Epic Entrepreneurs

Revolutionizing Marketing: Earning Trust in a Minimal Contact World

• Bill Gilliland

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Unlock the secret to marketing that doesn't just reach people, but resonates with them. This week on Epic Entrepreneurs, we're cutting to the chase with some hard truths about why your marketing might be falling flat and how to inject it with the dynamism it desperately needs. Prepare for a paradigm shift as we confront the modern consumer's preference for minimal human contact and dissect the evolving 'seven touches' theory that's now become a game of 28 touches—or an immersive six hours of engagement—to earn that conversion. 

We're not just talking at you; we're engaging with you on a journey to transform your business approach. Our session peels back the layers on what it truly takes to build a know, like, and trust factor with your audience in a world where information flies at us like telephone poles on a country road. Learn to navigate this high-speed information highway with marketing strategies that will leave an impression, not just a fleeting glimpse. Get set to refine your pitch, recalibrate your methods, and revolutionize your entrepreneurial impact.

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Bill:

Welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs Foward by Action Coach Growth Partners. You likely went into business to have more freedom and flexibility so that you could spend more time with your family, do more things or travel or enjoy your hobbies or whatever it is that you like to do in your spare time. We're here to help you find better ways to make more money, build better teams and get that time back so that you can have that freedom and flexibility. We'll help you simplify things and make sense of business, investing and wealth building so that you can be epic and achieve all your dreams and goals. And now enjoy the show. Hey there, hope you're having a fantastic week.

Bill:

This week we're going to continue our series with Always Be and it's Always Be Marketing. Now I'm going to skip a couple of letters. We're going to M Always Be Marketing, and there's a subtitle for this one, because I've had a couple of what we call BFOs or Blinding Flashes, the obvious around marketing in the last few weeks and months, and I'd like to share them with you. And it's the subtitle is why your Marketing and why my Marketing Likely Sucks, or let's just be nice about it and say why and how your marketing could be better.

Bill:

So there's an old saying in the business world that nothing happens in business until something gets sold. It makes sense, right? You have to sell something before you can execute on whatever it is that you said you sold, whether that's a product or service. Deliver the product, deliver the service. Whatever it is, something has to get sold. In other words, someone needs to make a buying decision. Well, there's some interesting stats that are making that more and more difficult, or at least different than things used to be, and I guess that's the thing. Change is constant. So now, the interesting thing is that most people today would prefer to have very little human contact. In other words, they don't want to talk to a person because they're scared they're going to get sold. They want to look at what we've got the internet. In fact, 40% of people who were recently surveyed said that they would prefer to buy something without ever talking to a person. In other words, they just want to go and click on it.

Bill:

Now, you can buy anything these days. That way, you can buy diamonds, you can buy books, you can buy you can buy a car. You can go on. You can design your car. You can click a button. Now, eventually you'll have to talk to a person because they're going to want to know how you're going to get paid and or how you're going to finance it. But at the end of the day, you can pretty much go through the whole process right till the end and they're not. It's not really a sale at that point, they're just taking an order.

Bill:

So what does that mean for us in today and age? How do we get people to know, like and trust us? People are never gonna buy from anybody they don't know, like and trust. You know what does that mean for marketing? Now, I remember there's an old saying in marketing that in order to sell something, people need to have seven touches, so they need to see and add or talk to a person or something. And I heard almost 20 years ago from Jay Conrad Levinson, the author of Guerrilla Marketing, that he believed it was three to four times that. Even then, because of the amount of data, the amount of information, in other words, we might need to have 21 touches, or we might have to have 28 touches before you actually register and get to that know, like and trust where we would be comfortable making a buying decision.

Bill:

It's sort of like driving down the road. You know an old country road with telephone poles on it. You go so fast it just becomes a blur. That's how information is coming to us, and it's not getting better. It's not. It's been like that for years and now it's getting faster and faster and faster and faster.

Bill:

In fact, our team was just having a discussion and some of the conventional wisdom in our industry is that we need to be in front of people for six hours. It's the same thing. You could have touches or you could have amount of time you get to spend with them. Now, that doesn't mean I have to be in front of them, talking to them for in person for six hours, but it could mean that maybe they've read my book, maybe they've been to a workshop, maybe they've had a telephone call, maybe they've looked at one of these videos, whatever it is. We believe that it's about five to six hours that we need to spend some more before we can completely build that know, like and trust.

Bill:

So what does that mean? Well, that means we can't be lazy. It also means that marketing is taking on more of the selling role. Marketing has to do more of the lifting. Marketing has to get us further down the path towards a buying decision. Marketing has to give us the know, like and trust, or a lot of it, before someone is actually gonna make a buying decision. Really interesting times and really fun, but that matters.

