Blake Beus  0:00  You were talking about hustlers mentality marketing plan. Yeah. All of that, like, yeah. Well tell me what you're thinking. Yeah. So

Greg Marshall  0:08  I think having a marketing strategy is important and kind of knowing how to get your messaging out there. And one of the things I was saying is, even if you don't have a large budget, I think the overall idea is you have to have a huge budget, in order to make marketing work. And that's not based that's not the case, that's not the full story, you either have more time, or more money, if you can do both. That's the optimal. But if you have less money, put more of your time. And if you have more time, he's more money, right? So you try to do a good trade off, and what you're doing but hustlers mentality, I was saying, a strong strategy that works really well from a tactical side is manual outreach, if you're trying to promote an event, or a service, right, and this manual outreach, I actually use this in the beginning of my couple of businesses, and it works like a charm, what you want to do is you want to find people who have the audience you already want, and you just start reaching out every day, you create a spreadsheet, put their name, phone, numbers, emails, and you essentially start working that list. And you want to have an offer that makes sure that the person you're talking to gets a huge benefit. In exchange for sharing the product serves that you have to their particular audience, one of the best ways to do that is to demonstrate how by them maybe donating a product, or a service, or sharing this their audience, they're also going to get in front of the audience you have right or will be going after it right. And it could be kind of have a joint promotion, and everyone wins there. Because every business is lead generating, trying to get more people to write their business. So it allows it allows you to add more resources to a marketing plan on both ends,

Blake Beus  2:00  right? Yeah, that's, uh, yeah, that's, I mean, I've participated in some of these, you know, business, lead groups and some, some things like that. And I think that's, that's one of the ways a lot of businesses are trying to do that. But the reality is, is you doing something like that for yourself, or like, owning that whole process, instead of just showing up to a lead generation group is going to be much more beneficial to you and everyone else? But I do, I do want to jump back to what you said, you know, you got either money or time if you have both. It's great. My observation, though, is that there are quite a few times when an organization or a person has money, yep. And then they go out and market because they're like, Well, I've got some money, well, let's do this. But they're not being smart with that. And they burn through a ton of cash, because that's the asset that they have a lot of Yep. And they end up getting kind of poor and miserable results. And honestly, if it's if someone had a stack of cash, and they're just starting out with a business or something, or a new venture, or a new pivot, say they made money in this business over here, starting out with the hustle mentality is still probably a better way to go. Yes. Then it is to drain your reserves upfront.

Greg Marshall  3:19  Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that I think about is a story Daymond John shared where he said, like, he made all his money and FUBU. He was a multimillionaire, he financed that new project through only through money into it thought of no marketing strategy. And he said, he blew it off. And he said, he thought, because he had the money, that that would solve the problem. We all deal with speed up the failure, right? So I like to take that lesson that he shared and think like, even if you have millions of dollars in reserves, you still should have the hustle mentality of test quickly, and in small steps, where you're not risking it. All right, so you're saying, well, let's first figure out if we do some outreach, and maybe some lower budget test, to even see if we can gain traction and figure out messaging. And you still use the same fundamentals. And I think it's the same in like, let's, let's use basketball, for example. Basketball is a very easy game, you just put the ball in the hoop, right? But there's a lot more that goes into that. But when people start to get overly fancy and focus more on half court trick shots and dunks, I mean, that's not the best way to go about it. Because if you focus more on that, those are a lot harder than just doing the fundamentals of putting the ball in the basket. It always goes back to the fundamentals instead of trying to get fancy, and do all of these fancy things. Do the things that are not as attractive, which is know how to do your bounce passes. Know how to make a layup, a regular layup, not a reverse layup, not a dunk for the free throw line. Just get very good at that and then slowly expand and that's how I kind of equate He's using a lot of money is the focusing on the slam dunk before you actually focus on learning how to do the layup

Blake Beus  5:07  Yes, yeah. Small little tangent. Yep. To, you know, hi, everybody shoots their free throws. Yes. Did you know that statistically, if everybody shot underhand free throws, you would get about 20 to 30% more free throws made in the basket, which is crazy, but no one will do it because they don't want to look, Grant shots. But but because of the motion, you're actually closer to the basket because of the rope, you're able to get a better rotation to roll it in. And it's been proven over and over again, but no one has asked because they want to look, they don't want to look like that.

