Overview
As we continue our video series, Sam Sayer is joined by marketing expert Al Tepper from TepFu. In this episode, they begin to discuss 10 marketing lies small businesses are told.
Highlights:
0:11- An overview of guest Al Tepper.
1:01- Marketing Myths.
1:45- What is a marketing mentality?
5:20- Marketing strategies and support.
7:42- The second marketing lie you are told.
9:15- The importance of niche targeting in business to stand out.
12:33- The benefits of a collaborative approach in marketing.
Sam Sayer 0:01
How are you doing Al?
Al Tepper 0:09
doing really well, Sam, thanks very much. How are you, mate?
Sam Sayer 0:11
You’re welcome. It’s really good to have you on board. So can you tell our raving fans? Who are you? How do you help people? What do you do?
Al Tepper 0:20
Great place to start.
Sam Sayer 0:21
In one minute.
Al Tepper 0:23
Yes, my name is Al Tepper, I run TepFu, and I turn business leaders into marketing leaders.
Sam Sayer 0:28
Perfect. Love it. Love it. Excellent. So I think we’ll get a few conversations out of this topic. You know, as you more than many most people know, marketing, you know, it’s such a broad gamut. You could spend your life learning one part of it. And yeah, it’s something everyone needs to be aware of, I guess. But which bits do you choose? Which bits feel right for you? Which book to outsource? You know, it’s a it’s a huge, huge spectrum? I guess. So. Yeah. What can you tell us about marketing? What’s the where do you start?
Al Tepper 1:01
Well, there’s a lot of different places to start. But let me start right at the beginning. And start by talking about the 10 marketing lies that small business owners are told, I think it’s probably the most powerful thing I have to say, because even I’ve been in marketing for over 25 years, when I launched my business, I was told a lot of these lies, and I even believed some of them. Because I’ve been working in marketing in business, or somebody, you know, for somebody else, when you’re running your own business, there’s a lot of rubbish that’s got to be cleared out the path in front of you. And so the first marketing lies a bit of a no brainer, but you’d be amazed at how many people it messes up. The first marketing lie is if you build it, they will come. They won’t. I can tell you, they won’t come if you just build it. It’s a hard slog. It’s a very hard slog, and I’m sure you’ve built websites in your life. And then the client has declined to do any digital marketing ongoing. And then they wonder why there’s no traffic coming to the website, because if you build it, they just don’t come. And there’s a reason why it’s really logical. It’s because they don’t know you exist. They just have no idea. Yeah, let alone what you do, why you’re awesome, why they should work with you. So the most important thing is, if you build it, great, that’s nowhere near enough. Marketing is a 24/7 365 days a year mentality. Absolutely. Yeah. And I always say to people, you either, you know, 100 at the time you’re doing marketing, the question is whose marketing you’re doing, you’re either doing your marketing, or you’re doing your competition’s marketing, easier for them to win the next piece of business?
Sam Sayer 2:49
And it really is a 24/7 world, right? It’s, you know, yeah, whatsapps everything, you know, there’s more entrepreneurs than ever before I think, so it’s, you know, and they’re looking at new things, you know, it’s, you can’t just be the nine to five marketer, right?
Al Tepper 3:02
No. And so that’s the problem. You can’t afford to spend all day doing your marketing. So you have to be very incisive with what you do, do you have to outsource some of it when you’re comfortable and capable when you’ve got budget, but even in the early days, on the foothills, there’s things you can outsource, you can get a marketing VA, or marketing admin person to do, you know, four hours a week for you to at least take over some small of some small part of the tasks that are very operational. And that allows you to start to build up the processes around marketing. That means when somebody messages you at 3am, they get a reply. One way or another, but it’s not from you, and they might even sign up for something it might actually, they might even pay overnight whilst you’re sleeping. What a wonderful idea earning money while you sleep.
Sam Sayer 3:49
That’s the dream.
Al Tepper 3:51
Let’s all just do that. Yeah.
Sam Sayer 3:54
Yeah, that’s a long term plan. I’m trying to figure it out but yeah, early, early days.
Al Tepper 4:00
I think that’s what no one gets into business to run a business. We get into business, to pay our bills to enjoy life, to do the work we want to do to work with people we want to work with. I truly don’t believe anyone just runs a business, for no financial reason whatsoever now, because why would you do something differently? So if we’re going to run businesses, we should at least enjoy our
Sam Sayer 4:25
journey, right? The journey?
Al Tepper 4:26
Absolutely. In fact, Gary Vee said that yesterday, I’m pretty sure you said it yesterday. He said it’s not about the outcome. Stop focusing on the outcome. It’s the process. It’s the journey that we go through that will colour our lives and fuel our lives.
Sam Sayer 4:42
There’s a great analogy. I can’t remember who said it, but they’re saying it’s like a piece of music or dancing, right? The objective is not to get from the start the peace of the end as quickly as possible. It’s to enjoy listening to it and the journey.
