Marketing Not Making You Money? Do This To Change It.

The only 3 marketing actions you need to take if you want to cut through the BS and make some sales.​

Marketing doesn’t always equate to sales, which makes it incredibly confusing if you’re an entrepreneur trying to understand where best to hedge your bets.

I’ve made the very expensive mistake of posting content on social media for years, without seeing any true ROI from it. I’ve been guilty of sending out emails that no one wanted to read, and taking too much advice from the Internet about aggressive marketing tactics that end up bugging people.

When did marketing get so complicated? In my opinion, marketing that produces sales shouldn’t require this much wayfinding. It’s simple when done right.

Here are the only three marketing actions you need to take if you want to cut through the BS and make some sales.​

#1 Know the difference between cold and hot leads

Do you know what actions your audience takes when they’re buzzing with excitement and are about to buy from you? If you don’t know the answer to this question, get your detective hat on and start studying your customers.​

Understanding common behaviors amongst your hot leads (those who are enthusiastically buying) allows you to work backwards and pinpoint what you need to do more of.​

Are your hot leads born from excited existing customers who refer them? Do they sprout whenever you do a free webinar or speak on a podcast? Do you get a solid batch of hot leads from that meticulously crafted cold email that you send out?​

Whatever it is, be ruthlessly critical about where the cold-leads-that-never-convert are and ditch them, even if they’re in the places that people say not to ditch. (You’ll be okay as long as you follow #2 step below.)​

#2 Let people subscribe to you

Whether you’re a product or service business, you must give your audience a place to subscribe to you. I’m a strong advocate for investing in subscription channels for your business whether that’s an email newsletter, blog, or a YouTube channel.​

If you’ve invested most of your marketing efforts on places like Instagram and Facebook, remember that you are beholden to the algorithm gods on these platforms. The algorithms on these platforms can quickly downvote your content out so that no one ends up seeing it (or only shares it with the same people over and over).​

Always supplement one of these channels with a subscription channel so that your audience sees your content when you want them to see it. This helps you control the flow of communication between your brand and its audience at little to no cost (in other words, you don’t have to put ad money in to get your audience to see you).​

#3 Proactively replenish your customer pool

Your customer pool diminishes by the week because they either are no longer interested in your product or service, or they’ve already bought from you. The tricky thing about a diminishing customer pool is that there’s no counter telling you how many leads have exited your pool at any given time.​

Rather than trying to find that answer in a crystal ball, you should proactively replenish your customer lead pool on a weekly basis by having a lead generation strategy humming in the background of your business.​

If you’re not sure what this lead generation strategy looks like for you, go back to step #1 and work backwards to find the source of your hot leads. Focus all your marketing energy into generating more hot leads and ditching the places that give you cold ones.

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