Entrepreneurs often have too many things on their plate, making them overlook the essential parts of their businesses. That’s why this episode’s guest preaches efficiency in all things, including marketing. Susie Carder sits down for an interview with marketing specialist Peter Sandeen. Peter discusses the need to have your essentials in place, marketing tactics, and why you need to avoid overly complex systems. Tune in and learn more from Peter.
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The Essentials Of Efficient Marketing With Peter Sandeen
What’s the difference between sales and marketing, and why is it so hard to attract your ideal client? Are you marketing the fans versus clients? I know I did for years. Are you doing the right things in the right order to get the results you desire? One of the biggest areas of business and business failure is marketing. I can tell you firsthand that I have spent thousands of dollars wrong on marketing. Everyone says they can do it but the reality is not a lot of people can do it. It’s the elusive shiny object.
In this episode, we are going to learn how to vet a marketing agency or a marketing person as well as learn from our guests on what you should do to eliminate from your day-to-day so you are not wasting time and you are working on the things that you need to be working on for that highest income-producing activity. First, I want to share with you three to-dos in putting together your launch and marketing strategy to get significant growth that we can be aggressive.
People are like, “Susie, how did you grow your database from $0 to $12,000 in a year?” I’m going to tell you the three things I did. One was tracking. We wanted to set up your tracking and look at where our clients are coming from. What groups, ads or events are they coming from? Where does your ideal client hang out and look at your ideal qualified client? I want you to go and find them and then track how many people came in? If you are on a podcast, I want you to track how many leads did you get?
If you are doing a summit like a virtual summit, did you get leads? If your lead generator isn’t working, ditch it and do a new one. Remember, business is like this combination lock. One tick off, and the sucker won’t open. I want you to look at measure track because it looks at, are we spending our money wisely? The second thing is we want to look at a digital foundation. We want to establish a comprehensive online presence that becomes the online resource for you.
You want to submit an online directory, provide accurate, complete, consistent information, and track by a phone number for My Google. My clients are getting ridiculous clients from their Google Ads and reviews on Google, Yelp, and Bing listings. You want to start a blog so people can get a taste of what you do. They are not going to go from meeting you to buying. You’ve got to build that relationship, so start a blog, a YouTube channel, create all your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ so that you can find which areas and where your clients are hanging out.
We know that we are wearing all platforms but when I look at the highest engagement, it’s LinkedIn and Instagram. That might not be the same for you. Do a promotional video that’s current and up-to-date about what’s happening now. That’s easy to swap out. Don’t use old images. Don’t look like you are twenty years younger than what you are. Be real about who you are, and you want to upload your sizzle reel onto your YouTube channel. This is imperative, so people can try it before they buy.
You all know I have Susie snacks. These are bite-size information for your cocktail for success. It’s a snack. It’s not a monologue. It’s not a power-long training. Social media, you’ve got to be consistent. You’ve got to establish communication to maximize, repeat, and create referral businesses. I was talking to my client, Linda, “Linda wants to go from dating to getting married in one appointment. It’s not going to happen, so I need you to post twice daily, engage with your followers. If you can’t do it, hire someone, promote offers and products and giveaways.”
It’s that 80/20 Rule, 80% is to give, 20% to ask. Run a social media contest, give something away or start engaging with micro-influencers. Don’t go after the big fish. Go after the little guys, little like Susie snacks. I don’t know if it could be 5,000, 10,000, 1,000 people but with micro-influencers, their clients are engaged and listen. Use hashtags to expand your reach. I never understood hashtags but there are whole algorithms about hashtags. There’s software that helps us determine what hashtags we are going to use based on the topics and the subjects we are using.
It’s juicy content with your search engine optimization or your SEO. I have SEO every single month. We are optimizing every article. It doesn’t have to be expensive. If you need help with that, private message me. I will give you my resource. If you want to optimize your website and improve organic search, add relevant keywords to your site, content, headings, tags and metadata. If you don’t know it, I’ve got a resource for you. You don’t have to do it all. Post your blog twice a week. You are in the aggressive mode. You’ve got to put 10 units of energy out to get 1 unit of the result.