Al Tepper 4:54
Absolutely I have so much fun running my business. I mean If this is work, I get to speak to you. This is brilliant. You know, I mean, the best best thing in the world, I look forward to going to work. I don’t need a holiday to get away from my job anymore. I used to when I, when I worked for other people, oh my God, I need as many holidays as possible. Yeah. But I think life can be more than that. So understanding that if you just build something, you know, if you fling up a website, or if you just send one email, or if you post once social media, just because you’ve done something doesn’t mean they’re going to react. Takes a lot more work than one. Yeah.
Sam Sayer 5:35
Because it’s a crowded place, right? Everyone’s doing something, or should be doing something. Right.
Al Tepper 5:40
I heard my latest insight on this is that the human brain receives 10,000 marketing messages a day.
Sam Sayer 5:47
Wow. Yeah.
Al Tepper 5:49
Well, and here’s the proof. If I pick up my phone, the Apple logo and the New York logo slide in front of you. So that’s two marketing messages, right there. Most of the marketing messages we see, we don’t even realise we’ve seen and so yeah, again, if you build it, well, they come. Why would they they’ve got 9999 distractions, at least, and that’s just marketing, their family, their own business, their own issues in life stuff, you know, you’ve really got to be present to capture people’s attention.
Sam Sayer 6:23
Absolutely. Yeah. And I guess being standout as well, you know, being memorable and yeah.
Al Tepper 6:28
Yeah, definitely. Well, you’ve got to, you know, I’ve got a marketing scorecard, which you’ve probably taken.
Sam Sayer 6:35
Yes, I have done
Al Tepper 6:35
And one of the questions. And one of the questions is, do you communicate your uniqueness? And people say no, all the time. And I’ve got another question that says, Are you unique? Because I know, how can you not be unique? There’s only one, Sam, there’s only one Al. There’s only? Yeah. Well, you know, we all live in this notion that we compete. We don’t compete. In fact, we compete, you know, with everyone. I’m working with a client at the moment, who’s not even in retail. They’re a business services organisation. And they said to me, their biggest competitor is Amazon. Right? And I said, why? And they said, because that’s where people spend most of their time. They said their biggest competitor is Google, because that’s where people spend their time. So that’s what people are used to online. It’s a very smart way of thinking about it. Your competition are probably not who you think they are anymore.
Sam Sayer 7:27
I mean, I’ve certainly found from Google ads and stuff people have found from over the place, you know, from certain things, it’s, you know, it can be Yeah, like, you say, inquiries through the night while you sleep. Yeah. So it’s lovely. It’s visible, right? Yeah, absolutely. Nice. Okay, excellent. What’s the second commandment.
Al Tepper 7:42
the Second? Second is? If you launch it, they’d support you. They didn’t
Sam Sayer 7:49
Thats a classic
Al Tepper 7:51
Everyone, everyone before you launch your business, whoever’s watching this before you launch your business. Remember how your family and friends said, Oh, it’s a brilliant idea. Yeah, I’d buy that. Yeah let me know when it goes live, Al. Yeah. And then you go live, and you tell them all, and it’s just crickets. And you think the message send your call up your mate and say, John, did you? Did you get my message? I don’t think anyone saw it, because nobody’s done anything. And John says, Mate I’ve been in meetings all afternoon. The reality is, they won’t support it when you launch. Yeah, because they don’t want to. But because they’re busy. They’ve got distracted, it’s like point one. Just because you launch the business doesn’t mean I’m going to stop what I’m doing and focus on you for the next month. If you’re lucky, I like your page. Yeah, if you’re lucky, I’ll see one or two of your posts over the next month, because the algorithm doesn’t want me see it all anyway. So even if you posted, you know, once a day, every day, there’s no guarantee I’m gonna see the content.
Sam Sayer 8:51
Absolutely. And also, I’ve you know, I’m aware of how simple it is to support you know, your friends and family in business. And I’ll just go through, go through LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever, I’ll just default like stuff if my friends are posted something that they’ve done business, I just like it and had a phone call quite recently. Oh, what did you think that poster put up? I was like, what post? oh you liked it? Like, oh, yeah, I didn’t actually read it. I’m just supporting you mate, but I will go back and read that now. And we had a good conversation about it. Yeah, great. That kind of worked in a weird kind of way. But yeah, that’s the reality. 100%.
Al Tepper 9:24
You’re on your own. When you launch a business, you’re on your own. And the sooner you realise that, the better, now you can get help. That doesn’t mean you can’t get help. But when you go to bed at night, you’re the only person caring about your business. It doesn’t matter who you love who loves you. And nobody else is caring about anybody else’s business, because we’ve barely got the brain space to care about our own. So the sooner people understand they’re on their own, and that means they need to be as visible and as present and as relevant and as resonant as possible. Yeah, where their customers are. The sooner you get that the quicker you’ll get marketing. Marketing isn’t when I posted something on social media once, but nothing happened. That’s not. That’s just firing a bullet randomly into the night and praying. You’re not gonna get it.
