Marketing Masterclass

to my marketing masterclass. Business owners. The first strategy is for you if you're disappointed in your marketing. The problem is not everyone else. It is your vision. Your marketing will always fail if you can't articulate your why. I cannot tell you how many business owners I've worked with who complain about their leads. They don't have enough leads. Just give me more leads. All I want is leads. My business would grow. And then I asked them the

follow up question where do you get your leads? When is the last time that you looked at the process that a lead goes through in order to actually become a customer? And they're like, oh, my marketing agency handles this for me. Okay, great. How is your marketing agency supposed to handle something that you yourself can't articulate? You will never find a marketing agency who is able to better articulate your business and where you are taking your

business than you. So don't just abdicate this. No one can read your mind. It is not the marketing agency's business. The marketing agency business is their business. Your business is being clear on your vision who your customer is and obsessing on that process. If you aren't looking at your ads or where your lead flow is coming from. Of course you're going to struggle marketing. The cool thing about

marketing is it's learnable, meaning you can learn it. It does not take some special, really smart, influential person in order to understand marketing. You as a business owner can and should learn about your marketing journey. Now, do you have to know every single piece? No. But where you get your leads from and actually looking at the ad, looking at the copy and saying, is this in alignment

with me, my brand and my product? Does this speak to why I started this business, how this can help people? And if you don't feel that it does, then that's your job to ultimately govern, shepherd and be responsible for. But your responsibility truly is articulating that, being so clear about it so that other people can take your vision and bring it to life. And then you say either, yes, this works, let's go to market with this, or no,

this doesn't work. We have to make changes because this isn't in alignment with who I am, what my product is, and who I'm ultimately trying to serve, and how I'm trying to transform their lives. Never forget that you and the product is the brand. You are the brand. If you don't have control of the brand, if you don't have a vision into the brand, if you are so able to articulate your vision for this brand, your business

is going to struggle. Your marketing is going to struggle because you're always going to put it on somebody else. And whenever you put something on somebody else, it is destined to fail because you're abdicating responsibility. You're saying, hey, it's Bob XYZ Marketing Agency's responsibility, and how come they're bringing me these? And I can't believe they're not able to do their job, and then you just churn and churn and churn all of your marketing hires. Well, hold

the freaking phone. Let's take some responsibility for our businesses and the brand that we are trying to create. If you are having this experience, I promise you it is not them. It is you. And the beautiful part about the problem being you is you can fix that. It is not somebody else that needs to change, it is you that needs to change. So how do you change? You get really clear on who you're serving, what their needs are, and why they should care about your product

and how it's a solution to their problems. And once you've clarified who your customer is, what your vision for your business is, the ideal target and the ideal result that your customer experiences, they're working with you. Of course, you can work with an agency. Of course you can hire an inside marketing person to help you bring that vision to life. Let's do a little bit of self-reflection for strategy. Number two, you are being selfish if you

are not marketing your business every single day. So look back on your calendar and see when is the last time that I spent the majority of my day marketing and promoting my business? Because as a CEO, 80% of your time should be focused on one thing, which is new revenue, which means new customer acquisition. It is very difficult to grow and scale a business if the person who is responsible for growing and scaling it isn't actually

paying attention to what creates growth. And as you look at a set of financials, you'll notice that a very small portion of a financial statement actually has revenue and income producing activities. And so much of it has expenses and all of the stuff that's required in order to fulfill on that revenue. But that doesn't mean that you're supposed to spend the majority of your time on those things. You're actually, as a CEO, supposed to spend the majority

of your time making your leads warm. How do you get so known in your market that people just do business with you, because you have outplayed everybody else in your market, on your ability to market and be top of mind to your consumer. Do not fall in this trap that I find so many business owners fall into, which is spending all of their time on the service

and the operation of their organization. You can hire people to do that once you figure out the marketing side, but if you never figure out the marketing side, you will never be able to hire people to help you on the operations. And the sounds counterintuitive. It sounds backwards, which is why most people actually get stuck not growing their business, not creating more revenue because it is counterintuitive.

But if you focus the majority on the growth, the majority on new customer acquisition, and then you are able to pay somebody for customer retention, pay them well for customer retention, you can have a thriving business because it is harder to get the skillset of being a great marketer than it is an operator. And I can tell you this because I have interviewed thousands of people. I have helped businesses find these exact roles inside their organizations.

