Let's talk about marketing because love it or hate it we can all agree that it's essential. I know it's not why you started your business. You started your business because you love the doing in the business, right? But you're not gonna make the sales unless you actually learn to love the marketing too. Here's 7 reasons why.
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Welcome, welcome to episode 11 of The Elevatory podcast. I am your host Anna Jonak and the founder of The Elevatory. Now, today let's talk all about marketing because love it or hate it. We can all agree that marketing it’s essential and constant. If you're doing it right, part of running a successful business. However, I know it's not why you started your business. You started your business because you love the doing in the business, right? The ideas, the concept creation, bringing the products to life, um, you know, getting them out to the world. But the reality is getting this product out and getting the storefront up and running, is one thing, but you're not gonna make the sales unless you actually learn to love the marketing too.
And for many, this can be a bitter pill to swallow because it's not your forte, you're creative, right? This isn't what you signed up for. So it's certainly a shock to the system and it is a whole new ball game. And let's be honest, one that's constantly changing and evolving. Now, there are some out there who might argue that, you know what? You don't have to do your marketing yourself. There's that old adage. If you don't enjoy it, you're not good at it. It's not your strength outsource it, but I'm actually gonna share with you right now, seven reasons why I would not recommend outsourcing your marketing early in the journey and why love it or hate it, I actually really do recommend you learn to lean in and love and embrace marketing just for the very first few years, at least until you start to get that traction and volume of sales that you need. All right, so I'm gonna dive into seven reasons right now.
1. What is the cost to outsource?
The very first one is that it comes with a significant cost to outsource. Which means sometimes it's not actually even financially viable very early on when you're not making many sales. When you start to add in the agency costs and the ad costs, and the fact that there's not very much knowledge for both sides on what works for your specific business. I mean, you might be in the same product category as someone else, but your account is new. There is a lot of testing to be done with copy and creative. And a lot of money gets spent on testing, with very little coming back in. I mean, when we work with clients, as we teach them to run their own ads in the first month or so, you really are working to being lucky if you break even because there's a lot of testing to be done.
Now, in some cases, this can roll on for months. And if you're locked into a contract, it could be months of what feels like pouring money down the drain, even though you're gathering data and insights, but those costs are exacerbated because you have the agency fees on top. So essentially you need really deep pockets. And obviously the costs are halved if you learn it yourself because you don't have those additional fees, what's more you're obviously more empowered and you have the opportunity to run these things whenever you want with no cost out to somebody other than your ad spent. So something to think about is obviously the cost. You've obviously invested in lots of things in your business to date, and this is an investment in your self by learning something that you can then use whenever and you're not having to pay someone again and again.
2. No one knows your audience better than you
I really wholeheartedly believe this. You speak to your audience on socials every day. You can survey them. You can poll them, you can analyse their purchase behaviour. You can even get on the phone to them. You have got so much data and insight and knowledge about your audience that you probably don't even realise. And when you really stop and think about it and lean in and think about pain points and drivers, benefits, features, you've got the goods and I trust that you will be able to pull together copy and campaigns that speak to your audience because you know them better than anyone else possibly could. Okay. And I don't believe an external agency is gonna be in the same position and they're certainly not gonna go and do all the data analysis that you would do or get up as closer and personal with your audience as you can.
Okay. And they're not also gonna have not the same care factor. Let's be honest. It's a job. It's a job that they're being paid to do. When you are in this, every single penny counts, right? It's really important for you. And that's not to say an agency doesn't care because I totally believe there are agencies out that will work exceptionally hard. But I still think that there's an element of, if something's not working and you are in an ad account, you're gonna go in, in the middle of the night and you're gonna tweak it. That's not gonna be the same for an agency because that's not what they're contracted to do. Okay.
3. You can be more reactive to what’s happening
So, which really brings me onto our next point about being reactive actually. And that is that you have your finger on the pulse of your audience and actually what's going on, or I hope you do, or you should do. And if you don't, then again, this is part of what you should be doing. Because the more that you're across what your audience are doing and how they're shopping and how they're reacting means that you can be more reactive in your own marketing. So if you've got a sale going off over emails, you can get an ad up really quickly and promote it there too to your warm audience. If you've got a new top, that's flying off the shelf, maybe you hero that in a campaign and get that up really quickly. You're able to react really quickly and you're not waiting for someone else to implement something for you. Again, you are in control.
4. You need to be certain your assets are optimised to convert
In many cases, I know that when people come to us, their assets are not where they should be. To outsource you need to be certain that your assets are optimised to convert, and you are putting your very best foot forward when it comes to your user experience from the website pages to check-out all the way through to your email marketing. This in itself takes time and skill and quite a lot of tweaking. And you really need to be across your data. But essentially the job of an agency is to get you traffic. They're gonna turn ads on and get you traffic, but it's not their problem. If things aren't converting that is on you. So I can guarantee there's a lot of people that will go and invest in someone running their marketing when half their stuff isn't working properly, things are not optimised. They don't have proper email sequences in place to leverage sales at multiple points in the funnel. In which case, sometimes they're making money, but they're not making half as much money as they could. So you wanna make sure that everything is working at its best. So that then you're maximising every opportunity when you're turning those sales on, especially when someone else is running it for you.
