Category: Step 5: Managing Your Marketing Resources

Investing in marketing is a cost for your business, so it makes sense to evaluate whether it is a worthwhile investment by measuring each marketing channel’s success.

Here’s a few factors to keep in mind when you’re using metrics to assess value – plus a reminder that metrics can get a little fuzzy around the edges, depending on how you allocate your marketing costs and associated income.

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In today’s video, I talk about some metrics you can use to check whether a marketing channel is worth investing in for your business – or not.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already, please do – it’ll help me out loads, and if you click the bell you’ll be notified when I release new videos.

Choosing the Marketing Channel You Want to Use

Before I get started, here’s a quick reminder of what I mean by marketing channel. A marketing channel is the avenue you are using to market your business, whether that’s through Google Ads, Facebook Ads, free social media posting and scheduling (such as using Hootsuite), email marketing, magazine-based advertising… and whatever the channel, metrics can be incredibly valuable.

A lot of people jump straight into choosing their marketing channels, but make sure you consider who your target person is and what your USP is first. These are steps one and two of my content marketing strategy. When you know who your target person is, you understand their wants, needs, fears and frustrations. And when you’ve got a really strong USP, you know exactly what differentiates your business from your competitors, and that it’s something that your target person really wants and needs. Spending a little time on steps one and two before you start choosing your marketing channels will help dramatically in terms of figuring out whether a channel is worth the effort – and investment.

Evaluating the Cost Per Lead

Once you’ve started using some of the channels that seem a good fit for your business, it’s a good time to test whether it’s been worth the investment. Imagine you’re getting some leads through the channel, you’re spending money on the channel, but is it worth it? (Note: If you haven’t identified some suitable channels yet because you are still working on steps one and two, the information that follows may not be that relevant to your right now – but it’s definitely worth returning to and/or keeping in mind going forward.)

First things first, I’m going to keep this as simple as possible: calculating the cost per lead. This calculation is super simple – you take the amount of money you’re investing into a particular marketing channel and divide it by the number of leads you’re getting.

Easy, right? Now you’ve got a cost per lead!

Measuring Your Conversions

What you’re working towards is figuring out how much money you’re getting out of a given channel through sales of your goods or services. If you’re not measuring your conversions from each marketing channel, you’re not going to be able to figure out whether the channel’s worth it.

You need to measure conversions from each channel, whether that’s through Google Analytics, your CRM system or some other method. Whatever your channel, make sure there is a helpful way you can measure conversions and identify how those conversions translate to paying customers – and how much they are paying you.

If you don’t have these systems set up in your business, you cannot measure anything; and if you’re not measuring, you’re not going to be able to tell how ‘worth it’ your marketing efforts are. You’ll just keep driving blind, which might be okay with you – maybe you’re getting enough business through the door and putting enough money in the bank – but if you want to push it, if you really want to know whether a marketing channel is working, you need to be measuring your conversions.

Assessing Your Marketing Channel: Is It Worth It?

So, you’ve got your cost per lead, you’ve got your conversions, and you know how much money you’re making from those conversions via your marketing channel. These are the kind of bare bones metrics that you need to determine whether your channel is worth it, because you can look at the income that you’re receiving and compare it to the amount that you’re investing into this channel… which allows you to answer the question, “Is it worth it?”

Look at the income figure – is it more than the costs? If the income is about the same as the costs of using the channel, and especially if it’s just a little bit higher, then keep going! That’s a good channel for your business and one you can work on growing. However, if the income is less than the costs, you might want to rethink that channel – perhaps it’s not a good fit for your business.

Even an income a tiny bit above your costs is the sign of a good channel because every single penny that you make is going into your business as profit. But – and there’s always a ‘but’ – there’s another aspect to consider first.

Making Sense of Fuzzy Measurements

Business is complicated, especially when it comes to marketing – and especially when it comes to evaluating the cost of marketing and the income from marketing, which can become a little ‘fuzzy’.

Consider an example. Let’s say you are using email marketing as your channel. You write blogs in order to produce the emails that go out. You don’t write the blogs yourself – you hire a writer to write the blogs for you (which is a cost). Then you’ve got the cost of the technology and everything as well. But the cost of that writer doesn’t just apply to this channel (email marketing), because the blog article is also going on your website, so it’s contributing to your SEO. So, in your little spreadsheet of costs, do you put it under SEO, or do you put it under email marketing?

This is the big question. This is what makes everything fuzzy when it comes to the costs of marketing, making it a little more difficult to give you a clear-cut, defined number that shows the cost of each channel.

This is okay – don’t panic! This is how businesses work – everything is interlinked. You are allowed to have fuzzy statistics; you just have to get a feel for them. This is where marketing starts to become more of an art and less of a science – you need to get a feel for whether the channel is generally working and whether it is contributing to your overall success.

Factoring in Lifetime Value

When you identify a great channel, your marketing decisions don’t stop there – in reality, you may be using a few different channels to market your business. This is fine, but it’s yet another way in which your marketing metrics can become fuzzy.

A key fuzzy feature to keep in mind is customer lifetime value. When a customer comes in and they buy from you that first time, you might be measuring that as the income from that customer. But if that customer then comes back a couple of weeks later and buys something else or uses your service again, or in a few months’ time, or in a year, that’s not ‘new’ income – that’s income that’s coming again from that same channel! That customer came in via a particular marketing channel, so any income should be attributed back to that channel.

This is customer lifetime value – how much value that customer has for your business over the lifetime that they spend money with you, which increases the income part of the earlier calculation, making the costs seem less intimidating because they are now more useful – they are responsible for generating more income for your business.

Embracing Fuzzy Metrics!

The way you calculate the value of a marketing channel is very customised to your business, and as a result it’s also customised to how ‘fuzzy’ you are comfortable with being when you assess the value of your marketing channels. Consider being open-minded about how you get a feel for each channel, and how specific and measured you want to be – and if you want to be more specific and measured, what other systems do you need to put in place to make sure that you’re tracking your metrics in the most helpful way?

