How to Avoid The 3 Most Common Mistakes in Marketing

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Never miss an episode and subscribe and listen at dawnmcgruer.com. Welcome to episode 64 of Dawn of a New Era, the podcast with a difference, talking all things marketing, motivation and mindset, with myself, Dawn McGruer, award-winning digital marketing author, speaker and trainer. And we're going to be talking about one of my favourite things today, which is all about strategy.

And in particular, we're going to be covering three common marketing mistakes to avoid. Now, the number one thing I see when a client comes to me, be it through our academy or through the agency, is always the same. It is lack of lead generation. Most people don't have a problem selling.

The bit that lacks in a business, the missing element of a sustainable business, is often getting enough people each and every day. Number one, knowing about your brand and business. Number two, expressing an interest in your brand or business or topic. And number three, generating leads that ultimately turn into profitable customers.

So if I look at the number one mistake in lead generation, it's looking at trying to get people into a free guide, a free lead magnet, and leaving them there, ultimately to fizzle away to achieve absolutely nothing. I have seen businesses spend huge amount of time, huge amount of effort and huge amount of money trying to get people to sign up for a free guide. Now, I absolutely love free things. I think they're the most amazing part of business because they add value, they build trust, they build relationships.

But where it goes wrong, fundamentally and quite critically wrong, is when people just get their potential suspects—they're not a prospect at this stage because they've only expressed an interest in a topic. They haven't expressed an interest in anything else. They have just said, I'm interested in... Whatever this guide's about, okay, they've not inquired about your products or services, is that when someone signs up, they get added to the all-important CRM, customer relationship management database or email marketing database, okay, and they get their free guide, and nothing happens.

And the shock and the surprise from the marketer when they don't get customers. Now, this means one thing. There needs to be a little tiny switch, okay. There needs to be just a little tweak in the campaign that will ultimately turn it into the most effective tool in your business.

Now, I'm guessing you'd like to know what that is. So, the simple thing is that when someone joins this list, okay, they've signed up for three amazing ways to change my life, or whatever the free guide is called, okay, they get added to this list. They've put their name in, they've put their email address in, the most valuable asset in business today. They press submit, and they wait.

Now, this time, this all-important time, is the one and only chance, the time that you have to make a difference because you've piqued their interest, they've come to your landing page, they've committed in giving you their information, and they're awaiting their magical free guide. Now, this time is the only time in history that you will have their full attention, and this is the marketer's dream, the time where you can make the difference, the difference between leaving them to fizzle away in your list or taking them on the next step of the journey. Now, if someone signed up for a guide and they've said, Oh, I want three ways to do X, Y, and Z, we know as marketers that they're interested in that topic. Now, the guide that you have created will have been created with your ideal client in mind.

You will have addressed and really covered their complete pain points, their biggest challenges, all of these things, the things that this person wakes up and thinks they want someone to solve. Now, as soon as they sign up here, the great news is, is that when they get to the confirmation page, the thank you page, you have the opportunity. To sell. Now, what happens is you can say on that thank you page where you've got the all-important eye time, thanks so much for signing up.

Check your inbox soon. Your free guide is on its way. Okay, and then you can either have a video or text that goes on to the next stage that says, although this guide is going to give you some amazing value, why stop there? You know, why not build more momentum and check out our blah, blah, blah, whatever it is you do.

Now, we have lots of different funnels in our businesses. So in the academy, we have one which is a free ultimate digital marketing guide. It's an amazing guide. It's got 30 different podcasts associated with different content.

There's loads of activities. It's our most popular guide. We get hundreds and hundreds of leads a day, people signing up because it's true value. It's absolutely packed full, as I say, with not just like tips, but strategies, things that people will come back to me day in, day out, say, Dawn, I watched this video and, you know, it really kind of got me, or it was an epiphany moment.

Okay, so having people engage in this guide that is linked to podcast audio as well as video and obviously visiting our website, it's like the dream. So what happens there is that if we just left people to sit in our list, nothing would happen. Now on the thank you page, what we do is we say, right, guys, this is an amazing guide. You're going to absolutely love it.

We guarantee that. But why not fast track and accelerate your results and get involved in X, Y, and Z? Now, what we actually do is we use this to liquidate our ad budget. And the amazing thing is here is we're getting hundreds of people, new people into our world each and every day.

Our ads do not cost us a penny because on that thank you page, we're upselling to them. Now, upselling, if someone is already into developing the digital skills, they're already in that mix, they want to learn, and we give them an amazing offer, a one-time offer, why would they say no? You know, so the offer we give is our Marketing Made Easy. Bundle, and within the bundle, it's a copy of my Dynamic Digital Marketing book.