Once you get that momentum going, you put 1 unit of energy in to get 10 units of the result. Obtain high-quality backlinks to your website one per week. You don’t have to know it all. I’ve got the hookup for you. I want to bring you the people I have spent years trying to find. They are partners of mine, people that I trust that are doing work for me. I interview them and do their due diligence. I write conversions.
Just like the tracking, we’ve got to track your conversions. You want to increase the number of leads who become qualified buyers. Leads are not buyers. They are lead, so they run Google Adwords campaign with a significant budget. How did I grow my list so well? I did a lot of advertising. I spent a lot of money in advertising to promote my book. I spent $50,000 in advertising but I have made millions.
You’ve got to risk to get a reward. I know it’s scary but if you want to have that growth and seven-figure year, you’ve got to play the game. Include a prominent Call To Action. We call that a CTA. One on every page of your website. Click here to schedule a consultation, receive a 20% coupon, get more information or download my free video. Offer free trials, try before you buy, discounts, signups. We are being aggressive. Create unique landing pages. You don’t have to do it all. We have resources for you. Those are the three top things to get aggressive, fast and going.
It’s easy to overlook the essential parts when you have so many things to do. Then you end up with an insane to-do list.
I want to introduce my guest Peter Sandeen. He’s often called the marketer’s marketer because more than half of his clients are marketing experts. Why would a marketing expert hire him? Like you, you are a business person, and every coach needs a coach. His primary focus is marketing a message and helping you with your funnels. He spent nearly a decade in copywriting and conversion optimization. He now helps small business owners get more leads and sales to their websites that convert. He has a program called the 6-Figure Website. Please welcome my guest, Peter.
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Welcome back to another amazing episode. I’m here with my friend. We are in a group together, JVMM, Joint Venture Mastermind. Peter, welcome. Thank you for being here. I’m so excited to share you with my tribe. My tribe is a bunch of badass business people taking radical action, living their dreams, and I made them a promise that I was going to bring my friends and talk about real business stuff. The ups and the downs, the mountain top, and the valley, so share with us who we serve? What do we do? Give us that high-level overview of who you are.
I have two different kinds of audiences. One is marketing experts. About 60% to 70% of my clients are marketing experts. The rest are anything, and everything from pretty much business beginners to multinational corporations, mostly small business owners but marketing experts are a group that comes to me a lot. That’s because I focus on the few things that are hard for you to do for yourself, even if you are good at it, which is messaging and looking at the bigger picture strategy and optimization of what should you focus on? What are the actual essential things in what you do?
Especially as marketing experts or people who know a lot about marketing, you have 1,000 ideas of what you could do, and probably 990 of those goods work for you. You know all these little things you could do better, optimizations, different strategies, tactics, tools, all of that, that you could do and get results with but you can only pick 2 or 3 things you work on, so how do you pick that 0.1% to focus on and put your time into? Are there 1,000 things in each one of those that you could focus on? What are the important things? When you have so many things you know you could do, it’s easy to overlook the essential parts.
You end up with an insane to-do list, but you don’t make any progress. You are wondering why isn’t anything moving forward. You are trying all these things, and nothing is working. When someone else can look at it objectively and analyze the whole thing, they can be like, “Here’s the problem.” You are probably going to slap your hands here like, “How did I miss this? This is so obvious. I do this for others.” It’s the same issue that people who read a lot about marketing or go through products always have that. There are a ton of things they could do but how do you make sure you get all the essentials right because if you missed one essential thing, you were by definition screwed?
We always say that business is like this combination lock, especially in marketing, because I have spent $250,000 wrong in marketing. I have lost a lot of money and one little tick-off. This sucker won’t open. To me, that’s marketing. We have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It could be one tick. Maybe I’m going in the wrong direction or had one number off.
What you are saying is you’ve got to have these essentials to make it work. That has been a lot of money went wrong. Everybody has a good story, good resume and says they can do a prettier but they can’t do it. How do I vet them because I still don’t know? I have been doing this for several years. I still get winked and I don’t like it. I feel like a ding dong. I’m like, “Come on.”
