Sarah: Good morning, everyone! Okay, so many business owners, they have the best intentions when it comes to marketing their business online, but sometimes their best intentions can go awry because they may not know how to best drive customers to their business. So we're going to uncover the five mistakes that small business owners make, five of them, and we're going to get to-

Glyna: That was 10.

Sarah: Yeah, five! We're going to do five. Just five today. To help you save time, money, and energy. So let's go.

Glyna: Hello!

Sarah: Hello. Good morning. Here we are just running and gunning.

Glyna: Yeah. Well, welcome to Marketing Mix everyone. Every week, we like to talk about different segments and highlight different kinds of digital marketing topics. We'll mix it up a little bit. We'll talk about tips. We may bring in some trends that are happening. We always like to review different products and services, and also we can answer Q&A. Before we get started, let's remind everyone where they can find us.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely. Golly, that frog is trying to find me.

Glyna: Yeah. It's the coffee frog.

Sarah: It's a coffee frog. Okay. Don't forget. Every week we go live on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and don't forget to subscribe to our fantastic podcast, Marketing and a Mic, and also follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn, and as always, I got to get the light out of my face, subscribe to our YouTube channel. I don't know where to sit here, but-

Glyna: A little quick on the "YouTube". We love our YouTube.

Sarah: Yes. Subscribe to our YouTube. Let's pop it up again, shall we? Our YouTube channel, Fusion One Marketing. Every single week, we are putting out new and fresh videos, and when I say every single week, I mean every single week, so make sure you subscribe. Okay, today we're going to talk about something that's really, really important, and it's going to, I think, save and help a lot of small business owners, but you know, small business owners are kind of dedicated to doing whatever it takes to bring in new customers. But sometimes it's just not enough to just slap up a website or just kind of rely on word of mouth to get your great product or service out there. It's just, long-term, not going to keep business churning, especially in today's world, that's for sure. So, while many small business owners understand the importance of a marketing plan, there's one powerful piece that just cannot be neglected, and that is digital marketing. So, we are going to kind of tackle today the five mistakes that these small business owners are unintentionally making. So this isn't here to embarrass anybody, but it's just some mistakes that they're making and we're going to help you fix it. So, let's talk about number one, which we really do come across this a lot, which is just simply not having a marketing plan. I mean, if your marketing plan consists of "get more sales", that's not a plan. You first need to kind of identify what you offer, what your brand personality is, what your message is, and also who your customer is. What it is about your ideal customer? What do they look like? And some important questions, I think, to start off with would be, let's see, what social media platforms align with the key demographics of my customer? So important. So you got to understand what their interests are, what they're about, what their likes are, what motivates them? Number two would be, what content or media does the ideal customer respond to? We've touched on this in the past. Everybody digests information online differently. Some like blogs, some like videos, some like podcasts, whatever it is. Some turn to Google, some turn to social media, whatever it may be. So you need to really kind of dig deep and find out what content or media does my ideal customer respond to. Also, what message do you want people to know about your business? You need to understand first, what is my personality? And then convey that out there so that when people are talking about your business, they got your message right, because they kind of are your mouthpiece of your brand. Number four would be, what are my competitors doing? I mean, you got to check out those competitors because if they're doing something well, you might want to tune into that and understand it. And number five would be, what tools do I need to reach our customers? And that's kind of where your marketing game plan comes in. So you just kind of have to establish these objectives out the gate, kind of beginning to put together your strategy and then map out actionable plans to accomplish that, so that's a real big one to start off with right out the gate.

Glyna: Yeah, all of that said, those are all important things, being consistent is one of the biggies. Whatever marketing plan you come up with, everybody's always excited at the beginning. Yes, let's do this. Let's do this. That's a great idea. Everybody has great ideas, but the implementation of being consistent with your marketing plan and carrying through all the strategies is probably one of the most important things as well.

Sarah: Very important. Anybody can get motivated, but you got to stay motivated.

Glyna: It's a little hard in your day to day business get it. Let's see, I know we had somebody saying hello. Hello, Steve Johnson. How are you this morning? Am I-

Sarah: You're good. Number two.

Glyna: 

Okay. I didn't know if I was echoing.

Sarah: Oh, I don't hear the echo. No. Am I echoing? Are you echoing?

