The Rookie Marketing Mistake That Almost Broke Me

Dan: Welcome back. That marketing, Dan. Today I'm going to talk about the five things that I wish that I knew when I first started out in business and in general marketing. So as you know from following as much as you have so far, if you've seen any of my other videos, I'm not here to be the Mr. Beast of YouTube. I'm here to give you just facts. I'm just here to give you my experience as a marketer in the business so that whatever business you're in, you can do marketing on your own. Learning through my experiences, my trials, my tribulations, so on and so forth. Okay, so we're not going to have a bunch of fancy cuts. If you're here to learn something, just watch me speak. That's what it's all about. I'm here with my assistant Aiden. I'm not going to put him on camera, but he is going to be talking today. We're going to do a little bit of an interview. He, um, put this together for me. It's basically five simple points. He asked, I asked him to put something together and he came up with these five things that are all about what I've known in the past and how I've able to overcome it. All right, uh, the five facts are trying to sell to everyone. I learned that one real quick. Doing everything yourself, ignoring your Google business profile. If you're in a service based business, confusing activity with progress and waiting until it's too late mindset. Those are the five things we're going to talk about today. Um, Aiden, say hello. They'll be able to hear you a little bit. They're not going to be able to see you. He's in the background here.

Aiden: Hello everyone.

Dan: Cool. Aiden's a rock star. You can leave your mic off, Aiden. I don't think anything's too crazy here. Um, Aiden's just simply going to talk to me about these five things. So Aiden, tell me about what you had in mind with these five. What's that first one about?

Aiden: Sure, Dan, let's talk about the first one. So the first one is trying to talk to everyone and not targeting the right audience. Then what's the biggest misconception owners have about the bigger the audience, the better the leads?

Dan: The bigger the audience, the better the leads. And that comes down to the core aspect of trying to sell to everybody. Um, hold on, let me actually pause a little technical difficulty here. Okay. So sorry about that. Phone messed up. My camera's up on top of here. I'd say I'm not fancy with YouTube, but I do have my iPhone recording as opposed to my just regular camera. Um, that said, the first one here was trying to sell to everybody. Why do business owners think a bigger audience means more sales? Um, really what it comes down to is if you try to speak to everybody, you're going to end up speaking to nobody. That is a fundamental marketing concept that's been around since the beginning of time. Knowing your audience and speaking directly to them allows them to resonate with your message. So if I say something along the lines of mothers. All right, cool. Anybody with a kid is a mother, right? If, uh, that's. Say that's my audience. What if we niche down to mothers with daughters? Depending on what your offer is, you're speaking a little bit more specifically. Not just somebody who's got kids, but somebody who's got a daughter. And that's really important when you're putting your messaging together. If you go broad and you just try to talk to women, right, that's way more broad than mothers, which is way more broad than mothers with daughters. And as you circle or, uh, funnel your way down, you're speaking directly to that person, and you're more likely to convert them. Sure, there's not as many of them, but you're going to convert way more consistently when you talk directly to them. As you get your offer dialed in, as you really specifically hone in on what it is you're selling, then you can widen out. You can go to mothers with kids, from mothers with daughters to mothers with kids, and then to women in general. All right, Depending on what it is you're selling, you really want to niche down, and that's what really helps drive conversions at the bottom of the funnel.

Aiden: So if a business owner could only ask three questions to identify what their niche was, what would be the three questions that you would ask them?

