Lessons in Marketing: Resiliency Pays Off

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Jul 15

Written By brandmerry

Lessons in Marketing: Resiliency Pays Off

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

Marketing can feel like a lot of work and to be honest a lot of entrepreneurs throw in the towel on their strategies too early. Today on the blog, I'm sharing why resiliency in marketing pays off and my top marketing lessons. | brandmerry.com

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When it comes to marketing, you've got to be in it for the long game.

Despite what you might see posted on Facebook Ads, the reality is most people aren’t making $10k in 10 days in the beginning. It takes longevity and dedication, something I’m here for, in order to create sustainable growth as a business owner.

Wouldn’t you rather have consistent $10k months than one week with $10k? Not that you have to choose, you can have both, but from what I’ve seen many individuals create one-hit-wonder marketing strategies that aren’t sustainable.

Resiliency matters as a marketer and if you don't have this resiliency, if you're not really paying attention to the data, to the details, you're going to struggle in marketing your business.

So, in today’s post, I’m sharing.

MARKETING LESSON #1: HAVE MEASURABLE GOALS

I don't know if you have noticed this, but sometimes you plan things, you put in a lot of energy, a lot of time, and you write all the emails, you do all of the things, you put in all the strategy, and then you're like, okay, something seems to be wrong; something's not working.

We're going to talk about how to actually identify what's not working in just a minute, but this is going to happen in business.

I think it's really easy when we're looking at the way specific marketers are talking about their products and services, and think it will automatically work for me and my business. We know this is not true.

So much of a strategy working depends on your audience and who you ultimately want to attract to your brand and your business. But when we go into marketing with this idea, or with this expectation that this is going to work exactly how we have it mapped out, we're really setting ourselves up for a lot of failures.

There's a difference between these crazy expectations and having clear, measurable goals.

As a marketer, it's really important that you have these clear, measurable goals that say, okay, in 30 days let's see where we're at.

If we haven't noticed a 2% or 3% or 4% improvement, then let's talk about some changes that we could make. Let's watch it again another 30 days and see.

Then after that, maybe we have to decide that this isn't right for us.
Or maybe we have to decide to implement something else into our strategy.

That's essentially what I'm talking about when I'm talking about this resiliency in marketing.

You've got to be in it for the long game.

This is the thing about marketing, my friends. It is a long game. But so is being a CEO and a business owner. You don't want a business for two months and then you're like, "I'm done with that."

You put a lot of time and energy into making that happen. So, this resiliency as a business owner is incredibly important and it’s going to help improve your marketing.

MARKETING LESSON #2: DON’T QUIT TOO EARLY

Once you’ve gotten super clear and specific with your goals, it’s so important to put in the energy and effort consistently, but a lot of small business owners quit too early.

They quit right before things start to shift.

One of the things that happened to me a couple of years ago when I launched You! Branded is that it wasn't working in the beginning. It wasn't selling and I had signed up for a whole program to support me in making this happen.

So I kept making small adjustments and then I kept making small adjustments, and then we started to see a little bit of an increase and I'm like, "Okay, let's keep making some small adjustments."

Then within a year, that product alone brought in six figures to my business because of those small adjustments.

Could you imagine what would have happened if I would have been like, "This doesn't work! Screw this." Which is what a lot of small business owners do.

We often get the first response to something, or don’t see the sales we imagined and we immediately throw in the towel, but this resilience and dedication to making small improvements can result in consistent income in your business.

If you’re constantly setting goals and then throwing in the towel when they don’t work right away you’ll always be creating and not selling.

SMALL IMPROVEMENTS FOR MASSIVE CHANGE

One of my favorite books is Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's helped me so much with my daily habits in both life and business, and what he talks about and what we don't focus enough on is 1% improvement every single day.

The same is true for your marketing.

We're typically looking for something to go from 10% to 90% in 48 hours. There's no proof that shows it’s going to happen. The growth we see is incremental growth, changes that have to happen to lead to the larger leap.

If you are improving even a little bit over time, just 1% daily, that's going to snowball to ultimately be that 90% improvement.

You have to be open to making changes.

You have to be open to making these small adjustments.

You need to set clear goals for yourself.

LESSON #3: DATA DRIVES DECISIONS

Why are the goals you’re setting so important?

The answer to that question is that data drives decisions.
When it comes to marketing, data should be driving your decisions.

The fact that you're like, "Oh, but I really, really love this title. It's so great." But, the data shows that nobody else loves this title or nobody else understands what you're saying. If you’re not willing to change then you’re too emotionally attached to it and not reading the data.

Or, "But, I really love this color." Yeah, but the data shows that that color on a button does not work for you.

Data needs to drive your decisions, especially your marketing decisions and when we're talking about this resiliency and making these small improvements, then you want to make sure that you're looking at the data to know what to adjust.

DATA YOU SHOULD BE PAYING ATTENTION TO

When it comes to data there are obviously numerous things you can measure. However, here are some of the most popular for business owners to monitor and track.

Landing Page Conversion Rate:
How many people land on the page and how many people actually follow through with what you're asking them to do? In this case, an opt-in to your lead magnet and email list.

Typically if you’re promoting something free to a cold audience, you're looking for at least a 30% conversion. We share this information inside of the Academy, by the way. So if you're ever, like, "I don't even know what these conversions should be," we talk about your data and your numbers inside of the Academy a lot.

