Here’s What’s Creating Dead Ends In Your Marketing
Here’s What’s Creating Dead Ends In Your Marketing
The marketing and sales myths you’re following and should drop.
When I work with entrepreneurs on their sales, I spend a lot of time undoing some of the sales myths they’ve adopted as truths (that are leading them astray).
These myths are pieced together by advice from very notable and successful marketing gurus. They’re real and solid advice, but they tend to dish out must-do’s without nuance.
Sure, TikTok is really awesome for content creators, but requires complex strategy if you use it as a product or service business.
Yes, email marketing is a great conversion platform, but if you write bad emails, you might as well not do it.
Because of this lack of nuance, a lot of businesses arrive at a marketing dead end — all of their efforts that were informed by guru wisdom don’t end up doing much for their business.
I’ve been gathering data on this for a while — what are the typical dead ends that many of us hold on to as truths, but need to remove from our navigation if we want to steer forward?
Here are some myths I see a lot of confusion around and the truths behind them.
Conversions > Views
What’s the point of getting a ton of views on your Pinterest post or Instagram Reels if 0 sales come out of it?
A misleading marketing metric that a lot of businesses and their advisors put on a pedestal are views and impressions.
Prioritizing views and impressions metrics are great if you’re a content creator or an influencer and you monetize off of views and impressions. Otherwise as any other business, relying on this metric will deploy marketing that exists in a vacuum without a concern for sales.
If you’re a product or service business where views and impressions are only a launch pad to facilitate sales conversions, relying on this metric won’t be your bread and butter. It won’t be a needle mover if it doesn’t have a link to sales conversions.
Prioritize active participation, not laid-back observation
I order my marketing initiatives in rank of active participation. This is usually a great rule of thumb when it comes to deciding which marketing plays to prioritize first, especially if you’re working on a tight budget.
The marketing activities that are going to convert into sales faster are the ones that are high on the active participation scale. So anything that results with your audience actively commenting, sharing, and responding to what you share is going to be prioritized. Because where there’s active participation, there are sales.
This is why I usually put PR on the bottom of the rung as far as marketing priorities go. Reading or observing content that doesn’t have a call-to-action or a live engagement invitation is the equivalent of talking at someone and them leaving the room as soon as you’re done speaking. We remember things more resonantly when we are an active participant, and often forget things we’ve passively read or observed.
Sales is a brew, not a quick mix
If you haven’t nailed down your sales formula, it can spark the anxiety-inducing feeling that you’re in the midst of a never-ending maze you haven’t figured out how to leave. There’s a misconception that sales is easeful for those who have “hacked” it. The truth is that even for those what have hacked it, sales are still freaking difficult.
Why? Because only 3% of your market is on the market to buy at any given time.
This statistic provides two harsh realizations:
Sales are not created overnight. Let go of the belief that the get-sales-fast pill exists. It’s time to roll up your sleeves.
Sales is a long-game and requires unwavering relationship cultivation through meaningful content marketing and engagement.
This statistic also leaves us with two meaningful solutions to steward:
Create audience-building targets that line-up so that 3% of your audience size equates to the number of sales you’d like to be making every month or year.
If you want your business to be making significant sales, put a 2–3 month cushion to your plan so that you can nurture your audience to buy, and boost that conversion percentage as much as possible.
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