I will give a very quick note because the combination lock is a brilliant analogy. That one tick is often what it is that you talk about. It’s not the tactic, tool or strategy you use for saying things but rather what it is that you communicate with it. That’s why I focus on messaging because that’s at the heart of everything. This is going to sound very awkward because I told you that I have a lot of expert clients but what I look at is how many people who know their stuff in the same industry go for someone?
If someone can advise other experts in that specific field, they must be pretty good. Now that doesn’t mean they are necessarily good for everyone. It can be that they are only good for helping experts. It doesn’t guarantee things but it’s usually a good sign that if other experts look up to and hire them, they probably know their stuff but be mindful that they know their thing in that one specific area.
There are people I know as their Facebook advertising people. A lot of experts go to them because they are good at that. I don’t know if they know anything about funnels and offer creation. They could be pretty good at that to do Facebook ads or any ads. I see them as experts in that one very specific thing because they are validated by a bunch of people I know who know what they are doing.
That’s about it because anyone can get a lot of testimonials. If you sell 1,000 products, there will be free who get lucky, even if it’s a crappy thing. That doesn’t mean a whole lot but there are some testimonials. That’s how I approach it and as I said, “It’s a little bit awkward right after saying that I serve these people.”
You are saying get referrals from other experts in your field, which we have done. You and I have done it but if you don’t know anyone, what’s a way that I can vet somebody?
There are a couple of things. One is, do they try to clearly sell their thing or first, genuinely try to understand what’s wrong with what you are doing? That can be pretty hard to tell, especially good salespeople will make you feel like they are trying to understand you, and then it happens to be that their thing is right for you. That’s a tricky way to go. One option is to hire someone for a small project. People can buy one coaching call from me, and for most people who do coaching, they will sell you a single coaching call. If they can blow you away in that one short call, give you good advice, and you like how they approach things, then great.
Another helpful thing is to understand how do they approach the bigger picture. Most people will have some way for you to learn that. If they don’t, I would be wary of it, not because they don’t know what they are doing. It’s not proof of them being incompetent but if you can’t see how they approach things on a bigger picture, you also verify that what they are talking about even makes sense for you. It is a lot about that.
There are different ways of looking, approaching, and focusing on things, and how the person you get help from looks like things should match at least pretty well with how you look at things because otherwise, you are probably going to screw things up later on without realizing. You start moving things in a different direction because you don’t see it the same way at all.
Betting is hard. I would say that hire them for a small thing and test them out. That’s the only way. If you don’t have any clue, test them out or hire them to make a recommendation for you. You would tell them that, “I will not hire you for anything more than this. Sorry, I have chosen you to make a good recommendation from me.”
I have a tendency to get married. Everybody wants to get married. They are like, “We are going to get married, and then we are going to do this project.” I’m like, “I get married or nothing. I can’t do that.” That is genius. That’s so obvious, as you said, “Sometimes it’s so obvious but not obvious.” We have been in this global pandemic. You see people and our economy struggling. What do you think is the secret sauce you are seeing with your clients, even for yourself and your business, to stay in action and grow?
If you ask what’s the problem from someone who sells hammers, they are going to see all the problems as nails. I’m going to see it from a messaging perspective. If you truly understand the target customer and you have selected, it’s not based on what they look like to you but how they see what you do, then you have an offer that’s easy for them to buy, and you know what you need to tell them about that offer for them to want to buy it. You are pretty golden. Almost any market reasonable marketing can work well for you. If you get any of those wrong, you are always going to struggle.
You can make some sales, especially when things are normal and going easily but the pandemic shows a lot of business owners that they hadn’t gotten the basics. They have scraped by with luck or an overabundance of chances. If you get those rights, things are comparatively easy going from there but those are somewhat the hardest things to do.
Many people struggle with them for months and years. Looking at those things is usually the solution because when you understand those things, you can also start deducing how do you need to approach those people? How do you need to price things? What do you need to tell them so that they want to buy? What would be a sales funnel that feels right for them?
They have to want to take the next step for them to take the next step because our business model usually doesn’t revolve around us taking a gun and punching it up. Now you click that button and take a step towards buying. If they don’t want to do it, they won’t. Understand them and understand what you need to give them in what order, and that’s what marketing always is about. It’s how well you can do it.