It’s easy to get lost in the numbers, so I highly recommend that you top up your tolerance of fuzzy statistics. However, measuring the stuff you can measure is a great way to make sure that you’re comfortable with a channel and that it’s working well enough for you to continue investing in it.

If you want to explore the value of your marketing channels further, please do get in touch.

The marketing funnel provides businesses with a solid model for creating a marketing strategy, but it is worth questioning whether it is helping you to identify the KPIs that best define successful performance for your business.

Here’s a new way of looking at the marketing funnel – one that can help you focus on all stages of the funnel, as well as highlighting some useful KPIs that can provide real insight into the way you measure success.

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In today’s video, I’m going to talk about the KPIs that you might be setting to measure success – and questioning whether there are some that you haven’t thought of that you might want to add.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already, please do – it will help me loads, and if you click the bell you’ll be notified when I release new videos.

Redefining Performance

During a course I recently attended, I had a thought-provoking conversation with another attendee about high-performance businesses. He was talking about how the idea of being happy in the workplace is all well and good, but once a high-performing business comes under pressure, it’s all about money over people – money, profit and numbers. I countered this assertion, because to my mind, purely looking at profit metrics isn’t necessarily a good indication of what ‘performance’ means to high-performing businesses – I would like to think that a business becomes a high-performing business because it prioritises other metrics alongside profit (which is of course important).

I think it’s critical for a business that wants to operate ethically to consider what ‘performance’ means for them – and to keep this in mind when they’re comparing their performance against a business that’s operating in a less ethical, or even an unethical way. If you’re comparing your performance against a business that’s unethical, then I think you can take some comfort in the idea that their performance success may be happening at the expense of something that you wouldn’t tolerate.

Performance is about more than profit – yes, it provides the fuel to keep your business going (which is important!), but is does not give your business purpose.

Measuring Performance: Success Metrics

Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure performance is crucial for making sure that your business can run successfully. It’s like checking your blood pressure to make sure that you’re healthy and well.

What are the success metrics that you look at in your business, and which ones are the most important to you? I think profit is only one metric, and it’s arguable whether it’s the most important. I think there are other metrics that are equally as important as profit, so here I’m going to talk through where to find these metrics in your business and how to rank them in your head.

The Marketing Funnel: Awareness

The marketing funnel can be thought of as the way that people travel through your business – and yes, it is modelled on a funnel, with a wide top and a narrow bottom.

You’ve got awareness at the top. Awareness is the first contact that people have with you. At this stage, they’re learning about your business – they’re finding out about what you do.

Awareness metrics include:

• Clicks
• Likes
• Signups to your email
• How many people are following you.

These are pretty important metrics in that they’re feeding into everything you do. You need the numbers involved at this stage to be the largest numbers in your metrics, and this is why this model is described as a funnel – those clicks, like, follows and signups funnel down into the next stage, which is consideration.

The Marketing Funnel: Consideration

When it comes to consideration – the next stage of the marketing funnel – you are looking at interactions with your business. People are now considering whether your product is the one that they’re going to buy. They’re comparing you against your competitors; they’re thinking about whether they actually need your product or service.

Consideration metrics include:

• The opening of emails by people on your email list
• People reading blog posts that explain more about your product
• Potential customers booking a sales conversation to further discuss their needs
• Potential customers completing a quiz or a calculator on your website to find out more about how your service or product relates to them.

Consideration metrics are where you see the numbers drop. Yes, you’ll lose lots of people, but these numbers are a lot fuzzier because consideration often happens in the head. This is true of awareness metrics as well – there’s a lot of loss that you won’t be able to measure, and you may not even be able to see that it’s happening, so a lot of what you’re measuring in these top two stages can be unclear. As a result, you can’t come to solid conclusions because there’s always another explanation that may account for changes in these metrics.

The Marketing Funnel: Conversion

The third stage of the marketing funnel is where people usually start with their KPIs. This is conversion; in other words, this is where you sell your products or services. The numbers involved in measuring conversion are fairly obvious – they relate to how many people have actually bought the product or service that you’re selling. That’s the bottom line with conversion metrics – how many sales do you make?

Profit is also a part of this stage. For example, you might want to compare actual sales against the costs of those sales and how much profit you’re making from them. As your business grows and becomes more complex, you can expand these metrics as required to evaluate conversion and profit in different ways.

The Forgotten Part of the Marketing Funnel

After the conversion stage come the stages of the marketing funnel that people often forget to use in their success metrics: loyalty and advocacy. They might vaguely measure aspects of these last two stages of the marketing funnel; they might even have some vague strategies in place. But it’s rare for businesses to use loyalty and advocacy to determine performance – in other words, to determine success – and this is a critical, strategic error.

It’s understandable why people think this way – after all, the marketing funnel is shaped like a funnel, so it’s almost guiding your brain to think these last two stages are the least important parts of this structure. But it’s a mistake to think that this part of the marketing funnel represents the smallest part of your marketing.

Duct Tape Marketing visualise the marketing funnel as a marketing hourglass, which helps to highlight the importance of these last two stages. Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch talks about how the bulk of your marketing comes in the awareness stage, but he highlights how the advocacy and loyalty stages involve nurturing your existing customers to buy from you. The loyalty stage is all about nurturing them to repurchase, while the advocacy stage involves getting people to talk to other people about buying from you. This turns your customers into your best salespeople. If you can get the loyalty and advocacy stages working in your business, sales will pick up like a snowball because that’s where people’s trust lies – in the people close to them telling them that your product or service is worth buying.

Loyalty and advocacy metrics include:

• Customer satisfaction
• Reputation
• Employee satisfaction.

As a side note, employee satisfaction arguably improves the entire length of the funnel, so maybe it should be a more important metric when it comes to determining performance. Employee satisfaction can be directly related to your profits – what if the unhappiness of your employees is impacting your profit? It’s certainly worth considering.

