Dysfunctional Marketers

Today I’m going to talk about something that every company globally is guilty of.

Something that if most small business owners and top executives changed, would produce something only written in fairy tales.

It’s called bad marketing.

I’m talking about dysfunctional, underperforming, unusable and rotten marketing pieces that are still being placed.

Marketing pieces paid for by enterprises.

These businesses are achingly unaware of the damage they’re doing to not only their business, but to the economy as a whole.

These pieces of content and advertising are taking up space on canvasses, websites and social media pages.

They are like books collecting dust because nobody cares about them.

A bad marketing piece is one that either does nothing, or does damage. However, since each marketing piece costs money, it doing nothing, also does damage.

No return on investment? Then the advertising is hurting the company AND could be hurting their reputation too. Ever seen someone’s face so much you got used to them? Well, if consumers are trained to ignore your marketing, they’ll be more gullible to do so with your future pieces.

So not only does bad marketing potentially hurt your budget, but also your reputation.

But how many people are actually putting out bad marketing? Surely goliaths like Verizon, Walmart, and Honda know what they’re doing right?

I mean they’re putting out high budget TV advertisements, updating their social media very frequently, and of course, making alot of money.

According to https://fournaisegroup.com/ 70% of Customer Value Propositions, Messages and Product Stories are Not Effective Enough to linger in the minds of consumers for a measly 5 minutes.

Your customer forgets about you by the time they reach their car, even after grabbing cash to buy whatever your selling.

This means everyone’s including top companies. IN fact since 47% of all advertising space is taken by businesses with 500 employees or more, I’d say its mostly top companies.

In other words, most marketing sucks. Small businesses aren’t the only ones doing it wrong, global enterprises are too.

What makes most marketing ineffective? And why do business titans all over the globe waste billions on some of the most unprofitable advertising?

Well, today we’re going to take a look at a few reasons why.

The Small Business Owner

Marketing is not something you can start today and achieve tomorrow.

Often it takes days, months, and in most cases years to achieve a consistent net return on your time and money.

Notice the word consistent.

This is because your content and advertising is designed to attract new customers, but the profit isn’t made until some of these newcomers convert into loyal repeat customers.

Now it’s hard to determine who’s become a regular without sufficient tracking. You can’t follow customers around all day and see how many of them become regulars.

Since the goal is to create regulars, results not only take longer to achieve, it’s also very hard to determine how close you are to said goal.

Marketing agencies don’t realize this. It is often only the highly experienced CMOs that visualize the customer journey as a whole and deal with it on all sides.

Imagine if you had a dog but he had a bird tail. Would seem odd wouldn’t it? This is what most companies look like when they hire out just any old agency.

This is because most agencies don’t put in the work to match up all the marketing to the customer experience. All they do is post is engagement bait (stuff like giveaways, testimonials) without content that builds the substance of what the company is really about — what the entire experience will be like.

Marketing agencies prey on small businesses without even knowing it.

Since they have tunnel vision and only truly care about acquiring new customers, they lose sight of the true objective — which is creating loyal repeat customers.

Since the marketing space is so convoluted. It’s easy to mistake progress for likes and comments.

This is why there’s so many scammers out there posing as legitimate marketing agencies.

Since it’s difficult to understand what you’re doing or if what you’re

doing is even working, it’s much easier to scam novices in this industry.

Keep an eye out for agencies that

• Only rely on engagement as feedback for if your media “worked”
• Only cares about new followers and customers and has no strategy to convert them into regulars
• Seem to have more eye catching media than an actual content strategy

This is why you as a business owner should heed great caution

when looking to marketing or advertising professionals.

Agencies often hire bots to do their bidding. They make it seem like their content is working when in reality you got a “air balloon” page. Looks big on the outside, but on the inside it’s empty.

So you may be thinking “we’ll, I’ll just hire someone with college experience who doesn’t have the halfhearted plans of a fully staffed agency”.

A college student looking to work for you is unfortunately only trained to make pretty graphics and eye catching videos. They are however, not trained in doing the math on how many consumers are now sticking to you like honey.

Because as we have proven before, nobody knows how to create regular customers.

However, if you’re still convinced to hire out, a college student having an background in economics or business is actually more worthwhile to you than one who has only studied communications and graphic design.

You want them to think about the environment their competing in as a whole and not just focused on engagement bait or pretty graphics.

But even then, these students are in debt and want to make a living with healthcare, so they’ll demand more compared to what a sophisticated agency will cost you.

It’s a double-edged sword.

So which one is better? A marketing professional who’s trained to mislead you, or a college student fresh with little to no knowledge on how to guide you? Both come with risks and profits but will seldom get you the results you desire without understanding what your measuring.

If business owners knew what we were doing, We could deal with this more effectively instead of giving our hard earned fruit to someone who could potentially damage the company.

So what do we do? We have to find and identify regulars.

Finding and Identifying Regulars

As a business owner, you want to succeed with very little headache. But results are not easy to achieve or even identify because having followers does not equal results.

Cultivating a plan to have regular paying customers is what makes all the difference.

Read that again, “a regular paying customer” is the result you should expect from good marketing.

It is the sole objective of all your marketing efforts

If your marketing attracts someone who come and tries your product, that’s a level of success to be proud of.

On the other hand, if that same customer tries your product and they never come back, it’s undeniable you’ve achieved a small breakthrough, though, you didn’t achieve the result you’d need to be in business for the long-term.

If the college graduate does not have this in mind, you’re wasting money.

If your marketing message is good, but your business doesn’t have the ability to convert customers to regulars, you’re already losing money.

If the marketing agency doesn’t discuss this or have this in mind, you could potentially lose a huge amount of money.

Most people get this wrong.

So, when the time comes to hire a marketer yourself when you’re uneducated in that field, you have to use your limited expertise to identify a solid marketer who’s going to deliver results.

But business owners are unaware what factors create a regular customer. They’re working with very limited time, attention, and budget; to identify, interview, and train these people.

It’s no wonder why all the marketing you see is seldom effective.

And this is what every business is doing.

Every business has a lack of awareness to hire someone who also has lacks experience with bringing in regulars.

