This episode’s question comes from Kieran May, from Accross Business, who asks, “This might be a good question to answer for start-ups but when should I start marketing? Or is this a bit like the chicken and the egg? And how do I know when it’s time to call in a professional?”
Joshua Strawczynski joins us to help answer Kieran’s question. Josh is the Managing Director & Online Consumer Psychology Expert at JMarketing who use their award-winning digital marketing psychology & UX techniques to help influence your customers’ online behaviour.
Josh made the amazing offer of a free, one-hour, online consult for your marketing so be sure to head along to jmarketing.agency to take advantage of that. Be sure to mention you heard about it on the podcast.
This episode is the second in an eight-part series answering listener questions. For each episode and question, an amazing marketer from my network will join us and provide some different points of view and advice.
You can also connect with Josh on LinkedIn
Enjoy.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
As part of the service, I have had this episode transcribed. Transcribing, proofing, and editing a podcast episode is A LOT of work. That’s why I use a service called REV who provide professional freelance transcriptionists who are vetted for quality. While they offer a 99% accuracy guarantee, I do not proof-read their work extensively. Instead, I simply copy and paste below and, as such, please note that this is not a verbatim transcript of the episode and I have trimmed things like the intro, close, and mid-show ad.
Daniel:
Josh, welcome to the show. You and I have been friends for a while now, and I know you’re a good person because you’re a Hawks supporter, but I haven’t seen you in ages because you do all your marketing consulting from, look, what I can tell from Facebook, a beach or a pool from some far-flung beautiful location. Mate, make us all jealous, tell us about that, but you’d better cover off the important stuff like what you actually do for a job and, ultimately, how you help people with their businesses.
Josh:
I do make people jealous. I’m based out of the Caribbean nowadays, and in fact, while we’re having this chat right now, I’m down in Costa Rica doing a bit of a surf weekend. Probably not the best thing to say during the pandemic, but it’s a nice part of the world to be in. Anyway, the way that we help people, the catch-all phrase is, we’re a digital agency. But nowadays, that doesn’t really mean anything.
Josh:
What we are is specialists in influencing consumer psychology online. That’s the very fundamental of what digital marketing is, and fundamentally, it’s the least talked about thing across all digital marketing. Everyone tells you how much money you need to spend on Facebook, and SEO, and the rest of it. No one talks about the actual consumer, the most important piece in the puzzle.
Daniel:
You and I both know as trained marketers, in chapter one of any good marketing textbook, the consumer, the customer, the potential client sits at the middle of that marketing mix, doesn’t it? But because everybody’s rushing around, talking about digital and new media, as you said, so many people often forget that.
Daniel:
Now, Josh, the question I have for you on the show to help answer comes from Kieran May. Kieran is a principal and director at Across Business, and Karen asked, “When should I start marketing, or is this a bit like the chicken and the egg, and how do I know when it’s time to call in a professional?”
Daniel:
So, Josh, let’s start with the when part of Kieran’s question. This is, I feel, sometimes a conundrum for those people, probably when they’re starting a business and they’re off to the races, they’re doing some stuff, but they’re also trying to bring in new business. But I’m sure that there will be some learnings for those who have established businesses as well, in terms of ramping up their marketing. What are your thoughts initially on when a business should start marketing?
Josh:
Let’s start with definitions, because marketing and advertising are two completely different things, and when should you start marketing your business? Before you’ve even started the business. You should be thinking about who your customer is and what their problem is. I’m sure I will talk about this later on in this podcast, so I won’t go too deep into that.
Josh:
If we’re going down the train of, when should you start advertising? Well, there’s two answers to that. One of them is, if you know the need, the underlying need of your customer, well, you can start advertising straight away. But what are you trying to achieve? If it’s an ROI, if it’s a return on investment, then, okay, measure that, see if you can actually generate that very quickly. Use a burn budget of like $1,000. Do it day one, see what happens.