Greg Marshall  5:38  You know what you actually bring up another great point, which is the perception how you want to be perceived by everyone else. Right. So don't make the mistake of trying to be perceived more like different and almost value that more than the results that you would get, yeah, that's more effective, yet, you don't look as prestigious.

Blake Beus  6:02  And the thing to remember in your business is you don't have 100 cameras on you, you're not being watched by millions of people. Most people in their everyday lives aren't really paying attention to your your business and what you're doing. So really, if you're concerned about your perception with I don't know, your peers or your neighbors or, or even maybe potential customers, I wouldn't worry about that so much as I would worry about what's working. And what's working is oftentimes not flashy, not sexy, not high budget, whatever video marketing, whatever, not not so bringing in celebrities, as a sponsor, usually what works especially at first is the basics, right? You're you're talking to bounce passes, or, or creating a list of people you can reach out to and form like a good relationship with where you can trade each other services or something like that, that is boring, all marketing. But that's marketing that is highly profitable for the amount of effort and cost.

Greg Marshall  7:02  Well, and the other thing, I want to really harp on that because I liked the point that you brought about perception. Most people don't want to do the outreach, because of the perception, they perceive it as below them, right. I'm a business owner, I shouldn't have to do that. Or my product is so good, I shouldn't have to do that. And that's really a limiting belief. Because most of the time, I know for me personally, most almost all of my biggest deals have been from outreach. Yeah. And it's, it's simply just networking and developing a relationship and not having the ego to think I don't need to be doing that, or I'm so important that I'm not going to send out reach someone else has to do it. Right. That's, that's where I think you can get a lot of trouble as you try to remove yourself just from the day to day, you know, things that businesses need, just don't worry about what the perception is get the results real

Blake Beus  7:57  well. And that is so interesting to me. Because every single business that grows from nothing to whatever, there's huge, there's almost always a strong leader, whether it's the founder or the CEO or something. But that person is oftentimes the one that's closing the big deals and building those relationships. And the nature of the deals change, right. So when you're first starting out your deals, our sales or a partnership where we can help sell a related product or service or something like that. But as the business grows, the deals now turned into well, we need to deal for our warehousing or whatever or our, our supply chain. So now you're making deals with those things. And the reality is, is as a founder, as a leader, as a CEO, whatever of your business, whether it's small or large, you're going to be making deals through outreach. And so you might as well just get comfortable right now. And it doesn't have to be a super intimidating thing. But you shouldn't ever think that doing outreach is below you. It's your business. That's because that's kind of what your job

Greg Marshall  9:11  was. And in a lot of ways too, coming from a sales background. It's similar to how a lot of people view sales, right? Like, I shouldn't have to sell my product because it's so good. Or they just don't they they almost disrespect the sales position in a way, right. I mean, I've had business owners actually telling me like, the most valuable people in organization are not sales, but that that message almost implies that salespeople are worthless or less than and I think that whole belief is just incorrect sales are just as important as every other part of the business. And, you know, in order to set selling should be your selling to help right yeah, at the end of the day, your product or service should really benefit the customer in some capacity. So why should? Why should there be a negative belief or perception of sales? When it comes to all you're really doing is helping people understand that there is help available?

Blake Beus  10:12  Right? Yeah. And the whole, like, the most important part of the business is this or this or this, I find that so crazy. It's all there. It's one, when I get in my truck in the morning, and I drive, there's a bunch of things that have to be in place, in order for my truck to get me to where I need to build. I can't go there anywhere. If I don't have tires. I also can't go anywhere if I don't have gas. Yep. So am I supposed to say, well, gas is the most important thing that you need for a

Greg Marshall  10:50  truck to work to see how far you go if you have gas, but I take the right wheel. Yeah,