The metrics that count at the loyalty and advocacy stages are more ‘concepts’ than they are actual metrics because the metrics that you need to measure when it comes to satisfaction and reputation are going to be more specific to your business. Maybe they’ll relate to customer surveys or the numbers of reviews you have, or maybe they’ll relate to rankings that you have on an industry website that people trust – such as checking a tradesperson on a website like Checkatrade.

Remember the Bottom Half of the Hourglass

I think that remembering to factor in loyalty and advocacy is one of the most important indicators of performance success. While conversion (and therefore profit) is seen as such an important focus – and it is true that your business needs to make that fuel – maybe you need to be looking for your success metrics at the bottom of the marketing funnel, at the bottom of the marketing hourglass.

Your success metrics are going to have a profound effect on what you decide to do with your strategy, so check what you’re measuring, check what you’re really paying attention to, and see if focusing that attention on certain metrics changes your strategy – and maybe transforms your business.

Are you wondering about whether your current KPIs translate to truly useful metrics for success? Please do get in touch if you want to explore how you can redefine how you evaluate performance in your business.

The way you approach your marketing may be rooted in an intriguing piece of occult wisdom, which asks you to consider whether you are more cup or knife mind – in other words, whether you push information outwards (knife mind) or draw information inwards (cup mind).

Here, I explore the pros and cons of each approach, considering how this occult wisdom can inform your marketing efforts and help you turn occult wisdom into marketing wisdom.

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In today’s video, I talk about some interesting occult wisdom that may help you think about how you balance your marketing focus.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already, please do – it will help me loads, and if you click the bell you’ll be notified when I release new videos.

Understand the Difference Between the Cup and Knife Mind

In occult wisdom, it’s thought that you have two different types of mind: you have a knife mind, and you have a cup mind. Your knife mind is the mind that pushes outwards – it’s the mind that goes out and gets things done. It pushes your will outwards. You get creative and make things happen with your knife mind.

The cup mind is different – it draws inwards rather than pushes outwards. It’s absorbing, like a vessel, so information and ideas pour into your cup mind. You absorb information –experiences, observations, statistical data – from the world around you, which your mind uses to make plans and evaluate the best course of action. You use information to invigorate and empower yourself with your cup mind.

Utilise Your Cup and Knife Minds

When I was learning about the difference between these two types of mind, I realised that occult wisdom like this underlies a lot of human psychology – and anything that’s in human psychology naturally underlies marketing too. There are different types of marketers and there’s different types of marketing, and I realised that you need both your knife mind and your cup mind if you want to maximise your marketing.

You need your knife mind because you need to get out there and do your marketing – you can’t just sit and plan, and you can’t constantly be thinking about strategy. You need to motivate yourself to make things happen – you have to create, you have to communicate with people, you have to push your knife mind out there and make your business a success.

But you also need your cup mind if you want to see great results. A major part of marketing involves stepping back, taking stock, looking at your stats and analytics, and figuring out what is actually happening – and understanding what is happening – before you go out there with your knife mind and take action.

This is the most important message from this slice of occult wisdom: it’s not that you have a cup mind or a knife mind, it’s that you have both – and you have to use both. You as a whole person need to use both your cup and your knife mind at different times for different purposes to make things happen in an informed way.

Find the Most Effective Balance in Your Marketing

If you’re a marketer or a business owner, consider whether your knife mind or your cup mind is currently dominating your marketing practice. Are you spending more time being creative and getting things done while at the same time neglecting your stats and all the information that could be guiding you? Or are you a bit of a spreadsheet fiend, so you’re too busy measuring performance rather than using that information to get creative and make things happen?

Or perhaps you have found the sweet spot for your business – the perfect balance between monitoring all the available information and statistics at your fingertips to create a plan of marketing action that you can implement. If so, congratulations!

Maximise Your Marketing Wisdom

Understanding the differences between the cup and knife minds, and their equal importance, may help you to check in with yourself regularly so you can work towards getting the balance right for your business. I find it helpful to return to this idea whenever I am working with customers or other marketing professionals who are struggling with balancing these two elements of successful marketing. It helps me with my own marketing too – we all need to take the time to check in with whether we are finding a successful balance in our marketing approach.

The concept of the cup and knife mind may be occult wisdom, but I also think it translates well to being marketing wisdom in action. If you’d like help with focusing your marketing energy in a more balanced way, please do get in touch.

Especially when you’re still growing, you need to be wise about how you spend your budget. Marketing help is one of those things you do need to invest in – and have a little faith in – to stimulate that growth. But not all marketing help is right for all businesses at all stages.

Here’s a quick breakdown of three of the most obvious avenues to go down in getting marketing help for your small business: marketing freelancers, Virtual Assistants, or hiring someone in-house.

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What type of marketing help do you actually need, in your business?

Today I’m going to talk about the differences between having a virtual assistant, an in-house marketer, or a freelance marketer when it comes to getting marketing help in your business.

When you need marketing help in your business, I think there are three kinds of major options out there, especially when you’re on a small team or on your own.

Do You Need Marketing Help from a Virtual Assistant?

The first option is your virtual assistant option. Virtual assistants are really great because you’ve got a really wide selection, there are quite a lot of virtual assistants out there.

That can be a double-edged sword because you do have to make sure that you, do your homework, make sure that that virtual assistant is actually good at what they do.

Experience Doesn’t Mean Better

Just as a note on that, experience doesn’t equal better. You can have a brand new virtual assistant, who will be way more committed to you, because they’re new, and because they’re new doesn’t mean they’re not good at the job.

The key thing about that is that, the job of a virtual assistant is often to really pick up the stuff, that you can’t do – or you don’t have time to do – in your business and do it efficiently and really well, so you don’t even need to check it. That’s when you’ve got a really good virtual assistant.

