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Introduction
Congratulations on taking the first step to building a successful marketing system in your business. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’ve probably already attempted marketing of some description, but since you’re reading this book, you also probably feel the results could have been better.
I write this book with two goals in mind. My first aim is to help entrepreneurs that already have marketing strategies in place. I want you to be able to have a look at your strategies and see how we can tweak it so you can eventually scale up. Second, I want to help entrepreneurs who are new to digital marketing. This book will help you create a step-by-step marketing strategy so you can hit the ground running.
I have found that marketing is the Achilles’ heel of most businesses, probably second only to profitability. A lot of business owners often leave marketing for last. It’s so easy to get busy with other aspects of the business throughout the day. You handle sales, finance, product acquisition, people management, and so on. Then when you have some extra time at the end of the workday, you may decide to finally have a look at your marketing.
If there’s one thing I’ve always reminded my clients in the last two decades, it’s that marketing isn’t something that you delegate, set, and forget. That’s a recipe for disaster. You wouldn’t leave your sales process to someone else without asking for results or even reports. You wouldn’t tell a third party or someone in your team to just go and sell the product. They’re in there playing a crucial role in the lifeblood of your business. Right?
In the same way, you shouldn’t just leave someone else to do the marketing for you and just wait for the results. Marketing is an extension of the sales process. It plays a crucial role in generating income for the business. It’s an extension of the revenue generation pathway.
What to Expect
Throughout this book, we will have a look at the ways in which you can make marketing work for your business. There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy here.
I’ve condensed the wide array of marketing strategies and tactics into an easy to follow system, to help bring out the best in your business. These strategies are based on what I know about best practices in the industry. You will be provided with worksheets and undergo various activities to formulate an effective marketing plan. So yes, this book will make you work, because information alone won’t make you richer. Implementation will.
Firstly let me say this: I believe in coaching. I believe successful people have successful coaches. Even Michael Jordan had a coach. The coach didn‘t have to play better than Jordan, but he knew how to pull out the best in him.
I’m here to bring out the best in your marketing, the best in your business. I’m going to unpack 20 years of international award-winning experience in marketing and advertising and equip you with it.
One time, I was shooting multiple ads for a $4.5 million campaign for Tourism Australia. Tourism Australia had partnered up with YouTube to showcase every iconic and beautiful spot around Australia. So there was this epic work trip planned, which aside from the early morning shoots, was essentially an all expenses paid holiday.
Great gig, right?
I needed to fly to the best parts of New South Wales, of Queensland, Tasmania, Western Australia. We were also going to the middle of Australia, the salt flats, swimming with dolphins by the coast again, then trekking up snow-peaked mountains. that meant I had to pack a pretty comprehensive suitcase.
What do I put in this suitcase?
If I wasn’t sure where I was going, what the weather would be like, who I was going to meet, or how I was going to encounter these people, how could I pack?
If you think about it, the question is really the same in marketing. When you start out on your marketing journey, you think to yourself, “Who’s going to build it? Who will look at it? How much should I spend?”
I would add to that train of thought; What tools are you going to use? Which CRM should you use? How are you going to run your ads? What’s the content of those ads? Where are you going to get the leads?
These are things that you can’t just delegate to an assistant or an agency. If you do, there’s a big chance that you may not be satisfied with the results. I could have asked my assistant to pack a suitcase for me on that work trip. They in turn might have packed it with clothes for warm weather, taking their best guess. I would end up freezing in the snow. After all, there is no bad weather, only bad clothing.
Simply put, you can’t just get somebody to do your marketing for you and then just report back to you when it’s done. Agencies, marketing gurus, and consultants have in-depth knowledge of marketing (hopefully) but they don’t know your business as well as you do.
Your Role in Marketing
The first thing you need to do as the business owner is to own and understand:
Where you’re going
Who you’re talking to
How you’re going to get there
You then need the tools and technology that will help you do it, and apply the right technique to those tools so your plan can be a success.
Tools vs Technique
Keep in mind that the marketing tool(s) you use is/are a separate thing from the marketing technique. You wouldn’t hire a carpenter with a hammer, and no experience, right? Yet when it comes to technology, people tend to assume that once they acquire said technology, that money automagically comes in the door. At least, software vendors would like us to believe that. Even marketers can make this mistake. I’ve coached marketing agency owners and business owners alike and I‘ve seen how often people mistake the tool for the technique.
It’s not the same thing.
Somebody once said, “a fool with a tool is still just a fool”. You don’t want to be foolish with your marketing. You have to know exactly what you’re creating and not just buy a piece of software (tool) and hope that it works. You can’t just pay an agency and have them wave a magic wand and hope that it works.
At the end of the day, nobody knows your business like you do.
In this book, I’m going to take you through a system (technique) in the same way that my martial arts teacher once taught me. He removed all the beautiful moves out of Shaolin Kung Fu. He stripped out all the unnecessary, flowy parts so that what he had left over were the ‘kill moves’.
Through the years, I’ve worked with various international brands, big and small businesses, B2B, and distribution. I’ve also sold my own products through distribution, so I get it. One thing I’ve learned out of all these experiences is that marketing comes down to a few killer moves. And I’m going to introduce you to some of them in this book.
The 3M Marketing System
Question time. What are you trying to achieve by reading this book? Chances are it is some variation of “improve marketing, make more money.” More importantly, we want to deploy marketing that is actually profitable.
What does marketing success look like for you?
For most people, marketing success is removing the guesswork out of their marketing and streamlining it so that it’s effective, efficient, and produces an ROI. It’s where every dollar that you put in gives you $2, $3, $4 dollars back because it’s generating and producing sales and conversions. That could be your definition of marketing success.
Some businesses may already have a level of marketing success and they’re looking to scale up. They need to leverage technology, scale up and streamline what’s already producing money. They need to strip away all of the things that are just eating away at their profit.