Show Notes

Part 2 of Marketing Myths That Are Killing Your Business brings us four more myths to bust. Listen in as I finish this year’s podcasts by dispelling some major misnomers many entrepreneurs believe in that could be holding them back from building relationships and building their business.

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Hey there. Thanks for listening and welcome to the marketing matchmaker podcast. If you're looking to grow your business, increase your revenue and scale your impact all while staying true to who you are and the people you serve. This is the show for you. I'm Jennifer Tamborski, digital marketing strategists, fractional CMO, and founder of Virtual Marketing Experts. My team and I work with six and seven figure coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs who are tired of playing the guru game of one size fits all marketing. They're ready to create a business and marketing strategy that actually builds relationships with their ideal clients creates massive shifts in their business and rapidly increases their revenue. As your marketing matchmaker, I'm going to help you find the perfect marketing match for you. This show will teach you how to reach your ideal client, connect with your audience, build that perfect relationship and generate more revenue. All through a process I like to call dating your ideal client. Now let's go have some fun!

Welcome back to Marketing Matchmaker. I hope you’re having an amazing holiday season! This is my last podcast for 2021. I’ve been doing this podcast for about 8 months now. It’s definitely been a learning experience. One of the biggest is determining what to chat with you about. I’m a big proponent of asking your audience what they want. So that’s exactly what I’m doing today. Head over to yourmarketingmatchmaker.com and click on the your questions button. Let me know what you want to hear about marketing and I’ll make sure to do an episode on the topic.

This episode is part 2 of the Marketing Myths That Are Killing Your Business. If you haven’t gotten a chance to listen to last week’s episode, I’d encourage you to give it a listen. The marketing myths I’m talking about are really detrimental to your overall success. Let’s make sure to dispel the myth and create success in the next year by doing something different. 

 

Email marketing isn’t effective anymore  

One of the most common marketing myths is that email marketing is dead. This is actually something I’ve been hearing for more than a decade. With the rise of social media there came a thought process that people were less likely to open emails. This my friends is so far from the truth. To this day email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to market your business to your audience. 

Here’s why: Marketing just on social media means that you are relying on that platform to share your message to your audience in a timely manner. Email marketing however is something that you control AND even better these are people that have specifically asked to get more information from you. When done well  it’s a method to help you nudge prospects towards conversion. Big bonus here, unless the internet goes down, you pretty much always have access to your audience here. Whereas the social media platforms can go down, as we saw a few months ago with Facebook. 

 

The more types of customers I target, the more I’ll sell. 

Marketing to a wide customer base may work for big companies with huge budgets. But even for these giants, it’s not as effective as it used to be. The more narrowly your small business can target its market, the better your results will be and the more customer loyalty you’ll build. We’ve all heard the term the Riches are in the Niches, there’s a reason people say this: The more specific you can be about what you do and who you work with the better your marketing message will be, which brings in more leads, better sales, more revenue… you get the idea. 

The fact of the matter is that those business owners that niche down make 2-3 times more than those that try and service everyone.

So many times when I ask potential clients who their target market is I get a response from “everyone”, or “anyone who…” I know you’ve probably heard this if you’ve been networking, my favorite are the chiropractors that say anyone with a spine or the skin care provider who says anyone with skin. The problem with these types of generalizations is that when you are trying to talk to anyone and everyone…  NO ONE is listening. 

And my friend the ONE THING you want to have more than anything else is messaging that cuts through the noise. Which means that your ideal client needs to be able to hear your message, it needs to speak to them, they need to be able to connect with you and your messages. 

I was talking to a potential client yesterday about what she’s struggling most with, and it came down to bringing in leads. She’s struggling with her messaging and getting her ideal audience to really connect with her. When you’re looking to grow your coaching business you need to expand your audience, this means reaching people who currently have no idea who you are. 

The ONLY way to connect with a cold audience is to have your messaging dialed in. The only way to do that is to have a narrow enough niche and target audience that you're able to speak directly to their problem and in a way that they connect with.