Glyna: Hey, I think some other people are tuning in. If you guys would comment, we'd love that because then we know that you're tuning in. We can't see you unless you comment, so that would be awesome. Okay. Every time we talk about anything, you know that we have to bring up SEO. I think SEO is if not the most important thing... No, it's the most important thing, because SEO, with that search engine optimization, everybody is online, and if you're not online with your business, then people are not going to find you. For instance, did you know that Google right now is processing over 3.5 billion searches a day? And that's just Google. That's not including any of the other search engines, YouTube, anyplace else. So again, you have to be online, and you have to make sure that your content is out there talking about what you do. I know that sounds pretty simple, but you have to be intentional about what your message is and the content that you're going to get out there. You want to make sure that your website is ranking as high as possible, and, again, that's with SEO. Then you also have to make sure that you're keeping up with the ever-changing techniques of SEO, and that's really difficult to do. We've been around for a while, and I think that we started our business when SEO was just starting. Now that tells my age a little bit, but also it's important to know that we have studied SEO for 10 years and we keep up with the changes. Let me tell you that's a job in itself. I think Google alone had over, I don't know, something like 500 changes to their algorithm last year. So, it's very important that you're keeping up with everything. You also have to know your keywords that will help target the audience that you want. What things do you want to sell? What is your moneymaker? And you want to make sure that you're using those to attract the people who are looking for you. Again, with all the SEO techniques and really good content, then the search engines are going to favor you and put you above your competition and make sure that people can find you. We tell everybody we build beautiful websites. We really do. And sometimes that's all somebody needs is just a nice website to say, hey, I'm a great business, but it doesn't matter how beautiful that website is if nobody can find it, and that's what SEO does. If you're not online, you're not using SEO to push your business to the top, you're missing out on a whole lot.

Sarah: You sure are. Yes. You and Rob were doing SEO before SEO was cool. You knew about it before anybody else. Let's talk about number three and they don't know their audience. Ugh, gosh, this is another big one. As a small business owner, don't make the mistake of focusing on your products instead of your audience. Focus on your products, but don't focus on it so much to where you don't even know who your customer is. So, you can't bring in the right customers if you don't know who your customer is. You just got to have that mindset of, what's in it for me. That's really what should be driving you, is what's in it for me, because that's kind of that fundamental customer question that you want to be able to answer, and that's key. So, before you start any online campaign, make sure that you spend the time kind of defining who your target audience is and how to find them. So, the first thing we suggest would be to define their demographics, their interests, their online preferences, and whatever that nurture path is to get them to make a buying decision. That's really important. Again, you kind of got to really develop your content around that target customer. So, once you've discovered that audience, find the platforms that best match that customer. That's really important. So it's a common misconception that business owners think, okay, if I just saturate all the social media platforms, then I'm just going to cover all my bases, and it couldn't be further from the truth because it's really a waste of effort to blanket yourself all over, especially if you can't be consistent with it. Now, if you can't be consistent with all your social platforms then don't even bother, but really just focus on the ones that you know where your niche is and that's it. Then just kind of make sure that you can devote the time. Again, we stress this enough. Don't slap up your social media platforms and then leave it a ghost town. I know it's Halloween, but it's no time to be a ghost town when it comes to social media. And develop an online community. I like this, too, because sometimes it's great to get firsthand feedback on your customer. Sometimes developing an online group, get you information, kind of learn about what they like, get feedback. It's kind of your way of having your own little focus groups. So it's a good one. Got to know your audience.

Glyna: You really do, and people don't take enough time to think about this. Like you said, it's not a shotgun approach. You really need to target. Target is one of the biggest words right now in marketing. Well, it has been for a while, but people always ask me, do I need to be on Pinterest? Do I need to be on Instagram? Do I need to be... Let's stop. Hold back just for a minute. Who are you selling to? Who's the person? Tell me what that person looks like? How old are they? I think I am echoing now. I don't know what's... Tell me what that person looks like? How old are they? What do they do for business? Really getting down to the common core of who is your customer and targeting to them. You don't have to be on every single social media channel. Now you can be if you have the time for it, but most people don't. So pick one that makes the most sense for who is buying your products. Alright, next thing. Okay. Again, it's kind of like social media, not just social media, but social media and online marketing and doing ads, all of that. You don't want to just focus on likes and follows. I know when a company first starts with us and they're getting more likes to their pages and they're getting more people to comment and all that, that's really cool. That's awesome. But we always say you can't take likes, you can't take clicks, you can't take impressions to the bank, even though that's fun. It is really a boost to your ego. You really need to concentrate on conversions. I'll talk about that in just a minute. You can look back at our blog posts. I know we did an article a while back telling the difference between reach, impressions, engagement, all of that kind of stuff. So even though you may have 20,000 different followers, that doesn't always equate to sales.

Sarah: That's right.