Signs That You Might Need Marketing Help From a Virtual Assitant

• If you are time poor – you’re constantly running out of time.
• If by freeing up your time, your business is going to make more money.
• If you have systems in place already, that someone else can pick up.

If the above is true, you’re ready for a virtual assistant!

Do You Need Marketing Help from an In-House Marketer?

The second option is bringing in an in-house marketer. This is where you’re getting someone to join your team, someone who’s going to be committed to your business, to do the marketing for your business.

The Most Expensive Option For Marketing Help

This is most likely the most expensive option because you’re going to have to pay a good salary. You’re also going to have to make sure you’ve got all of your employment processes in place. You’ve got contracts and employment policies, insurance, and so on, that you need to do as an employer, in the UK at least.

What’s really important here as well, is that to attract an in-house marketer, you’re going to have to pay well. You could hire a marketing executive in-house and that might be cheaper, but be aware that if you’re hiring a marketing executive, you’re hiring someone who doesn’t yet have expertise. Which could be totally fine and something that you may want. You may want a more blank slate and, like I said, with the virtual assistant, a new person comes with a higher level of commitment too, because they’re new, and they’re ready and energetic.

So, you might want to do that, but be aware that if you are looking for expertise, which is often why someone brings an in-house marketer, you’re looking for someone at a higher pay grade.

If you are bringing in a marketing executive at a lower level, and at a lower pay rate because you can’t afford it, then that’s fine, but make sure that you’re giving them support and training, and that you are budgeting for giving them some extra support and training because they will need it. They’ll need to learn how to do a lot of this stuff, that they haven’t had any experience doing yet. And with marketing, you do learn through experience, because everything is changing every day.

So Why Might You Want to Hire an In-House Marketer?

The bottom line of what you need, of why you might want to hire in-house, is:

• You have enough money,
• You need to pull in some expertise
• You need someone committed to your business.

And that last point about them being committed to your business is really important. Because even if you have loads and loads of money, you can hire a marketer and they will join you – money is attractive to people, and people do need money. But you won’t get them to stay. As soon as they’ve got another offer, that sounds better to them, they’ll leave. So having money isn’t the only thing about keeping a marketing person in your business.

Alignment of Values Are How You Get Your Marketing Help to Stay

You need to have a set of values that are going to attract a marketer. You need to make sure that you’re authentically living those values as well. You can’t just talk about those values and hope that they’ll believe them. You need to be authentically living them otherwise they will eventually realise.

You need to have a business that people will want to fight for because marketing can get tough. As much as people love to think, that marketing is this joyful joyland of creative creativity, marketing is a hard slog sometimes. Going through stats, figuring out new technology, figuring out why a bug has happened. And if you’re hiring in-house, that person is going to have to do a lot of things. They’re going to have to have their hands across all the different things, different channels, to make sure that everything’s working in sync. It gets tough, so if you don’t have a reason why they’re fighting beyond the money, that they’re being paid, you’re not only going to lose them eventually, but you’ll also not get the best work out of them.

Be Really Clear About Your “Why” If You’re Hiring In-House

So if you’re going to hire in-house, make sure you’re really clear about why. Why does your business exist, who are you fighting for, who are you serving and why would your marketer care. And you know what, that will apply to any employee you hire. Whether it’s an admin person, a finance person, an HR person, everyone wants to know why they’re fighting.

Yes, money is important, and they are also working to earn because everyone needs a living. But they’re staying because they want to.

Do You Need Marketing Help from a Freelance Marketer?

The last option is – surprise, surprise – a freelance marketer (like me!).

For When You Need High Expertise For Less Ongoing Spend

Why would you want to hire a freelance marketer, as opposed to the other two, is that you need that higher level of expertise in your business. Maybe you haven’t got really good marketing systems set up yet, you haven’t thought about your target person properly, maybe you’re not sure if your USP is correct and there’s all these little bits, all these foundational bits, especially when it comes to your marketing, that you need set up. But you don’t have the money, you don’t have the systems in place, you don’t have the capacity to hire someone full-time.

This is where a freelancer comes in perfectly. They’re invaluable, because usually your relationship with a freelancer is fairly fluid, so if your business is a bit money poor, then you’ll just be able to spend the amount that you have, that you can budget for, and a freelancer will be able to shape their offering, to give you exactly what you need.

A good marketing freelancer can condense their marketing expertise, to exactly what you need for your business, and to give you the tools to maybe help yourself, to get to the point where you can hire someone. Get you to where you have enough profit coming in that you are then able to hire that permanent extra support.

You can have long-term relationships with freelancers. But I think the best relationships you can have with a businesses as a freelancer is to help them get to that stable point, where your business is supporting itself, and then setting you free into the sunset.

So when you might want to hire a freelance marketer instead:

• You need high-level marketing expertise
• You don’t have enough money to spend on an ongoing salary
• You need a flexible working arrangement to only access and pay for the expertise you actually need.

There are obviously lots of different freelancers with lots of different ways of working, which also means you can find the one that fits best for your business.

If you think that a conversation with me might help you figure out what kind of marketing help you might need, feel free to get in touch and ask for a completely free chat and I’ll help point you at the right thing for you!

The term jack of all trades is sometimes seen as positive, but the full idiom actually goes “jack of all trades, master of none” – meant as a criticism of stretching too broadly and therefore not being actually good at any one thing. Let me tell you why you should be a proud master of none as a business owner.

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Business leaders should be jacks of all trades. Hi I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and in today’s video I want to talk about my opinion on how leaders should actually have a wide breadth of knowledge rather than deep knowledge.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouYube channel already please do! It’ll help me loads and you’ll also be notified whenever I release new videos.

People throw around the term jack of all trades to as a bit of an insult because you know, “jack of all trades, master of none” meaning that if you know lots of things you’re no good at anything. And I think I would care to disagree about this when it comes to business leadership.

