Overview
In this episode with marketing expert Al Tepper, we delve into the role of content output, marketing strategies and consistency and the importance of investing in your marketing.
Highlights:
0:06- Marketing Lie 6: You just need to sell more and sell harder!
1:53- The importance of providing valuable information to customers, even in times of uncertainty.
4:21- Harnessing a change in your Marketing Strategy.
6:23- How to drive customer loyalty.
Sam Sayer 0:06
Mr Tepper, we meet again. How are you doing buddy?
Al Tepper 0:09
A pleasure, a pleasure as ever. How are you doing, you all good?
Sam Sayer 0:12
All good, All good. It seems to have cooled down a little bit today.
Al Tepper 0:16
Yes, yes, definitely cooler. Yes.
Sam Sayer 0:21
Right then. So last time we covered in the 10 marketing lies business owners are told, we covered marketing and sells is easy, right? Unfortunately it isn’t. But, you can do it, it can be done, we will come to that. So number five?
Al Tepper 0:39
Number five, is you just need to sell more and sell harder. If your business isn’t working, if you’re not making enough money, don’t do any marketing that’s for suckers, just sell more and sell hard to everyone you meet. That’s the most awful advice I think anyone could ever be given. Because nothing no one wants to be sold to. And so actually, if you sell harder, you’re going to turn people off. Whereas what you should be doing is actually invest in your marketing, create the customer journey, and serve them on that journey. And then you won’t have to sell hard the problem is, is that that’s going to take a bit of time. And so if you’re in revenue, distress, if you need money today, frankly, do whatever you feel, is going to be required to pay your bills. But as soon as you’ve got space, and you can give yourself a runway and build a customer journey for the love of God do it. Because you need to get off that feast and famine cycle of just selling. And then what happens is you get really busy, so you stopped selling and you’re not doing any marketing. And then you lose a couple of clients. But you don’t have a pipeline now. So you just don’t turn into salesman. It’s terrible.
Sam Sayer 1:52
Yeah, yeah. It’s a tricky one. I think I’ve found all sorts in the past. I’ve tried things i’ve not been comfortable with and guess what, they’re the ones that didn’t always stick. Some of them actually got my head into it. And I thought, You know what? In at the deep end. You know, you can’t do the same job we’ve done get results that we’ve got.
Al Tepper 2:11
Absolutely. You’ve got to, you’ve got to change it up. Definitely. I think that there’s no, you know, take it seriously. And your customers, you will thank you for it because they need information anyway before they’re gonna say yes to you. So the purpose of marketing is to give the customer all the information and control they need to make the best decisions then, which hopefully is to work with you. So yeah, serve them love them.
Sam Sayer 2:35
Absolutely. One thing we’ve been building a lot of our current clients, and leads will be saying this is the nurturing campaigns. So automation, suddenly, it’s been on my list to do for probably at least two years now. And we finally want it launched, and we’re doing it iteratively as well as doing the basic build on it, improve on it. The main thing, I can’t remember who said it, but yesterday, yesterday, you said tomorrow, you know, just get started, there’s no such thing as perfection, you just got to start going and keep going. Right?
Al Tepper 3:06
Yeah and don’t be afraid to screw up and fail because life, that’s the only way we learn the only way we move forward is by taking a chance and, and regretting it, and learning and doing it differently next time. So be brave!
Sam Sayer 3:20
Definitely. And I think the other thing we’ve touched on a bit before is consistency is, you know, you have the classic sort of feast and famine, you’re really busy, I’m gonna I’m gonna talk to you marketing, oh, it’s a nice to have our blah, blah. But the thing is, you know, with our lifecyle it can be it can be as little as a month or a couple of weeks, really. But it’s average between three and six months to actually getting a project started from first conversation. So it’s having that communication. And there’s an interesting stat I read by from published by Gartner. That was saying in times of uncertainty, you should market it like you’ve never marketed it before. Because guess what, mostly we’re coming to that space, right? Yeah. We’re gonna, we’re just gonna do the work. And I found this when I was freelancing in 2008, when the credit crunch or whatever they called it. I was mobbed. I was turning stuff done a lot of their full time staff. I get it, I understand the mindset. But they pay more for a freelancer to get that done.
Al Tepper 4:21
Absolutely. In fact, I doubled the size of my business during lockdown by simply doubling my content output because everyone else around me was slowing their content output. So I just went crazy and got literally I remember saying continue, we’re gonna double our content output. And everyone thought I was mad. Well, it worked because the signal to noise ratio had dropped because nobody else was focusing on marketing and doing content. Exactly what you said. Yes.