I love that you say that because I spent right the first three months serving my clients, giving them free education, finding out what their need was, trying to create some community, so they didn’t feel alone because I was feeling alone, and then finding out what’s your biggest challenge. For me, in marketing, it is meat and potatoes. People think marketing is not essential but it’s the foundation of what you do if you don’t get your name out there.
I always put in their budget regardless of what it is. Ten percent has to go back into your marketing. It’s meat. It’s not marketing. If you know what the meat of my business is, marketing is one of those meats. A business coach is a meat if they are helping you produce results. If they are not helping you produce results, that might be floss and fat but I’m a meat and profit center for my clients. In business now, what’s the biggest challenge you are facing in your business, growth or a project that you are doing now and how are you tackling it? Give us the skinny.
To someone who sells hammers, they’re going to see all problems as nails.
I will give you a very boring answer first. I will try to come up with something a little more interesting next but the biggest thing is the time crunch. I do everything on my own. I do have an accountant and a few things like that but I do pretty much everything on my own. A few projects have turned into these massive things. I expected to do them in a few weeks but they have taken months.
That’s where the entrepreneur struggle. I love that you said that because that’s real. Each level we get to, we get tapped out in our time and that’s when you know, “I’ve got to hire someone else. Who else can do this besides me.” Peter, I have this saying on my desk, “What’s the highest income-producing activity?” I have to ask myself that every day because I find myself doing minutia. I’m like, “I don’t need to be doing this. Let me give it to Josie, Sam or somebody. Why am I doing this?” Do you have any time packs that you are using now?
I’m very mindful of how I use my time because I have been doing this for a long time. I have always done it alone. First of all, I’m very mindful of two things. One, don’t do anything you don’t have to do. I’m extremely good at cutting off things I don’t need to do. The first thing is for me to go a social media. I probably haven’t logged into any social media now. It’s not a part of my strategy. I don’t have time for any extra stuff, so never, not once.
You are reading this from a marketing person. Be okay with it because everyone thinks you have to do it all, “I’ve got to have a podcast, do the social media, Facebook Live, Instagram, TikTok.”
You just need one system that works. That’s the part that people often miss. They do seven different ways of reaching new people but they don’t have anything for getting them ready to buy or getting them to make the purchase. You need one way of reaching new people, getting them ready to buy and close the sale, that’s it. You don’t need seven of each one.
It’s good if you can do many but get one thing to work and keep it working. There were several years when I worked 1 or 2 hours a week and made six figures because my system worked. I didn’t do anything except what that system required. I was selling services, not digital products, and that included delivering the services.
You can be very efficient if you are mindful of it. Skip everything you don’t need to do. The other thing is to be strategic about how you approach things. It’s not about skipping all the things that don’t work and aren’t essential but also making sure that you get all the essentials right. If you get them right, many of them are things you do once, and you don’t have to think about it for a long time or ever until your business changes somehow.
I help people a lot with websites. They ask, “How often do I need to update this?” If I go through the project now, it doesn’t take long. It’s a few days maybe of work but then it’s done. “How long is it fine?” I’m like, “Until your business changes or maybe ten years.” You need to give some a facelift for your website. Maybe every decade or two because it starts to look like it’s broken at some point. Anything short of that, you don’t have to make any changes, same with your marketing message, funnel and offers. Until something changes, keep going. There is no reason for it to stop working. Ads are weird like exceptions to that. They will stop working even if they are good and nothing seemingly changes.
Those are the hardest ones. As for hacks, I don’t usually open email until the last thing of the day. I sometimes do lighter from this but that’s one. I exercise every morning before work, so I’m awake. Sleep well. Work on your business for the first 2 or 3 hours of the day. Don’t schedule anything except your own business stuff. If you have to do something else, then you have to but otherwise work on your business for the first couple of hours, at least every day. I don’t usually ever schedule calls to be the first thing in the morning and such. Those are some of the things that come to mind.
Let’s go back, and it could be recent or a long time ago. What was your biggest failure in business or life, and what was the lesson you learned from it?