Josh:
But much smarter is to understand that there’s probably quite a few different ways that you can convince someone to take action. So instead of setting your metric straight away based on, okay, how am I going to make more money out of this, use that burn budget to work out, what do people respond best to?
Josh:
That might not generate an outcome straight away. You might not say, “Oh, this ad just suddenly got me five contracts.” It might be a much softer metric than that. You might find that this ad means people spend an extra 20% of time on your website. Well, that is a hugely valuable insight and you can build your business around it.
Josh:
So if you’ve got that money, if you can start straight away, then go into it and do that, but go in with the right mindset and the right plan of what you’re trying to achieve.
Daniel:
You speak about running ads and getting a distinct return on investments, not just about an extra sale. Is that more true for those businesses that maybe aren’t selling t-shirts, and sneakers, and coffee cups, but maybe they’re selling professional services and it’s a much longer buying decision for their target audience?
Josh:
Absolutely, it is. In fact, as an agency, what we specialize in is the longer-term B2B sales cycle. So really, yeah, if you’re selling a packet of gum, probably the same rules apply as how the supermarket merchandises them. But for most people listening to this, the buyer decision cycle is a much longer one. So be thinking about, how can we start that conversation really, really strongly and put a pretty smart process in place that’s going to get me where I want to go?
Daniel:
Let’s move to the timing of the professional help part of Kieran’s question. I’ve always been a big fan of, it’s not what you know, it’s how quickly you can learn it. Because a lot of the stuff that we talk to clients about, day in, day out, they didn’t teach us at university, you don’t find it in textbooks. We have to learn how to apply certain things based off our own steam, and I often say to businesses that there isn’t a lot that I do for them, that they can’t teach and learn, and then ultimately execute and implement themselves.
Daniel:
However, all businesses, they have priorities and various different levels of expertise in terms of internal resources that they can use to focus on their marketing. But ultimately, what are your thoughts on how somebody knows? What are some telltale signs that a business might need to call in a professional to help, rather than just, let’s just keep doing your marketing internally?
Josh:
You’re right. We live in an open source economy where information is freely available. You can find anything online if you’re willing to spend long enough. One of the big questions to ask yourself is, is it worth it for me? I mean, for a long time, I did my own accounting, but now I’ve realized that was craziness because I was losing so many valuable hours doing something that could be done by someone offshore for not very much money, and probably better than me.
Josh:
So when should you be calling in professional advice? This is the other side of the equation. Just because the information is freely available doesn’t mean you should go chasing it, because if you don’t know enough to be able to disseminate between what’s good advice and what’s bad advice, you can waste a lot of time, money, and effort.
Daniel:
Hear, hear.
Josh:
So I would strongly be recommending, you don’t need to pay someone, everyone’s got a mate that knows a business consultant, that knows a really good digital marketer, go and talk to them, get their advice. They know what you don’t know, and they will point you in the right direction. Then be smart about it. Choose the things which are going to be high value to invest in and maybe give one of your team members some of that lower order stuff to start to work out.
Daniel:
Completely get your point about the accounting. I hate doing my own bookkeeping. I’d rather rearrange my sock drawer or watch the grass grow, and getting somebody else to do it, even though it costs me money, means that I don’t have to stress, I don’t have to worry about getting it wrong, and I can focus on either more important things at work.
Daniel:
So Kieran’s question was kind of aimed at early stage businesses, and sometimes if someone has a great business idea and they’re off to the races, but doesn’t have much marketing experience or knowledge, all of the things people tell them that they should be doing, it can seem a bit overwhelming. Even myself as an experienced marketer, I’m curious to see whether you feel this as well, there’s just so many things that people tell you they should be doing. At the moment, we need to be on clubhouse for example.
Daniel:
But for those in that boat, what do you see as some of the critical things that they really maybe need to have bedded down before they go and start looking to explore, maybe some more of those fringe tactics, so to speak? What are some of those key planks that they really need to have in place for their business before they start growing and expanding their marketing?