Sam Sayer 10:13
Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, I spent, well, 22 years, two years this year running events, you know, from pre Facebook, you know, when forums were a thing when MySpace was a thing, and yeah, can’t wait for this can’t wait on the actual night. Where are they? No one shows up, you know? And they’re like, Yeah, we should book this DJ booked that person, we booked them, they’re not there.
Al Tepper 10:35
Well, that’s a great example of the problem. You know, and we’ve all been, you know, we’ve all, we’ve all been victim to that, where we take it on ourselves to organise something, and none of our mates care. I mean, how maddening. But when you extrapolate down to business, the reason why I do what I do, and I love what I do, and the reason why I try and keep people safe, from a marketing perspective is because when you get it wrong, you have to go back and get a full time job. And that sucks.
Sam Sayer 11:02
Absolutely. It’s got to work right?
Al Tepper 11:05
Yeah, no one. I mean, you know, the thought of going back and driving a cubicle and making somebody else money. Just feels me I think I’d rather, you know, live under a bridge, you know.
Sam Sayer 11:17
I mean, it’s that classic thing, you start a business to live life on your own terms. And you know, all the rest of it. And yeah, working more hours for less as you know.
Al Tepper 11:17
I think you’ve got to hustle a lot and work hard. But yeah, a lot of it is working out what the business is, you know, what you want it to be? Yeah. The trap a lot of early business owners fall into is saying yes to everything. And actually, that’s great for short term cash on revenue. But it’s really bad for defining yourself and positioning yourself. Because you become a bit of everything, you know, you say yes, to everything for the revenue. The reality is, people, you need to be specialists, something if you do everything, nobody really knows what you do. And if you’re good at one thing, you know, if you’re good at one thing, then everybody knows what you do. And that people, especially when you start a business, people really struggle with the idea of, you know, targeting in focusing niching people really, you know, but if I’m niche, am I going to lose other customers? No, you’re not gonna lose it. Why would you lose a customer? It’s actually more reason for them to go with you. Because they now understand you’re good at that for that group of people. Therefore, you’re likely to be good at it for me, too. Yeah,
Sam Sayer 12:34
right now. Yeah, that was a very conscious session. And we had, you know, when we started, we did brand, we didn’t even do websites in the very start. But it’s a brand new thing around branding and design, you know, graphic design, then we got more into websites, then Canva came along, it’s kind of we shift things around. And now we’ve just built partnerships with people like yourself, we’ve got an SEO partner Spring Hill. So we can focus on what we’re good at, and part of the rest, so you can still offer it all. But we linked the people up. And it’s just like, look, we can help you make this a reality. But speak to Al for this, speak to Chris, for this, we’ll do this bit. And yeah, just being clear on that.
Al Tepper 13:11
I think that’s the best way collaborative. You know, the collaborative approach is essential. Because the reality is, and I’ve been in marketing long enough to know that, if you want everything in house skilled under one roof, you’re going to pay a hefty premium for that. And the reason for that is that to attract the right talent, if you’re a marketing agency, and you want to be genuinely full service in house, do everything, and you’ve got them in house not partnering up and people, you’re going to need a very decent office in a very decent location, you’re going to need a foosball table, you’re probably going to need it all. You’re definitely going to need an omelette station, all of those and all of those, all of those perks to attract and retain talent, increase the overhead, so your cost is definitely going up. Whereas when you work with a smaller agency that specialises like DeType, who can bring in the partners as and when you’re still able to keep the budgets? I would say affordable yesterday world.
Sam Sayer 14:13
Yeah, I mean, always, I need to know a little bit about all the peripherals enough to say, look, this is looking conversation now. You know, funnily enough, you say omelette station, I want to I want to call out, shout out a client and a friend. He bought the domain omelette station. Yeah, he’s got the domain name. So right I’ll have that.
Al Tepper 14:32
Gotta be worth something. Omelette station.com I mean, that’s got to be worth something to someone. Absolutely.
Sam Sayer 14:39
Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you so much out. Let’s wrap it up there. We’ve got a few more to go through. Yeah, fascinating. This is really fast enough. So marketing is such a huge, huge space. And it can be so confusing and people there’s the have a go thing and it’s like actually right let’s do it properly. So awesome.
Al Tepper 14:59
I can’t wait to tell you more and I look forward to the on-going chats Sam, thank you for inviting me.
Sam Sayer 15:03
Thank you. Cheers Al, catch you later. Bye.
Cool. So how can people find you?
Al Tepper 15:11
Well, there’s two ways. First of all, I’m blessed with a very unique name. And it’s down there, type it into Google I pretty much on the first page. But more importantly, if anybody, if anybody would like me to build them a free marketing campaign, they can join me on my next five-day free challenge. And if they show up for 15-20 minutes a day, over those five days, I will build them a free marketing campaign. And all they need to do is go to marketing5daychallenge.com, marketing5daychallenge.com. And the five is a number five, and register for the next the next five-day challenge. And I’ll be happy to build them a marketing campaign.
Sam Sayer 15:49
Excellent. And I’ve been asked myself and I can wholly say it’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve got I’ve gotten so much out of that. So excellent. Cheers. Till next time. Cheers.
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