Sam Sayer 4:49
We talked about it on one of the earlier sessions, Marcus Sheridan, they asked you answer, right? Yeah. I saw him at a seminar last year in Birmingham. Blew my mind It’s always like, I got in the next day, we’re changing everything we’re doing. Yeah.
Al Tepper 5:05
Yeah, he’s a very inspiring guy.
Sam Sayer 5:07
It’s and I think we’ve started building a lot of just general evergreen content as well, because I quite like I quite like writing. So I was writing blog posts on things. And we’re building our website is a real knowledge hub for anyone, you know? How do you put a website live? How long does it take? All these things. So I’ve put them all as content points
Al Tepper 5:28
It’s nice. Absolutely
Sam Sayer 5:30
But yeah, there’s always little snippets you can do if you’re on a train, if you you know, especially as business owners, you kind of never quite switch off and you should, you need to have your time reserved.
Al Tepper 5:40
You never know when they’re going to. The thing is, you never know when they’re going to look it up. You never know. So if you’re there when they type the query into Google, if you’re not there, yeah, I always say 100% of the time people don’t respond to something you didn’t say. Yeah, so if you don’t say something, I guarantee you’re getting business from it. If you say something, you might get business from it. So be visible, talk much talk lots, talk more, value your customer as much as you can, and serve them if you put them first. If you put your customer at the core, your marketing strategy, they’ll feel it. If you put sales at the core, your marketing strategy, they’ll feel it.
Sam Sayer 6:22
Sure. Yeah. We’ve we lost our client portal back in June. And that’s like a dashboard for all our clients to see the login page that details also things, FAQs. You know how to stuff like that is saved an immense amount of times, if you need us, but guess what? It took a while to put it all together. But that’s there. And it will only grow. Right?
Al Tepper 6:47
Well and it’s not as is all of the content locked? I mean. Yeah, so there’s personal content. But here’s the thing, when they go to that, are you are you sharing content in there from your website? relevant content?
Sam Sayer 7:02
Right so a lot of it links to a blog post.
Al Tepper 7:04
Perfect. Which then you know, they can share it. And that’s the point. You then turn your you know, the smartest brands turn their customers into their marketeers. Look at Apple. Look at Apple. That’s exactly why they created raving fans from dot zero. The minute the iPhone existed, they had raving fans, you cannot buy that now. They spent a lot of money on it, but what they did was love the customer. That’s it. That’s all they do. They put the customer at the centre of their strategy. It isn’t rocket science.
Sam Sayer 7:38
Awesome. Thank you Al. Appreciate you your time as ever. Before we wrap up, quick question for you. What is your favourite flavour of crisps?
Al Tepper 7:48
Flavour of crisps? God this is controversial. Well I spent the 90s in Canada. Controversially, I loved ‘all dressed chips’, so all dressed chips are kind of like I don’t even know how to describe them. It’s got a multitude of flavours so that it’s all dressed with all of the flavours so yeah, it’s just amazing chip the best chips they call them chips aswell not crisps. Yeah and Ketchup crisps in North America as well. Unbelievable. Who would have thought you know?
Sam Sayer 8:21
I’m sure Walker’s has done them. I was a fan of them. Yeah, for me spicy knickknacks and for the purists out there who is it maze? Is it a corn base snack? No they’re crisps.
Al Tepper 8:34
Yeah, absolutely. Love knickknacks got tonnes of them. In fact the last crisps I had were salt and vinegar squares.
Sam Sayer 8:43
Ahhh yes, that’s my wife’s favourite.
Al Tepper 8:45
Not quite at the severity of a disco but much better than a normal crisp you know?
Sam Sayer 8:52
Yeah, definitely a refined crisp.
Al Tepper 8:54
Yeah, the refined gentleman’s choice of a crisp.
Sam Sayer 9:00
Do you know what, I always thought the real highbrow ones are the salt and shake you know?
Al Tepper 9:04
Yeah, yeah!
Sam Sayer 9:05
More salt sir?
Al Tepper 9:07
Yeah, it is very, very personal service. When I was growing up, we had hedgehog crisps, I don’t know if you remember those. They obviously weren’t actual hedgehog, but my God is kid we thought they were.
Sam Sayer 9:19
Nice. Thank you as always Al. We’ll catch you next time for Part Six. Looking forward to it. All right.
Al Tepper 9:29
Cheers.