This brings up another essential question — if this is ordinary with small businesses, what about big businesses?

Is their marketing truly dysfunctional? And if so, why?

Let’s identify whether or not this is true.

Top Companies

A survey of 1,000 U.S marketers was commissioned by the Content Marketing Institute.

These marketers were working with companies with over 1,000 employees (so big big companies).

Navigating through all these marketers, only 9% strongly agreed with the statement “I know our digital marketing is working”.

These are not just baseline freelancers popping out of the woodwork, these are top marketers at the peak of their game. Marketers that perform at Intel, Walmart, Starbucks, and so on.

These are executive marketers ****getting paid MILLIONS to do what they do, and they don’t even know what they’re doing!

How could that be? Well these companies lasted a long time and marketing has changed more in the last ten years than the last 50 years combined.

It used to be extremely simple.

You put the word out on Newspapers, TV, Radio, Magazines, and Billboards, and hope

that a couple new people would walk through the door.

Whoever had the risked the most amount of money would get the customer. That was the game.

Back in that day the amount of customers was equal to the ratio of dollars dropped on any source of media.

Ten dollars in 4 customers out.

Nowadays? Betting money without strategy is a failure because things have changed drastically.

There’s no longer a limited amount of TV or magazine space because we have the internet.

But that’s just the icing on the cake.

On top of that most “mom and pops” don’t have a clue how to market so they copy what the “big boys” are doing.

Lets say you as a business owner needs to market your business. Well, you have to learn from somewhere right? So where do you learn from? Surveys show the typical business owner absorbs what either top companies are doing (who we already evaluated 9% know what they’re doing) or worse, they study their “mom and pop” neighbors who are also incompetent in the realm of marketing and copy what they’re doing.

Because of that, most people aren’t truly aware of what they’re doing and often don’t drive homerun results.

They don’t know the difference between good and effective marketing that delivers consistent results versus what is downright dysfunctional.

Marketers in College

Another reason big companies are prone to dysfunctional tactics is due to the fact that colleges are teaching apprentice marketers the incorrect guidelines for how to create new regular customers.

They teach them how to make pretty graphics that only look cool from far away, but are forgotten shortly after.

They’re taught to use words that have no substance like “innovate”, “solution”, and “processes”. These words not only are vague and abstract, but they are so widely used they make every website look alike. This in turn repels customers away from your door, leading them to a competitor who understands what they’re doing.

These colleges want to help interns. But the companies hiring the majority are the top companies who don’t know what they’re doing. Sure they got the job, but they’re commanded by incompetent leaders who claim to be efficient marketers – leaders who favor alluring commercials and mass smearing of their business name without steering the boat with some thought around how to intrigue and educate the public on their services or products.

This sparks another question: Why should colleges teach something different in their marketing courses if it’s only been working for the past 50 years?

Maybe because it’s due to primitive tactics that were working for the past 50 years. But remember what I told you — that marketing has changed more in the last 10 years than the last 50 combined.

As long as they can put “bachelors degree”, on their resume, who cares. Companies, big or small, find confidence while hiring graduates with a degree. The degree itself is what gives companies comfort while paying these individuals a considerable amount of money each year, no matter what stone age education they’ve received.

Even senior marketers who gradated from college are molded into this flawed thinking. Many of these people bring these ideals up the “corporate ladder”, passing on their dysfunctional teachings onto the next generation of “soon to be brainwashed” marketers.

The cycle continues, and will continue.

But it hopefully ends with this writing.

This brings us to the harsh truth that you can’t rely on most people to confidently drive forward results. Not until we stop manufacturing marketers who have no care whatsoever of the true objective at hand – creating regulars. Once regulars become the “big idea” then and only then can a business multiply their profits substantially.

This is why really good marketing is only seen in a handful of unique companies.

So, knowing you can’t trust other businesses, and knowing you can’t really trust a marketer with educational accolades, let’s say you hire a marketing agency What could the drawbacks be? What are the benefits? Let’s explore this idea in depth.

Agencies

Every marketing agency has one goal in mind that’s the exact same as the business owners

who hired them and that goal is profit.

Now every agency has 3 factors you need to consider

• How much they charge
• How many clients they can take at one time
• Time Sensitivities or Urgency

How Much Agencies Charge

Now, most people don’t have a clue about marketing. So to the general public, every marketing agency looks the same.

In addition, when everything looks the same across multiple different companies in the eyes of the consumer, the service becomes “commoditized”. To the uneducated business owner or consumer, the cheaper the commodity, the better. That’s why we get coffee beans in Vietnam and semiconductors from China. Since all agencies look the same like ripe tomatoes in the grocery store, the business owner looks for the cheapest one.

However, in most circumstances the agency offering the higher price is most likely to be worth your money. The cheaper you go, the more likely you’ll be scammed or smeared.

Often, a marketing agency serving cheap prices often has

• Much less quality work
• Much less quality consultations
• Doesn’t realize the end goal is to obtain regulars
• Much more clients
• Is often private labelling to poorer countries overseas
• Can potentially be a scammer agency looking to steal your money
• Could potentially damage your brand using shady, automated marketing tactics.

These companies take on more clients at the market’s reasonable rate (which is low) lets say $100 (super low). Since these employees are low risk due to the amount of money they are being paid, companies will oftentimes turn to other companies for inspiration.

Put media on every channel frequently.

So, what they expect is “put media on every channel frequently”.

But there’s one major major issue here, this is not effective marketing.

Nowadays every marketing agency has been diluted to commoditized

video editing and graphic designing.

On top of that, people equate followers and likes to money. Although this may be true for some companies, followers and likes don’t generate the same revenue as actual product sales.

Since that’s what people are willing to pay for, that’s what they produce.

It’s a straightforward supply-and-demand concept, right? But that’s not what true marketing is about. Marketing is a lot of work. It’s about using the right tactics, such as:

• Understanding the consumer’s mindset and identifying every roadblock between them and your product
• Overcoming objections with targeted, high-impact content
• Building anticipation through pre-selling and pre-framing product launches
• Mastering funnel marketing strategies
• Developing strong branding techniques
• Utilizing analytics to drive decision-making
• Leveraging advanced technology
• Applying key psychological principles
• Crafting highly persuasive and compelling copy

True marketing demands substantial work, which inevitably restricts the number of clients a marketing agency can handle.

