The 5 Costly Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #280

Speaker A: M. Get set, podcast listener, and be ready to win with your mentor, motivator and marketer, Cam Roberts. Grow your business and achieve your goals quickly with the latest tips, tools and tactics on business success and marketing. Subscribe now and download your free resources@camroberts.com au. Hi, Cam Roberts here. Thank you very much for joining me on another episode of my podcast, Personal Brand Talk, where I unpack, um, strategies, tips and tools to help you grow and scale your business or brand. On today's episode, what I'm talking about is the five mistakes that you need to avoid at all costs with your marketing if you want to grow and scale. Now let's dive straight into it. Mistake number one is overspending on paid advertising. I see this all the time. We see it in my agency, Bubblegum Marketing. Um, as a fractional cmo, I do run a marketing agency. That marketing agency is called Bubblegum Marketing. We specialize in paid advertising and also E commerce, sales funnels, all that sort of stuff. Direct response marketing. That's our jam, right? And one thing that we see time and time again is overspending. When we take over an account from someone, it's not uncommon that the previous agency or the previous media buyer has been overspending. So it's really important that you keep to your budgets. One particular client I can share, uh, a story on. I won't name the client or name who they are, but we took over their account because we were engaged for the first month to spy, if you like, on the existing agency, find out what they were doing well, what weren't they doing well. And one of the things we discovered was a 30% overspend each and every month. Now, you might say, well, that's not a lot of money, 30%, you know, whatever. However, this particular client was spending a hundred thousand dollars a month, so that particular 30% ended up being an extra $30,000 every single month. Now, that's a lot of money if you're not getting the leads and the returns, which they weren't. So that's the first thing you've got to make sure that the team that you're working with, the, uh, freelancer, the media buyer, that they stick to their budget. And how do you make sure they stick to their budget? Make sure that you can report, make sure they are reporting on that to you on a regular basis. And not only reporting to you based on their spreadsheets or their reports that they can actually show you on a weekly or monthly basis that this is how much they spent in the last 30 days, make them send a screenshot to you so you can see and prevent overspending. What we do at Bubblegum marketing is we typically underspend by about 5% per month. And that way that gives us a buffer just in case the ad account itself, like the Google or the meta ads, if that overspends. Because that can happen. Like, you know, it can happen, um, but it won't spend by an extra 30%. But it can be a couple of, you know, percentage points. So we often like to keep, um, under whatever the budget is. So if the client says the budgets, you know, $10,000 a month, uh, we'll underspend by 5% of that $10,000 a month. And that way it just keeps us under the ten thousand. Doesn't matter. What's ten thousand? Fifty thousand, hundred thousand in paid ads, we'll keep it under the 5%. And that way, uh, helping them achieve their goals of only spending what they allocated to spend. And that way it's, you know, it's better for them. They know what they're spending on Google Ads or meta ads or wherever they're advertising and, you know, they can work their budget and run their business properly. Now the second thing that we see a lot, the second mistake that people make with their marketing and it's also with paid advertising. And not all of these mistakes are with paid ads, by the way. So hang around for three, four and five. But the first two are, uh, because they are the biggest levers in most businesses. But the second mistake is not setting up their paid advertising campaigns correctly. Um, even in this week, as I record this podcast, there was a particular client that we just onboarded and we set up to stabilize their ad accounts. They had events not tracking properly in Shopify. They didn't have their Google Shop connected properly. They didn't have their pixels connected properly. Uh, their email marketing. And Klaviyo was not. They're not also connected properly with Shopify. And so what it meant was they were just wasting a lot of money on paid advertising because the groundwork wasn't done in the setup. And that's a real key when you start any sort of paid advertising. You've got to, uh, know that your people, whether it's an agency, a freelancer or a media buyer, whoever you're hiring and working with, that they've set up your campaigns properly. And how do you know? The question is, how do I know if it's been set up properly if I'm not the expert? And that's what I'm relying them on, you'll know because they won't be able to get your results after 30 days. If you see after 30 days the ads aren't tracking as well as what they thought or you thought they were. The leads are coming in at uh, too expensive, they're not coming in frequently enough based on the money you're spending. Those sort of KPIs not being met often indicate that the account is not set up properly and the tracking is not set up properly and the pixels are not set up properly because Google or Meta can only perform as well on their paid advertising campaigns as much as what content and information you send back to them. So the more information and the more clean data that you can send back to Google Ads from what, what you're seeing, you know, in your conversions and your appointments and your sales, whether you're E commerce or service based, it doesn't matter. But the more data that you can send back to Google, the more data you can send back to Facebook through the, you know, through that whole process of someone coming into your funnel, making an appointment, talking to someone, becoming a sale or becoming a client. The more data points you can send back to Google or Facebook or Meta, the better those ad platforms can perform for you. So that's a really important one and we see it a lot. Um, and if you don't, I tell you what, it's going to cost you a lot of money. It'll cost you a lot of money in lost leads, it'll cost you a lot of money, you'll pay for higher leads and it'll cost a