Now specialists are great and they’re really important as a part of business but as a leader, as the business owner, I think you should be a master of none. I think you really need to be able to learn lots of different things so that you know how much you don’t know about different things.

And this is the real key here.

Really understanding how much you don’t know about an area where you’re not an expert in so that you’re aware of how to ask for the right help. And I think it’s really important that as a business owner you should be really unafraid to ask for help. Ask for help in areas that you know you don’t know enough about.

But when you are really buried deep inside a thing, when you are a specialist in a certain area, it’s very, very likely that you don’t even know how much you don’t know about other areas of your business. And business has so many different moving parts that you really need to make sure are moving correctly from your marketing to your HR to your finances to your sales to your product development to your logistics – these are all areas and then there’d be so many more for many different businesses.

So it’s really important that you know what kind of depth all of these places are required for your business. So then you know where to use your resources most wisely in your business.

Now, a lot of people think that by trying to go and learn lots of different things it looks a bit like egotistical that you want to know everything and you want to have your fingers in all the pies. But, really, it’s quite the opposite. It’s really learning about how to drop your ego and when you learn lots of different things you will start to realise how much you don’t know and you should kind of automatically have a drop in ego and realise that this is an area that I need help in. This is an area I need to hire someone in. This is where I need a specialist.

So I don’t mean to say that specialists are not important or that business leaders are not important. There is a synergy that needs to happen here between business leaders who know enough about all the different things directing specialists to really utilise their skills in the best way that makes the whole business machine work well.

And that’s what you want to achieve. You want to achieve a business machine. And the key to that is being able to trust specialists with their speciality to do the things that you know need to happen to keep the whole business ticking.

So I hope that makes sense to you and I hope that it helps you a little bit in trying to figure out how to lead your business in the best way. And I would love to discuss this if you have the time if you care and so feel free to email me or message me on my website or find me on linkedin.

When you’re starting to learn marketing, it can get super overwhelming – there are so many tricks and tips on what to do on Instagram, Facebook, Email, your blog to get more people to pay attention to you.

But as a business owner, you really shouldn’t be spending all your time learning how to use those platforms. You should be spending most of your time doing the marketing work that’s going to continue making your marketing effective further into the future.

You need to think about strategy, not just tactics.

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Think strategy, not tactics. In this video, we’re going to be talking about the mindset that you need to have as a business owner when you’re thinking about marketing because it can get really, really overwhelming.

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Learning Marketing is Overwhelming

So, today want to be talking about a mindset that you need to have and it’s really important in marketing because there are so many things in marketing. Have you ever sat down at your desk and thought, “Okay, I’m gonna do marketing for my business today!” and then you just look at all of it and it’s just– there’s so many things to do! So many things to learn. There are so many courses on marketing. There are so many tricks and tips to learn on how to make Instagram work for you, how to make Facebook work for you, how to make email work for you… it can get really, really overwhelming.

Learn the ‘Why’ Not the ‘How To’

The point is – and this is the key thing you need to have in your head – is that you need to think strategy, not tactics. And what I mean by this is that you need to be thinking about how these things work and why these things work rather than how to make them work.

In the end you should be leaving the tactics to the people who know how to use them, the people who use them all the time. Hire a person who knows how to use social media, if social media is the channel for you.

Marketing Strategy Questions to Ask Yourself

But as the business owner, as the architect of your marketing strategy, you need to be thinking,

“Is this the right channel for my marketing?”

“Is this where my target person is?”

“Can I convey my unique selling point really clearly on this medium?”

“Is this platform a place where people are going to take the action that I want them to take?”

These are the kind of questions that you need to be asking and have the answers to not,

“How do I post on Instagram?”

“How do I get more followers on Instagram?”

Getting more followers on Instagram is the result that you want to get because you know that Instagram is the place where your customer is.

Example of Strategic Questions for SEO

And the same thing goes for something like SEO or email, right. What is the kind of person that is going to be using that? If it’s SEO you’re thinking,

“Is this something that people actively search for on Google?”

“Is this the kind of thing that Google is going to promote?”

“Is it saturated on Google?”

These are the questions you need to be asking yourself.

This is Step 1 and 2 of the Content-Led Marketing Strategy

So, as a business owner, you need to start taking a little step back from all of the shiny things in marketing and think strategy. And that is why my whole thing, when I’m teaching marketing, is all about strategy.

It’s all about thinking, “Who is my target person? Do I understand them really well? Do I understand where they come from, why they care about my product, what drives them, what makes them want to buy the thing that I’m selling? And how am I unique? Why do they want to buy from me in particular?”

These are the first two steps of the content-led marketing strategy, and they are the most important, I cannot overemphasize this. This is what it’s all about. It is about strategising, and as a business owner – as a smart business owner, as an ethical business owner – you really want to be building your marketing strategy around that foundation.

Because then it doesn’t matter what channel you choose. It doesn’t matter what tactics you take, the strategy is the bit that’s going to form a solid foundation that will keep your business running no matter how the market changes.

And believe me marketing changes so much. It changes so often, you’re never going to be able to keep up unless you are actually actively doing marketing all the time.

So, focus on strategy, not on tactics and believe me you’ll have a better business.

In one of my mentoring sessions, one of the major goals they wanted to achieve was to figure out where and how to automate their marketing and sales processes.

This stimulated a discussion that I later realised should definitely be something I share in a video!

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When is it the right time to automate?

In this article, we’re going to talk about the process that you should go through in order to decide what to automate and how.

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Wasted Time on Sales & Marketing – What Do We Automate?

The reason I wanted to do this video today was because one of the businesses that I’m mentoring was thinking that they really want to automate loads of processes and start freeing up a lot of their time that is being wasted in managing their sales team and managing the marketing leads and stuff like that.

They thought that automating is definitely the way forward in making sure that they can start working on their business instead of just getting caught up in the day-to-day.

