Lesson 8: Become a Marketing Master | Tips for Entrepreneurs

Okay, so lesson number eight and today I want to talk about marketing. If you are reading this, you are most likely a business owner, an entrepreneur, or someone who runs a business at a high level. If that’s the case, I get it, you’re cut out of a different cloth. You’re like me. I heard the quote one time. An entrepreneur is the only person who’s willing to work 80 hours a week in order to avoid working 40. And that’s how it is. When you run your own business, you’re busy, you work all the time, and it takes a lot of your time and effort to be successful and to run a business. So today I want to talk to you about how your time is spent. Most entrepreneurs put out fires all day. They go from one issue to the next, and successful entrepreneurs are great at solving issues and that’s awesome. However, I believe the best entrepreneurs are masters of marketing. They know how to generate interest in their product and get people to perform the act of doing business with them. I want you to become that type of entrepreneur.

Steve Jobs was known to have spent about 50 to 60% and possibly more of his time on marketing and advertising related activities. Some of that was working on design of their products. Some of it was their packaging design. Some of it meant spending time helping to create user interfaces within the products. One of his last conversations Steve had with Tim Cook, shortly before his death, was whether he really wanted Tim to be in charge and if that meant Tim could pull the trigger on some advertising without Steve’s input. Steve wasn’t so sure about that. He spent a big portion of his time every day as the CEO of Apple working on marketing and advertising. I realize you don’t have to enough time or resources to spend 50% of your time on marketing activities. I get it. That’s okay. But you should actually be spending about 20% of your time on it. That means if you’re working 50 hours a week, you need to be spending about 10 of those on marketing and marketing related activities. That’s gonna be crucial for the success of your company long term. Find a way and make the time. 

The other thing you have to realize is that you need to spend money on marketing. I know this sounds,, very self-serving, coming from a guy who owns a company that sells advertising, but whether it’s with me or somewhere else, or even if you’re just advertising on the big places like Google AdWords in the Google Map, on Facebook, so that you can make sure you’re found, you need to spend money. It’s great to have a great social media following. But on a local level, you realize you only reach about 4-6% of people with organic social media posts. 30 to 50% of potential clients in a market if you do paid social. There’s a huge market out there that’s not being reached by some of those major players. You need to find other ways to get the word out. Your community probably has lots of local resources to utilize. We help people with local digital solutions to make sure they are reaching their community.

Becoming an expert and marketing is crucial. I hear people say, I hate marketing, I just need to have someone do it for me. I believe this is a mistake. I think a business owner, should have help with their marketing but they themselves should be an expert. For example, you should understand that you have to hit marketing from different angles. It’s called omnipresence marketing or layered marketing, where you’re on a lot of different things and you’re, you’re seen in a lot of different ways. It is also important to be consistent.

Here are my tips for you as you attempt to become a marketing expert.

1. Make sure you have an awesome product or Service. Spend time making sure your product delivers and that it’s amazing. That’s number one. Without number one, the rest don’t matter.

2. Number two, know your unique selling proposition in your USP. What is it that is so amazing about you that brings people back? I also like to call this your Why statement. Not your why for doing your business, but the why of your clients as to why they do business with you. If you haven’t downloaded the USP worksheet you can here. Once you have established your USP then you will want to use it in all of your marketing. Not just the words, but let the concept of your USP guide your marketing messaging.

3. Number three, learn how to tell people about your USP or what makes you great, in a way that makes them want to do business with you. Or at least come check you out, or, consider doing business with you. Know your USP and become good at telling people about it.

4. Number four is tell people it Every day. Get in front of people every single day. Give yourself the opportunity to earn business every single day. That’s how you become an expert marketer.

I’m going to review it one more time. Make sure your product’s awesome. If your product’s not awesome, start there. Get it fixed. Number two, know your unique selling proposition. Know what makes you unique, what makes people come to you. Number three, learn how to tell people about it in a way that gets them to want to come to you. Then number four, tell ’em about it every single day. This is something you have to work on constantly. It’s not gonna be an instant success. You’re gonna have to try some different things and I encourage you to spend a lot of time on this, be intentional in your marketing There’s a lot of information on the internet, lots of videos, lots of ways to learn, but become an expert marketer. Spend your time and take more pride in the title CMO, Chief Marketing Officer than you do in CEO or president of your company. Take more pride in knowing that you know how to market your product and bring clients to your company. Your survival depends on it. Again, my name’s Ryan Spelts, RyanSpelts.com. You can get a copy of the Who and Why worksheets along with the Where. It has lots of great information in it, including becoming a master marketer and plus lots of brainstorming ideas to help you come up with ideas for each month so that you can continue to tell people every day about your products. Good luck out there.

(Tips for Entrepreneurs)