In business, I didn’t change my business quickly enough to be what I wanted it to be. This bit me twice badly. One was, I don’t know how many years ago, I lost all motivation, and that’s when I started then working as little as I possibly could to keep the business going. It worked okay but I didn’t enjoy what I was doing. The problem was that I didn’t feel good about the business. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted from it. Arguably, I couldn’t have done much about it, but I did have the sense that I would want to have not coaching clients and consulting clients but also some digital products.
That would be more interesting for me. I’m such a perfectionist that whenever I built something, I would sell it once and deliver it with a lot of coaching and then be like, “It’s not quite good enough for me to sell without the coaching, and I don’t want to do this again,” so I will create another one and kept doing this over and over. It took far too long for me to get to the point where I would build something.
I’m very happy having people go through it. You will get good results and that’s happening. That bit me once then, and the other was when COVID hit. I had this perfect storm of big projects ending, and the next ones are scheduled to start but COVID hits right at that point, so all of those projects that were scheduled get canceled or move forward for an unknown time, and coaching clients, two of them overreact heavily. They are like, “Things look good now but they might go bad, so we are going to cut off everything we don’t have to have.”
Suddenly, my income dropped like 90% or something. It was like, “I know what to do.” It was a good showcasing of how I had built a business that wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It was reliant on a few steady clients and had a system that steadily created a few clients. I didn’t want to work with twenty of them at a time. I had few at a time, and that created this vulnerability.
If I have built the business, I now have a couple of years ago, which I helped many others do. This is the stuff I help people do. If I had put in the work and pretty much gone through my mental crap, all of that would have gone, but it’s hard to make yourself process your blocks faster. It wasn’t there yet. Somehow that catastrophe and perfect storm were the final cake I needed for changing my business to what it is now and what I have wanted it to be for a long time. It had to happen, I guess.
Most people got hit by the COVID storm. I’m not reacting. I still have clients that are waiting. I’m going to wait but wait for what? This is a new reality. This is it for a while. It’s like, “I will wait until it gets back to normal.” What’s normal there? There is no normal. Business is never normal. That’s juicy and a great example. If you could be remembered for one thing, Peter, what would that be?
Maybe my first answer is the wrong one but I feel like I shouldn’t even want to be remembered for something. For some people, I’m sure it’s a good thing to think of what I want to be remembered for, and it will create the right motivation for them. In me, it will easily create a wrong type of motivation. It will make me think of the wrong things. It will make my ego get bigger instead of me saying that what matters is what happens now.
My life is not about creating a legacy. For me, that’s not a good motivation. It could be a motivation but it wouldn’t make me happy, create the life I wanted, make me a good person, and help me in any way. I used to think of that thing, and I was the worst person for it. I want to enjoy the things I do. I’m a very much all-or-nothing type of person, either I’m super interested in something or I struggle to show any interest.
You can be very efficient if you’re very mindful of it. Skip everything you don’t actually need to do.
I want to do the things I enjoy doing and do them as well as I can. I enjoy doing things I’m good at, and I’m excited about. That’s pretty much the motivation. I’m happy with my wife, and I want to make that better. I want to have a better life with her and so on. I’m more motivated by other things than thinking of what will be left off me when I’m gone. I would rather think of other things than take a step back in my development as a person.
If you look at business and marketing, what’s one thing we, as consumers, need to know or do you wish I would have asked you so you could have answered?
One thing that people should remember is something I said already that marketing tactics, tools, and strategies, all of that are a waste of saying something. What you say with those tactics, tools, and strategies are going to always make a far greater impact on your results than changing the tactic or changing how you use the tactic.
Websites are one of the best examples that are on my mind now because I talk about it with everyone badly. If you go to two different websites, one looks amazing but you don’t get the sense of, “I can get something I want from here.” You are going to leave but the other website looks fine, nothing special but you immediately get that sense of like, “I can get something I want, and I can’t get this anywhere else. This is cool.”
Which one do you buy from? Still, 99% of people put far more effort, energy, and money into perfecting the design and making sure the technology is great instead of admitting that the basic template is fine as long as you say the right things there. It’s infinitely harder for most people to improve what they say than pay for another theme, slight upgrade of the design or some branding advice that usually ends up being a new logo, a color theme, and such.