How Many Clients Agencies Can Take At One Time

Since true marketing takes a lot of work, agencies and marketers can

only handle so much and this makes them very limited.

This also makes them extremely limited when dealing with

enterprises and large businesses.

This is because true marketing requires focus, attention, and some problem solving.

However, the more businesses an agency takes on, the more divided they become.

Their focus, attention, and problem solving skills become split, it causes their services to become less and less effective with differing uniqueness and craftsmanship embedded into each project.

There are private agencies that exist costing $30k to $50k per month because they

know they can only take on 10 – 20 clients. These businesses often run the entire marketing

department for the clients they take on and drive a lot of growth because

of how exclusive they are with each client.

On the other end of the spectrum there are $300 a month agencies that promise to

“manage social media” but take on so many clients they just post pictures and

quotes that don’t drive any real value.

They have the “just posting” philosophy which is a defective way to get regulars online.

Very rare is a marketing company that can help build a brand as influential as Nike or Apple. Hopefully you’re starting to understand why most marketing strategies are so dysfunctional.

Time Sensitivities and Urgencies

Now, on top of all these reasons why crafting amazing marketing is difficult, we come to our final obstacle blocking agencies from hitting their full potential.

With the increase of speed in most technology we see today, a certain impatience

persists among most of many business owners.

Everyone expects things instantaneously and for this reason time sensitivity is often

unrealistic and can damage marketing pieces from reaching their full potential.

Enterprises see this more than ever as CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) often push more urgency on their marketing departments instead of carving out time to craft and research superior marketing pieces.

From a SEMrush survey of 1,500 businesses, only 36% of respondents claimed their strategy was

fairly developed, meaning only 36% thought their planning and marketing was above average. ****

On top of that only 19% of companies believed their marketing efforts were very successful in 2021. Further evidence that nobody really knows what they’re doing when it comes to this line of work.

55% of companies in the SEMrush study said what made their content strategy so great was “improving the quality of their marketing pieces”. This takes considerably more effort and time.

Not to mention is an absolute lie. If this was true, we wouldn’t have enterprise leaders putting out top dollar commercials and content and yet only 9% of these enterprise leaders believing that their high budget marketing was working.

You can have pretty graphics or videos but if they’re not part of a bigger content strategy, they’re not successful marketing pieces .

These are ways to increase engagement and a following, but not tools to promote products in ways that invite customers to see their true value. Therefore, the 55% of companies in the SEMrush survey have flawed thinking and false confidence.

Patience and strategic planning is key. But it’s hard to be patient and plan when the CEO or business owner is breathing down your neck waiting for their next batch of uninfluential graphics.

So with uninformed business owners hiring agencies expecting them to urgently deliver followers and 4k aesthetic content, most businesses have no idea what they’re doing. This is why we’re trying to take you a step in the right direction.

By following a couple principles your marketing can become much greater than literally (and I mean literally) every business within your city. Big promise I know, but from the above we can see why that would be possible.

And To Add Insult to Injury

Agencies are often adept at acquiring customers but leave it up to you to

turn them into regulars.

I see posts all the time on LinkedIn from neighboring agencies claiming that they received leads but the business couldn’t keep them. Then they tell a story touting statements like “it’s the business owner’s job to get regulars”.

This is because most agencies are scams who don’t actually know buying psychology.

All they know is how to press the button to deliver a simple google ad, a very easy skill

on it’s own.

At Monolith Media, we think it’s unfair to reach out to businesses who are

having trouble acquiring customers and expect they know how to keep them.

In our line of business, we try to assist companies with our knowledge about how to retain customers, not only through our content, but our briefings as well.

We also have guaranteed consultations for free, where we come and examine your business and give you the steps you need to create certified regulars.

This is because we believe attracting and keeping customers must be part of the same overall strategy.

When a business focuses on customer retention while the agency focuses solely on acquisition, the strategies are misaligned, leading to mediocre results.

With many agencies operating this way, your plan for sustainable profitability is often set up for disappointment from the beginning.

Our goal at Monolith Media with marketing is simple: acquire regular paying customers, and your business will be successful. If you have regular, frequent, loyal, and consistent customers, you will be destined for success.

These regular customers are the backbone of your business, and you need tools that not only capture and retain them, but also track how many you’ve collected with your adventurous marketing.

This is why most business owners have their head in the ground when it comes to marketing. They’re not actively plotting or executing broad long-term strategies that would net them a lifetime of regulars. Rather, they focus their attention on the marketing that has the lowest cost and risk – counting followers and beautifying their website.

A follower, page like, or subscriber is an effective way to track the results of your marketing. But these tools don’t track the revenue that you’re trying to collect by providing a product or service.

If more business owners identified and pursued regular paying customers when their business first launched, there wouldn’t have to be a playbook on advertising. Marketing would just happen.

Most marketing from top companies is not created to attract new customers but to re-engage current ones. This is the most essential marketing strategy, and is the goal of marketing as a whole. Regulars are key people in company study groups, studies that are created to identify who and what to market next.

If companies utilized their tools and applied this focus to their marketing tactics, it would drastically change the company’s return on their investment of time, money, and resources. This is because most information governing your customer’s opinion and emotions around your company are voluntarily given to you by your regulars.

This critical information you can keep as the basis for all future marketing campaigns.

Instagram and Facebook

Instagram shouldn’t be used to acquire new customers or to build authority in your digital presence. Instead, these channels should be strategically leveraged to re-engage fading regular customers and increase referrals.

Each post should offer something that appeals directly to your regulars—something they’d want to come back to see or buy. Any content created for other objectives is often a waste of both time and resources.

There was a time when Instagram and Facebook were great for catching brand new customers and expanding digital presence, but those days are long gone.

Meta has done a fantastic job ruining these platforms so that almost no traction is built when posting things online. They ruined these in hopes to expand their advertising revenue so you’d have to “pay to play”, and boy, did it work.

Everyone started getting the message and starting going “all in” on advertising as opposed to posting while expert marketers started moving all their followers to an email list – which, by the way, having an email list is a great way to keep up with all your regulars due to the ability to always stay in touch, no matter what the algorithms are doing.