They've got a copy of my Fill in the Blanks copywriting swipe file. We've even given them a hundred social media done-for-you templates. I mean, that's unreal. And our awareness dates and key dates planner.

So the awareness days and key dates planner is basically all of the dates globally in the world. You know, so if it's Mental Health Awareness Day, or it's, you know, Hug a Person Day, or Happiness Tuesday, or whatever it's going to be, these dates are literally in there, which are the biggest inspiration for people's social media, and it's a great, great resource. We've even thrown in content planners so people can, you know, plan the content, right? So it really is an ultimate bundle, a pack full of huge resource, and we're selling it for 97.

Now, each of the items, if we were to sell them separately, they'd be about £600. So the amount of people who sign up for it is huge, and they're not just covering the cost of the ad; it's actually generating a profit for us. So it's honestly the biggest tool that we use in our business, and you can start to see the difference it makes because you imagine someone signs up for that, they get a copy of my hardback book, beautifully gift-wrapped with a postcard signed from me, delivered to their door, as well as these other assets which are housed in our online learning portal. All of this is automated so that as soon as someone signs up, these things are triggered and they get instant access.

Now, what that does is it builds this bond with the client or potential client. Now, they are a customer, and okay, they've only spent 97 pounds with us, but that's amazing because now the psychological difference between them now being a customer means that they're now experiencing our products and services, you know, and people will read the book or they'll post a picture of it, they'll start using some of the resource. Courses, and we get amazing feedback and testimonials on the back of this. So it's 10 times easier now to sell to the client.

So not only are we generating hundreds of thousands of leads, we're getting people into our world, we're generating leads, we're getting people to buy something, and ultimately there's a large percentage of those people who go on to buy something else. So think about your strategy. Think about—

Lead generation. I mean, I hope this makes sense because it's the difference that, when I teach these principles on our courses, it's the game changer. It's the difference of someone having an absolute guaranteed strategy that turns the business around. Even that alone, we have clients who just have mini products.

We have clients who are selling hundreds of thousands of these mini products and services through ads. And the thing is, is if you're just spending money on ads, you're just going to blast through money and cash, and nothing will happen. You know, not necessarily will you even get a lead on the back of it. They may never turn into a customer.

So for me, the things that are so important are to have this steady flow of leads, to make sure our ad cost is absolutely covered, to get people to turn into customers as quickly as we can, and to pack full of value so that We are also getting word-of-mouth referral, you know, and this is important. So the best thing any business can do is to showcase what they do, and for people to sample at, you know, a non-brainer. It's not a huge amount of money to commit £97. It's an impulse buy.

So people either want it, it's a one-time offer, and they go off and get it. And this is the magical thing. I honestly feel in marketing, it's the principle that I love seeing the results. It's the one that when I do any course and we talk through and we do Q and As, it's the bit that I see people really buzzing from.

I mean, we've gone through it, obviously, at pace, but there's more detail in terms of, you know, how we do this on all of our courses. There's a free resource area within our website, so go and have a look at it. If you just type in Business Consort into Google, it comes at the top, digitalandsocialmediaacademy.com.

On that resources area, there's hundreds of videos, there's loads of things that you can literally use to kind of really hone in on your marketing and start developing, you know, a really solid strategy as well. So go and check out the freebies. And this brings me nicely on to number two. So the most common mistake that we see after lack of lead generation is selling too low.

And you might think, well, Dawn, you've just told me about selling something for £97. Well, that's just one offering that we have. We have large ticket offers all the way through to £5,000 for our certified digital marketing professional program for people who want to add digital marketing services to either their own business or start it up or whatever. But it's accredited and certified.

So if someone is serious about this in the business, it's something that they would obviously be quite happy to invest that money in because the returns would be huge. But let's look at the lowest value, yeah, we're selling something for £97. Ninety-seven pounds. So we have a mix of pricing, and we have payment plans.

So we have higher ticket prices like the diploma, but what we're doing is we're offering it up for 99 pounds a month. And one of the messages that we talk about is making education really accessible for all ages, all stages. And there's lots of underprivileged countries that, you know, their education level would mean that they would never be eligible to actually participate in these types of programs. So we've built a foundation program in there.

Now, all of this different type of messaging, it's setting parity between what we do versus other people. And by being able to have, you know, these flexible payment plans, we've got different pricing, we've got different offerings, we've got different markets. It means that whatever anyone's doing, it's even if someone's spreading the payments out, you imagine that, you know, we would have to sell a lot of 99 pound payment plans to get a good monthly revenue. Well, other things are covering that as well.