Bill:

So how do we do it? Well, it's a great book. It's called they Ask you Answers by Marcus Sheridan. What he says is they ask a question, you answer the question. Pretty simple, don't try to sugarcoat it, don't try to make it into something that it isn't. Just answer the question and people will start to know, like and trust.

Bill:

On his pool company, on his pool company, they answered all kinds of questions how much was the pool gonna cost? That's a great thing. That's one of the things people wanna know. What's the difference between an in-ground pool and a concrete pool? What's the difference between? You know? What kind of pool should I have? Do I need heaters? You know, whatever it is, that is part of the deal. So here's my. Here's a three. At least three BFOs, or blinding flash of the obvious that I've had in the last couple of One is I need to put my ego aside. Listen, I have an MBA. I've spent most of my career doing some kind of marketing or sales. You know, obviously, coaching, building businesses, but it all comes back to marketing and sales.

Bill:

I recently sat with a friend of mine who has a marketing agency and he had a chart and had a bunch of gears and whatnot and a bunch of stuff. It was a nice visual of all the different marketing channels and I think he left out a few. I mean, if you start thinking about marketing channels, you have traditional marketing like television, print, newspaper magazines. You have Facebook, you have email marketing, you have YouTube marketing. You have on and on and on and on. In other words, there's a whole bunch of things that's paid advertising.

Bill:

There's a whole bunch of things that you would need to be good at to be an expert in marketing. Well, the truth is, I don't think anyone can be an expert at all like team things. It's pretty tough. You gotta have a team to help you with that. So the first BFO is you can't know everything. You can't do it all yourself. You need help.

Bill:

Number two I was chatting with another friend of mine and what he said was if there's an area in your business that's underperforming or not doing so well, then it's likely because you don't have anyone in charge of it or you've got someone who's no good at it, and I realized that we, you know, part of our thing was inconsistent leads. We needed consistent leads coming into our business all the time, which means we always have to be doing marketing, and the reason our marketing sucked, the reason our marketing wasn't working as well as it should be, is because I was in charge of it. Talking about ego, I had to check my ego at the door. I was in charge of it. I'm also running the coaching business. I'm also doing some coaching.

Bill:

If we really want to do marketing well, we had to have to have a marketing person. So I've taken care of that. I've hired a marketing person. I've hired an expert. I've hired someone who's actually in charge of our marketing, actually in charge of generating our leads, and he is way smarter at this than I'm, way more experienced and way better, and he can also spend a hundred percent of his time doing it. Now he's handling the digital part.

Bill:

So the second BFO is if you're not getting the results you want, you might need to look at yourself first. Get your ego out of the way, check your ego at the door and find somebody who's actually better at it than you are. So the third thing is and this is a relearning and some blinding flashes the obvious are relearning is marketing's math. There's branding and there's marketing, and they're both important, but for most of us, if the math doesn't work, the marketing's not work.

Bill:

Okay, like branding, for me, is more farming. It's longer term, it's running out and we need to be doing. The truth is, we need to be doing more farming, more content, more things now to build our brand than ever before, because that's how we build the know, like and trust. However, most of us need to have needs. We need to live indoors, we need to pay the bills, so we need our marketing to work now. So you need both.

Bill:

Now, when you get ready to hire a marketing person, you need to know are you hiring somebody who's more a branding person or more a what I would just call a straight up marketing person, someone who's going to get leads, who's lead generation person? Are they more farming or are they more hunting? Now, what I did was I hired somebody to do both. They're going to hunt in the beginning and then, of course, we're going to do farming in the end. Now, one important note is there's something called ROAS, r-o-a-s. It's called it's return on ad spend. Whoever you give for marketing, you need to make sure that they understand and they're going to give you reports on return on ad spend. On ROAS If you're not getting a ROAS on your marketing, it's because you're not measuring it. So marketing is math. You must measure your mark. So let's recap Number one you can't do it all by yourself. Number two if it sucks, it's likely because you're doing it. You need to hire somebody to do it. And number three pay attention to the farming, pay attention to the hunting. You got to do both, but you must get a return on your ad spend.

Bill:

I hope you're having a fantastic week. I look forward to talking to you soon. If you'd like to chat with us about up in your marketing game, up in your business game, we'd love to chat with you. All you got to do is reach out to us at billgillilandactioncoachcom or ncbusinesscoach. We're all over everywhere. We're pretty easy to get a hold of. Get a hold of us, hook in for a strategy session. We'd love to chat with you. And until next time, all the best. Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. Here's four things you can do. First, you can listen every week on Biz Radio, mondays, at one Second. You can subscribe to the podcast. Hey, you get it. The more subscribers we have, the more cool things we can offer you. Three you can also go out and give us a five-star rating everywhere. And number four if you'd like a free copy of my book, the Coach Approach Five Principles to Build an Epic Business, just go to giftfrombillcom. It's your roadmap to building your epic business. That's giftfrombillcom. Until next time, all the best.