But that’s not the worst part.

Have you heard of the ‘Dead Internet Theory‘? It’s a concept from IT circles suggesting the internet is much emptier than it appears. Studies on website traffic have revealed that 57% of traffic is bot-generated, not human.

When these IT people put all their applications together, 57% of all their combined traffic was bot traffic. Bots are not humans, and they can’t possibly become true, paying customers that return.

So, since this number is an average of a bunch of different websites, I use this number to apply to the followings of most paid client’s social media pages.

This means a large portion of social media engagement is likely coming from bots, not actual customers. I apply this average to many paid clients’ social media pages. Therefore**,** I divide engagement numbers in half to estimate real human interaction.

Social media pages can easily become ‘bot traps’. Essentially am page that a botnet (network of bots. Think of it as a hive mind of fake accounts) can target. This botnet of accounts will flock to your page to inflate it’s worth and promote products and services to whoever engages with it.

Bot accounts mimic real followers and inflate engagement statistics to drive up prices for ads. These bots increase in value the more they interact with content, appearing like real people.

Avoiding ‘bot traps‘ is possible, but it requires a counterintuitive approach: make it harder to follow you. Set your pages to private and allow only regulars to interact. Remember, our goal on social media isn’t to attract new customers—that’s futile. Instead, social media should be used to ‘grease the wheels‘ for regulars to return.

You want your loyal customers back more often, spending more, and bringing friends with them. That’s the goal I focus on when working with clients on their content.

The Starbucks Way of Keeping Customers

Running advertising is a good way to attract new customers, but if what they walk into is a horrible environment? They will never come back, and that potential customer will be wasted. Before you start advertising, your system and plan for retaining customers must be solidified.

You’re always going to lose money on the first sale. On average, the cost of getting that initial purchase is 3x the customer acquisition cost (CAC). That means, even when the customer buys once, you still have the potential to have lost money automatically.

This is the average for every industry.

The only way to make money off advertising is securing repeat customers. The only way to catch repeat customers is to build an environment that encourages them to come back..

Seth Godin (expert marketer) talks about Amazon and how they created the perfect environment to retain customers. They do this by optimizing the website by rearranging its homepage to only show products you’re likely to buy – using an algorithm that cultivates an environment that offers products they will most likely purchase or need.

Cultivating The Perfect Environment

Amazon builds the perfect environment for you, making it easier for a customer to open the website from time to time. No matter how your tastes grow and change, Amazon has the perfect buying environment for any user.

Companies can’t possibly rearrange everything for every customer, but they can identify what their customers enjoy and want and build an environment around those needs. This is done whether you are a regular or not, which is why the environment is so effective.

However, not every business has this algorithm – some are brick and mortar, trying to find ways to invite customers multiple times through customer interaction, knowledge of the product, and cultivating an inviting environment the customers can return to regardless of the location. This is what your regulars want.

This is exactly what Starbucks did.

More Than Just Coffee

Starbucks realized that most regulars wanted a comfortable place to go to.

Whether it’s business work, schoolwork, or just meeting up with a friend, they realized people wanted to go somewhere or go out to a place that will feel safe.

They wanted a place to go that felt like a second home, or an office space that is more friendly than the traditional space they’d have to work in otherwise.

So what did they do?

They designed it to be a place to hang out and get things done. They created an environment that drew people in because of the friendly servers, the delicious coffee, and many places to sit and talk with friends. They created a modern upper-class interior design that lures and relaxes people into coming back, and it works.

The music and interior perfectly crafted and replicable across all couple thousand Starbucks environments.

This is their tool to retain customers. This is what they do.

They did this because they knew they needed people to come back again and again

in order for them to be profitable.

This is why they have locations sprouting out like sunflowers.

Now whenever they do decide to do advertising or marketing, they don’t just get someone who

comes in and buys something, they get what we all aspire to capture with our essence of

marketing.

They get regulars.

And they do this using the environment they built.

They could literally buy any billboard, and just slap a picture of their interior on it with some people

sitting on their laptops or chatting while drinking coffee.

Everyone who sees this billboard will immediately feel a connection to this place, this environment, and would then imagine themselves in that welcoming environment.

The foundation of Starbucks is their environment.

This is what a sales environment should achieve, prolonged interest and more sales and happy regular customers.

Without a good sales environment, marketing will do nothing for your business if there isn’t an environment that offers more.

Eventually, you’ll lose money. Having a way for your customers to return, stay, and browse your products constantly will be your greatest asset.

Rethinking Loyalty

A sales environment is essentially an optimized environment designed to influence repeat

purchases.

Digitally, it’s something that captures data, and offers cross-sells and upsells.

But traditionally, it’s either a trendy addictive product or a place that makes the initial purchaser

feel something.

The place either makes them feel some connection to the environment or website, typically based on their emotional resonance with the business’s services or products. Of course, making people feel something requires a substantial amount of research, planning, and resources.

This is why when people come to us for marketing and advertising, most of the groundbreaking work doesn’t come from writing marketing copy or whipping up pretty graphics, but by optimizing your environment.

Although you can’t craft a magnetic environment today or tomorrow, you can definitely start today. Little by little, you’ll create the perfect room or website environment where people will love to buy in.

Sales environment optimization is key for both digital and traditional worlds. For now, you should know that if you don’t have an optimized environment, people will be repelled from purchasing regularly.

You should not be marketing or advertising without some fundamental idea around your regular’s preferred environment.

The items below are non-negatable. At first glance you may be asking yourself “why would I need that?” but in time, everything will be explained.

Here is the list of things you need to have what I call an “optimized environment”.

• A Refined Product
• A Customer Loyalty program
• Account registration on your website
• A promotion to increase referrals

Notice the difference between my checklist and the example I gave you with Starbucks.

Why is it that this list doesn’t touch on things that Starbucks had in my example?

When Starbucks committed to becoming the ultimate “third place”—a spot outside of home or work—they had data to support this strategy.

With the right tools, you can make informed decisions to shape your business uniquely.

These tools not only help you create regular customers but also allow you to recognize and understand who they are.