Pricing Is Not Part of Marketing.

Pricing should be an essential part of any marketing strategy. Whether pricing products to remain competitive or pricing products to generate an aura of exclusivity, pricing decisions play an important role in how products are bought, sold and promoted. 

We’ve all done it, judged a product or service based on their price. I actually had someone once tell me that they didn’t hire me originally because I didn’t charge enough. By being “inexpensive” when compared to the market they thought that I actually didn’t know what I was doing. 

She ended up going with someone who charged 2-3 times more than I did and she spent a year getting subpar service and results. She then came back to me and we took her to a million dollar business. All of this is to say that pricing is incredibly important when it comes to your marketing strategy. 

Price too low, and you look like you don’t know what you’re doing or they don’t find value in your product, service, or solution. Price too high, and you may price yourself out of what the market will bear. 

There are several ways to determine your pricing strategy. You’ll often see business owners go through all these steps before they actually determine a price point.

• Competition-Based Pricing Strategy - This pricing strategy focuses on the existing market rate (or going rate) for a company’s product or service. Competitive pricing works especially well when your business offers something the competition doesn’t

• Cost-Plus Pricing Strategy in Marketing - Cost-plus pricing works well when the competition is pricing using the same model. It won’t help you attract new customers if your competition is working to acquire customers rather than growing profits.

• Dynamic Pricing Strategy in Marketing - Dynamic pricing can help keep your marketing plans on track. Your team can plan for promotions in advance and configure the pricing algorithm you use to launch the promotion price at the perfect time. You can even A/B test dynamic pricing in real-time to maximize your profits.

• Premium Pricing Strategy in Marketing - Also known as prestige pricing and luxury pricing, a premium pricing strategy is when companies price their products high to present the image that their products are high-value, luxury, or premium. Prestige pricing focuses on the perceived value of a product rather than the actual value or production cost.

Marketing doesn’t need to be a priority. 

There seems to be this belief that if my product or service is good enough, I don’t need to market it - it will sell itself. This in and of itself is a myth. There are thousands of coaches in just the US, depending on where you look the stats run from 10K-100K coaches. This means that you have competition out there whether or not you want to admit it or recognize it. Even if you are highly niched down you are going to have competition. 

 

Marketing is CRITICAL to the success of your business. 

 

I was asked in an interview recently how to help people understand that marketing isn’t a “nice to have”, it’s a MUST have. My answer stemmed from a very simple concept. Think about where you shop, who you buy from and who you follow. How did you find those places? Odds are you didn’t just stumble into a store or sign up for coaching by accident. 

The people you buy from MARKET themselves to grow their customer base. Seriously, just look at Amazon, Jeff Bezos didn’t just throw it up there and hope people found it. He marketed the hell out of Amazon (still does). He didn’t reach billions of people by a hope and a prayer, he did it by using marketing, especially digital marketing to his advantage.

So many coaches and entrepreneurs  don’t prioritize marketing because they think it’s something that’s “nice to have” or “a bonus.”

 I had a client come to us about 2 months ago. His 2021 has been a bit of a struggle for him. In the past he would average 30-50K months, however since COVID he’s been lucky to make about 15K. In the past, his business had grown solely by word of mouth, however when COVID hit he lost a bunch of his clients. 

While he was able to get by on what he was bringing in he wasn’t happy where his business was and he wasn’t growing by word of mouth anymore. In August he reached out to us to see if we could help. We created a multi-tiered marketing strategy for him and all the assets for the strategy. We began implementing the multi-phase strategy in October; this included paid traffic, however it went beyond just ads. 

I just had a call with him, he closed out November at 34K. The simple process of marketing helped his business to double in revenue in less than 60 days. This my friends is the power of marketing when you understand that marketing is more than just throwing up an ad. 

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 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 yourmarketingmatchmaker.com. I look forward to hearing from you.