Episode 82: Marketing Fundamentals with Tim Fitzpatrick

Kendra Corman: 

Welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing! 

Today I am excited to be talking to Tim Fitzpatrick. He is an entrepreneur and business owner with expertise in marketing and business growth. Who doesn't want more business growth? 

And he has 20 + years of entrepreneurial experience with a passion for developing and growing businesses, so very, very cool.

You've had failures and successes that have helped you continually grow, and now you have Rialto Marketing that you started in 2013, and you've been helping B2B professional service firms that wanna accelerate their growth and attract more ideal clients, right? 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

That's it, you got it. What else do we have to talk about? 

Kendra Corman: 

Perfect. No, that's awesome! 

So, thank you so much for joining me today, I appreciate it. I'm really excited for some of the topics that we're gonna be talking about, especially cuz some of them are very big passion points for me, including really understanding and narrowing your audience. 

I find not enough of my clients, and the people that I consult with, have a clue to really understand their audience.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

It's a challenge for a lot of us. We're all in the same boat, right? You know, and I think some businesses that have really found their target kinda stumbled upon it more than really planned for it. 

But everything from a marketing standpoint starts with your target market and your ideal clients within that market. If that is not in alignment, everything else down the line. It's not that it's not gonna work. 

It's just, it might not work, but you're, it's gonna create a lot of problems and you're not gonna get the return that you should on your marketing dollars, and you're gonna waste a lot of time. 

Kendra Corman: 

I agree. Identifying your target audience saves time and money, that's my big thing. It saves time and money. Who has extra of both? That's who I wanna talk to!

But for you, when you're talking to your clients and your prospects about their target audience, what are some questions or some tips that you have for people to help them identify that? 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

So, the easiest place to start, I think for an, is for an existing business.

So, you've been in business for a while, you've got past customers, you've current clients. I think the easiest place, I call 'em the three power questions. 

Ask yourself, who do you love working with? Who are your most profitable clients? And who do you get great results for? 

If you ask yourself those three questions and look, dig into your current and your past client base, you will get a subgroup, right? That you have answered positively to all three of those questions.

I don't know about you, Kendra, but who the hell doesn't wanna work with people they love working with, that are profitable, that they get great results for? If you can work with people like that day in, day out, you're gonna be happier. 

You're gonna make more money, and you're gonna grow your business. It's just, it's inevitable. 

So that's the easiest place to start. And then with that subgroup, then you can start to dig a little bit deeper. Right? And when I say dig deeper, we need to start to now understand who these people are, what they look like. 

You know, you start to look at demographics, which is the numbers side of things. I don't think the demographics are nearly as important as the psychographics. The psychographics are about what are they thinking? What are their thoughts as it relates to what you do? What are the common problems that they have that they want solved? What outcomes and results are they looking for? You know, what roadblocks do they have?

We really, with psychographics, we're really entering the conversation that they're having in their head. And when we can do that and understand our ideal clients at a very deep level. That's, that's the secret sauce right there. 

Everything from a marketing standpoint becomes easier when you can get to that place.

Kendra Corman: 

I like how you were talking about the fact that the psychographics are more important than the demographics. Does it really matter if they're 45, 55? 

Ultimately, it's really, why do they need you? You know, what do you need to do for them? Where are they at?

You know, when you're thinking about, one of the things I also like that you're talking about is, you know, who do you like to work with? You start to think about it. You also like the way you interact with them. 

So, I'm an email addict. I, my texts, I don't even wanna know how many do I have unread currently, I'm not a texter. I've got some clients that text. I have 58 unread texts, right? 

And they haven't come in on the last day. So that, but just saying, so I, I don't keep up well with my texts and because I don't live with my phone, I live in front of my computer. And so, my clients that I like the best seem, they like to communicate with email for the most part, right? 

And so, you start to find that fit into things even beyond just that you like their business or their personality, you like how you interact with them. That's another reason I think it makes it profitable too, right?

Because you're not wasting time trying to figure out how to find time to check your phone messages like I do. Things like that are really great opportunities, so I like that a lot. 

So, once they've identified their audience, they really need to create messaging that works for that audience, right?

So that they can resonate with them. I love it when I drive by a billboard, and I start nodding my head. Or I'm reading a print ad or an email and I'm like, yes, that's me. They have to really know me to be able to do that. 

So, what’s been your experience, or what do you recommend, and how do you create marketing messaging that's clear and engaging for the right target audience?

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

Messaging is so, so important because if it's, what you're putting out there isn't resonating, none of the marketing you do is gonna convert well. There are a couple common problems that I see with messaging. 

So, I mean, if people just take away these common problems from this episode, they'll be well served from it.

But first thing is we, we make it hard for people to understand what the hell we do. And when we confuse people, man, we're so impatient now because we're so used to having answers at our fingertips quickly. 

Man, if people land on the top of your website and they read it and they're like, I, I don't get it. They're not gonna take the time. We need to err on the side of being clear. Don't get clever, don't get cute. 

And I know, look, I even want to do this. Okay. It's really difficult. Marketing messaging is so challenging because as business owners, we're too close to the fire. We can't think objectively, and so we need to get these, that's why it's so important to talk to our ideal clients and get the information in their words so that we can create messaging that's in their words, not our own.

The second thing we do is we talk too much about ourselves. Our customers, sorry to say it, they don't care about us. They don't. They care about the problem that they have that we can help them solve. They care about how we can help them get from where they currently are to where they want to be. 

Those are the two biggest mistakes that people make when selling their products and services. And if you can get over that hump with your messaging, you'll be far ahead of the pack. You know? 

