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Show Notes

How do you create growth in your business? Growing your business to the next level is the dream of any business owner. The key to scaling and achieving true long-term success lies in secret, that most business owners neglect. When you stop devoting time and energy into this important practice, it can be detrimental to future business growth. Without properly implementing this one thing, scaling for success means climbing a much steeper hill that does not need to exist in the first place!

Want to Work with Jennifer and her Virtual Marketing Experts Team?

Are you a coach, consultant, or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income, and scale your impact? Connect with me at YourMarketingMatchmaker.com I look forward to hearing from you.

Jennifer:

Hey there, welcome back to Marketing Matchmaker, I am super excited for the month of February. Can I just stop for one second here though and say, Oh, my goodness, it’s already the month of February. Okay, I won’t dive into the time is flying so quickly, scenario already, but I have to say, for me, it’s, it’s going by really quickly. So, in February, it is all focused on the month of love in the outside world.

And, really, it should be also in your business, like, for business owners, we want to love our business over and over and over again and dive back into our business because we love it. I actually love focusing on the things I love to do and talk about in the month of February. So one of my favorite topics is really marketing mistakes.

In fact, you’ll notice in interviews that I do, I often ask, What was your biggest marketing mistake in your business? And how did you overcome it? Because I want to give people the vantage point of, I really did make a mistake, and I fixed it in this way.

Because let’s be honest, everybody makes mistakes when it comes to business when it comes to growing it when it comes to marketing, being able to look at it from that perspective of you know, what is your biggest mistake, and how did you overcome it allows us to see what other people did. So maybe we can avoid those mistakes. So today’s episode is going to be focused on a big marketing mistake that I see a lot of business owners make.

In fact, I’m going to tell you a little story in just a minute about one of my former clients and the mistake they made. So we’re going to start with the three types of business owners that I see when it comes to business and marketing.

So we have business owner, number one who quite honestly is struggling to get out there. They’re they have impostor syndrome, or they’re worried about what people will think or whatever the reason is behind not marketing their business at all, is they’re in what my business coach likes to call entrepreneur witness protection program, right?

Where they don’t tell anyone they have a business, which means it’s very hard for them to grow that business. They may be networking, and most likely, it’s in dribs and drabs, right, it’s not consistent. It’s not, it’s not bringing in those consistent leads and the consistent revenue that they need to really have a business. So if you’re in that position right now, where you know that you haven’t been marketing your business, as well as it should have been, I’m going to encourage you to step into that right now.

Find something that you can do in your business to market it, whether that’s just going to all your family and friends and telling them about your business, or whether that’s networking or getting on social media and posting and letting people know that you have a business, step out into that and do that.

So that’s that’s business owner, one, business owner two, is that business owner that does up and down marketing, right, they start marketing, and they’re pretty consistent for a little while. And then they fill up the roster or whatever their business model might be.

They get enough sales, where it feels like, okay, I’m good, I’m good to go. And, and they stopped marketing, right? They, they stopped telling people about the opportunities to work with them. Even if it’s not opportunities, right now, they don’t have a waitlist, they don’t have a way for people to stay in communication with them, so that when they’re ready for new clients, they’re able to get them.

What ends up happening there is that they get those new clients, they’re happy they’re going and then when one or two of those clients fall off, it becomes this, oh, my goodness, I need more clients. So I’m going to go out and market. Here’s the problem with that scenario, because you haven’t been consistent with your marketing. You don’t have anyone to pull into your sales pipeline right now.

And sometimes marketing can take 1, 3, 6 months to actually become effective, and start bringing in consistent leads. And let’s be honest, if even if you get on sales calls, depending on how good of a salesperson you are, maybe you don’t close them all.

The whole point of this diatribe is that you want to be consistently marketing your business, whether that’s simply making sure that you are in front of your ideal clients on a regular basis, or it’s running ads or having a funnel or whatever that is for you. That consistency is what makes a business successful.