5. You need to understand your metrics and financials
I believe really strongly in this point. You need to truly understand your metrics and financials before you outsource. And this is an area so many shy away from. And I would say that 95% of the people that I've worked with, and I've worked with thousands, they shy away from it because it can be overwhelming. And again, a bit like marketing, numbers aren't their forte. However, you really need to understand and be across things like your margins, a pretty simple one, through to your cost per acquisition, your customer lifetime value, because that in itself can have an impact on your cost per acquisition. And what I mean by that is the cost that you are willing to pay for an ad in order to make the sale. Just things like marketing efficiency rate. Like there are just so many numbers that we need to be looking at to make sure that your campaigns are working properly for you. And, and that your, you know, to understand the success of your marketing in the bigger picture of your business, cash flow, all of these things, it's not just about looking on a return on ad I'd spend. And a lot of people just get sent reports and they don't understand them. So they don't know whether the things are working. You need to be on the ball and understanding your metrics and analytics and your financials so that you know how the marketing is working for you. And you can decide to scale up, to scale down, or things need to change.
6. You need a marketing plan and a bigger picture strategy
Number six, your marketing also needs to be feeding into a bigger picture plan and a bigger picture strategy. It's not just about having somebody run ads for you or somebody write emails for you or someone run social media for you. You will make more money and more sales and more impact if you have all of your marketing working together and part of a bigger picture, multi-layered, multi channel approach. I'm talking, having a clear view on what's happening week to week, month to month and email, socials, content marketing, paid ads, partnerships, whatever else you wanna do, all working in synergy, okay. Dipping your toe and sending an email here or there, or spruiking something up on your socials, or, you know, running an ad. You want cohesion and everything working together. All right. That will help you increase those conversions. You want launches, sales, events, everything mapped out, and you want it all working across all platforms. All right. So the plan, and I love these sessions with clients getting them into a plan, but it just helps give you so much more structure and focus.
7. You’re only as good as your last payment
And my last point today is that you are only as good as your last payment when you outsource, because obviously you don't know and understand it all yourself. As soon as the money runs dry or say the agency closed down any one of those scenarios, you can't afford anymore, you're back to square one. And then what I think that is the biggest thing, right? Is that if you suddenly stop and even if it was working okay, um, and you need to pull back for a bit, everything stops. Okay. And we don't want you to be in a position where you are out of control, because I feel like that's where it is when you're running all this stuff in the early stages, you're in control, you're learning all the insights and information you gather will help you to pass this stuff onto someone down the track so that they can work it and make it work really hard for you.
Real life example
All right. Now, I just wanna bring this all together by sharing a bit of a case study with you from one of our clients, her name's Sarah, and she runs a business called Daisy's Closet, and I'm gonna pop up a link to her case study. In fact, go and check out all of our case studies by all means at theelevatory.com/case-study. But Sarah is a great example of every single point I've just mentioned. She came to us right at the end of, um, a contract working with an agency for running her ads. She was about six months into her business and she literally came to us haemorrhaging money, poor thing had decided to invest in a lot of stock and open a storefront. And then what happened is COVID happened and she was unable to sell all of her stuff in the storefront. And as a result, she decided to try and get everything online. Now, the agency was making sales for her. She was bringing in about $7,000 a month in sales through the agency. Um, however, she was losing more than she was making when it came down to the ad spend to bring, to make those sales, the fees of the agency and other costs and her cost of goods. Now, she was at a point when she was feeling completely scared and nervous about what the next leap was, because she felt like she was just, like I said, hemorrhaging money, but she knew she had to take back control and she wanted a chance to make her business viable and that she needed to step up and, you know, put her big girl pants on in her words, um, and try and take the helm and make things work.
And that is making sure assets are optimised and your infrastructure is in the best position possible, that your messaging is on point when it comes to features and benefits, pain points when it comes to your target audience, marketing plans. And obviously the most important is actually the physical running of paid traffic. So Facebook ads, Google ads, and the like, okay. She lent in and learned all of this, implemented everything, learned it all herself. And fast forward, about six months, six months in, um, she was going from seven. She went from $7,000 a month to $70,000 a month, all by learning and embracing it herself. Fast forward another six months and she hit 150,000 thousand dollars. Okay. In a month, that is such a huge, huge difference, right?
From seven to $150,000 because she lent in and mastered her marketing and she understood her numbers. She got a plan in place. She knew her audience. She lent in, she was being reactive and it's just had the biggest difference. And she just continues to scale today by kind of like continuing with this mastery. And she's obviously in a position now when she can outsource and indeed in some areas, she has begun to outsource some of her marketing. For the most part, I think she's gonna keep Facebook to herself or create an in-house team because it is one of her biggest drivers. And she's obviously very sensitive to that. But she's been able to outsource other things so that she can focus again she knows on her marketing. Um, anyway, so I trust that this example and all the things I've spoken to you about will give you some food for thought, especially if you're early in your journey.
Okay. The key to real growth is learning and mastering this amazing part of your business. And it might not be something that you see is amazing right now, but you can learn to love it. And you can learn to get excited by numbers and metrics. Trust me back in my day when I started, it wasn't my forte either, but when you can see the power and the impact and your ability to reach and to get your product or service out there, it's actually can be really very exciting. So I urge you to find time in your diary, create time, block time, create space, and learn, and implement this side of things, guys. Okay. Outsource your admin if you need to, if you need to create back and claw some time, do whatever it takes so that you can get your head into the marketing, put that marketing hat on, you get out there and start getting eyeballs on your stuff, being in front of mind for your customers, being reactive and get excited and passionate, because this is where the magic happens and where you will certainly put yourself on the path to the next level in your business. And, and you will see and reap the rewards of impact, financial rewards, you name it, and as well as putting your business on the map. All right. Marketing, don't hate it. Love it. All right. Okay. That's it for me today.
Now, as I wrap up, if you do wanna learn anything more about our programs and how we can help you with all areas of marketing mastery, then head on over to our website and book yourself in for a discovery call. We would absolutely love to connect with you at theelevatort.com Alrighty, that's it for me, have a great rest of the day and I will catch you soon.
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