What I’m hearing throughout this whole interview is our messaging needs to be spot on and what they need to hear isn’t necessarily what they need to hear. It’s what they want to hear, and your gift is bringing that out of us that we say to the consumer we are looking for. Do you have a gift or a resource for us that we can give to our readers that we can support them in getting clear?
Now that we talked about messaging, there is something on my homepage, PeterSandeen.com/value. There’s an exercise around that under this small video about some missing mistakes people often make with messaging. The one that I meant to mention was one where I redesigned my own websites. It’s a video of me going through the process of changing it. I did it in less than 3 days, about 7 or 8 hours combined, including revising videos, rerecording them, and all of that. I went through the whole process, including the message part, to some degree. That’s another that might be interesting.
Where do we find that one?
That’s at 6FigureWebsite.com.
If you are looking to build that 6-Figure Website, I need you to go check out Peter so he can help us with our messaging, so we are clear, we can get seen, heard, and, more importantly, get paid.
My whole idea with it is that like, “Let’s figure out what makes websites effective at generating leads and sales.” There are a few words about design but a few words about designing an entire course afterward. After the video, there’s an option for buying a course. You don’t have to, the whole process is there, and it’s more fun. It’s not a sales webinar. I recorded me going through the process and explaining what I was doing.
I appreciate your generosity, contribution to the industry, and helping us get clear on our messaging so we can attract the clients that we want that we can serve and do the work we are put here to do. Are there any last words you want to leave us with?
I’m glad to be here. Thank you.
I appreciate you and your commitment to the industry. Thank you for being our guests and the two gifts. Thank you so much and have a blessed day.
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I’ve got to share this big brand Jeremy and Chelsea Marson. They have been working with me for years. They own a marketing agency, and I am their coach. I’m going to share some of the juicy nuggets. They are beef at what they do. Anyone that’s up to anything has a coach. When I coached them, I looked at their agency. I’m not going to coach you with what you do. You know what you do. I’m going to coach you on anything that you don’t know. Fifteen percent of our financial success is based on our technical ability.
The other 85% is your sales, marketing, operations and finance. What do we do? We learn how to schedule their effective time, just like Peter talked about managing your time instead of reacting to fires. We created a budget that they could follow, so we planned out the year and then followed the plan. We made ourselves duplicatable. It was all on Jeremy and Chelsea. We have to train many people to be mini them. We connected gladiators from around the world to become close friends and clients.
We move away from being stuck in startup to taking their business to the next level. They are implementing tools. They were more efficient. We’ve got scheduling software. We hosted the management platform. They reviewed and implemented systems and processes for their company, so they are building a business to sell. They increase 237% in their business in less than a year. We gave them a script for pricing and how to do turnaround so that they have less time waiting for the bid and closing the bid.
We streamlined it. They have a new graphic design for strategically adding more services that their client needs. They were leaving more money to the table everywhere. If you are leaving money on the table, I want you to look at what’s the next level for you, and if you need help growing your business, you need another set of eyes to help you with that strategic plan. Don’t be in business by yourself. Be in business for yourself. I’m your sister on the journey, and I want to help you as I did with Jeremy and other clients to look at how you can truly be the CEO of your company.
That’s it for this episode. Head on over to PowerYourProfitsPodcast.com, and please subscribe to the show. When you subscribe, you instantly get your gift, Bullet Train to Big Profits. It’s my secret weapon to understanding how to get to the millions. It is juicy, and this is a scaled-down version, a snapshot, and a snack so that you can grow your business and wealth.
Important Links
- 6-Figure Website
- Bullet Train To Big Profits
- Joint Venture Mastermind
- PeterSandeen.com/value
- https://Twitter.com/Peter_Sandeen
- https://www.Facebook.com/peter.sandeen.marketing
- https://fi.LinkedIn.com/in/petersandeen
- https://www.YouTube.com/c/petersandeenmarketing
- PowerYourProfitsPodcast.com
About Peter Sandeen
Peter Sandeen is often called the “marketers’ marketer” because more than half of his clients are marketing experts. His primary focus is marketing messages and funnels, but he’s spent nearly a decade in copywriting and conversion optimization. He now helps small business owners get more leads and sales from their website.
