need to have in order to move your business to the next level. Today, I'm going to speak about the skills required to grow your business. Now, generally and mostly I speak about marketing skills, how to effectively get your brand out there.

And by the way, this podcast is sponsored by Amplify Your Brand, a free three part video series I created for you to help you learn the core elements of amplification of your brand without the need for self-promotion or necessarily running paid ads right from the start. Now you can check that out by googling Amplify your brand, Bartoli. You'll see it there. It'll come right up and into the search results.

And just as a little tip, by the way, do you notice I didn't tell you to go to blah blah blah my website. Use that as a tip to help search your. Basically, what you're doing is helping your own search and you're effectively training Google to find your brand, thereby helping Google associate that search result with your brand. It's just another helpful skill. You're welcome. The skill I'll speak to today is about finding and working with the right partners. This falls under the operational and managerial side of skills that are required to grow your business.

The partners I'm referring to are those you look to to help you inside your business. That might be a part time virtual assistant or a bookkeeper or somebody that does some of your marketing. So how do you identify the right people? Now, in my own experience, I've done a variety of things to find the right people when it comes to things like bookkeeping or finding a lawyer to help manage your LLC.

Those can be found through referrals from other business owners that you know. So I'm not going to go into much detail with those. I would highly recommend you have a trial period with them and let them know you will let them go at will if they are just not working out. There is never any sense in holding on to any partner, whether it's somebody doing your bookkeeping or somebody, somebody handling any legal matters, etc. if they're just not working out, you need to move on. And that's probably the first skill that one of the first skills early on that I needed to learn as well.

It's very similar to coming from the corporate world where. Just in the same way I was responsible for bringing in vendors to support what it is, you know, whatever it was, what we were doing. For example, if we were working specifically with a marketing agency, I needed to vet them and check them out.

And that was, very similar to running my own business, because in order to and actually, it was probably even more, of an effort because I had to make a business justification to my senior leadership team.

Then once I got that approval, I was I was assigned, I was given a specific budget to support that. And then I needed to make damn sure that this team that I was bringing in was going to be productive and actually produce results for the company.

So it was a lot. It wasn't as easy as, as a as a founder, where you can bring them in and within 90 days decide they're not working out and then just get rid of them. In the corporate world, you're under a much different level of of protocol or bureaucracy, because you've got to go through the legal team to, to get a master service agreement and a statement of work and all of this sign off and done.

And then after some weeks of that onboarding and dealing with all of that. So you really need to make sure that everything is checked off. And so I, I, I know I acquired some really great skills from the corporate world in vetting and understanding exactly what was required to bring in a team to help support me.

So today I'm going to speak more specifically to hiring and finding a marketing person, consultant or an agency. And again, I'm leveraging a lot of those skills that I had from my corporate experience, from years ago.

Now, I've literally been hearing from all of of the founders that I speak to.

I have many sales conversations on a regular weekly basis. I hear things like they hired interns, and what that means is I'm too cheap to actually hire someone. So I looked to my local high school or college to find students who would learn on the job because they're on TikTok so they can post to my account and maybe I'll get some traction.

So why is that bad? Well, to start with, how do TikTok is even where your audience is? Okay, sure. Maybe they're using that platform and maybe they're also on Instagram.

But the premise you just have them, they're posting randomly without an actual strategy or having specific goals in place is really just a waste of their time. Not to mention, how much do you expect to actually gain from that? And honestly, if that's what you think marketing is, there's a lot of education that we need to have together because that is not marketing, that is just having some rando posting to these platforms and without having anything measuring, you know, against is this successful or is this not successful?

 I've also heard, well, I heard someone from the Philippines, to quote, do my marketing again. What is the strategy? What's the goal? How are you measuring the results of that effort? If you are at all waste of time and whatever money you're throwing away at them, it's completely it is. What is the right solution? Well, even if you met with a consultant who you might not able to be able to afford right now, but just engage in a free strategy session to share with them who you are.

What are you trying to accomplish that would be far more useful. I speak with lots of founders, just a 25 minute initial discovery call, and I'm really trying to maybe they don't have the budget to work with me one on one, but I get to learn and help them and guide them into really the way that they should be thinking about marketing their business. So, so many times I hear when I ask, what are you doing?

From a marketing standpoint? The answers I get are really kind of surprising to me. Some of them are. Well, we post, we post something in an offline newsletter, you know, at a local chamber of commerce. I hear things like that to cold calling. Well that's sales okay. So I and really outbound I wouldn't hardly look at that as you know, traditional marketing. When I ask about digital marketing, again I get variety of different answers. So you really need to start any marketing with a plan. What what is it that you're trying to accomplish if no one knows about your brand, start there.

What meaningful way can you get those people whom you can help most to learn about your business and what you do? You need to be the face of your business to start with. There is no TikTok influencer that can do anything before you do.