So my point is that if you set up a business and you think, right, I'm just going to sell something at 97 pounds, you'd have to sell a lot of them, and you have to have a very good stream for that lead gen to convert. So you need to make sure that your pricing is correct. And selling too low can often mean that you've got the most amazing product or service, you've got hundreds of, you know, customers, if not thousands, but your business is not sustainable. So the maths of selling is to go check your numbers first of all and have a look at how much you need in terms of, you know, within your business and the expenses, how much you want to pull out yourself if you own the business, but really kind of working through to understand that, you know, volume is a hard thing to achieve if you are a newer business.

And, you know, if you've got to sell a hundred things in a month, that's a lot of effort. So there has to be a level of pricing, a level of understanding and research around what your proposition is going to be. going to be priced at. Now, the third one, and I think you're going to love this.

I think you really are going to love this. I think when the words come out of my mouth, you're going to say, Thank you, Dawn, because doing too much, okay, this is the epic mistake number three. Trying to spread yourself too thin. Literally do the whole marketing mix, everything in digital marketing.

Jump on every platform, every channel, be posting every day, eight times a day, whatever it is. Literally scale back, because I promise you, there are three things that me and all my team think about. This is what I share all the time with all of my clients, anyone on my programs. I say it all the time.

There are three things you need to think about each and every day: increasing your customer base, increasing your average order value, and your purchase frequency. These are the three goals, and we really need to drill things back and get back to basics, because the fundamentals are life is easy if your business is profitable and sustainable, okay? It frees up a lot of time. If you're spending too much time, money, and effort on your marketing right now, you need to declutter, scale it back, and get back to basics and think.

If you have two lists of people in your business, prospects and customers, what are you going to do each day to turn those prospects into paying customers, and what are you going to do to get the customers coming back and buying again or more and becoming a customer all the way again? How can you get your customers referring? How can you incentivize them maybe as an affiliate? How can you build partnerships to get other people pushing business into you?

These are the crux of the matter. So what we call this process marketing and just getting into the churn tends to be the least effective. When we're really laser focused on the end goal, which is how do we get leads and customers every single day, we tend to be better marketers and proficient digital marketers who are successful are honed in on this. And this is something that I literally talk about every day to my team, talking about, let's just drop everything else and think about how do we do X, Y, and Z.

And when you are laser focused like this, it brings such a clarity. It kind of gets rid of the overwhelm, the confusion that just kind of makes you stall, and it gets you just thinking like, okay, so I got 100 leads in yesterday. How do I get some of those people to turn into paying customers? You know, and it's about thinking about things like, you know, having early bird offers as well, having flash sales, having launches.

I mean, there's so many different things you can be doing. But you need to step away from just thinking about, right, I need to do my SEO, I need to do my social media. Think about the humans in the business. And these humans that, you know, are the most valuable asset to you are your team and your customers, okay?

So how are you going to make sure that that business sustains and helps your team and obviously your customers? So drilling back to basics and thinking about customer first every day, sales first every single day. What do we do to get these prospects, these customers over the line? And when you start thinking about these ideas, you tend to become a far more creative, far more energized marketer who's not feeling drained, but you're feeling like you're getting traction, you're getting results, you're thinking outside the box.

And having this focus means that ultimately, as a marketer, you'll get to the point where your day or your time is spent purely optimizing campaigns, dipping in, making everything better and better, rather than firefighting and just every day pushing marketing out, trying to pull in leads. That's a tough way of trying to market your business. So I hope this helped. And honestly, if you have experienced any of these challenges, if there's anything I can help you with, I would love to connect.

You can find me on all of the channels. Just go to DawnMcGruer.com. If you go onto the Work with Dawn area, you will see all the different training courses that we have in the academy.

So if there's anything you would like to know about digital marketing, business strategy, there's always the free group too. There's lots of free resources we have on tap, obviously the podcast, lots of other episodes that you can listen to. But DawnMcGruer.com is the place to head to.

And there's also a free guide on there that is super useful that talks about the three core pillars, the three things that I know and I feel are the absolute crux of being a successful entrepreneur. And the free guide covers marketing. Marketing, motivation and mindset. So enjoy, and I will see you on the next episode.

And I hope you enjoyed listening. Let me know if there's any wins. I'd love to hear from you in the group. Come and find me and let me know if any of these episodes have helped you grow or start or...

Your business. Thank you for listening to Dawn of a New Era podcast, and for your free checklist to find out how to boost your business for growth, profit, and success, and join our community, go to dawnmcgruer.com.