Episode 20: Never Stop Marketing

Hey, hey, what’s going on you guys? Alex Branning here with a special message about when do you turn the marketing off? There’s going to be things that come up, you know, we hit bumps in the road and when do you turn the marketing off? I’m going to talk about that. Let’s dive right in.

For those of you who are regular listeners, you can hear something different in my voice and this is just one of those weeks where things just did not go according to plan. I’m recording this episode on Friday way late. I usually deliver this to my team by Wednesday, but it is Friday and I woke up a week ago and not feeling great, but I still had a long day of coaching calls and virtual workshops to complete, and I did it even though I just felt worse and worse throughout the day.

And by about three o’clock I was toast and I was in bed a lot during the weekend. And I was just miserable, and the entire week so far I’ve just had a hard time. Tuesday was my first day that I was “back in the office” but I started working and then shortly afterwards I had to go back… But anyway, the point is not to throw a pity party. The point is to talk about when do you turn the market off? One of my clients who knew that I was going through this horrible cold said, “Well, are you turning your ads off?” And I said, “Absolutely not. Why would I turn my marketing off?” Even though I can’t make a phone call right now it doesn’t mean that my marketing needs to turn off. I can continue to fill my pipeline so that when I do get back to work I can follow up with all of those leads.

His question really reminded me of so many different times when clients of mine have reached out to me and said, “Alex, I think I should pause the ads. Alex, I think I should turn everything off. Alex, this isn’t working. We need to stop.” And it brings up a good point. When do you turn off the ads? When do you stop the marketing? When do you do hold everything in and protect what you have so that you don’t risk loss anymore? And there’s not really an across-the-board answer, but I will tell you this almost never is the right answer to turn off the ads, because your ads, your marketing, the new leads that are coming in, that new cash flow, those can solve a lot of problems that you have in your business.

I remember once there was a really tough month that we were experiencing the Branning Group.          There were some personnel issues, there were some accounts receivables issues and it just all seemed to be stacking up. And just looking at the budget going, “Okay, should we turn off the ads?” And I said, “You know what? We just can’t. We can’t turn off the ads because you never know what person is going to come through that door from an ad.” And sure enough, it was near the end of the month, we got a phone call from somebody who went through one of our funnels, loved what we did, and was very interested in hiring us for a big project, and not only did he bring himself, but he also referred to another friend. And if we had turned off the ads we wouldn’t have got that great deal that came in. I think it was like the 25th or 26th day of the month. I mean, it was just like, right in the nick of time. And so what? We never turned off the ad, we never gave up hope, we never closed the door to new business. And it worked.

I remember another story. I had a client of mine and they were struggling and it was really slow and they just didn’t know what to do. They were hurting, revenue was down, things were looking bleak. And he said, “You know, I think I might turn off the ads. I might turn off the marketing campaigns that we’re doing.” And I said, “You know, instead of turning everything off, let’s instead focus all of our efforts, all of your dollars on one campaign and being honest, letting people know like, hey look, I’m in a tight spot and this is the deal that I’m giving.” And just give people a great deal and a reason to do business with you. And I don’t want to give too much information because I don’t want to give away the clients on this, but we ran all of the ad campaigns. We turned off some of their ads and we focused all of our efforts on this one Facebook campaign to is warm audience just in a hail Mary attempt to really save him for this quarter because it was looking bad. And I’ll tell you what? It worked.

Not only did he fill his calendar, but the way that he worded the ad and the word of the offer, you got a lot of money up front and so he was able to pay off all the things that were just piling up. He got more work that pushed him into the future and his next quarter started well, and it was a hail Mary pass. It was a hail Mary pass, but it worked. And here’s the point of the story. The point is that things might look bad, and you might have a dry pipeline, and you look at your marketing and it’s money going out and not coming back in, but you never know who that next ad is going to reach. You never know who is going to come in the door. You have no idea what referral will try to send somebody to your Facebook page if you stop communicating to your audience, right? So it’s all about continuing to market. Pull the levers of your business, pull the things that you have control over so that you can continue to generate business for yourself.