Learning how to market and position a business is a much more difficult skill set to find, but once you yourself acquire it, you're no longer dependent upon other people to get this for you, because you understand intuitively what it takes to grow your business. It's how you position

your brand. It's how you talk to those customers. So I would recommend you pull out your calendar and you start x-ing out areas that are totally focused on fulfillment, and you replace that time with revenue generating activities, with marketing and promoting your business every single day. There's really only a handful of ways to truly increase your revenue. You can acquire more customers, which is what we're talking about.

You can raise your prices, which I do recommend you do increase your profit margin, or you can retain your existing customers. And in a properly functioning business, you do all of those things. But the main growth has to come from the acquisition of new customers. If you do not learn this very valuable skill set, it will be impossible for you to create the business that you want. Solving operational problems is for other people in your business. Yes. Do you have to be involved? Yes. Do you have

to understand your customer? Of course. But your primary function should be the acquisition of new customers, making your leads so warm. And you understand that a marketing first CEO versus an operations first CEO is a much more valuable skillset and will ultimately lead you to greater growth. Instead of you assuming you are always going to find some marketer who's going to be able to help you. I'm

ripping the frickin Band-Aid off for you. Now, learn this skill set, and you will never be dependent on somebody else. Some agency, some marketer, to solve this mystical, magical thing that needs to be solved in your business to grow. So now that we've taken accountability, a strategy, number three is to take advantage of the best free marketing tool that exists in the world, social media. If your brand isn't on social media, you are leaving money on the table.

You're quite literally saying, I don't want to participate in this once in a lifetime opportunity, a once in a generation, a once in a human being opportunity, which is the fact that we live in a time where you can promote your business to anyone in the world who has a device that looks like this, and they're able to see it for free. In this day and age that we live in, where we have interest based algorithms. If

you are interested in hair haircare. If you're interested in pest control or you like watching pimple popping videos, you can actually find other people who like those things too. And you can build businesses around interest space. It is not you having the biggest following. It is not you paying thousands, if not millions of dollars on the most incredible ad campaigns that are only controlled by a handful

of people. If you create fantastic content about your product, your service, your solution, and you are able to tell that story to your target customer, and you're able to pique their interest in how you can be a solution to their problem, you have unlimited access, and this has never before happened in the world that we live in.

So if you're not on social media and you are not using social media as a way to promote your business, to market your business, you are quite literally just saying, I'm going to try to figure this out on my own. I'm gonna forget that all of this stuff is happening. I'm going to put my blinders on, I'm going to live in a hole, and I'm going to do this the hard way. Because the easiest way to market your business today to get the ideal customer that you want.

Is through using social media. And 77% of consumers prefer shopping with brands that they already follow on social media. Think about the last time you bought something. I have a feeling that if you go back and open up your credit card transactions, you're going to find that your most recent purchases have had everything to do with the people that you follow on social media with the recommendations that they make, maybe with the brands who served you

in an ad. This is not going away. In fact, I actually just had to pause the recording of this video because I am very interested in ordering the road lip treatment. That is a special edition holiday drop that I literally just had to say, like, wait a second, it just came out, so I need to go do this. Why am I buying that? Because I was influenced via

social media. So if I'm trying to think, how am I going to market my business if I am not already leveraging social media, where I know where 77% of consumers prefer to shop, then you're missing the greatest opportunity as a business owner, as a marketer to hop into something that starts for free. You have to lean into this because they are free, they are available to you. And the only difference between people who figure it out and people who don't are the people who just decide,

I'll figure this out. You see, I work with so many small business owners and most do not have the bandwidth to be on every single platform, and I wouldn't recommend that you start with every platform. There's Twitter aka X, there's LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, all the options. What I recommend you do is you find the platform, the one platform that you know your target customer predominantly uses. In all likelihood, this is going to be YouTube or

it is going to be Instagram. Now, if you happen to serve a younger demographic, I would recommend TikTok because TikTok is phenomenal for a younger demographic and it is continuing to get older and older as the months go on. But do your research on who your customer is and where they spend their time across the social media landscape, and pick one platform on that platform, you have to learn how to use it. You should be a master if you choose Instagram, you are the person who no

longer says, oh, I don't know how to use this platform. Oh, I have no idea how to edit or how to use the little stickers. Freaking figure it out. It is not that hard to learn as I mentioned. What did I say before I said it is learnable. You have the ability to learn it and it is not just for young people, it is for every single age you can learn it. You have to go in with that belief.