Email Open Rates:
When we're talking about email open rates, if no one’s opening them, it’s a sure sign that your subject line is underperforming.

It could also be deliverability, but that depends on your email platform. That's why we love ConvertKit.

Typically, it changes based on your list size, but 18% to about 24% is average.

If you have 10,000 people on your email list and you're hitting a solid 22%, great. If you've got 40 people on your email list and you're at 90%, fantastic. As your list grows your conversion will shift as well.

If you're feeling like your email marketing doesn't work, then look at your numbers, starting with your email open rates. If your people aren't opening your emails, it's because your subject line sucks. So, let's focus on increasing that first - remember to make one small change.

Click-Through Email Rates:
If people are reading your emails, but they're not clicking through, then that's your CTA (call to action).

What are you saying in your email? Are you using the right messaging to get people to take action? Sometimes we group everything together and we're like, "It's not working." And, then we don't make these small adjustments that would probably shift everything.

When you start to get into the habit of making those small adjustments frequently and looking at the data, you can make these informed decisions.

It took me about five years to like webinars. I'm in my fifth year of business now. There were periods of time where I was convinced I would never do a webinar again.

It wasn't webinars that sucked. It was that I wasn't great at doing webinars. I needed to fix my game. I needed to get really, really clear on what I was teaching on that webinar. I needed to get better at my CTAs.

I have clients who are like, "Live video doesn't work." And I'm like, "Live video does work, but let's figure out why yours isn't working and let's fix it."

Put your marketing hat on and ask yourself very specific questions to discover what’s not working, rather than generalize the entire thing.

BTW, a good click-through rate for your emails is 1-3% and on a webinar, you’re wanting between a 2-5% conversion rate.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE DATA

If you don't have a ton of data, try looking at what your audience is responding to.

What kind of posts do people like that you post on social media?

What type of blog topics get the most click-through rates in your email marketing?

What are people asking you about over and over again?

When it comes to marketing we want a clear target and we want to take actions to get us closer to that target. That's how you create marketing that works for your business.

MARKETING LESSON #4: CREATE MARKETING GUIDELINES

One of the things that I implemented a few years ago to help drive my decisions in marketing, were marketing guidelines.

These marketing guidelines for my business specifically helped me step into the CEO role of my company.

I talked about it in this post a few weeks ago.

My marketing guidelines as a CEO are that:

I don't need to post fresh content daily.

I focus on longevity, so I never want something that's going to disappear or that I can't keep and repurpose. That will allow me to create high-value content.
I drive traffic to my home base (aka website)

Those are my three guiding principles when it comes to marketing.

You want to create your own because that's going to allow you to come back to these very specific pieces when things aren't working or when something new comes out and you’re wondering if you should implement it into your strategy.

There’s always something new and you can’t keep up with all of it or you’ll burn out!

These guidelines will help you determine if it is in alignment with how you want to run your business.

The example that I gave a few weeks ago was Clubhouse, which is a great platform and people absolutely love it, but it does not hit my criteria.

It's high value, I will give it that. But it requires you to show up often and the longevity is not there because things disappear. That's just not in alignment with my core guiding principles as a marketer.

So, when it comes to resiliency in marketing, you want to say, what are my principles?
What are the things that are important to me?
What are my values as a marketer?

Make sure that when you're committing to a new marketing strategy and that you're putting in the time and energy to get the data you need. Because marketing is about resiliency and it's about longevity and it's about consistency.

MARKETING LESSON #5: CONSISTENCY IS KEY

This isn't a fluffy word. There's a reason that we talk about consistency in business and why it is so important.

If you're setting a goal to see how blogging works and then you post one blog every month, it’s going to take you a while to know if blogging works for you.

But if you set a goal to see how blogging works in 60 days and you’re diligent and post weekly, then you’ll have the data to look at and make a decision on where you go from there.

Thinking of redoing your entire website because you’re convinced it doesn’t work?

Well, let’s fix what you do have because redoing it is going to take you a long time and maybe some money. Let's instead make some of these tweaks and modifications. Let's see if that helps before you now waste six months of your time writing new copy and redoing your entire website.

Now, of course, there's a time and a place to redo your website, if your brand has changed, if your ideal customer has changed. But we're so quick to not put that marketing hat on and say, "Let me look at this with a lens of data and see, what could I change?"

We’ve recently made changes to our marketing strategy at Brandmerry because of what the data was showing. To hear all the behind-the-scenes of that change be sure to LISTEN to Episode 7 of The Brandmerry Podcast here.

CONCLUSION

Data-driven decisions are so important as a business owner and I really, really hope that you see that.

This message that I wanted to share about resiliency in marketing, it cannot be 100% an emotional decision. You need to follow the data and you need to know what’s working and why!

This is what we teach inside of Brandmerry Academy. You can go to brandmerryacademy.com to check it out.

I hope that this was incredibly helpful for you. I hope this motivated you to start looking at the data to really look at marketing in a way of its longevity.

It isn't a one-hit-wonder strategy. It can't be a one-hit-wonder strategy

We have to keep ourselves on our toes with marketing, it's essential. And so if you struggle with that, if you want more accountability, if you want to know how to look at the data in the right way, we cover that inside of The Academy.