To get a perfected environment like the one at Starbucks, our consulting services are valuable and can help you put everything into place—whether it be ideas to cultivate an environment that will have a return on your investment, or to help implement successful marketing practices.

However, having an this checklist applied to your business is highly recommended. After you have all these in place, your money won’t be wasted on advice—it will be invested in your future.

Once you have identified regular customers, you can talk to them and have them join the conversation of where you should go with your business.

Once you have identified who your regular customers are, as well as their interests, you can talk to us and have us join your business venture in a positive way. We’ll help build that conversation to see where your strengths and weaknesses are with your business’s current marketing plan.

Most small business owners do not have these things in place. However, when looking at top companies, most of them have all these things in place.

They capitalize on every customer their advertising pulls in, doing exponentially well with the return on their investments.

Big Challenges for Big Businesses

Imagine you’re an executive at a top company. You get paid very well, and like everyone, you have an immense fear of being fired. Your boss comes to you and says, “Whip up a new ad.” So you resort to the highest cinematography ever paid for, and believe that it will build a company image.

Building a company image is a very vague goal and minimal in terms of revenue being received through that venture. However, it works for his boss because that’s what they’ve been doing for the past 50 years. This is what’s called brand advertising, or traditional advertising.

Brand advertising is a form of advertising used to elevate the appearance of the company. It can’t be tracked because the ad is simply distributed and it supposedly builds awareness.

If a marketing professional does marketing this way, the executive doesn’t get fired and he has no risk for any advertisement that he does from now until forever—he’s getting paid to do horrendous advertising and getting away with it.

This is why there’s so much advertising out there by big brands that produce miniscule results..

Ask yourself this question: Do you want your integrity compromised for job security, or do you want your integrity strengthened by doing the best advertising that you can?

Most people choose the former, since it’s easier and secure—there is no risk when you don’t try unique, innovative ways to advertise. This is why there’s so much advertising out there by big brands that produce minuscule results.

However, other executives aren’t so lucky to have this sort of security when doing mediocre work. They have to set up all of the tech, what’s known as “setting up the net.” They are tasked with analyzing the customers who came through from their advertising. They have an actual job to make sure the environment is working and building regular purchases. This is why you can absorb information from top companies on building your environment, but not advertising.

So how do we know if your business is “good enough” to do marketing?

A defined environment is designed to keep customers. So we need to see if your environment is good enough at keeping customers coming back.

There are a couple of ways to determine this, but first, we need to measure what a regular is before we can try to determine if we have them or not.

Frequency Value

All regular customers have a frequency value. This frequency value is different for every industry.

If you’re in a “repair” industry, the customer comes to you when something is broken so there is no true frequency value. Dealing with customers that have no frequency value requires much more strategic input in order to make them come back to the establishment, or refer others to come to your business when they need repairs.

If you own a business that sells drinks, however, your customer has a frequency value. Often, if you compare frequency values across competitors, you’ll find out what a regular’s activity looks like. You can determine this first and foremost by using your data. However if you’re reading this and you don’t have the tools in place, my favorite website to lookup these figures is statista.com.

However, Statista.com does charge a fee of $199 a month.

You can also ask your customers how often they frequent their competitors and get an estimate for what your regular activity should look like

You also need to get an idea of how frequent regulars can be. If you don’t understand what’s possible, you’ll assume someone who comes in twice a year is a regular, when that’s far from the truth.

You need some way to measure it.

The Refined Product

There are a myriad of books on product and service design, but both share the same key principles.

But let’s start with a quote from my favorite marketing book: “Trading Up”

• “Why bother with a product that offers neither a price advantage nor a functional or emotional benefit? Companies that offer such products are in grave danger of “death in the middle.” They will be unable to match the price of low-cost products or the emotional engagement of New luxury goods. They will lose sales, profitability, market share, and consumer interest. To survive, they must lower prices, revitalize, and reposition their products, or exit the market.”

                                                                              ”- Trading Up by [Michael J. Silverstein](<https://www.amazon.com/Michael-J-Silverstein/e/B001H6QR1C?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_4&qid=1660510916&sr=8-4>)

There are two factors that make up your place in the market: product and marketing.

Without a good product, you’ll get a bunch of initial sales but no regulars, killing your business. But, a good product with no marketing, you’ll get no sales whatsoever.

They go hand in hand with each other. Sometimes the product is so good and universal, you don’t need to carve out an audience. All you need to do is let people know the product exists.

Unfortunately, if you’re here, that’s probably not the case.

But you must examine and realize that if the product isn’t the reason, your marketing isn’t working. Take a second and ask yourself if this is a product problem, or a marketing problem.

This book can’t help you if you have a problem on the product layer.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself before starting or continuing possibly broken marketing:

• Why do people buy this compared to my competitors?
• Why do people buy this?
• Is there an emotional connection I can increase with this product?
• Is there something I could add to make this product align with my audience?
• Which segment of my subscribers are buying this more than others?

These questions are essential in refining your product and marketing strategy for business growth and customer loyalty.

Why Do People Buy This Compared To My Competitors?

If you can hone in on why people buy from you over competitors, you can “force multiply” by either expanding upon that dimension of interest within the product, or you can advertise that connection and make it a key point in your value proposition.

The reason why people go to Starbucks is the environment, so imagine if they just had a billboard of the Starbucks interior. The marble counter with the pastry case and the wooden chairs and possibly wooden tables. I think that would be enough to persuade someone to go in.

Or of course, they could multiply the other way. “Expanding that dimension” would possibly mean selling Starbucks furniture. This would sell a bigger piece of their environment and make bigger transactions.

Why Do People Buy This Product

Another good competitive advantage regulars give you, besides frequent purchases, is their ability to answer hard questions like this. When you acquire them, ask some regulars why exactly they keep coming back. Once you find the reason, you can expand and advertise using that reason as fuel.

Emotional Connection

The third point of emotional connection is a bit hard to answer for regulars.

Of course, you can ask, “What feelings does my product give off?” However, you’d get very surface level emotions that aren’t integral with effective marketing. The best products tap into unconscious emotions and desires.