One of the things that my business coach, Eric Lofholm tells me is, focus on revenue producing activities. When you get stuck focus on revenue producing activities. When you’re stressed out, focus on revenue producing activities. When you have your back up against the wall, focus on revenue producing activities. When the pipeline is dry, focus on revenue producing activities. What is one of your revenue producing activities? Marketing. You never stop marketing. Now that doesn’t mean you keep the campaign going if it’s not working right? Like for us, the reason why we kept those ads on and we got that big deal this 26th of the month is we knew that the ads were converting. It typically brought in smaller deals and just kind of break even on the campaign, but every once in a while we brought in a whale, and so we kept the ads on and brought in the whale. And so it worked out really well.

Now, sometimes you might kick off a campaign, it’s not working. You’d let it go for 30 days and it just doesn’t work, well then what? Well, then you make some adjustments and try it again, but you never just stop marketing altogether. You never just give up on the overall goal of finding new business. For me, I could remember various times in my business where it was tough, tough month, tough quarter, and it was like, “Oh my gosh, I need a hail Mary pass here.” I told this story in my list building Webinar, it was December of 2014 and this is all tied into never stop marketing. Pulling all the levers that we have and we had an unexpected financial hit right after Christmas. And it was like, “Oh my gosh, I needed to make a $1000 and businesses aren’t looking to start new marketing projects. What am I going to do to generate a thousand dollars between, I think it was December 15th and the end of the year.” It was like, right around Christmas time. You’ve got to be kidding me.

But I did have one thing. I had an email list, I had an email list and my hope is not lost. So, I wrote an email out and I took a couple of days actually to like pore over this thing, and review it, and I had this pit in the bottom of my stomach, like, “Oh my gosh, did I really send this email?” And I made an offer to my list, and I needed to make $1000 or it was almost exactly $1000 and I made an offer to my list for a $50 product. And it was like a $50 thing, like, “Hey, let’s all start the year off together strong.” We were going to do, it was like a coaching thing. It was like a one month long mastermind, 50 bucks and so I sent the email out to my list and then I waited. And about an hour after the email got sent out, boom, I got a sale. And over the span of the next couple of days I made a total of nine sales.

And then it was like right after Christmas, I got a phone call from a prospect who got the email, wasn’t checking it before Christmas was in his office between Christmas and New Year, saw the email where I made the offer. It reminded him of the proposal that was on his desk that I’d given him. And he was excited about it. He called me and said, “Man, I’m just so glad that I saw that email of yours because I really wanted to get my deposit in before the end of the year so that it counted towards this year’s profit and loss statement. So, I got a check for you right now.” And he totally saved my year. What’s the point of the story? You never stop marketing, right? You don’t stop. You always figure out what you can do to keep the new leads coming in, keep your customers remembering who you are, and just keep the doors open, right? You want that … because you want that door, that constant flow of business coming in.

And one of the things that this week reminded me of is that there is really, there are so many things that happen. So many curve balls that come at us, different things that we cannot anticipate and my team saw this log jam of new leads that were coming in and they were looking at it like, “Okay, this is … This is not good, right?” And I had a different take on it. I said, “This is great because now next week we have a full calendar of people that are just itching to talk to us and we don’t have to start from a trickle, we have a full-on flood of people that are ready and excited to talk to us. And that’s a great thing to have.” And so it’s awesome. Am I going to turn off the ads? No, am I going to turn off the ads? These things are profitable and they’re working.

I had a client of mine, she said, “Alex, I have too many leads coming in.” Excuse me, I’m still suffering from my cold. She said, “I have too many leads coming in,” and I told her, I said, “You know, we can turn off the ads, but it’d be even better if you could just bring in some help like an assistant or something to help you out instead of turning off flow. Because, why turn it off if you can just build more of a team to handle it?” So, she reached out and she’s, she’s hiring an assistant right now to handle some more of the leads that are coming in from the real estate ad. So, it’s all about continuing to just keep the marketing going. Pull all the levers that you can.

So, that is my message. I’m passionate about it. I have seen so many businesses saved because they did not stop marketing. It’s marketing seems to be one of the first line items cut when things are going bad, but it shouldn’t be, shouldn’t be. You got to keep the leads coming in. You got to keep the business flowing in. You got to keep people come through the door. Cut off bad marketing, but man, if marketing is working don’t stop it. You just never know who’s going come in the door. You never know that next person that’s going to see the ad. You don’t know that Hail Mary that you throw, it could work. So anyway, you guys, I’m here for you I want to encourage you, inspire you and keep you going. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I apologize for the sound of my voice and the quality of it today, but I did not want to miss a week of this podcast. So, I appreciate you guys and have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you next week.

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