Glyna: People may like you. They may go, oh, this is cool. These guys are fun, but if they don't know what you're offering and it's not for them and they're not buying, then you may be wasting your time just a little bit. So, likes do not equal leads. We'll go with that. Comments don't equal cash. Again, you can't take those to the bank, but if people are messaging you and asking you about your information, then those can turn into sales. So make sure that you are concentrating again on conversions. You want people to make a purchase. You really want to reach out to them in a way that makes them say, hey, I definitely need what they are selling, and then you can also boost your conversion rate by making sure that your online content matches what it is that you want your audience to look at. Or... I can't think of words today. You got coffee throat.

Sarah: I got coffee throat, that is exactly what that is.

Glyna: I'm having a hard time coming up with words. But anyway... Again, it's exactly what you said just a minute ago. You have to put your information where your ideal customers are. Make sure you add value, give useful information about your products and services. You want to be a resource and you also want to be that person who they think of when they're like, oh, I need a website. Oh gosh, yeah. It's Fusion One Marketing. I want to make sure that I call them. You also want to nurture and develop ongoing relationships with people because they may buy from you once. But then they may see things that you have as you go along. And you develop that ongoing relationship to where they keep coming back. So hopefully that all made sense. I don't know it did coming out of my mouth.

Sarah: It makes sense. I've been with you the whole time.

Glyna: You have to have conversions. That's the bottom line. You can be out playing on social media all you want to, and doing your pay-per-click ads. But if it's not converting into sales, then you need to look at what you're doing for sure.

Sarah: Yes. Right. Which leads us to number five, which is so important. What are you doing all this for if you're not tracking your results? What are you doing all this for? This all kind of falls right in line. It really does. It starts with your marketing plan. I mean, we really are trying to build this whole thing, and if you've got this whole thing going, but you're not tracking your results, you're not seeing what's working and what's not, how can you understand the success and the pain points of your marketing campaign if you're not paying attention to your results? So, the thing of it is that your analytics, they really are kind of the fruit of your labor. You could check these numbers to see, to understand, what's working and what's not. And these analytics are available to you and you've got so many at your disposal. First off, nearly every social media platform provides some sort of performance metrics so that you can look at what's getting more engagement. What is my audience responding to? What are the behaviors of them? It helps you kind of make adjustments where needed. If you see some content is just really not getting any traction, then you can adjust accordingly. If you use Google ad words, they do a nice AB testing, so to speak, to help you identify what ads are more successful so that you could kind of redirect your marketing dollars. It helps you to kind of understand what motivates your audience and what they're responding to. You could see this ad is not as successful, I can see by my results, and now I can adjust accordingly and attempt this ad that seems to be doing a lot better. So knowing clicks to your website, knowing where they're coming from. You've clicked to my website, how did you find me? That's another thing that you could figure out and also kind of track page views, sessions, how long they're staying on there, bounce rates, which is how long they're staying on before they're off and not coming back. So without these kind of hard facts, it's impossible to really track all of your efforts and truly one of the best ways to help with all of those, all the forms of marketing initiatives that you're using, is to use a dashboard. Now we provide a dashboard called Dash and it's phenomenal, and it enables business owners to easily track the performance of all of their marketing campaigns in one place. So we can put it all in one place, one online dashboard gives you real results. You can easily evaluate your data of all the marketing campaigns that you've got going on, and you can make quick decisions and avoid costly mistakes in the long run. Dash is an awesome marketing dashboard that we use. It is a Fusion One exclusive, customized. We've got it. It's phenomenal, and all of our clients really respond to it because it helps them keep track of everything that's going on.

Glyna: Now, this is one of my biggest pet peeves, because I hate to see companies getting ripped off. I just do. We work for small businesses. We love small businesses, and nothing irritates me more than to go meet with a small business, and they've been paying however much money for a year to this company, because let's be honest, what we do, a lot of people don't understand. So they're trusting. They're trusting that these people are doing what they say they're doing. Anyway, nothing bugs me more to say, okay, well, what kind of analytics have they brought you, or how many calls? Let's get down to this part. How many calls are you getting a month from your marketing efforts? I will tell you, and it's kind of sad when I say 90% of the businesses have no idea. They're like they bring me these things every month or they send me this report. First of all, they have no idea what's in the report. They don't know how to read it. So our bottom dollar is, are you getting phone calls and where are those phone calls coming from? If you can't tell yourself, or if you can't answer those questions, then please find another marketing company because you're throwing away your money. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox on that. But our dashboard is phenomenal. I'll have to brag on that. Rob and his team put together an absolutely wonderful tool, and we'd be glad to show it to you at any time. We can also incorporate not only what we do, but if you have any other marketing efforts that you're doing, ground level, like mailers or billboards. We can also track that inside our dashboard. Anyway, just a little plug there. Please track the results. Please know what you're paying for. It honestly breaks my heart when I see... I don't like people throwing away their money.