Here’s a list of questions that could possibly give you some hidden answers for your product. Write them down somewhere so you don’t forget them.

• What would your life be like if you didn’t have this product?
• What image does this product represent to you when you hear the name?
• If this product had a natural environment (cave, island, etc..), where would it live?
• What words come to mind when you think about us?

How Can I Make My Product Align With My Audience?

The fourth point is fairly tricky.

If you’re selling a sales course to sales managers, you could add managerial material to make it more aligned to them.

Meanwhile, if you’re selling coffee to travelers, you could simply change the name to something that resonates, like “Traveler’s Coffee.”

The messaging would stick with them due to it being personalized and catered to the audience you’re trying to reach. Changing the messaging or adding features that would align with your audience is a great marketing trick, and you should constantly be spotting new ways to do this.

Which Segment Of My Subscribers Are Buying This More Than Others?

When asking questions, be on the lookout for some similarities amongst your customers. Think demographically.

If you do find a segment of your audience that buys or pays more for what you sell, you should align it more to them.

That means nearly alienating everyone else that wouldn’t find value in your product. This will give your product more value and brand strength over most companies who try to sell to everyone.

If you do find a good segment that values your product more than others, capitalize on them and make sure you do all that you can only speak to that group of people.

Make messaging and email updates that only call to them, creating features that are only designed for their needs and interests. You’ll make more profit in the long run serving one super defined group of people than multiple vaguely defined groups.

These are all things that could be hard to figure out.

Luckily for you, there are multiple ways to track all this data and answer these questions for yourself.

Customer Loyalty Programs and Account Management Systems

The next thing you need to have in place is a customer loyalty program. You need it specifically to answer the questions the last chapter and to solve complex marketing problems.

Customer loyalty programs basically gives your customers rewards for giving you information and frequently returning to your business. ****The information they give you will be 10x more useful than their money in the long run.

For those of you who don’t know, I live in the Midwest area. Here, we have this coffee shop called Dutch Bros.

Dutch Bros is like any other coffee shop, except they have a dedicated line of “rebels”—blended Red Bull energy drinks that can be equipped with a vast variety of flavors.

They used to do this marketing thing where every time you bought a drink, they gave you a stamp on a little card. If you got 10 stamps, they would give you a free drink.

Well about a year ago, they switched it up.

TThey made you download an app to get these stamps. Instead of stamps, you accumulate points on the app, giving you gifts and free drinks based on the number of points you accrue with each purchase.

They made you download an app to get these stamps. Instead of stamps, you accumulate points on the app, giving you gifts and free drinks based on the number of points you accrue with each purchase.

Having a look at a Medium article titled “The Psychology of Loyalty Programs,” let’s see the governing psychology on how this turns customers into regulars:

One of the most important concepts for loyalty programs is the theory of reinforcement. Most people understand the idea of reinforcement.

Whether you’re training your dog to sit, getting your kids to do their homework or ensuring your employees turn up to work — reinforcement is everywhere.

B.F. Skinner developed the concept of operant conditioning. The basic idea is that behavior which is followed by a reward (positive reinforcer) is more likely to recur.

                                                              *-The Psychology of Loyalty Programs (Medium Article)*

Basically, when enforcing a customer loyalty program onto your consumers, you can set up an addictive system that keeps customers coming back.

But most importantly, setting these things up gives you the ability to track each and every purchase. You can also require information in order to sign up, giving you the ability to segment and target your audience in ways never before possible.

You can also require information in order to sign up, giving you the ability to segment and target

your audience in ways never before possible.

This is why I made customer loyalty programs and account management software non-negotiable.

What follows is a story of how we helped one of our clients, and how well it turned out by switching tactics to gain regular customers.

Doing some outbound work, I came across a man who interested me.

He was a good source for financial content and economic news, so I decided to reach out to him and thank him for bringing out such a high caliber of content.

After talking for a few months, he reached out to me.

Turns out, he ran an insurance business. He said, “It was the easiest business to start and run.”

One thing he couldn’t start and run efficiently, though, was his marketing strategies. So he reached out to me for help.

The work I did with him was phenomenal, so I decided to include it here to emphasize the importance of gathering the right data.

The man who owned the business did not want recognition from this blog post, so I redacted his name.

Here’s the story.

The Challenge:

Auto insurance is a fiercely more competitive market than most markets. In order to drive more leads to his company, insurance.com, we had to elevate their message above the rest of the noise in advertising. There are almost a million websites just like this one that gets you a quote from several different insurance companies and posts the results in a list for the user to read.

Usually, the user scans the list and shops for the lowest price and since there are so many of these websites out there that are arguably doing the same thing, using “price” as the big idea will hinder this brand.

On top of that once the results are posted, the consumer never needs insurance anymore and advertisements for insurance will be dismissed because the user had made an informed decision.

And to add insult to injury, most covered drivers only have insurance because they want to legally drive their vehicle. These people just get the cheapest package available to solve their need for driving legally.

Therefore making these customers super price sensitive and as they say in economics, “a war on price is a race to the bottom.”

So, we did something different.

The Solution

I took a sample of the highest paying customers. The people with multiple vehicles had the lowest deductible and highest casualty plan.

Then, we identified similarities between all of them. We targeted them all exclusively with our copy, and then only marketed to them.

These people had a number of traits, one of them being they lived in condominiums. We informed them of this, and they made condominium insurance easier to see on their website. However, they decided to expand on this opportunity, utilizing the resources they had with the audience that was easiest to attract.

For example, 38% of our sample worked in healthcare. So we designed an ad that said, “Auto and Home Insurance for the Healthcare Professional.” We didn’t change any of our services, website, or slogan – we simply publicized the company and directed it towards their largest audience. Since this was the case, the ad itself brought in over 30% of new revenue.

This was only one example of a few of our hyper-targeted campaigns.

The results were phenomenal and altered the business forever.

What Can We Learn From This?

Slowly but surely, their budget decreased from the mass public brand advertising onto more hyper-targeted demographics like the ad directed towards healthcare professionals.

Healthcare professionals became their target market and all they did was change the wording to make it seem more exclusive.