Now the problem was though they weren’t really clear on what they needed to automate. And that was, I guess, the big question is like, “What do I automate?” So, before you can start automating anything you need to know what are your processes.

Flowchart Your Processes Before Your Automate

The way to go about figuring out what are your processes is, honestly, pen and paper. To me it’s this is the easiest way to do it is that you get a piece of pen and paper and you start drawing out a flow chart.

What I mean by a flow chart is you draw a little box and you write what’s happening in that box. You draw an arrow that says for this situation go here for that situation go there.

There’s obviously flowcharting rules and you can google about flowcharting rules and if you want to follow those rules properly you can do that. It’s good in terms of if you need to communicate it to other people, maybe to get an automation expert to help you, might want to follow flowchart rules.

However, if you’re just trying to do this for your own internal sense to get an understanding of your process just do what makes sense to you. Write down on the piece of paper what makes sense to you. Map out how everything works. Where are all of the moving parts? When a lead comes in, who is the first person to do any action on that lead? What do they need to activate? What do they need to email? What do they need to call? What questions are they asking? Write down everything that you can think of.

Figure Out The Most Common Path

But this can start to get overwhelming especially when your systems might be really complex depending on what the customer needs. This example of the business that I was mentoring, they’re providing psychological services to people through an app and so it obviously gets quite complex once you start digging out into what that customer needs once the lead comes in.

So, how do you figure out a flow chart when every single individual question creates a whole new path?

The key here is a saying that my old boss used to say Shweta Jhajharia she always used to say systemise the rule and humanise the exception. And what this means is, think about the most common path.

What is it that almost every single one of your customers do? And there will be a common path that most of your customers go through. Design your automation based on that most common path.

And then have an escape function. As soon as something happens that means they have to divert from the common path, then you start humanising. You get someone involved that will require that extra level of expertise.

Then once you’ve got this path defined you can then see how much of that can be automated.

Automation Doesn’t Have to Be Machine-Done

Automation doesn’t just mean getting a computer to do it. Automation can also mean creating a process that means a human can follow that process without much thought.

And that could be you, that could be a team member, that could be an outsourced person who you don’t really have to think about too much you just send it off to them and they do it.

When you’ve got a system in place, you don’t have to do any training, you don’t have to do any checking and updates. You’ve got a process it’s systemised. That is a form of automation.

Now, obviously, automation is very complex and there are lots of ways to do it lots of software to use if you want to have a discussion about it at any point you absolutely can message me let me know what you’re doing and I will be happy to help you as long as i have the time to do it.

We are living in an age of data. It’s fairly established that when we are able to measure something, we are most likely to focus a bit more on that thing. As the adage that Peter Drucker made famous goes, “What gets measured gets managed.”

There is a lot to be said, however, about important things in marketing that cannot be measured and, more importantly, that not everything that we measure actually matters (and can sometimes hinder more than they help).

Marketing as an industry is obsessed with data and that means you often get flooded with a ton of metrics, that not only confuse non-marketers but also get in the way of even experienced marketers from using the data to quickly make good decisions.

If you’re trying to get a more birds-eye view on the impact of your marketing strategy, what are the Marketing KPIs (that is “key performance indicators”) that you should be looking at? Let me try and help make this a little clearer for you.

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What are the KPIs that small businesses should be using to determine marketing success?

Today I’m going to go through the top-level metrics that you should be watching as a business owner to see whether your marketing activity is successful or not.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel, please do, it will help me loads with my YouTube credibility and you will get notified when I release a new video.

What are KPIs?

A KPI means a Key Performance Indicator and what that means is it is a metric that you’re using to measure to tell you whether your marketing is working well.

KPI is kind of a very generic term it can be used to refer to the whole business, it can be used to refer to a particular team member, to a particular project, to a particular department. So while KPIs can be generic, what we’re going to talk about in this article is the KPIs for marketing.

We’re not going to go into each individual channel or anything like that because the KPIs will change according to your channels. So instead of thinking about individual marketing metrics, I want you to think of groups of metrics that matter to your marketing and making sure that you have visibility across the marketing funnel.

The Five Different Levels of The Marketing Funnel

There are five different levels to the standard marketing funnel. This is not my invention this is basic marketing. Top level is Awareness, then you go down to Consideration, then you go down to Conversion, then you go down to Loyalty, then you go down to Advocacy.

Let me just run you through very quickly what each of these steps means.

Awareness is when people don’t know about your busines and you’re just trying to get them to understand who you are or find out that you exist.

Consideration stage is when people have found out you exist and now, they’re comparing you against competitors, comparing you against other services, and deciding whether they actually even need your service or not.

The third stage Conversion, when they’ve taken an active action to be involved in your business and done something that your business benefits from.

The next level is Loyalty. This is where they stay with your business, they buy again from you, and they continue buying from you when they have their need again.

And the last stage is Advocacy, taking it that step forward and talking about you – talking you up to other people and recommending your product or service to their network.

The Three Parts of the Funnel to Have KPIs For

Now why I’m going through this funnel is it’s important that that you look at this and that you have marketing KPIs across this funnel. I wouldn’t say you necessarily need metrics at every single stage of this funnel I think there are three groups that you need to pay attention to.

The Marketing KPI Group

The first is Awareness and Consideration stage. This is what I would actually say is “Marketing”. This is the stage where you’re trying to make sure that people find out about your business, that they find out about how your product or service satisfies the wants, needs, fears, and frustrations of your target person.

And so, these metrics – the metrics that you want to measure at Awareness and Consideration stage – are things like traffic and views and clicks.

The metrics that are about people seeing your product.

And this will change according to the channels you’re using. Like I’ve said there’s no specific metric that I can tell you is the most important – usually it’s something like traffic or users on something like Google Analytics. But basically, what I want you to think about is what are the metrics about them seeing my product or business.

The Sales KPI Group

The next level down is Conversion and this group, Conversion, which is on its own I think that is what we call “Sales”.