Josh:
I speak to so many business owners who feel completely overwhelmed. They know they’ve got to do Facebook, Instagram, Clubhouse, these things, where do I start, and they do all of them badly. What’s most important to understand is that those are just channels. There’s a million channels. Television’s a channel, newspaper’s a channel, getting your dog to run a banner at your local football club is is a channel.
Josh:
Marketing itself has not changed in 200 years. The fundamentals are exactly the same; who is your customer and what is their underlying need? Now, this is probably a good point for me to delve into this a little bit deeper, so you can understand where I’m going with it.
Josh:
Let me tell you about the guy who needs to buy a vacuum cleaner. He does all his research online. He looks up the best suction of a vacuum cleaner. The head that’ll go over carpet and it’ll also go over his hardwood floor. It’s got that little [inaudible 00:09:12], that bit that gets on, that’ll get cobwebs if they’re up in the corner. He works out which one’s the right one. Then he goes to all the stores in his local area and he tries to drill them on price, and goes through this whole buyer decision cycle. Right as he’s about to buy it, he realizes his objective wasn’t to find the best vacuum cleaner, it was to impress girls when they come around to his house. So he hires a maid.
Josh:
Now this story is something that resonated with me, I think it was Dan O’Reilly who told it originally, because as marketers, as business owners, if you can understand the fundamental underlying need of the audience that you’re marketing to, then you can test ways of actually appealing to them.
Josh:
We have one client who does a corporate wine. So he’ll whack your label, a custom label, on the bottle and send it to your customers for you. We tested things like headlines and ads like, “Australia’s number one corporate wine. The most trusted name. Guaranteed on time,” all this crap, and none of it worked. Guess the headline that did work. I’ll give your listeners a second to actually think about it. The number one headline that worked was, “Make your customers love you.” It didn’t even reference wine. You know why? Because if they wanted wine, they would go to Dan Murphy’s. That wasn’t their underlying need.
Josh:
So the underlying need is the thing that you need to focus on and tune out all the rest of it. Don’t worry about Facebook. Don’t worry about Clubhouse. Just focus on, what is my customer’s underlying need, and I know I’ve gone on a little while, but I’ll talk about something no one talks about, what are the frictions and anxieties in the buying process, and how can you remove them?
Josh:
This is something Google did a really, really good article on recently, which is surprising because most of their stuff is just trying to get you to spend more money. But they talked about the buyer decision cycle and how humans make decisions, the psychology we go through. What they found, through a hang of a lot of academic research and scientific testing was, as we’re evaluating products, our mind is looking for what makes us feel safe and comfortable and solve the problem. If we feel any friction in that process, what’s really interesting is that we don’t choose another competitive product, we just bail out of the whole decision making process and start again.
Josh:
So to come full circle and answer the question, the best thing you can do is not worry about those channels, but worry about, what’s your customer’s underlying problem, how can you clearly show him that that is what you solve, and then have you mapped out the frictions and anxieties they feel towards your solution and come up with ways of overcoming them?
Daniel:
I love speaking to you, Josh, because you talk about a lot of the things that I talk to my clients about, as well. You talk about the bumps in the decision process, the underlying problem, and then how you can actually solve them for your potential customers and clients. Because, for me, and I’m interested to see whether you see the world the same way, if you focus on those, the tactics actually become a little bit more obvious, rather than saying, “How do I make Clubhouse work in my business?”
Josh:
Yeah, 100%. I use the cocktail party example all the time. Would you just run up to someone at a cocktail party and be, “Hey, Hey, I’m a lawn mower”? No, it’d be weird. What you would do is engage them in a conversation, see if you can tease out the need of how big their garden is, how much time they waste on a Saturday when they could be watching the footy, and then solve it by saying, “How great would it be if you had an automatic lawn mower that did it all for you? Cool. Now let’s talk business.”