Of course none of this would’ve been possible if they didn’t have an account creation system that asked a lot of questions. Since most auto insurance companies check employment to determine rate, it’s fairly easy to find quantifiable data to create super attractive and targeted advertising.

Account management systems and customer loyalty programs are designed to drive data decisions, just like this man’s company.

Most insurance companies only use it to calculate premiums, but we also used this data for advertising. We created the first niche auto insurance advertising campaign in the world, and because of this, we know exactly how to work with other auto insurance providers.

So be wary. If you’re going to hire us as a marketing company, we may request to make changes to your tech stack. Your tech stack is anything software related, like your website or POS software.

We do this to help build your environment. Without an environment that reliably tracks and is able to sift and sort details, we can’t reliably see the information necessary to produce quality content and advertising for your business. You need eyes and ears within your company in order to create a more refined position in the marketplace.

If you allow us to make changes you may not be comfortable with, we can build this environment for you and could massively boost your profit.

We’ll also recommend business decisions that may seem intrusive, tactics you may be opposed to. However, this is just for marketing strategies and long-term goals – not to deceive or manipulate the data in a nefarious way. We get business owners all the time deflecting or arguing our requests which hinders our ability to do great work. Although some things we recommend may cause discomfort, trust us. And if you can’t trust us, trust the process and you’ll find the gold standard of our results.

There are a myriad of marketing strategies out there that have been designed over the years.

We talked a little bit about brand marketing which top companies mostly use.

There’s also direct marketing or direct response, which is trying to sell the product within one touchpoint. This is also called offer forward marketing.

Anybody you see online quoting that your offer needs to be “good,” is usually only experienced in this kind of advertising.

For your advertising strategy, I recommend a mix of both.

Before I move further I must let you know, acquiring customers is the hardest part of the job. You’ll always have poor conversions, expensive cost-per-click (CPC), and have mismatches in buyer psychology.

You’ll always have these in the beginning. But as you tweak and alter your marketing to be perfect, you’ll gain traction over time.

This is why I talked about optimizing the environment in the beginning of this blog – it is essential to do this before you can start the process of building up a brand that will last.

This can be very time consuming and expensive, so we at least need an environment to capture as many resources as we possibly can.

Enhancing Your Advertising

There’s two ways you can make your advertising more interesting. You can tune yourself into the buyer’s mind and hit them with the right messages at the right time, or you can have such an amazing product that it’s economically inclined to succeed.

If you wish to tap into psychology, you must capture the mind’s attention and lead them down the slope of interest into desiring the product.

Or, you can showcase the product in which it is either useful, a good substitute for an already dominating product, or so unique that customers are curious about how it works.

Economics come into play here because, in some cases, the product itself is so compelling that it overshadows the advertising effort. When this happens, people sometimes overanalyze the psychology behind the ad, when really, the product is doing most of the work. I often see confusion around this concept, so I made sure to address it here.

In this section I’m going to go over the common things you need to think about when developing marketing, both psychologically and economically.

Invading Buyer Psychology

Before you can influence the human mind, you must first study the target group in which you wish to serve. You must study what they pay attention to.

This may involve asking a lot of questions, not unlike the process mentioned in the “refined product” chapter.

You must determine sociological and behavioral factors that will carry your marketing through the minds and memory of your potential consumers.

Here’s an example of questions you should ask when creating your marketing.

What are the potential downsides or drawbacks? Are there reasons someone might hesitate to come in? What fears, concerns, or doubts could prevent people from trying what you offer? What types of advertising are my competitors using?

You can easily identify these and turn them into marketing pieces or material for your sales cycles. Often, you’ll find the need to stand out, so it’s essential to understand what’s already out there to avoid adding to the noise. Look for key themes or economic messages your competitors are conveying.

Remember, most of your customers are going to be stolen from your competitors.

Is there a particular time where your customers are more likely to purchase from you? It’s a worthy question to keep in mind. You must be prepared for any pitfalls or holes in your product, so you can easily navigate through them when the time comes.

You can effectively determine the optimal timing for an event if your goal is lead generation. While events may not appeal to everyone, I’ve seen them transform small businesses into significant successes.

Additionally, pinpointing the best times and days to advertise, based on when customers either visit or avoid your business, can give you a substantial psychological and economic advantage.

I remember one of my friends from Seattle had contacted me for advice on how to start her cafe. I had informed her to create an event and make it a continuous date that people can remember. She created a “Dungeons and Dragons Sunday” where people would meet up at night when the cafe was slow and would play.

It’s no surprise that this consistency was effective. She ended up exclusively running ads for her events instead of just running brand advertising for the cafe – the plan she initially intended to follow. She did very well for herself in the end using the “event strategy.”

What is a brand most of your customers absolutely despise?

This can help determine what your customer’s values are. You can use these value statements inside of your advertising. If you dig deeper with this question, you can also find common past experiences to relate to and use those as well.

There’s a bunch of questions I could go over with you. I have a bunch of files that I look through whenever working with a client that are potential questions the client should be asking in order to further their brand and business. But for now, let’s move on to what a funnel is and how to think in funnels.

The Funnel Mindset

There’s four famously known ingredients a customer must acquire when interacting with your company:

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

You may have seen these ingredients before in a mental model known as AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action).

The AIDA Model identifies cognitive stages an individual goes through during the buying process for a product or service.

Here’s some more info on each stage and what you need to do.

Attention

If your content can grab their attention and deeply engage them, your target audience will start to become curious about what your company actually does.

In this stage, the consumer is asking, “What is it?“

In order to get to this stage, you must first get in front of them. This comes with increased brand awareness and effective messaging. Not only that, it means having a genuine knowledge of your product, being able to answer absolutely any question that might come up when potential customers come around.

Interest

Once your target audience is interested in your product or service, they’ll want to learn more about your brand, the benefits of your solution, and your potential fit with their lifestyle.

In this stage, the goal is to get them to think, “I like it.“

In order to get to this stage, your content must be persuasive and engaging. While the first stage of AIDA is capturing their attention, this stage is about making them feel like this will mesh into their lifestyle. You can do this with a hook that represents a piece of them.

Let’s say you run a gas station that attracts a bunch of truckers, and this gas station serves black coffee.