It has a very subtle difference from marketing. It needs to cooperate, it must come together, which is why I think that a content-led marketing strategy makes sense because content needs to be the thread through this funnel.

But the conversion stage is sales and I think sales is the most well defined when it comes to metrics. If you talk to any salesperson, they’ll tell you that they’ve worked very hardcore with metrics – much more than marketing level, because the marketing can be a bit more ‘fuzzy’.

Sales usually is very well defined – you’ve got purchases, you’ve got sign-ups, you’ve got memberships, you’ve got very specific things that you can measure that indicate that someone has taken an action with your business.

It is very clear when someone has taken an action with your business. It’s less clear when someone sees your business and what effect that has. Sales is super clear. Those metrics should jump right out at you.

The Customer Relationship Management KPI Group

The last group is Loyalty and Advocacy and I group these two together into what I would call “Customer Relationship Management”.

What you’re looking at here are metrics that are about the people who have already bought from you, continue to buy from you, and continue to feel a part of the community that you’re creating with your product or service.

This could be things like up-sells and cross-sells. It could also be things like responses and comments from people who are existing customers. It can be number of testimonials you receive, and things like that.

I would also say that at this level you might also be looking less at delivery-led metrics and more like activity-led metrics.

Result vs Activity Metrics

That last bit that I was saying is an important thing to define, I think. What I’ve been talking about in this video so far have been performance metrics or delivery metrics right – they’re the results. The results that you want for your business. But these are not the only KPIs that you have.

Your KPIs can also involve activity metrics.

So, going back to the funnel, your Awareness and Consideration campaign could have lots of activity metrics – things like number of blog posts you’ve put out, or number of social media posts you’ve put out, or number of billboards you’ve signed up for, or flyers you’ve dropped.

With the Conversion stage activity metrics can be things like number of sales calls you’ve made, or number of sales meetings you’ve had, or number of products that you’ve put up on the website. These are things that you can do but not necessarily the result.

But like I said at that Loyalty and Advocacy stage there might be a lot more activity metrics here. There might be things like sending out thank you letters to people, it might be wishing your customers a happy birthday on their birthday, it might be making sure that you’ve sent out feedback requests and a feedback follow-up request.

Activity metrics are also really important to consider because sometimes you can’t measure the result. You don’t know what effect is. But what you can measure is the activity and you can keep doing the activity to make sure that you’re maximizing the result even if you can’t measure it.

I hope that’s a little bit helpful in trying to figure out what metrics and KPIs you need in your business. It’s going to be super customised to your business. It’s going to be really important that you sit down and really think about what matters in your business and what metrics are important in the activities you’re doing.

If you need any help with it at all please feel free to get in touch, I’m happy to have a discussion with you even if you can’t afford to have me actually working on it for you.

Otherwise enjoy the rest of the videos on my channel and I hope to see you in another one.

When leaders get overloaded, they learn to delegate. But delegation isn’t just about passing over the task to someone else and then dusting your hands clean of it.

Here’s a simple framework that can help you make sure you pass over tasks in a way that’s efficient and ensures the task gets done with minimal delays.

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In today’s video, I’m going to go through a little framework I made up that will help you dust your hands of tasks when you delegate them.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already please do it will help me a lot and it will mean that you will get notified when I release new videos.

This is Step 5 of the Content Marketing Strategy

Today we’re going to talk about delegating tasks. In the five steps of the, you know, creating a content marketing strategy that I talk about in my other videos, the last step is Managing your Resources. What that usually means is either managing your own time so that you can get it done or managing other people – whether that’s a freelancer, whether that’s a team member – to get the tasks done that you need to do for the channels you’re advertising on in the content you need to produce.

What Most Leaders Do to Delegate Tasks

What a lot of leaders often do when they are delegating a task to someone is they tell them how to do the task – they tell them what to do, or they tell them how to do it – and then they’re done. They absolve themselves of responsibility, they check-in at the end, find out that it hasn’t been done properly and the project gets delayed.

The DUST Framework for Delegating Tasks

Let me explain to you a little framework that I made up for a workshop that I think will be super helpful to you to help you actually release your time and make sure the task still gets done on time.

I call this the DUST framework – to dust your hands off from the task.

The first letter is D. D stands for Define.

What I mean by this is that you need to really clearly define what the task is. This doesn’t just mean explaining the task in your own words and making sure that all of the variables are considered.

What it really means is making sure that the other person has understood what the task is.

It’s not just making sure that you feel you have explained the task well it’s making sure that that person has understood it.

This is especially important for a freelancer, especially a new freelancer, if they are not familiar with your business yet, you need to spend that bit of time making sure that they understand you, you understand them, and you’re both on the same page about this task that needs to be done.

But it’s not only true for freelancers. If your team members are involved it might feel like, eventually, you can start skipping over a lot of this defining as you start having a little bit of a relationship and understanding of each other. However, try to remember to keep in that habit of defining the tasks properly to make sure that nothing slips through the gaps.

The next letter is U and U stands for Updates.

What I mean by this is that you need to make sure that, after you’ve defined the task and you’ve set them on their way, the next time you check in with them is not only at the deadline.

Because if you wait until the deadline, then if there were any problems along the way they might not have brought that up with you.

Usually, with a freelancer, you’ll find that the freelancer will bring up any issues along the way, or probably will schedule updates with you anyway. However, it’s important that you have in your diary updates that are happening so that you can make sure you’re still on the same page with the person you’ve delegated the task to.

This is super important to keep your task on track for the deadline that you’ve set. Otherwise, it’s way too easy to go off deadline because, I don’t know whether you’ve managed tasks before, but in my experience, any project inevitably has something that we didn’t think of at the start or a new problem crops up or, you know, a virus gets released into the world and things have to change!

Having these regular updates means there is a point when you know for sure that you’re going to get an update. It is also just peace of mind for you that you don’t have to keep thinking about this in the back of your head because you know exactly when the next update is coming.