Blake Beus  10:53  if I don't have one of my tires, right? It's, it's so weird. And as, as you know, a business owner, you need to be thinking about the system. Yes, right. And all of these systems, and you need to think about how these pieces need to work together and where those bottlenecks are. And I think that's a good segue to kind of go back to what we first started talking about is marketing plans. And I wanted to talk to you about that, because marketing plans is essentially creating a framework or a system for the marketing and sales of your product. So going back to that, what, assume I know nothing about marketing, what would you recommend? I do? Because I know it can be an overwhelming thing where you dump all this time and effort into it. And you get locked into this mindset and idea, and it doesn't work. Yep. Right. So there's clearly ways you can dump too much timing too locked into a way of thinking, or you can just willy nilly leave free, you know, just figure it out. And if it that also doesn't work. So yeah. So what do you need to know?

Greg Marshall  11:58  Well, number one, I think the biggest mistake that you can make, is to start at distribution. So you're so how you're going to distribute your message. The reason why I think that's a big mistake is because you don't, you haven't thought through enough of the who, who you want to get in front of. So I see business owners oftentimes go right into, I'm going to do Facebook, or Instagram or LinkedIn, or Tik Tok, or whatever, and he thinks or events. And you think, Well, where did you come up with that idea? And why that versus something else? And it's usually Well, I heard somewhere that this is great, or whatever. And all channels are great. It just they need to make sure you they have your customer. Yeah. So the first part and a marketing plan, I believe, that you should start off is creating the emotional message and trying to match that with the person you're going after. So an example would be your messaging, let's say you're going after moms. And you historically, after looking at your past customers, you notice most of it is moms, or dads or whoever.

Blake Beus  13:08  So there's some data behind Yeah, you're targeting? Yeah, so there's just guessing. Well, some data races for the person

Greg Marshall  13:14  who at least has a business already developed. They would use that data of who's already buying, why are they buying? What are their greatest pain points, their fears and desires, then you would do negative visualization. And think of all the reasons why they wouldn't buy so that you can do the polar opposite with your messaging, and develop a whole messaging plan first, what are we going to say? Why? How will we trigger them emotionally? How will we help them justify logically? And then once you have that, then you move into the distribution plan. Where do they spend these people? Where do they spend most of their time? And is that platform, a platform that I am able to distribute this message in the way that it needs to be distributed? To get a response? That's the first place I think you start is data messaging distribution. That's how I believe you should start a marketing start

Blake Beus  14:20  with your marketing plan. Okay, interesting. What if I'm brand spankin? New, I haven't sold a single one of my widgets yet. So I don't have past customer of data. Yep. How How would you recommend someone like that get started on developing their messaging. So

Greg Marshall  14:39  I recommend you come up with two to three broad audiences that you would test. Then you would start doing outreach and figuring out who responds, right. Once you figure out who responds. Then you go back to the data, the messaging distribution, yeah. And that's essentially what you want to do is you want Keep testing to figure out who responds to your message and why. And then do your own research so that people that are responding to your messages, ask them, what about this product or widget attracted you? Why didn't like it? What do you do for a living and you start figuring these things out, because if you dig deep enough, you will fit most businesses, I think, don't believe that the same type of person is buying their product. But when you start to dig in, you start to realize there's a lot of similarities to the people who keep responding to your message. And then you can really like hone in on that one segment, and make it better and better and better and speak more like clearly to that audience, and you'll get better response rates.

Blake Beus  15:45  Yeah. And I think it's good to note here is the similarities don't have to be split down with standard demographics, that's the easiest way for us, yes, to split up a population is, you know, men, women, age, location, ethnicity, things like that. And, yes, sometimes that's important. But sometimes what brings people together is none of those standard demographics. It's an idea or an interest in something or a passion about this, or that or whatever. And so it's easy to get locked into the simple demographics. But you got to dig a little deeper and do that. The other thing I would say is, if you're just starting out, you have not sold a single product whatsoever, you can take a few guesses. But then I would recommend reaching out and trying to get on the phone with a couple of people that you don't directly know. Yep, that are in that and just ask them. And the easiest way to do that is to say, on Facebook, or something like that, hey, I've got this product, it's I think it's best geared towards this demographic. Yep. Does anybody know someone who fits in that that would be willing to hop on a quick phone call with me for 1520 minutes. And I can ask them some questions. And specifically, look for someone you're not friends with or family with. Because there's an inherent bias there. Yeah, they can be as honest as they can think they're being as honest as possible. But the reality is, like, we want our friends to succeed, so go for it. But in order to actually succeed, you need to get some honest feedback about about those things. And that's a good way to, I mean, you could get some data, some meaningful actionable data, without spending a dime that way, and only putting two to three hours worth of work into that you can get some meaningful data that can then shift your efforts to say, Okay, here's who I'm targeting. Now, here's what their interests are, here's what their fears are, because I ask them those questions.