You can and you will learn it. So once you pick the platform, make a commitment for the next 90 days, you are going to spend at least 90 minutes a day creating content for that platform. That's going to be your commitment 90 days, 90 minutes a day. You are going to create content because that is the only way that you actually learn these platforms. You do not learn it through reading a book. There's no book, unfortunately. I

wish there was. But there isn't a book because things change so frequently, and the way that you understand the zeitgeist behind these platforms is you use them and all of a sudden, I promise you, if you do this for 90 days, where you create consistent content for 90 minutes, ideally that's three videos. You will start to understand how to use the platform, and once you hit that 90 day mark, then you can start running ads on that platform.

But you might not even have to use ads because you could create content, also known as organic content that performs well, that talks to the pain point of your customers, where you build a conversation and a community around your product and your service to where you can push ads way down the road. And there are countless examples of people who are doing this across all the social media platforms right now. One of my favorite is Strawberry Milk Mob.

She is hilarious. She is awesome. She's on TikTok, she sells swimsuits, and she's created a seven figure plus business selling swimsuits online all through organic content. If we're sticking on the girly side of things. I also think of Odd Muse, who went from a startup in 2019 to having over $15 million in sales all through sharing the brand story in a very organic way from a founder's point of view. There are so many examples of people who are doing this, and they are doing it successfully,

and it starts with their commitment. So that's what I'm asking of you. Commitment for 90 days. If you want to be a marketer, I promise you in 90 days from now, if you spend 90 minutes a day for 90 days, you will change your perspective on how to use social media and you will walk into a room being really confident. And people will ask you, oh, how do you record those videos? How do you do that? Oh, it's so confusing. Guess what? I know how to do this.

I know how to answer your questions and I make a shit ton of money doing it, which is the best of all worlds. We do not just want to be influencers around here. We want marketing that makes money. Now, this fourth strategy can save you years of mistakes because quite honestly, why spend all of your time begging your audience to buy from you when you can collaborate instead? This is the fastest way to grow your brand and to market well. You see, collaboration is the new currency.

This is exactly how we started Cartel Ventures. We knew that we had a skill set, and that if we partnered with somebody who already had a large audience, that we could just multiply the success and make it go faster. So this is why we partnered with Grant and Elena Cardone, because we recognize that they had an audience. They had a group of people who loved them, who trusted their

brand and who we could be additive to. And so instead of us doing this the hard way, creating a brand from scratch, we leveraged the brand that they had that already existed to provide products and services that they didn't already have, to be able to come to the marketplace, to their audience and say, hey, here is an extension on what you already know from ten X. You might be in their sales programs. You might have learned marketing from them, or you might be investing in real estate

with them. That's awesome. But wait, there's more. Now there is business consulting. There is private equity. There is additional education and all sorts of programs around people, operations, finance, everything that a small business owner needs. We are now able to add on to the existing tax business. And so when we did this and we brought this idea to Grant and Allen in 2019, they opened up their audience to us. And this kickstarted our success. Because you

don't have to do this alone. You can collaborate with people in your area, in your industry, somebody who is doing something that's similar, who already has an audience, where you can say, hey, this is my track record. This is why I'm already successful doing what I do. What if we did this together? This is what's in it for you, and we can do it so much faster. This will save you years off of figuring it out,

doing it the hard way. Especially if you can find somebody who already knows social media, email marketing and funnels and all of this stuff. Now you still have to learn this. As we talked about, you cannot just make this somebody else's responsibility. You cannot just not learn these lessons on your own. But if there is somebody who has an existing audience collaborate with them, do not think of them as competition. I just recently worked with a

business owner and he is phenomenally successful. There's another business owner that is in the exact same space that has recently joined our group, and business owner A was frustrated because he's like, I can't believe you guys are now doing business with him. He's in my space now. We're competing. You guys are going to give us the same strategies. And I said, don't be so short sighted. He's actually interested in selling. He doesn't want to do this any

longer for a variety of different personal reasons. So instead of you thinking, oh, I don't want to work with this person, or I don't want to be in a group with this person, use this as an opportunity to collaborate because he could bring you clients. An ideal scene is you actually buy his business for pennies on the dollar because he wants to get out, and your short sightedness is going to prevent you from even seeing this

as an opportunity because you're so used to competing. So if I was a small business owner, what I would be doing in my marketplace is saying, who is beating me? It is likely that you do have competition that's beating you. How could you collaborate if you made a list of your top ten competitors? And you also made a list of the top ten people who are doing something in a similar space that's connected. But they have big audiences, they have big followings, and or they have a great

