Episode 3-68: Redneck Marketing

Yee-haw! All right, we’re going to talk about some redneck marketing on this podcast. All right, laughing at my ridiculousness. So we’re going to go over what I call redneck marketing, which means we are taking it back old school. One of the things that entrepreneurs can get stuck on, especially us in the digital space, is this obsession with automation, making everything digital and really just trying to take everything online. But sometimes taking everything online actually, if we do it too fast, we don’t set up systems to support us, what it does is it actually leaves us stranded. So, on this podcast episode, I’m going to go over a couple of things for you to look at with your own marketing and maybe taking some things back to the redneck, back to the old school.

The first thing I want to go over is how you’re actually tracking your sales. I mean, you might be like, “Alex, of course I’m tracking my sales. I have an online shopping cart. I know exactly where things are coming from.” Here’s the problem. If you are only tracking your sales that are done online about one source, what you’re going to miss out on is tracking the sales of, for example, repeat customers, tracking sales from referrals. If you don’t know where your customers are coming from besides the paid ads, by the way, you should not only be doing paid ads, you should have multiple streams of people that are coming to your website, then you’re going to miss out on some of the biggest revenue streams. If you don’t have an ascension ladder where you can track where people are coming from, what they’re doing next, what products they’re looking at after they buy the first thing, and then how long they stick around.

If you’re not able to figure that out, really dig into it, take some notes on a piece of paper to track it, then you’re going to be losing out on revenue from people that are slipping through your fingers and not coming back. Before you try to automate figuring all this stuff out, really write down a list of the last buyers that you had or the last big buyers that you had and figure out what their process was. The second thing that we do a lot in our quest to automate everything is we get out of the marketing methods that are already working. I want to give you an example. One of my clients, who will remain nameless, had a very successful marketing campaign using billboards. And they came to me for a Facebook ad campaign and we were just crushing it, we were doing really well. We’re still doing well. The ad campaign is still alive. But here’s what happened.

They took down their billboards and they said, “We’ll be able to save this money. Maybe we can reinvest it.” Here’s the problem. The billboards, while they were expensive and the leads that were coming in, there wasn’t the quality, the people that were coming in from the billboards were, in general, signing up. So once they ran the numbers, they realized that the money they were spending on the billboards was coming back to them three times. They were 3X-ing their dollar. Even though they weren’t getting as many buyers from the billboards, the people that were coming in were buying. Whereas the people that are coming in from online sales sometimes are tire kickers or just looking for information and they weren’t necessarily taking action right away.

So what does that mean for you? That means that if you have a marketing campaign that’s working, no matter how redneck it is, no matter how unsexy it is, don’t turn it off until you are certain that it is not working anymore. So if you have a marketing campaign that’s 2X-ing or 2X-ing your dollar, I don’t care if it’s radio, TV, billboards or a stinking pigeon, keep that thing going. You are multiplying your money and isn’t that what it’s all about in business? It’s not about impressing your peers, competitors, or your audience, it’s about multiplying your money. Don’t turn off a marketing campaign unless you absolutely have to. The other way that we get away from the old school way or maybe we should keep going back to old school is in how we say thank you to our customers. I’m a huge believer in thank you marketing.

What that means is just as simple as it sounds, writing a thank you note, and saying, “We appreciate you, appreciate your business, appreciate what you bring to us. Appreciate working with you.” The short thank you note, just acknowledging them, thanking them for their business, their purchases, their referrals, whatever it is, genuinely saying thank you. In a busy world we often forget to turn back around and say thank you to all the clients, customers, and partners that got us to where we’re at. And when we do that, we make them feel like we don’t care. The biggest thing that turns customers away from us, it’s not the lack of service, it’s not us doing things necessarily wrong, it’s a perceived indifference to us sticking around. If they don’t think that we care that they stick around, they’ll go somewhere else.

The third thing, I’m sorry, I already did the third thing. That was thank you marketing. The fourth thing that we do that gets us away from redneck marketing but that we need to look back and go, “Hmm, should we be doing this?” Is the hand to hand handshake type relationship building. With the world of automation and video marketing and all the other fun things that we specialize over here with at The Branding Group, there’s still something about just sitting across the table for some of someone and talking. And some of the best deals in the world were made by people just who sat across the table from each other at dinner, got to know each other, and then saw what happened, just felt where the conversation going. So I’d encourage you, is there someone that you should be sitting across the table from? Is there someone that you should be sitting down at dinner with just getting to know them for the sake of getting to know them with no agenda? It’s kind of old school, but sometimes the old school way works. So you want to check that out.

So, in conclusion, when you are looking at your business and you’re looking to automate, take things to the next level, have fun building your business, look at your business and go, am I moving too quickly? Am I turning things off that shouldn’t be turned off? Am I forgetting my customers? Am I forsaking that personal relationship so that I could try to automate everything before it’s ready? Am I forgetting where I came from as I try to move forward? Redneck marketing, sometimes it has a bad name. Honestly, a lot of the stuff isn’t sexy, but we still need to make sure that we are doing the things that got us to where we’re at. So look at your business and go, what do I need to go back to? What can I learn from the olden days? I’ll talk to you guys later. Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I appreciate you. I’ll talk to you soon.

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