Greg Marshall  17:51  Well, I think it's a very, so a marketing plan should be extremely customer centric, right? Meaning it's not what you think they want to buy, or what you want to sell. But providing them what they give you, right, the feedback that they're actually giving you. So if they, they liked this product, because of XY and Z, and you want to sell your product because of not that you need to give in to the XY and Z because that's what they want. Right? Right. So for example, if you're selling a product, and everyone says, I like this product, because it's easy to use, it's lower cost. And it's very efficient. But you want to position the product as high end and different from everyone else. Well, I've seen businesses get so kind of like stubborn with I want to sell it this way. Even though the language that my customer who is paying me is saying this. They don't they keep pushing this marketing message. And what did they end up like, pounding their head against the wall? Because they're like, No, but I want it to, I want it to be this and it's like, but the customer, not just one customer. Many customers are saying this phrase. Yeah. Imagine if you use this phrase in your marketing, the response rate you get, yeah, and how much easier life was become. So this is a part to not be stubborn. When it comes to your messaging and branding, let the customer almost do that for you, not you.

Blake Beus  19:23  And if you do that life's a lot easier when you don't have to you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about messaging, you're more going with the flow and the more you kind of let go and go with the flow of what your customers are saying and keep kind of gearing towards that they the actual people that are actually giving you actual dollars that you act actual bank account are the ones that are dictating your marketing message because it's actually working, as opposed to me trying to like paddle my canoe up river, because I want it to be positioned like this. Yep. And I think just just last week, I was speaking with someone who wanted to launch a podcast So as part of their marketing plan, and so they know that I do a podcast and so they're asking me some questions and, and I said, Well, okay, so what's, you know, what's your audience and things like that. And they, their audience are business owners, and they're typically busy, whatever. And so he said, I really want my podcast to be maybe maybe two, maybe three minutes long each episode, because I don't ever have enough time myself to listen to anything longer than that. And he said, Well, is that what your customers want? He's like, Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Have you asked any of them? And they have existing customers? And he's like, Well, no. And I said, Look, I typically podcasts that are most popular are between are between, you know, 20 minutes and 90 minutes or the three hours long, right. And I said, and that's that highly specific to industry. But there are almost no podcasts that are popular that people listen to that are only two to three minutes long each episode. So what you're doing is basically projecting the way you feel about podcasts onto your customers. And this person doesn't even listen to podcasts. Yeah. So I was like, and that's fine. You don't have to listen to podcasts to produce a podcast. But you don't know how people are consuming podcasts because you don't even like listening to podcasts yourself. Yeah. Right. And so I just had to be frank with him said, You need to just ask some people, what, what types of things would you be interested in? And how long are is when you listen to a podcast or something like that? How long is the podcast? And? And, you know, we'll we'll see, we'll see when he gets back to me on on what he's found out. But yeah,

Greg Marshall  21:41  and I think that's very valuable, because that also goes into the the mistake of assuming everyone consumes buys or behaves exactly like the business owner, right? Are you? And that's just simply not not true, right? I mean, you have to test and see what do customers look like? What do they respond to? You need to reach out to them? How can I make this better? What don't you like about this, so I can get rid of that. And it's a never ending, like, you really have to cater to your customer base, to give them the best experience if you want any chance of referrals, organic growth, and higher profit margins, because if you don't do that, it's gonna be churn and burn. Right? You might be able to get people to do stuff, but then they leave. They don't stick around. They don't tell anyone positive about you. It's all negative. So you're really like making this harder on yourself versus if you become the company or the brand that's known as we're going to take care of our customers by any means necessary. And their feedback means something. Right, right. That starts to travel on quicker than, No, we just do our way. And that's the only way, you know, and try to kind of pigeonhole that.