Dan: Well, that's. Now you're getting into the actual honing in on that audience, which I just talked about a little bit. Um, number one, you want to know, you know, what is the biggest pain point? What is it you're helping them solve? Right. What is it I don't want to do? What is it I'm looking to avoid? Ask yourself, what is your audience's pain point? Because a lot of people go into, like, demographics and ages and. And gender and job titles and stuff when you're doing targeting on Facebook. But ask yourself, what is their desire? What is their pain point? And what are they looking? What is. What is stopping them from getting it? All right, so I help mothers with daughters get, uh, develop a better relationship with them without making them feel awkward around their friends. All right? If I'm trying to have a better relationship with my daughter and I'm selling a program or a consultancy or something that allows that to help help them, I gotta really dig into what that mom with the daughter is thinking. What is it she's worried about? Right. She doesn't want and say, let me back up a little bit, we can niche down further with a teenage daughter. Mothers with teenage daughters is a very specific audience if you're selling a relationship program to help bolster their relationship with their daughters. Okay. It's not just 5 year olds or 20 year olds, it's teenage daughters. All right, now what is a teenage daughter's, uh, big issue? She doesn't want to have, uh, her mom make her feel uncomfortable or awkward. So we're going to want to design our marketing to be centered around that pain point. Because the mom, the last thing she wants to do when trying to develop a relationship with her daughter is to make her feel awkward or not be cool around her friends. So you'd want to design your messaging around that. And again, to answer your question, Aiden, what is the pain point? What is their desire and what's the biggest thing they're looking to avoid? Or an old method they have been trying before?

Aiden: I really like that. Can you give me an example of when niching down actually turned a business around? Or in the contrast, when you went too broad or a client you had went too broad and it ended up not working?

Dan: Yeah, I mean, any, anybody that's in business loves, they're thinking, okay, I'm gonna go super broad. That means it's all my customers. I've asked a lot of my clients, when they come on during onboarding, I'll say, hey, who is your target customer? Who is it you're going for? And they'll simply say, anybody. Anybody that's got money, that's my client. Yeah, sure, that's cool. But what are we going to say to anybody you know that's too broad? It's way too broad. Niche your way down. Start asking questions. And again, as I mentioned earlier, it will be less of them, but you're going to convert them every time. If you've got an audience of, uh, a million people, you convert. Convert 1%, that's a thousand. What if you convert 10% of only 500,000? Or that's for easy math, 10% of 100,000, that's 10,000 people of 100,000, 10% versus 1% of a million. Only 1,000 niche it down. A million isn't a big, is a big audience. We don't want that. We want to niche it down, make it smaller so we can talk directly to them.

Aiden: One percent of a million is not one thousand.

Dan: It's not?

Aiden: No, that's a hundred thousand. That's ten. It would be ten thousand. Ten thousand is one percent of a million.

Dan: Oh, uh, well, he got, he got it. Whatever the case, the, the, the, the, the analogy is still the same. You understand? That's what I'm getting at. My math is terrible.

Aiden: I do understand. I totally understand. That's all I'm telling you. Because we're cutting.

Dan: This is, this is why I've got Aiden as my assistant.

Aiden: All right, so the next thing we're going to talk about, unless you want to do a one liner, if you want to throw up three fingers and talk about three things, about the danger of talking to everyone, or we can just go on to the next, um,

Dan: well, as far as the dangers go. And again, for anybody watching this, what we're also doing with this video, and again, I'm not trying to get into crazy editing, so we're just talking, Aiden and I, um, because we want to create some short form out of this too. So you're kind of looking into the innards of a marketer's brain by watching this and how we're approaching our content strategy. And I'll be the first to admit, our content strategy is not that great. I do it really well for my clients, but not that well for myself, which is why we're trying to do this. And that's what Aiden is here for. What we decided to do, um, with that information, it's about a 10 minute long video. We're going to chop this up into a five part series so that the videos don't get too long and you're getting one specific point out of each. And again, if you're watching this, you're not here to be entertained. You're here to be learned. And that is the whole point of this channel. Maybe one day I'll become entertaining and I'll lean in with some fancy graphics. But right now what I want you to do is learn from these things. So this first video here is me and my assistant, uh, experimenting. And this first point was about trying to sell to everybody and the dangers of going too broad with your message. The next video, video number two is going to be about doing everything yourself and wearing all of the specific hats. Which, again, you're going to have to do when you first start out in your entrepreneurial journey. But you want to start thinking like a business owner, not a job owner. And that is the most important part about, uh, being an entrepreneur, is so that you can delegate tasks, so that you're no longer working inside of your business, but instead.