presence in your community. How can I use these relationships, this list of 20 people to create on what growth could look like through working together, instead of thinking about it as I'm competing with this person, or I have to figure out how to crush this person, I have a feeling that across those 20 relationships, you will at least find one where there are opportunities for you to do something in your town, in your market, across your

different products, that bring both of your customers to the table and create an incredible experience for your community, for your brand that creates growth instead of you thinking that the world is against you and there's no possibility or hope of collaboration. Because this is one of those secret tricks that successful people understand and they implement constantly, while unsuccessful people think that they have to do everything all

on their own. You can collaborate with anybody. If you're in the HVAC space, how could you collaborate with somebody else who's in the home services space, maybe plumbing or roofing? And you say, great, I had this customer list. We have all of these clients who aren't new installs, but they are on warranty with us for many years to come.

You could service the same home ABC plumbing business and we could share leads, create a community event where both of our businesses honor and celebrate our best customers, and we cross refer to each other. That is a no brainer, and we see ridiculous success from people coming up with ideas like this, from small business owners who actually leverage their network instead of thinking that they have to build

everything separate. Now, a more traditional idea when people think about collaborating is with social media influencers to promote products, services and your brand. I think this is a fantastic way to go, but can be a little bit more difficult. And if you are going to go this route, how can you be unique? What is something that you can offer somebody that is special and different and not just what everybody else does? What I mentioned earlier about thinking

about yourself as 80% of your time is marketing. How can you think about in the shower in the morning? What is a good way that this influencer would want to work with me? You have your targeted list of people that you would be thrilled over the moon if they collaborated with your brand. Think about how you could collaborate with them all the time. Obsess on it. What can you offer them? What is a problem that you

can solve? Influencers have a lot of people throwing a lot of different stuff at them, so truly understanding how to make your pitch unique to that person, make it one on one to that person and reach out and follow up with that individual will actually get you further than you think. But it always starts with creating a list of people. Always, always, always. Who is your ideal

list of influencers? Who is your ideal list of collaborators, and how can you create on those relationships so that you can solve their problems in a very unique and authentic way to your business? Next up, strategy five is realizing that the wrong role models can ruin your business. My ultimate hack is knowing what actually works and not guessing. So many people just copy what somebody else is doing,

but they don't understand anything about that person's business. They look at an ad, or they look at some front end offer that they're making, and they price based off of this. They market based off of this, when really that person could be going broke in their business. And that person's website that looks so beautiful that you're copying, that you think is so successful, could not be making money, could potentially be losing money, and practically be going out

of business. So stop thinking that you should be copying what looks nice. What looks pretty. Look at your competition. Who is actually executing and what's so cool if you are really honest about yourself, is you can figure out what your competition is doing. There are team members that work there. There are relationships with the actual owners that you can establish to understand how much money are they making, what is working and what's not working. Going back to

collaboration is the new currency. I have a feeling that if you just ask the question, you're creating relationships and through networking that they are more transparent than you think. And I know that people who are successful have no problem actually sharing what's creating the success. People who aren't successful are the ones who don't want to talk about their numbers. And it's all like a smoke and mirror show.

So stop using what the competition is doing as your baseline, because 97% of businesses go out of business within ten years and most barely make a profit. So stop looking at what they're doing and assuming that what they're doing actually works. I was working with a client just last week, and she was telling me all about this new campaign that she launched, and she was frustrated because it wasn't working the way that she thought it was going to. And she asked me to take a look at it.

So I opened up all of her ads, and I opened up her funnels, and I said, why did you make this specific decision to talk to your customer in this way? It feels very inconsistent with the rest of your brand and how you position yourself. At which point she said to me, my competition is doing it this way. So I figured I would just hack what they were doing and do it myself. I was like, no, no, no, this is not the way to do this. Your competition

could be going out of business. You don't actually know unless you've asked the question. And she hadn't asked the question. She didn't know if her competition was truly financially doing better than her. So she used this campaign and just mimicked it, thinking it was going to work. But if it's not working for them, it's probably not going to work for her. And it didn't work for her, and

it felt icky. And that was why it was broken, because she didn't understand what she was actually trying to do and how she was using her brand as the filtering mechanism for whether or not she wanted to record the ads, whether or not she wanted to position it, the way that she was positioning it, and how the copy was worded. Every single time that you use somebody else's measurement for success and you don't dive into what makes you unique, what makes you valuable, what is different