Blake Beus  22:54  Yeah, I remember very, very early on Netflix used to do this. This very simple survey strategy that I'm sure sure worked really, really well. And I was I was on Netflix, way back when they they didn't even really have a streaming offering. So I was a very early adopter on that. And they said, Ed, I had a two disc plan that anyway, but about every other month or so they would send me an email with three links in it. And a simple question it was, and the questions were sometimes like, how, how was the the quality of the DVDs? And the answers would be like, it was great. It was scratched or, but still played, or it was unplayable. And if I had one question in there, and three links, I would click and I could click on one of those links. And it would say, thanks for taking our survey. That was it. And they would log that data in the background. Very, very simple. But they could have also been things like, what new feature would you like to see next? This, this or this? And I would click on one of those links. Yep. survey done? No extended survey, no, nothing, but because they I was a customer of theirs. They already knew my contact info, they could track which link? I clicked. Yep. They could say, Okay, this demographic wants these features, this demographic wants these features. And it was a very simple survey tactic. But the thing is, is you don't need this massive infrastructure to do the exact same thing. You can do that exact same thing by just calling up a handful of people. 510 people don't have to be a huge, statistically significant audience. And just ask them, hey, what new features I do you use XYZ products that's maybe a competitor or something, what features do you wish they had? Okay? Then you go and make a product or a service that fits that gap. And you just let your customers dictate your next line of products or whatever.

Greg Marshall  24:49  Yeah, and I think you know, if you just want to make your life a whole lot easier, just listen to your customers and then adjust things as you go. And I think one of the challenges that sometimes It's hard, right? Is you personalize your business, you know, you put your blood sweat and tears into it. So when you're almost afraid to hear something negative, but if you can remove yourself from whatever they say, is not a reflection on me personally, it's just a reflection on the experience the service they're getting. And I can change that, then you'll be able to get much greater growth because I think there is a level of you don't want to hear anything bad, right? Or that's, why would I ask if there's problems, but that's every problem that I've ever run into with a customer. I've always been able to use that data to go, Okay, we need to get better at this, right? Or we need to prove it that and that's just quality feedback. And that if you care about providing a good service, or a product or whatever this is, you want that, right. You don't want to put stuff out there and, and secretly, everyone's like, I really wish we had this or that. Versus you knowing that they want it you can like delightfully give it right. Yeah. It's so much easier to sell something a product or service

Blake Beus  26:10  to someone when they've told you exactly what they want. And then you give them that exact thing. Yep. It's it's like it's it's like Christmas shopping. Yeah. Right. Like when someone says, Hey, I want a red Ryder BB gun to compass in the stock, and you get them that literal exact thing. They're happy. Yep. But if you're like, Well, you know, what if it's not a read writer, but it's this, this brand, and it doesn't have a compass in the stock, but it's got a scope on top, and you give it to them? And they're like, it's okay. Yeah, that's not what I want. But that's not what I really wanted. It's so much easier to have happy customers, when you just literally give them exactly what they want.

Greg Marshall  26:51  That's a great analogy, because it'd be the equivalent. I really want that, but you should, but you think I would really, if I was a kid, I would really love this right? And then you give them the place that they're like, I don't even like video games. Yeah. Now you've alienated? Yeah, exactly. Even

Blake Beus  27:08  if you've spent more money on it, and it's like a way cooler gift. If it's not what they want. They're not going to be happy.

Greg Marshall  27:15  Well, I think that's the perfect analogy. They're asking for stuff for Christmas all the time. Let's let's let's be a good Santa. Yeah. And give them what they want. They

Blake Beus  27:24  want. So yeah, well, I think now's a good place to kind of wrap that up. We kind of put that a nice little neat bow on that. Yeah, everybody. So Greg, how can how can people get in touch with you?

Greg Marshall  27:36  Greg Marshall Dotco. And you can book a free strategy session. And just Blake Beus TOCOM All right, so next time, we'll see you later. Okay, bye.