Sarah: Your marketing agency should be getting you leads and calls. That's what all this is about. So if you don't know and you have no way of knowing, that's just not a good sign.

Glyna: It really isn't. I tell everybody, I'll bring you all this pretty stuff, but you know if the phone's ringing or not, or you should be. I don't know, you should be. But anyway, this is all about having a plan and being able to track it. So we have all these cool things. We want to run back through them real quick of things that people might want to concentrate on. We had number one, you need to have a plan, so that's pretty obvious. Number two, please start doing some SEO. Even if you just start with some little things, like make sure you have a Google listing. That's my number one thing. Make sure that you know your target audience. You should be able to tell me what does that person look like? Make sure you know what it is, and don't just focus on likes and follows and being popular. Again, popular doesn't make you money, usually. Well, I don't know. I can't say that. In our line of work, it doesn't make you money.

Sarah: Does it make people more aware? That's kind of brand awareness, so that's important, but you can't stop there.

Glyna: All right. Make sure you're tracking your results. So these are all so important. We do have a couple of what we call honorable mentions, and I think we've mentioned it along the way, but make sure that you're consistent, whatever you're doing, you can't just half-ass it. Sorry for saying that, but you have to put it all in, because why take so much time to come up with a plan if you're not going to implement it? Keeping up with trends, things change, especially Google, oh my gosh. Then make sure you are using digital marketing, which is basically marketing on the internet. Anyway, I think that's about it. I know that's real high-level, what we covered today, but any of these things, if you want some more information on digital marketing as a whole, we can also help you come up with a plan, so just reach out to us. We'd love to help any time and you can get a free consultation and just kind of chat with us about what it is that you need.

Sarah: Yes. We would love to have a conversation. All right, that's it. Those are five mistakes-

Glyna: Not so fast.

Sarah: I'm sorry.

Glyna: No, I think this is so funny because I'm always doing it. And I never remember. Ever. And I was, oh, something popped in my brain. Let's talk about our contest. Let's talk about our fun trivia night that we have coming up this week.

Sarah: Yes, let's do it. Okay. I'm going to have to switch over here real quick so that we can pop it up here. Okay, what do you want to talk about first?

Glyna: Let's talk about trivia.

Sarah: Okay. This one's really exciting.

Glyna: This is going to be so much fun and we are going to be playing "Are You Smarter Than a Marketer?" It's basically just going to be a cool, fun trivia night. Most of our Fusion One people are going to be involved in some way or another. We also have some previous Biz Talk guests that are going to be on, and I think Steve Johnson's on with us this morning. He'll be one of our guest players. It's this Thursday at five o'clock. So, fix you a drink. Come on. You'll find us here at Fusion One Marketing on the Facebook page, probably the easiest place to find us. So, I think it'll be a lot of fun.

Glyna: It will be a lot of fun. Okay. Let's talk about this one. The live scream giveaway!

Sarah: 

We've got a contest brewing.

Sarah: I didn't do it right. You do it better.

Glyna: Oh no. You've got it nailed. All right. This is a giveaway. It's real easy. We're just wanting to get some more visibility for our Marketing Mix, which is what you just watched. So this is how you play. Share our marketing mix broadcast. You can go on our Facebook page or YouTube channel and they're all over the place. Share two of them. Make sure you tag Fusion One Marketing and use #MarketingMix and you get an entry to win a hundred dollars, a hundred dollar Amazon gift card, so that's pretty cool. We will announce the winner on October 31st. So those are some fun things that we have going, And before we go, say a quick hello to Don Phillips. Thanks for joining us this morning, and we've got the Edmund's in the house. Got Cindy and Kirk, good morning to you folks. So thanks for joining us today. And now, Sarah. Now.

Sarah: I'm so glad. What would I... I mean, you're on it.

Glyna: Oh, for once.

Sarah: Some mornings I could carry the torch and others you do. Today, I'm handing it to you.

Glyna: Don't count on that too much.

Sarah: I'm going to work on getting this sun out of my eyes.

Glyna: Very entertaining.

Sarah: I keep wanting to tilt off the screen here.

Glyna: It's very entertaining.

Sarah: Here for everybody's amusement. Okay, everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. Don't forget to check us next week. We're going to have another new, fresh topic and don't forget about Biz Talk on Friday. We're going to have an awesome guest, Scott Stearns, with MortgageBanc on the show, so that's going to be a good one, and we're going to have a two-part one with him. That's going to be exciting. Okay, everyone, till next time. This is really going to be a good one to rewatch.

Glyna: We really are drinking coffee.

Sarah: We can't even get off the show.