Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur [00:00:00]: What's really remarkable to me is there are so many courses and programs out there to teach you every marketing tactic under the sun. Yet, what those courses rarely, if ever, teach you - is how to know if your marketing is working.

It's no wonder when I ask a business owner, “Is your marketing helping you reach your business goals?” they stare at me blankly and then shrug. “I don't know.” Well, it's time that you know so that you're not wasting your time, energy, and resources doing marketing that is completely useless to your business.

Today, I am taking you through my simple three-phase process to evaluate what works so you can double down and ditch what doesn't.

So let's dive in.

Michelle Mazur [00:01:09]: Welcome to Make Marketing Suck Less. The podcast that knows marketing is freaking hard, especially when you're a solo business owner trying to juggle it all. I'm your host, Dr. Michelle Mazur, author of the 3 Word Rebellion and founder of the Expert Up Club. Forget the latest marketing fads and tactics promising social media stardom. I'm here with research-backed strategies to help you clarify your message and get twice as effective with your marketing. And while I can't promise you'll ever love marketing, I'm here. to make you hate it a tiny bit less.

Michelle Mazur [00:01:49]: In past episodes of the podcast, we talked about the jobs your marketing and message should do for your business. As a reminder there are three distinct jobs - Grow, Engage, and Offer, or as I like to think of them G.E.O.

So the Grow job is about growing your audience and building your brand awareness so your audience of right-fit clients knows that you exist.

.Engage is about nurturing that audience and building an argument for the work that you get paid for, so they raise their hands and want to know more about how you do what you do so well.

And then the final phase of this is the Offer stage, and this is simply just inviting people into your sales process. And if you take nothing away from this episode but Grow, Engage, Offer - G.E.O. - then that's a win because you know exactly what your marketing should be doing for your business.

Michelle Mazur [00:03:07]: Now how do you know if your marketing is doing the job you hired it for? Or do you need to fire a specific marketing tactic and find a new employee? In order to figure out what works, you need to think like a scientist.

This is exactly what we do in the Expert Up Club. We think about all marketing like it's an experiment. And I know, experiments might be a little bit scary because what if it doesn't work? Most of us want our marketing to work, like, yesterday, because you have a launch coming up, because you know you have some client spots to fill, so it's kind of scary to think about a marketing experiment not working.

But the good news is when you do an experiment, you're actually going to be marketing way more consistently than you ever have before. So even if it doesn't work the way that you want it to, you're still gathering data on what will work in the future. You'll still be putting yourself and your business out there imperfectly, so that's a win.

And it's a win that helps you grow your audience, and find clients. And the great thing about experiments is you absolutely do not need a PHD to run one. Experiments can be broken down into 3 distinct phases: plan, execute, evaluate. And I just realized that acronym spells out P.E.E. So here's the P.E.E. method for running experiments.

Michelle Mazur [00:05:01]: So the 1st phase is planning the marketing experiment. And there's 3 parts test to phase. I'm gonna run you through an experiment that I'm currently conducting in my business.

So part 1 is to determine the type of experiment you want to run. You just wanna know, like, what do you want to know? If you've been on Instagram for a while, You might want to know, is Instagram actually growing my email list? Or if you're doing YouTube, is that effective in bringing new clients in? So determine what type of experiment you want to run. So for me, I have been curious whether or not LinkedIn is a viable marketing channel for the Expert Up Club to reach new people, to bring them into the community so that I can help more experts get known and hired so that we can change the industry. Right? So will LinkedIn work tech for me.

Michelle Mazur [00:06:14]: Then the 2nd part of planning your experiment is identifying the why behind running this experiment. Like, how is this experiment helping you reach your business goals?

So for me, one of my business goals over the next few years tech is to grow the Expert Up Club to a 100 members. That is my goal. So in order to do that, I know I need to grow my audience. And so is LinkedIn the place where I can do that effectively efficiently?

Michelle Mazur [00:06:58]: And then finally, you have to formulate your research question or hypothesis. So for me, does posting on LinkedIn lead to email growth? That's the question I want to answer because I'm not gonna sell the Expert Up Club on LinkedIn. What I'm going to do is do the messaging that is around the grow and engage phase of my marketing and see if I can get people to opt-in to my email community where I can nurture them further in order to join the Expert Up Club.