After you've decided what your marketing plan is, and again, you really need to determine for yourself in your business what that is. And you might even use your favorite LM, or whether it's Perplexity or Gemini or T, get it to learn about you and your business. I have been doing this for months now, and I'm going to actually post up a picture, but I and I did that in, in LinkedIn where I said, who do you think I am and what do you think my office environment looks like? It really was not far off the mark, except that I do not.

It looked like I was overseeing a city. It had a lot of windows, which I do have actually in my office, and I don't know how it knew that because I never actually shared that with it. But it said that I'm overlooking all of this, these buildings in a city, which I do not live in a city. So I thought that was also interesting.

But get it to learn about your business as you train it. It can become a great brainstorming partner in your business for not a lot of effort or money. So that is definitely something that you should and could be doing right now. You need to be specific and and help it as best you can. Let it know what your business is, what it does, and how you very specifically help. So when I say specific, I mean as specific as you can be.

For example, let's say you're an accounting firm and you help women business owners in the tech sector let it know that hopefully you've had one on one conversations with these women so that you actually know what their number one challenge or pain points are.

Share anything that you can share those ideas and things with the AI platform. Ask it to help you create a marketing plan. What types of content topics would appeal most to them? Now that you have that plan, you have some tactics to help you execute that plan.

Then pick a platform one that you feel most comfortable on. It could be YouTube or LinkedIn or a combination of the two. Find time each week to dedicate to building useful resources for your ideal client. And when I say useful resources, it could be anything like. Here's a top ten list of things that that my client did to to achieve X or you know, if if you have any ideas or principles or, or strategies or things that you helped your client or customers with, share those things, they should not constantly hear anything salesy from you. It shouldn't be sign up for my thing. I'm having a special blah blah blah and nobody cares because it just becomes noise. They should be here, especially if you are in the stages of building out and and really getting your brand out there.

They should be hearing more about things that they haven't heard before. And that also could be asking your favorite AI platform to say, hey, you know, what's what are some ideas that maybe, others in my industry haven't shared? Really force it to do the work. Then again, leveraging it as a brainstorm, partner of yours, you can come up with ideas together.

What new ways can you make a statement that really helps them hear things in a unique way? Thinking about questions or statements or things in the way that you share in whether it's LinkedIn or,  Instagram or YouTube or any platform.

So I might say omnichannel marketing is the most effective way to build a loyal, trusted, and connected audience of buyers. Long term. Some might have no idea what that even means, but it might pique their interest enough to keep coming back and reading or listening more. And then by doing that, they're learning more. I'm educating them, and I'm building up more of a trust and,  as myself as the authority in that, in that subject.

So that's what you what you need to do. This also is not something that can be done overnight. It can't be done in 30 days. It can't even be done in six months.

Although you can get a really good start in six months for sure. But I recently heard a podcast where this woman who provides. Speaking of accounting, she does provide QuickBooks consultation and support to small business owners. It took her four years. She loves YouTube, so she YouTube was her platform of choice.

She it took her four years to really get traction. Now maybe it doesn't take you four years, but. But you should be always thinking long term, especially growing your business. It is a marathon. It's definitely not a sprint. It's going to take whatever it takes, and it's going to take some trip ups and some failures.

But you need to be consistent, and you need to find that place where you can be consistent. In her situation, it was on YouTube. She was more comfortable there. And early on some of her videos sucked because everybody does.

But then she just got better and she got, more comfortable in her, in her space and with her messaging. And that also happens. And then as the face of the business, you're just now growing, when you're consistent, then you're going to build interest, you're going to build your email list, and you will have people reaching out and asking for help. That does happen. And all of this is is really done organically.

So when is the right time that you actually should look for and hire that marketing person or the team? And I'm going to answer that is simply as I can. Once you've proven what you're doing is so effective that it's driving so much in terms of results for you, that you do need support to come in because you're handling the sales or the or the fulfillment end of things. It's, you know, it's it is not really,  in exact time frame. It just is when you, when you've done what you've done is proven. So if you cold email somebody or you post up on LinkedIn or whatever it is that you're doing from a marketing standpoint, once you see results, that's the time that you can bring it in.

You've already tested, otherwise you will hire people, pay them to do all this testing for you.

When it fails, which it will. You'll run out of resources. Put your further. Basically, your business will then further go into more of a hole and then you'll do the same thing over and over again, only to get the same result. Why bother wasting that time and money?

Because I know that you're getting emails from all kinds of people. Just, you know, hey, I can, I can run cold email for you, or we can book leads for you or whatever. Instead of giving them a chance to try out and see if they can be successful for you, you need to do this first.