So then I come To my third type of business owner, and usually these business owners have a pretty good marketing organic marketing strategy, right? They’re pretty consistent about organically marketing their business, and they’re looking to scale. And they’re running into this wall of how do I get enough leads to scale my business, because let’s be honest, organic marketing can bring in two or three sales a month, which may be enough for you.

And if you’re looking to hit those million dollar business models, it’s probably not enough for you. So if we just look at it from a perspective of numbers, and I know everybody hates data, and if we look at it from that perspective of quantity, if you need 10 people in your group coaching program, and 1% of that is going to buy 1% of your population is going to buy from you, you need 1000 people that you have interacted with in order to get those 10 people to buy from you. So if your email list is only 1000 people, the question then becomes, how long is that email list going to survive if you’re not continually growing it.

And the easiest way to grow it, especially when you’re looking to scale quickly, is going to be through paid traffic.

So that story I was promising you at the beginning, I wanted to tell this quick story about a former client of mine. So when we started working together, they were looking to scale their business, they were doing pretty well in business, but they wanted to use ads to really scale to that next level. And so we did, we started working together. And we did a really good job of scaling their business up to the goals that we had set.

And then we just kept doing that, right, we were doing a great job of of continually getting their pipeline filled, getting their sales, and then growing their business. And then 2020 hit right, the pandemic hit. And like a lot of business owners during the pandemic or right when the pandemic hit, this client looked at their business model and went, you know what, I’m spending a lot of money on ads. And I think I can do this without ads. And so I’m going to cut back and no longer spend money on on growing my email list through ads.

I totally respect that.

Sometimes, these are hard choices that you get to make. And in all, honestly, her 2020 and her 2021 panned out just fine for her. She she was still growing, she was still growing her business in her revenue.

And then 2022 hit. And that’s where the struggle began. So I am still interacting with a lot of my clients because whether they stay with me forever, or they step off, we’ve developed a relationship just like every business owner should. And so I know what’s going on in her business. And she’s been very honest about struggling to hit those numbers again last year, and that that business year was actually worse than the year of in the pandemic.

And I’ve seen this a lot with a lot of people that have come to me to to work, they did really well during the pandemic. But then it started dropping off and and they were struggling afterwards. And of course now we’ve hit a recession. And so now comes the the whole other side of things of how we use money effectively in our business for that. from an outsider’s perspective, I can see what happened. organic traffic and organic growth is fabulous. In fact, it’s part of business models, it’s part of marketing, and it’s essential.

However, what ends up happening is that when you have an email list and you’re not continually growing that email list, or feeding that email list, there are only so many times you can directly mark it into that email list. Before you’re going to have a dry up when it comes to growing and scaling your business.

You really want to keep in mind that it is essential to continue growing your email list.

Let’s look back at those 1000 people that you had on your email list when you have marketed into that email list for two years and you’ve maybe only added 10 or 15 people over the course of those two years, or maybe even just 100 Because you’re doing all of your additions organically rather than running paid traffic. You’re going to struggle with the number of sales you can make in a year.

At some point the email list dries up if you are not continually feeding it new members. So of course, when I look at these clients that have left and that are struggling because all they’ve been doing is organic for the last two years, or even just the last year, I can see how the thought of running ads was an expense to them.

And now they get to realize that that expense was actually an investment in their business in the long term growth and health of their business. And so now they’re coming back to, again, run ads, because we all know that in order to grow your business, increase your revenue and scale your impact, you must have a strategy that consistently grows your audience organic traffic, while amazing is not going to get you the speed you want.

If you’re looking to quickly grow and quickly scale, pay traffic is going to be a huge investment in your business and really getting you to those next levels. And if you’re struggling right now, because you don’t have a strategy at all, or you’re looking to want to run paid traffic and you’re not sure where to start, head over to your marketing matchmaker.com and sign up for a free marketing exploration call. I would love to help you get to that next level of business.

OUTRO: Thank you for listening to the marketing matchmaker podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to hear your feedback. Please head over to Apple iTunes and leave a review so we can hear from you. And if you are a coach, consultant or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income and scale your impact. Connect with me at your marketing matchmaker.com I look forward to hearing from you.