Daniel:
So, Josh, I just referenced the specific marketing tactics there and how they become a little bit more obvious if you get the foundations and the important questions right. Are there some tactics now that are really just better left to the professionals? You and I speak to clients all the time and they might be, for example, they’re already doing their own Google Ads, or AdWords as we used to call them when they first came out. Most people, including me when AdWords first came out, we could sort of make them work well enough. It wasn’t that complex to be able to execute them.
Daniel:
But as the years went on, they got more and more technical and complex as the product evolved. These days, if I needed to run Google Ads, I would never dream, even as a marketer, I wouldn’t dream about doing it myself. It’s not in my wheelhouse. It’s not what I’m good at. I just refer people to our good friends at Reach Local. What do you think? Are there any specific marketing tactics that you think, just don’t do that yourself, just get somebody else to do it because you can’t do it as well as a professional?
Josh:
There are many, but there are three channels that I really want to draw into attention. One of the things we’ve built our agency around is high-converting websites. This is something that, we estimate 95% of all websites on the entire internet are grossly inefficient, including the big multinational players. The reason being, everything I was saying before. They don’t take the customer through the journey of how we solve your problem, what are your friction points, and how we relieve them?
Josh:
We’ve got countless case studies to show, companies that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on websites, we’ve come in and for a fraction of that, seen their inquiry rate increase 100, 200, in one client’s case 10,000% overnight without spending money on advertising. So my point being, everyone thinks they’re a copywriter. Everyone thinks they know what good designer is. That doesn’t matter. Talk to someone who actually understands consumer psychology when you’re making your website.
Josh:
You talked specifically about advertising channels, though, so let me do that. Google Ads and LinkedIn ads are going bananas right now, and they are so easy to mess up. LinkedIn, for the reasons that I spoke about before. Everyone thinks they’re a great writer. Everyone thinks they can just spam people and connect them into their network and then send them this super spammy message. That’s just awful. If you’re listening to this right now, and you’re doing that, stop.
Daniel:
Please.
Josh:
You are just destroying your personal brand. It’s not scalable. That’s not how you do marketing. When it comes to Google Ads, Google has been pulling the wool over people’s eyes for a while. They deliberately dumbed down the system so it looks like it’s easy to use. It is not. Let me tell you a couple of stories this will help illustrate.
Josh:
You would think that the big power and gas companies, who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, would be good at this. I have worked with a whole heap of them. My favorite one, I won’t tell you who the brand was, but they do both power, electricity, and gas. The third-highest keyword they were spending money on, completely unbeknownst to them, was when people typed into Google, fart. The reason was, they were using the keyword gas. Google says, “Hey, farts are related to gas,” and it was showing their ads. They were wasting tens of thousands of dollars a month, and this was using people that knew Google Ads, they just didn’t know them that well.
Josh:
Another one, you might even be able to work out who this was, the number 10, I think it was, keyword they were spending money on, so the 10th most amount of money, and this is pretty much their whole marketing budget, was going for sugar daddies Australia. Now they provided a CRM system. They did not want sugar daddies coming through to their website, or young girls wanting sugar daddies.
Josh:
That’s how easy Google Ads is to mess up. So, yes, you could learn that yourself, but you could also flush a hang of a lot of money down the table, and I didn’t even get into the creative writing, A/B testing, all the other stuff you should be doing.
Daniel:
Josh, if Kieran or anyone else wants to get in contact and continue this chat, what can they do? Where can they go?
Josh:
www.jmarketing.agency is our website. Anyone that’s been listening to this podcast, please submit an inquiry form, mention Daniel in it. I’ll donate an hour of my time, completely free, to go through your business situation. I’ll give you some real, honest advice on where I would be putting my resources if I was you, and if you’ve got any follow-up questions, I’ll be happy to answer them for you.
Daniel:
Outstanding. There’s probably five or six marketers in my network of people that I would trust. If you were to contact Josh directly and ask for help, I can guarantee you’re going to be in safe hands. So, Josh Strawczynski, Managing Director at J Marketing, thanks for joining us, sharing your expertise and advice, and answering Kieran’s listener question.
Josh:
Awesome catching up with you. I look forward to the next time we do it.