Remember when we mentioned that targeting the audience with the highest revenue potential can transform how people perceive the value of your product? Simply changing the menu item from coffee to “Trucker’s Coffee” will make them feel like it’s just for them. Changing titles for branches of consumers is a quick and easy way to design interest within your target market.

Desire

People do business with those they know, like, and trust. The first two stages of the AIDA model establish the know and the like.

The goal of this stage is to change “I like it” to “I want it.” That’s done by cementing in the final piece of the puzzle: Trust.

To do this for longer sales cycles, keep serving them content. Make sure they subscribe to your blog, follow you on social media, and download your offers. The more prospects interact with your brand, the more they’ll trust you, boosting the chances they’ll eventually buy your product or service.

For short sales cycles, simply seducing them with emotion will convey a sense of desire. If there’s a certain smell or a certain story that can be told to help pull the buyer off the fence, use it. While this doesn’t generate immediate revenue, it lays the foundation—building relationships with future customers who can ultimately become the regulars that sustain your business.

Action

After you generate enough desire for your product or service, give your prospects the chance to act on it. After all, what’s the point of creating content and building deep relationships with prospects if there isn’t a clear next step? This is where all the information discussed beforehand really comes into play – taking action to ensure that customers use your product and come back for more.

The goal is to get them to decide, “I’m getting it.”

No matter what the “next step” is, you should compel them to respond with low-friction but high-incentive calls to action.

Advertising is usually done in the attention stage. They would visit your website in the interest stage, visit your building or website in the desire stage, and purchase your product in the action stage.

The AIDA formula is the funnel mindset. You must think this way when doing marketing.

When we were optimizing your environment in the previous chapter we were also predefining the most important stages of the funnel: The desire and action stages. Since your advertisement is aimed at the attention stage, most of your focus should be on capturing interest. However, you must remember that without the action stage, your product lacks the potential to become a must-have for your target audience.

Retargeting (Attention to Interest)

Retargeting is how we turn attention to interest. Retargeting is the method of advertising to those who already viewed something. Could be a webpage or an advertisement.

Retargeting is how we move from the attention stage to the interest stage. Facebook and Google both have a piece of code you install in order to track and re-advertise to individuals. If you haven’t yet advertised on Google or Facebook, you should easily find Youtube videos on how to do it. I wanted to make this a “getting started guide” but technical stuff is already oversaturated in the marketing world.

When you do look up how to do it, make sure you know about retargeting. You can do crazy creative stuff with it and really segment your audience to only those who are genuinely more likely to be interested.

Retargeting is the key to successful advertising. It takes an average of 7 advertisements before your customer actually wakes up and considers your product. Always be retargeting.

Differentiation

Differentiation is the key hack to building desire.

People want to go into a place and feel like it was made for them.

Whether it embodies a passion or interest of theirs or it gives them a feeling no other brand does. You could also differentiate by refining the product to be superiorly different from your competitors but let’s make one thing clear, you never want to look like everyone else.

You want to stand out in some way. This may require a creative touch nobody else in your competition has.

Here’s a paragraph from the article “A Danish Café Grows in Brooklyn,” about how their Danish style and culture contributed to one of the most unique cafes in Brooklyn. This is how they differentiated themselves from the others:

After a lot of soul-searching and researching, my girlfriend and I came up with the idea. I had to go back to my roots in Brownsville/Bed Stuy Brooklyn and to open a cafe that would reflect our lives, bringing the best parts of Brooklyn, Colombia, and Copenhagen together. I found the perfect location in a landmark building in my favorite part of my neighborhood, Bed Stuy, and I went for it.

A Danish Café Grows in Brooklyn

You can feel the passion flowing through his words. This man is excited about the work he’s done, and he enjoys being able to combine his passion with the business venture he was afraid to pursue.

He simply blended everything he loved about his life – the colors, the emotions, and the history. He put them all together in a place that he would call home. This is where most creative juice comes from.

If you’re looking for inspiration to differentiate, always start with what you love. Now that we looked at buyer psychology, let’s move onto some economic advantages that might impact your advertising.

There are a few ways you can use economics and economic trends to empower

your business. Whether it’s a new technological difference or you’re a substitute

capturing some audience of a dissatisfied brand, economics will be a superpower to

use when not only growing your business but doing your advertising.

Here are some key ways to gain competitive advantage today.

Price

If you have an active competitor that everyone knows about but they’re too expensive, you can always lower prices. You don’t have to do this forever. Remember, the point of advertising is to get regulars.

You can lower your prices until you get a bunch of dedicated customers and then you can raise them back up again.

This is a neat hack I’ve advised with some of my clients.

Functional Difference

A functional difference can be something useful, like a can opener on a keychain, or as subtle as putting kombucha in coffee to make it more healthy. Whatever this functional difference is, if you have one, you surely must advertise it.

But I didn’t include this chapter to remind you to look for functional differences, I put this chapter here to tell you to search for them. When analyzing your competition or just watching ads on TikTok, be mindful of why it’s going viral. Watch the tactics, read the comments, review the profiles that are engaging with their content.

Is it consumer psychology? Or is it just economically competitive?

Look for patterns in the way people interact with the content—are they responding emotionally, or is the value proposition so clear that they’re motivated purely by the product’s relevance? Sometimes, it’s a combination of both.

A viral campaign often hinges on the right blend of emotional appeal, social proof, and urgency. So, ask yourself: What elements are sparking the strongest reactions? Is it a shared sense of belonging, a desire to be part of something trending, or are people genuinely excited by the offer itself?

Dig deeper into what’s driving the buzz, because understanding these triggers will help you replicate or counteract the same effect in your own marketing efforts.

Conclusion

Well, that last part was short but I felt it was necessary.

By the time you reach the end of this text you should understand that

• 95% of marketers don’t know what they’re doing
• Your sales environment is going to get you more sales than advertising
• The AIDA model
• Sometimes advertising succeeds because of the invisible hand

Hope you enjoyed this text.

If you’re looking to advance your business using marketing strategy

or just looking for someone smart to handle your social media,

feel free to email me at

marketingdirectors@monolithmedia.info

Or you can text me at (775) 436 4259

You can also check me out at LInkedin

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See you next time!