about your product offering? You're just going to fall into this trap, and then you're going to be victimized. Because my marketing isn't working. Your marketing isn't working because you don't know what your positioning is. Never copy somebody else and just assume that it's working. Understand what makes you different. And your target should always be doing what your competition is doing better. You can absolutely look at what your competition is doing, especially if you know from a numeric

standpoint that they are actually beating you. But just because their competition in your mind doesn't actually mean that they truly are your competition. Because if you don't have financial visibility. If you don't have financial transparency, you don't actually know if they're your competition. This is why we talk about

our numbers all the time. We say over the last five years, we've generated $500 million in revenue because we don't want to sound like every other business scaling expert who talks about business scaling opportunities, when really they've made a business that might have scaled to 3 million. That's not what we do. We know that we have the expertise that we have because we practice it within our business, and then we showcase the clients who are also having success.

So we quantify it. Our competition, who isn't doing what we're doing is probably looking at us. And they should actually be funnel hacking what we're doing, because I can tell you that it works and we make a lot of money and we help a lot of people because it works. This is a very different instance than you mocking up that your competitors are doing really well without actually knowing, quantifying that data and truly determining if they

are your competitor. Because if they are not doing what you were doing, at least in revenue, and they are not making the profit that you are making, then they might not actually be your competition and you should look to other businesses, other industries where you do know that they are making a crap ton of money because they add an extraordinary amount of value, more value than who

they are competing against. And you copy what they are doing because positioning your marketing as you are the best. You are the top of the market. You provide the most value is the best way to win the marketing game. You are able to market off of true results. You're able to market off of the real problems that you solve, not based off of something that you're copying. Assuming that somebody else knows what the heck they're doing, they likely don't.

So take that responsibility on your own, and I promise you, you will feel better about your brand, and your brand will actually grow because you're focused on the right things, adding value to your customers and then telling people about it, which is what marketing is. Strategy six is about not making excuses. Creativity doesn't come first. Commitment does. We have a saying around here is quite literally creativity follows commitment. The secret to great ideas is simple keep doing the work.

There is no moment of creativity where you are just going to feel like creating content every single day, and it's just going to be wonderful and blissful, and you're always going to be in this super creative state to be able to create the best content. No. Creativity follows your commitment to create content. Back in the day, before I started Kala Ventures, I decided I was going to launch a blog and I was like, I'm just going to commit to this thing in order for me to

get the result that I'm looking for. So my commitment was one blog post every single day, Monday through Friday, and there were so many nights where it was 11:00 at night, and I didn't have a blog post for the next day, and it's not like I felt like it. It's not like there were some great ideas that came to me because it was just the best vibe. And I had the candles burning. No, it never was like that. I was like, shit, I have to do this. Therefore, an idea is going to have to come to me.

I'm going to have to use my environment, my surroundings. I'm going to have to research Because my creativity, my ideas, are following the fact that I'm committed to doing this with one blog post every single day. And when you become the person who says they're going to do something and actually does it, ideas will follow because you have to get that post out. You have to create the content.

Don't think that you have to be in this creative space, and you always have to feel like it, because oftentimes you will not. So you practice this discipline through committing to the 90 days for the 90 minutes of content, and you will get better at it and your creativity will start to come out. It might not be ever flowing, it might not be limitless, but you will get creative

because you first committed. Marketing and positioning yourself in the marketplace is a game of commitment to the growth of your business. It is nothing more. It is nothing less. You are committed to getting your products and your services in front of your customers. So then you find creative ways to do this. It is not. You find creative ways and then you commit to your business. That's not how business works, and it's not how marketing works. And

the best marketers commit to the campaign. They commit to the post. They commit to getting their product and service known, and then they create the content around it. It's never the other way around. Back when I was writing those blog posts, most of them did not turn out well, but a handful of them got me conversations that led to the next thing, which led to the next thing, which I honestly would not be sitting here in front of you today, having a YouTube channel, being able to

create content. If I didn't first start with truly understanding a blog post, truly understanding what it took to show up in a blog, and to take photos for a blog every single day. Because now I know that game. I understand how websites work. It forced me to learn this, which goes back to my 90 day challenge. It will force you to learn the platform that you need to get better at, in order for you to talk to your customer who needs you to figure out this marketing thing.

You have to figure this out. There is nobody who's going to figure this out for you. To the extent that you figure out how to market your business, how to position your business, your growth is limitless. So these were the six strategies of my Marketing Masterclass. If you love this video, check out my next video on Brutally Honest Business Advice for women. And if you enjoyed this episode of Billy and Billions, do not forget to give

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