lot of money because you just won't be able to scale properly and you'll know something's not right, but you won't be able to put your finger on it. And I can bet you any money you like, nine times out of 10, it's because everything wasn't set up properly at the start. Now the third mistake people make is not setting goals. They don't set a goal. And if you don't have a goal, you've got a moving target. I mean, think about like people who train for the Olympics. Again, at time of recording, the Winter Olympics are on now. Olympians train for four years for an event that might last 30 seconds to five minutes, some longer if they're kind of endurance based exercises. But nonetheless they train four years for an event and they set goals, they set short term goals, medium term goals, long term goals, they set goals that they want to achieve every day. What are the Three things they want to achieve today. They set goals that they want to achieve over the week. How can they make improvements this week? They set goals based on months, and they set goals based on years, and they set goals based on even decades in some cases. So you need to be the same with your marketing. What, what are your goals tomorrow for your marketing to achieve? Like what KPIs have you set up and so you can track what goals are being achieved. So what, what is it that you want to achieve? How many leads do you want to have come in your sales pipeline tomorrow, next week, next month? How many appointments do you want to make tomorrow, next week and next month? How many sales, how many conversions, how many, um, new clients do you want to close in the next week, the next month, the next year? All of those goals are really important. And if you don't have them written on paper, if you don't know what your goals are, well, then your marketing will fail every single time. Because your marketing can only be as good as the people driving it. And if the people driving it are not clear on what the objectives are, you'll be all over the place. You can't hit a moving target and you can't hit no target. If I was to go to the archery range and I was to get a whole bow and arrow full of arrows and a bow and just shoot them down the range and there was no target, I'm going to hit no target. But if I've got a target and I know what that target is, well, then I can hit that target with every single arrow or at least get very close to that target. So that's the third mistake, is people don't have goals. Now the fourth mistake people make with their marketing is they hire the wrong people. I tell you what. Hire fast, fire slow. It's an old saying I heard from Brian Tracy. He was talking about it in the corporate world. But it doesn't matter whether it's corporate, whether you're hiring a bdm, whether you're hiring a salesperson, whether you're hiring a Facebook ads guy, whether you're hiring an agency, whether you're. Even if you're hiring a fractional CMO or internal cmo, you, uh, need to fire fast and higher slow or higher slow fire fast. And what that means is take more time to interview people, Find out their strengths, find out their weaknesses, find out what case studies have they done, what have they achieved before, what sort of clients have they worked with in the past, who do they work with, who, who trusts Them already with their business. What brands do they work with? Have they worked with well known brands previously or currently? And that gives you a hint of, you know, do I want to work with this agency or do I want to work with this fractional cmo? How could I work with, you know, someone like Cam and his team, for instance? Like, what would that look like? Let me go and check him out online, Let me listen to his podcast, let me watch him on YouTube, let me get a sense of who he is and what he does, right? And so then that will give you an idea of, hey, you know, great, I want to work with that person. You've taken time, you've done your research, now you can hire the person, right? And if they don't work out, get rid of them quickly. If your Facebook ad guy that you've got and you've only had him for a month and it's not working out and you've got that gut feeling and you know he or she is not working out, get rid of them. Find someone else. There's plenty of other people that would do the job properly. You don't have to keep working with someone who you're already working with if they're not getting the results. Okay. And if you're scared about making that change from one supplier to another supplier, um, well, get someone in to do an audit on your business. We do that all the time at Bubblegum Marketing. I do it as a fractional cmo. We come in and we have a look at people's businesses. We don't intend to take over their ads or anything like that at that stage. We're just having a look, seeing what the people are doing behind the scenes, checking out their ad accounts, making sure everything's set up properly, and providing an audit report and a plan to move forwards in. If they want to keep their current ad people in play, great. They've now got a proper plan, they've got things they can fix up. If they want to change, they can do that too. And that's always a good way to do it. Now, the fourth mistake you need to avoid with your marketing is not producing enough content. It's 2026, folks. If you're not producing content, you're missing out. I really do mean that, because the thing is, I seen Gary Vee last night on a video. Someone asked him, how many times should I post on LinkedIn? And he said, Eight times a day. And the person that was interviewing him said, what? Eight times a day on LinkedIn? And the way he explained it was quite logical. Like, you think about LinkedIn as an algorithm. If you go to LinkedIn and you follow the same process as everyone else and you post three times a week, you're posting the thousands and thousands of people. LinkedIn's only going to show it to a handful of people. Your three posts are, uh, competing with all of that other attention, all of the other posts. Whereas if there was a eight posts a day, what's going to happen is a small amount of people will see you more often, right? So a small amount of people who already engage and stop and read your posts, they will see your eight posts a day more often, right? They might see two a day instead of now, one a week, you see, and then they start seeing four a week and six a week and eight a week. And so they become to know you more, trust you