Summary: It is no secret that the game of marketing is fast, competitive, and continuously evolving. With so many new techniques, trends, and ideas, it may feel overwhelming to know where to start. According to today’s guest Tim Fitzpatrick, marketing will always come back to three main fundamental ideas. These three are knowing your target audience, having an engaging message, and being able to have and carry out a strategic plan. At the end of the day, marketing comes down to generating leads and turning those leads into clients.
Today’s episode will help break down three fundamentals for success and further specify six key steps that can be taken within a marketing plan. Whether you are a startup, a small business owner, or a business that has been around for a while, coming back to the fundamentals can help spark and generate new ideas.
3 Fundamental Marketing Secrets to Stop Wasting Money
1. Who if Your Target?
2. Ensure Your Message Is Engaging
3 Have a Plan and Measure It
Who Is Your Target Audience?
First off, who’s your target market? Who are your top three ideal client types that you love working with that are profitable, and that you do great work for? Do you really understand who those people are? If you don’t, we need to nail that down first. For example, most companies know their target’s demographics pretty well such as income level or type of job, but where they struggle is identifying their psychographics. These are things such as what are their thoughts and feelings. What’s the most consistent problem that they all have? What are their goals? If you really understand psychographics, you can create messaging that hits upon those, and you can get people to engage with your company from there.
From there, we need to then create messaging that’s going to engage those ideal client types and be clear. So many people try to get clever with what they say, and we end up confusing people. If we end up making people think too hard about what we mean, we can end up losing people because our attention spans are so short. How do we make sure we avoid losing our target’s attention? We need to make sure that our message is clear, engaging, and consistent.
When you understand who your ideal clients are, whether there are one, two, or three types of ideal clients, you are attracting those people for a reason through targeted marketing. In most cases, you’re attracting them because they’re profitable, and you can do great work for them. Doing this will result in higher quality leads and will increase conversions, thus leading to being more profitable overall. Furthermore, doing this is going to help avoid attracting people to your business who are really not a good fit.
Ensure Your Messaging Is Engaging
When you look at messaging, having a clear and engaging message increases profits and customers. When people see your message, it will make more sense to them, and they will be more attracted to it. If you’re attracting your ideal clients, when they see that message it is naturally going to resonate with them. This will allow them to feel connected to whatever your product is and cause them to want it.
When you invest in producing the best quality message you can, it’s going to perform better and save money and time. Instead of spending money on multiple marketing techniques at once, consider focusing on smaller, more effective messages.
When you focus on your messaging, you’re essentially creating a framework that you can come back to and use each and every time. Having a highly engaging message that resonates with your target audience will naturally turn into conversions. Whatever message you are trying to get across to your audience, ensure that it is having quick and efficient delivery, in order to keep your audience engaged. In order to do this, you may need to analyze your message through a technical lens to look at factors behind the scenes.
Have a Marketing Strategy and Measure It
Having a plan is going to help eliminate information overload and distractions that can happen quite quickly in today’s evolving marketing world. As Tim likes to look at it, having a plan that is 90 days long is going to help achieve your goals more efficiently than a 3-year plan. When focusing on a short-term plan, ignore whatever isn’t inside that current goal. Within a short-term marketing plan, there are six key steps you will want to follow in order to maximize your success.
First, who is your target market? Have at a minimum a summary of one to three clients. Know who they are and what they like.
The second is what’s your goal? That 90-day goal is going to help you get closer to your one, three, or five-year goal. Ensure you have some type of specific measurable goal for the next 90 days.
The third step is identifying a marketing budget. This will ensure you don’t overspend and will help identify what resources you have from a time perspective.
The fourth step is writing down what your current marketing plan is. Have a list of any current marketing channels you’re doing such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing, paid advertising such as Google ads or Facebook ads, offline marketing, networking, etc.
Then in the fifth step, you can map out what you can do in the next 90 days on each of those channels. This step is going to eliminate any distractions and keep you focused.
Lastly, in the sixth step, you can choose the specific metrics that you want to track to see what metrics were successful.
From this data, you can repeat these steps and start a marketing plan. At the end of the 90 days, you can reflect and see what rebranding may need to be done, which digital marketing efforts were possibly a waste of time, and what the best and worst parts of your plan were. If you and your company try out these six steps throughout the year, at the end of the year you are going to reflect and see how much was accomplished. Although some may find this a simple plan, coming back to these steps can allow for redirection during difficult times such as COVID-19. Sometimes seeking out help from a marketing firm can take this responsibility off your plate and their knowledge can eliminate the confusion of marketing.
About the Guest Tim Fitzpatrick, Rialto Marketing
Today, I am excited to be speaking with Tim Fitzpatrick From Rialto Marketing. Tim is an entrepreneur/business owner with expertise in marketing and business growth. He has 20+ years of entrepreneurial experience with a passion for developing and growing businesses. That passion served him well in operating and managing a wholesale distribution company he co-owned for nine years. The company grew an average of 60% a year before being acquired in 2005. Since then, he’s had failures and successes that have been valuable learning experiences. He started Rialto Marketing in 2013 and has been helping service businesses simplify marketing so they can grow with less stress. Tim feels that most people overcomplicate marketing. It doesn’t have to be that way.
About The Host Stephen Halasnik, Financing Solutions
Stephen Halasnik is the host of the popular, Entrepreneur MBA Podcast. The Entrepreneur MBA podcast’s purpose is to help small businesses get over the $10 million per year in revenue mark. Mr. Halasnik is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Financing Solutions. Financing Solutions is a leading provider of Lines of Credit to small businesses and nonprofits
Mr. Halasnik is a graduate of Rutgers University and has an Executive Masters from the MIT Birthing of Giants Entrepreneurship program. Mr. Halasnik has started and built 6 companies over 25+ years with 2 of those businesses making the Inc 500/5000 fastest-growing list. Mr. Halasnik is a best-selling Amazon author on business and regularly tweets about his ideas about growing a business. You can also find Mr. Halasnik on youtube talking about Entrepreneurship.
Mr. Halasnik loves small businesses. He lives in New Jersey with his best friend, and his wife Gina. Mr. Halasnik’s number one purpose is raising his two boys, Michael and Maxwell, to be good men.
About Financing Solutions
Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.
Unlike a traditional business bank loan, our business credit line requires no collateral or personal guarantee (except in cases of fraud) making it an excellent alternative business financing option. Small businesses often used their line of credit for short-term expenses, working capital, to make payroll, or for a business investment especially when business cash flow is temporarily down.
Get a free, no-obligation business line of credit quote by filling out our simple 2- minute business line of credit application here.
Remember: The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it.
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Note: Financing Solutions donates 10% of its profits to various nonprofit charities