This is something that you've got to build up. It's your business after all. So here are the here's the five things that you do. Number one, you're building a marketing plan. Number two, you're determining your messaging and the content you'll deliver on whichever platform you want to be present on. Number three, be consistent in delivering that content and that I can't underscore that enough. I think the biggest fail I've seen with most marketing, all marketing is the inconsistent nature of of it. Whether it is, I push out a YouTube post every 3 or 4 months, or I push out a newsletter, email, an email newsletter, you know, every 3 or 4 months or quarters or whatever. It's the whole starting, then stopping and starting and stopping.

There's no momentum. It's just basic, uh, physics. If you just got to keep going, if you keep going, you're you will build momentum. But if you stop, that's where the foul happens. Number four watch it working. Get results from that effort and whatever and however you can, make sure that you're measuring it. Perfect example is if you're using YouTube for example, that IQ is a great resource that you can use that will help you understand the analytics. How much what's the watch time?  how what what video topics are getting more interest and engagement than others? All of that is not something you look at on a day to day basis. Look at it from a month to month basis, but from that you're learning what's working, what's resonating. Number five, once you have a working model, then look for experts to help propel your growth. Now I want you to go after it and apply those very simple tactics.

And if you'll notice, this is pretty simple. It's pretty obvious to many, but there are so many founders that overlook this they're busy worrying about what their logo should look like or other meaningless things out there. And by the way, I mean things like a logo. Go to Canva, have a logo done. Honestly, I've done that for whether it looks good or not. I've done it for my company logo. I've done it for my podcast. I mean, it's not something I feel that my brand really needs to invest in at this point. That is not a ding on anybody who is a branding expert out there. I have the utmost respect for you, but in the way that I need to move forward, I'm trying to move faster in other areas, and that was not an area that I felt I needed to focus in on as much.

I don't mean to say it's meaningless, but at the end of the day, you need to get some traction after a few years of them focusing on these other, you know, quote unquote meaningless or time wasters, they wound up having to close their business.

And I don't want that to happen for you. Now, I do have some helpful resources I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, so I want to make sure this episode has some specific, helpful resources that you can also go walk away with. As as I gave you those specific steps that you can take and apply to your business this week.

The number one, this is one of my favorite resources. Justin Welsh's weekly newsletter is called The Saturday Solopreneur. You can sign up at Justin Welch. That's w e l s h dot me. These are very actionable newsletters, and if you're looking for a newsletter model to follow, that's it. He does a really great job. Everything from how he starts the the newsletter, uh, what he kind of sprinkles in and even the clothes. It's a it's a really great, uh, template, if you will, to kind of follow a really good model to follow. And it is one of those weekly email newsletters I get that I to look forward to.

I highly recommend Justin Welsh's weekly newsletter. He's also on LinkedIn a lot, and you should also follow him there, because you can see sort of his LinkedIn strategy, his approach, studying how the more successful ones are doing things is is a good thing to do. Another person to follow also on LinkedIn is Rand Fishkin. now he used to be the he was a founder of Moz.com

I posted about him in a LinkedIn post where he was somebody that I really respected and, and, appreciated his his insight and his intelligence. He's been a resource that I've recommended for many years. He now owns a software called Spark Toro, which I use in my business for my clients. But even if you never use that software, that doesn't matter. Following him.

You're going to gain so much insight and knowledge about how to effectively market your business post.  sort of like the AI search, uh, situation, especially when it comes to like zero click where, you know, Google is effectively answering things and it's becoming increasingly more and more difficult to measure where or attribute I should say is probably the better word, uh, where you're getting attribution, where you're where, where you're acquiring those leads from specific other areas, without getting into the weeds of data science or search nerdiness,  he does a good job of of educating in and using terms, more layman terms, rather than strict nerdy marketing terms.

And lastly, I need to make sure that about my resources. Now, I mentioned amplify your brand, but if you need to get to move to the next step and get a fully planned out strategic digital marketing plan custom for the next six months for your business, then you should sign up for my Digital Marketing assessment. It's a fully customized and very in-depth view of your online presence, your competition, and your audience that shows you exactly what topics, platforms that you should be focused on and how to better improve your website Upset experience and content.

Because all of that stuff does matter. But so all you need to do is I'm going to give you a Google action, just Google digital marketing assessment and my last name Bartoli, and you'll find exactly how to get signed up and how to get started. You can also go to LinkedIn and connect with me there. I am happy to help. Feel free to DM me. Um, and I'm very interested in in helping everybody I can and any founder I can. So look for me over there too.

I hope you found value in each of those resources. Make sure you subscribe to this podcast, share it with other founders that who you think might find it helpful. Next week I'm going all in on mindset and I'll have a really great resource to share with you that will multiply your personal effectiveness, and I really can't wait to share that with you.

Thank you for listening. I'm Janet Bartoli, and if you want to learn how to amplify your brand, head over to Bartoli Consulting. Com forward slash. Amplify. Any links mentioned are listed in the show notes. I want to answer any digital marketing questions that you might have, so here's what you do. Just drop those into the comments into the review section. Keep showing up. And hey, if you really like this, give me some reviews. Thank you so much.