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Timestamp:
00:00 Introduction: Avoiding Costly Marketing Mistakes
00:18 Mistake 1: Chasing Shiny Objects
01:36 Mistake 2: Targeting Too Broad an Audience
02:49 Mistake 3: Following Misleading Gurus
03:26 Mistake 4: Consuming More Than Creating
04:12 Mistake 5: Buying Courses Without Completion
04:32 Mistake 6: Ignoring ROI
05:09 Mistake 7: Not Focusing on Ideal Customer
06:08 Mistake 8: Lack of Content Pillars
07:11 Conclusion: Learn From My Mistakes
Ash Roy's Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Ash Roy:
So in this video, I want to talk about the eight key marketing mistakes I've seen business owners make that will lead your business to a dead end. I've made several of these mistakes myself. Grab a coffee. Let's talk about it.
The first mistake I've seen a lot of business owners make, and boy, I've done this myself so many times, and that is chasing shiny objects. It's very easy to get distracted with the latest marketing tools and tactics. I often thought each of these was going to be a game changer for my business. And the truth is, if I had followed one through to its logical conclusion, it probably would have been.
But therein lies the problem. It was never a game changer. one course, one marketing solution. I was trying to do five at the same time. And I can understand that because we all feel like we want to diversify our efforts in case one doesn't work out. The other one might, but that's actually a paradox when it comes to marketing tools and following tactics.
Less is more. Constant switching from one channel to another, one tactic to another led to a diffusion of my efforts. I didn't end up doing any one thing properly. It's when I decided to choose one channel and double down on that channel that I started to see traction. So the lesson I learned was staying consistent with one channel, one path and mastering that before moving on to the next is a great idea.
I probably could have saved myself at least two or three years of wasted effort if I had just followed this one rule.
The next common mistake I've seen and one I've made myself is not. I remember Seth Godin telling me, find the smallest possible audience and give them what they desperately need. I'll link to that conversation with Seth in the description below.
You see, more is not always better and this particularly applies when it comes to choosing the right audience. The smaller your target audience, the better off you are, especially when you're starting off in business. Now again, just like marketing tools and strategies, it may feel like more is better. But in fact, when you try and be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to anyone.
Focusing on a very small niche feels riskier. But if you try and talk to everybody, it actually dilutes your message, and you end up not resonating with anyone in particular. So just like with the marketing tools problem, where I focused on too many tools at the same time, the lesson I learned here was less is more.
Find the smallest possible audience and deliver something they desperately need and do it so well that they tell their friends about it and their friends will tell their friends and so on. That's how all great businesses have been built. The next big mistake I made was following these gurus. A lot of marketing experts talk about their revenue numbers and not their profitability.
I think profitability matters and this was one of the hardest lessons I learned. If you want to grow in scale, you're going to have to reinvest your profits. So now when I hear a guru talk about making millions of dollars overnight, I assume they're lying. The lesson I learned is building a business is hard.
You have to believe that things are going to work out and you have to keep pushing forward. It's not easy and it doesn't happen overnight. That said, I do believe it's very important to be optimistic and believe that the results will come over time. This coffee is delicious. Now, the fourth big mistake I made was consuming way more than I created.
I don't know about you, but I love learning. But while I believe that learning is valuable and important, it can actually become an impediment to growth. Consuming content doesn't actually pay the bills. If you use content marketing like I do, then you need to create content. To build your brand and to attract high quality leads over time.
So the solution is to be mindful of how much time you're spending on creating content versus consuming content. Over the years, I've tried to move that to a one to one ratio. This means that as I'm learning, I'm implementing. And when you teach, you learn it at an even deeper level. So the big lesson for me here was create more content than you consume.
Now, a related but slightly different mistake I made was buying courses and not completing them. Over the last 12 years, I've probably spent over a hundred thousand dollars on courses, several of which I haven't completed, and this meant I was spending a ton of money on courses. And most of her money was going down a big black hole.
My next big mistake was not keeping track of ROI or return on investment. I spent a ton of money on subscriptions, on software, things that I rarely use. I never checked to see whether the stuff I was spending money on was actually profitable. And the best way I found to do this was to track it all on a spreadsheet.
And so now I know every single subscription I pay for and I check that spreadsheet at least once or twice a month. And if I'm not using it, I cancel that subscription. So my advice, audit your expenses often and ask yourself this one question. How much return am I getting on this investment? My next big mistake was not focusing on my ideal customer.
When I started my business, my content was way too broad. Because I hadn't picked an ideal client, my messaging and my content was very unfocused. So the impact of my messaging was limited. It didn't have cut through. Because I hadn't picked a niche, my content was trying to be everything to everyone, and of course it was nothing to any particular audience.
So here's what I learned. It is absolutely essential to create an ideal customer avatar and truly empathize with them. Try and understand what their day looks like. A great way to do this is to create an empathy map. And I've written a blog post about this on my website. You can check out productiveinsights.com/117, I'll link to that in the description below.
If I were to do it again, I would get very clear on my ideal customer. And I'd. Develop a clear content strategy around specific content pillars. And that was my eighth big mistake, not creating content pillars. You see, if you want your content to resonate with your audience, you need to be clear about the problem your audience is trying to solve, and then you need to build your content around specific pillars that relate to that solution.
Now this ties into search engine optimization and becoming the perceived expert on a particular topic by creating related content, i. e. content pillars that connect back to that topic. So for example, if you want to be seen as an authority in content marketing, your content pillars would be include things like search engine optimization, the different forms of content you can create, video, audio, written content, how to use artificial intelligence to brainstorm new ideas for content, how to use artificial intelligence to improve your research when creating content, how to study trends in content and so on.
And by the way, if you want to learn more about how to use artificial intelligence in content creation, I'll link to a video that talked about exactly that in the description below. Now, if you found this video useful, you might also like this video where I talked about the five big mistakes I made over 12 years in business.
So hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and you won't end up making the same ones I did. My coffee's over. I'm gonna go get another one. I'll see you in the next video. Ciao for now.