The next letter is S and S stands for Support.

This is really important and one that I feel sometimes leaders don’t want to do because they feel like it’s more work. But if you don’t provide support when it’s needed the task will inevitably take longer.

What I mean by support is that during those updates that you have, you need to be not only checking that you’re still on the same page but also making sure that if any problem has cropped up, the person you’ve delegated to has all the tools that they need to solve that problem themselves.

This is a very important point. You are not there to solve the problems for them you are there to make sure that they have the tools to solve the problems themselves. If you end up solving the problem for them, you will not be delegating anymore you’ll be doing the work and just pressing a button on a person to get bits done.

It’s really important that you’re making sure that you’re empowering the person that you delegated to do the job but you’re providing whatever support you have to provide as the leader. You might be the one who has the information in their head or the one who maybe has creative control so you’ll still need to be involved.

Obviously, support looks slightly different depending on who you’re delegating to. If it’s your team member, support might look a little bit more like you helping them along, teaching them how to use a tool, giving them creative input.

If it’s a freelancer that you’re delegating to you might find that the support involves more like giving creative input, more like just making sure you’re on the same page, and making sure that they know how to use the tools that are integrated into your business.

The last letter is T and T stands for Thank.

This is so important and so many leaders start to slack on this last point.

Thanking is an incredibly important part of the delegation process because it not only means that the person feels gratitude to you for having this task and doing a good job at the task, but it also means that they understand what you like.

Let me explain that a little further. This is essentially positive reinforcement. I’ll give you an example. One of my clients that I work with one day a week, they are really, really good at this. Since the entire team is remote, we have this task management system and every time a task is done or there’s an update on a task that’s come in, they’re really good with saying ‘thank you for doing this in this way it’s really helped me’.

So, as an example, it might be, “Thank you for being really clear about what the problem is here it’s really helped me to understand what needs to be done next. Here’s what I think.”

Or if somebody has said that they’re unable to do something or that they don’t have time, they would say something like, “Thank you for being clear about your boundaries this helps me plan and time this project better.” 

Even for things where there’s something that’s not gone right, you can still use thanking as a way to emphasise the parts that you enjoy about working with this person.

It’s also really, really important for morale, especially in a year like 2020, where we’re all needing a little bit of human connection. If you’re forgetting to thank your team members or thank the people that are doing work for you or with you, you’ll start to have less of a positive relationship with those people. But, more importantly, when you do thank them, you’ll have an extra positive relationship – and that means more to people now than at any other time that I’ve been working.

I hope that that framework was a little bit helpful to you in terms of learning how to make sure that when you delegate tasks, it’s done in a way that makes sure the task is completed on time and the people you’re working with are happy and you’re happy with the result.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel yet, please do it will really help me a lot, and please feel free to comment and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, if you want to see more of something.

If you need help with something, please feel free to get in touch – I want to help you. Even if you don’t have the money to hire a freelancer, get in touch, I’m happy to have a conversation and see how I can help you.

Marketing is probably one of the most important parts of your business, and most entrepreneurs do realise this.

But the big mistake many of them make it “I need someone who really knows marketing to do this all for me.” And while that’s partially true, I’m here to give you some bad news: you can’t outsource your marketing. You have to be involved in this. Let me explain…

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Marketing is way too important to leave it to marketers to do for you.

In today’s video I’m going to explain to you why, I’m sorry, but you can’t step outside of the marketing process.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel, please do. It will help me do more on YouTube and you’ll be notified when I release new videos.

Marketers Understand Marketing

Today I want to talk about the phrase that marketing is too important for the marketers. I heard it on a podcast, and the idea here is that marketers are really jammed inside marketing. This includes myself. We understand marketing. We understand the tech, we understand these concepts – the concepts that I talk about in these videos are marketing concepts that marketers know. It’s not anything new.

And the point is that when you’re doing marketing for your business, you’re not just doing marketing concepts. You’re not just applying marketing principles. You are selling your product or service.

You Need to Market YOUR Product/Service

What I mean by that is that you are selling YOUR thing. You are selling the thing that YOU’VE become an expert in. You’re selling the thing that YOU’VE built from scratch. And so, YOU are the one who has all of the best knowledge to sell that thing.

You have you got all of the correct content – you’ve got the value system that needs to be used. You are the whole reason you started this business.

Marketers Come In to Extract & Communicate Clearly

All marketers do is come in and help you extract that knowledge from your head and apply it in a way that is best communicated to your audience.

You can’t just absolve yourself of marketing once you’ve got a freelance marketer or once you’ve got a marketing person on your team. You need to be involved in this because your attitudes and your expertise, is necessary for making the marketing tick.

This Concept Applies to Marketing in SMEs

And to clarify, I definitely mean that this is applied to small and medium-sized businesses where the founder is still very important in the marketing process.

As you grow up and you become a bigger sized business, you can start to systemise a bit more. But that can only happen if the founder, the person who has started this business, has successfully downloaded their values and expertise to the rest of the team. Then you’ve got multiple people on the team now that are the best people to sell this product or service.

Only Then Can You Release the Marketing Headspace

Once you have someone on your team who understands marketing principles and now understands your business as well, along with your value system and how you want to sell this thing then you can start to release power. You can start to release that headspace because you can trust that that person will take it forward.

But until then you have to be involved. You have to download that information to a marketing freelancer or to a person on your team.

Your Marketing Will Be Better When You Are Involved

Believe me, your marketing will be better for it. If you try and get an agency to come in and take over everything, I can bet you it won’t work until they have done some kind of extensive process with you to download that information from your head.

I hope you got something out of that video in terms of motivating yourself to do a little bit of the marketing yourself. At least a little bit, at least the planning. Plan your content out.

If you didn’t or you disagree or you have questions please feel free to email me at dj@rainbowdragon.digital or comment below.

Otherwise, good luck with your business and I hope to talk to you soon.