Alright. So we're gonna take a short break, and when we come back, we'll talk about the actions you need to take to answer your research question.

Michelle Mazur [00:07:42]: If you're tired of being overlooked for your expertise and clients passing you by in favor of the charismatic web celebs with the super shiny marketing, then I want to cordially invite you to the Expert Up Club Open House. The Expert Up Club is the only community that is full of experts and established business owners who are doing the work of dialing in their message and marketing that message so they can grow their audience and more easily find the right clients for their business.

If it's time for you to be surrounded with a community of people who are legitimate and doing this work, then I'd love to see you at the Open House. The Open House is happening December 6th at 10 AM Pacific Time, and you can sign up at drmichellemazur.com/openhouse. I can't wait to see you there and show you what makes the club so unique.

Michelle Mazur [00:09:01]: And we're back. Let's talk about the E - execute - which is the 2nd phase of creating and running an experiment, that you have to have a plan to execute by taking specific actions that will let you answer your research question.

So for me, if I am trying to figure out if LinkedIn is a viable marketing channel and grows my email list, well, what am I going to do to see if LinkedIn works for me. So for me, that looks like posting 3 times a week, doing a stand-alone post once a week that teases oug the newsletter, and then engaging. I know this is this is funny to say, but engaging with other accounts.

Like, social media is meant to be social. So if I engage with some of the bigger accounts that have a larger following, if I engage with some smaller accounts, does that help me grow my following? Right? So I know what actions I am going to take on a weekly basis. And then I have to figure out what I'm going to measure. Right? So how do I know if this experiment is working for my business? Well, I'm going to measure how many LinkedIn followers I have. Do I see that trending up, and then I'm going to measure how many subscribers I get on my email list to from LinkedIn..

Michelle Mazur [00:10:39]: So I'm measuring that, and then I measure that on a monthly basis. And then the final part of this is deciding how long you want to run this experiment for. And for something like figuring out if LinkedIn is a viable channel for audience growth, like, at least 90 days to run this experiment. So that means I am committing to 3 posts a week, interacting every single day for 90 days. And then at the end of the 90 days, we move to the final phase, which is Evaluation. And I don't have any statistics to report to you yet. I don't have all of the data in yet, but what I'm going to do is look at the numbers.

Are followers trending up? Am I seeing an increase in email subscribers from this channel? And part of this evaluation is also determining, did I follow through on the actions that I said I would. Right? Because if, you know, life happens and you drop off and you're not posting regularly, well, hey, that's going to affect the experiment, and some so sometimes when that happens, you need extend.

And then at the end of that, I'm going to ask myself the question like, do I like being on LinkedIn and creating content there? Is it working? Am I seeing new subscribers, and is there anything that I would change? And at this point, I might decide to stop and be like, nope, this isn't working. I'm not going to do this. I'm gonna find a different way to grow my audience and to grow my email community. So you always have to decide whether you're gonna continue doing it, you're gonna stop, or you're gonna continue with some tweaking.

Michelle Mazur [00:12:37]: And that is it. That is the P.E.E process for planning your marketing experiment. So you're going to plan it, you're going to execute and take action on your marketing activities, and then finally, you're going to evaluate what works after a period of time. And for me, this is the only way you can know whether or not your marketing is working because it's not acceptable to me for you to be wasting your time. Because if your marketing doesn’t work, if your messaging needs to be tweaked, you need to know about that so that you can get it working well for your business, so that it is doing the three jobs it needs to do. And then once you have that data, you can figure out what your next steps are, not based on what some web celeb is telling you works, but it will be on what works for your business. And my friend, when you know what works for your marketing that makes it suck a whole lot less.

Michelle Mazur [00:13:56]: If the Make Marketing Suck Less pod is making your marketing more effective so that your clients can find and hire you, please share the show with a friend. The easiest way to do that is through pod link. You can find the show at pod.link/rebel, and that page will allow anyone you share the show with to subscribe and start listening in their favorite podcast player.

That's pod.link/rebel.

The Make Marketing Suck Less podcast is a production of Communication Rebel. Our production coordinator is Jessica Gulley-Ward. The podcast is edited by Steven Mills, our executive producer is me, Dr. Michelle Mazur.

The make marketing suck less podcast is recorded on the unseated traditional lands of the coast salish peoples, specifically the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish people, original stewards of the land, past, and present.