more, follow you more, and then become clients. So I don't know if the answer's eight a day. I know that's really hard for a lot of people, eight a day. But I do know that that rings true because there's a lot of people that don't post anything on LinkedIn. It's not just about LinkedIn. It's also about your Facebook page, your Google, my business profile, um, a podcast, a, uh, blog that's part of your website, um, a TikTok, your Instagrams, YouTube shorts, YouTube, um, Pinterest, all of those sorts of channels. Pick three of them and do three of them really well. Right? So for me, I like podcasting. It's always been a favorite of mine. I come and go with it sometimes I'm more active than other times, but it is one of my favorite channels. I do enjoy creating podcasts. I can do them sitting in my pajamas at nighttime or however I want to do them. I don't need to set up a video, I don't need to comb my hair. I can just do an audio and away I go. So I love podcasting for that reason. The other form of um M. And by the way, these aren't the ones that you should pick. You should pick the content, um, channels that you prefer. But these are the ones I prefer. Um, I'm liking YouTube at the moment because YouTube is competing against TikTok and Instagram and those other short form, um, channel platforms, video channel platforms, and they're actually starting to open up the organic algorithm a bit more. So a couple of years ago, when they had the monopoly and there was no other video platforms, it was really hard to get seen on YouTube. Like, you could put a video out there and you might get 27 views. And it's stuck on 27 views for like ever. It kind of just didn't grow. But now with YouTube shorts, it's not uncommon to get a thousand views on a good video with a good hook and good, um, description and tags. And there's tools like TubeBuddy and Vidiq that will allow you to be found and it will suggest thumbnails, it will suggest headings, it will suggest titles. And so that's why I'm loving, uh, YouTube views. Um, our own personal YouTube channel has been growing significantly over the last couple, um, of months, as have some of our other clients that we're doing YouTube SEO on. And that's just a basic way of saying, it's a fancy way of saying we're optimizing the YouTube videos so the YouTube can show them to more people that are looking for them. So again, pick your channel. Uh, my favorites are podcasting, YouTube shorts. I love that. And I do love other short form video platforms. So I'll often repurpose um, the platforms on other channels like TikTok and Instagram and Chuck it over on Facebook. And I do like Insta, uh, I do like LinkedIn as well. Um, I like to do long form written content on LinkedIn with an image I find that's working really well. And from time to time I'll also post, um, a, uh, LinkedIn newsletter. I've got a LinkedIn newsletter going. It's got over two and a half thousand followers subscribers. And every time I post LinkedIn, uh, newsletter that then goes out, LinkedIn lets those people that have posted a new newsletter. So that's again a powerful marketing tool that not many people tap into and access. So, um, you know, get into it, get into your content marketing. It's free, it doesn't cost you anything, it's supplementary to your paid advertising. But if you're not being aggressive with content marketing, you're missing out on building your brand. You're missing out on new leads, you're missing out on people finding you, knowing you and liking you and trusting you. The fifth and final mistake people make with their marketing is they don't have a big back end. And what I mean by big back end is that they don't finish strongly. So when people come into their funnel, when they have a good experience, when they're searching for them on the Internet and they're looking at their Facebook and they're looking at their TikToks or they're looking at YouTube or listening to a podcast and they come into their funnel, they make an inquiry, they have a call with a salesperson, then crickets, nothing happens. What are you doing at the back end in the way of email marketing and SMS marketing? How are you continuing that relationship, continuing that journey, using email selectively and collectively to demographics of your own email database? You know, if you haven't got an email database with over 10,000 people or more in 2026, you really have been leaving money on the table. You need to make sure that you're not making the same mistake as many other people and think that email marketing is dead. Email marketing is not dead in 2026. It is a great channel that you own and control, not like the other channels you own and control it. You can send as many or as little emails out per week as you want to your list. You can make offers, you can create content, you can add value, you can educate, you can empower, you can entertain through email marketing, you can share your social media links, you can share your content that you've created. It's a fantastic media for filling out the back end. So once people come in from the front end, come in from the top of funnel, go through the bottom of the funnel, end up, uh, at the back end in your own database, in your own sandpit, as I call it. Make sure you continue that journey for them. Don't just stop and don't nurture them anymore. Don't just stop and don't offer them any value anymore just because you've made the sale or you think they've lost or they're lost. Right, They're a lost lead or lost sale. I've seen the case in many times where even in my own business, people have been on my email marketing list for four or five years and then end up being a $10,000 a month client. So you cannot underestimate how powerful email marketing is. Well, they're the five mistakes to avoid. And I've given you some tips on what you should do to make sure you improve them. If you've got any questions whatsoever, just reach out to me@camroberts.com au or wherever you're listening to this podcast, just send me a dm, follow, fill out a form and one of my team or myself will be in touch. And if you need help with any of your marketing, any of what we discussed today, direct response marketing, paid ads, hey, reach out to me. I'll be happy to arrange a call with myself or one of my team. We'll talk about what's working, what's not, and then maybe we can do some work together and help your business grow and scale. Until next time, this is Cam Roberts signing out. Sam.