Now when we, when we work on messaging, there's so many different messaging, frameworks, formulas out there, but storytelling within marketing is huge. Story Brand, I think, does a really good job with this. They've done a really good job of making messaging a little bit easier for most people to understand. 

Having said that, I still think marketing messaging, you need to hire somebody to help you do it. It's just, I have not talked to a business owner unless they had extensive marketing background, that could create strong marketing messaging without some help.

It's like trying to manage, trying to do your own tax return when you know you own five businesses and 10 million worth of real estate. No, no. You, you have no business doing your tax return at that point. Okay? You need to get help. 

So, we all need help at times. Messaging is, is one of the main areas in marketing. Man. If it's not your thing, get help because it's such a critical element. You don't want it out of alignment. 

Kendra Corman: 

Even if it is your thing, get help. Because as, I think one of the great points that you pointed out there is we're too close to it.

So, I hired a, I did a coaching session with someone on LinkedIn. I've been doing marketing for, we're gonna go with 15 plus, cuz otherwise I sound too old. 

So, 15 plus years. I've been the Jeep advertising manager. I've been the marketing director at a wholesale insurance firm. I've had my business now for almost 10 years. I'm in my ninth year right now. I've got a lot of experience and a lot of background in, in marketing.

I needed someone's help on my LinkedIn profile and my headline. I could not write my headline. I just didn't like it. I didn't like what it was. And so, a friend of mine had sent out her email newsletter and she said, Hey, if anybody would like to have a coaching session, I've got a couple available. 

And I was like, will you talk to me about my headline for most of the time?

And she's like, yes. 

And I said, okay, done. And I went on and I bought the coaching session, and I scheduled it for the next Monday. And I'm like, we're all good to go! 

But we get too close to it. I mean, the stuff that she said isn't stuff that I don't know. She just put it in a way that clarified it for me. Because again, I was too close to it, and I was overthinking it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

Yep. I'll give you a perfect example. I worked with a residential siding contractor. This was before the pandemic started, so it was a while ago. But, you know, in residential home services, like the messaging is like all the same. 

I go to five siding contractor websites in Denver, and it's like, number one siding contractor, high quality customer service, best materials, who cares?

That's all table stakes. Like how do you prove that? People don't care. And when we started working with this client on their messaging, one of the things that we did, and this is one of the things that you can do. 

Like if you're just getting started out, there's all kinds of online reviews for your competitors. Go read your competitors' online reviews and what people are saying. And we read through their reviews, and one of the women in there said, they treated my house like it was their own. 

And I was like, there we go. That's it. Like, we don't need to, they don't, they expect that you're gonna do a great job giving 'em good siding.

What happens a lot of the time is contractors come into your house and they just, they're slamming doors. Their feet are dirty. They leave it a mess. 

Don't you wanna hire somebody that's gonna treat it like it's their own house? They're gonna make sure the job's done right, that everything is perfect and immaculate. That became their core message. 

So, although this is, it's simple, right? It's not rocket science, we've gotta go through the process and we have to be open to like, oh my gosh, there's a client that's in their words what was really important to them. 

She didn't say anything about siding. Those little types of things.

Kendra Corman: 

And it's what matters. It's, we treat your home as if it was ours. You know, that's, and again, it's about what's in it for them. You know, again, another point that you brought up that I loved about messaging is that a lot of time we talk too much about ourselves. I had a recent guest, Lorraine Ball, who came on.

Tim Fitzpatrick:

Oh yes, I know Lorraine. 

Kendra Corman: 

Yeah. Everybody, I think, knows Lorraine now. Well, we had an awesome conversation about landing pages. And you know, she and I talked about it and she's like, okay, print out a couple pages of your website, get out a red pen and a blue pen, and start circling.

If you do not have, you know, two to one of, you know, blue circles to red circles, then you're talking too much about yourself and people don't care. 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

Yeah. 

Kendra Corman: 

I love that. 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

You know, in the B2B space, and honestly this goes B2C too, but b2b, you need to talk about yourself enough to establish credibility, trust, but outside of that, that's it. The rest of your messaging should really be focusing on the people you intend to work with.

Kendra Corman: 

Yeah, because it, it's all about us as the reader, as the listener, what's in it for us? Everything you create should have your audience in mind. 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

That's it. 

Kendra Corman: 

And again, if you don't know who they are, then you need to figure that out because you'll be wasting a lot of time. Right? 

I think that that is great. And I love how we're talking, you know, we go from our understanding, our target audience to talking about messaging. 

Now what do we do with that messaging? Right? We gotta create a plan. So how do you go about creating a marketing plan that works? 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

Yeah, so I'm gonna get really tactical here, cuz I think a lot of the people I run into either don't plan at all, or they have a very loosely based plan, or their plan is overly complex.

In my opinion, marketing planning should be done in 90-day sprints. You know, at the beginning of the pandemic if you had a year long plan, what happened to that plan? It went up on a shelf. It got burned. It got tossed into the garbage can. Our businesses are evolving quickly. The market is evolving quickly.

One year? Nobody puts together a year long plan that is the same at the beginning as it is at the end. So, if that's the case, why do it? 

They become far too complex, and complexity is the enemy of results. So, let's keep it simple. 90-day sprints and you wash, rinse, repeat. 

90 days is long enough to start seeing traction, but it's short enough where we can start to, once we've measured, we can make course corrections and we just wash, rinse, repeat every 90 days.

So here's the six steps that I use in the plan for my company, and the clients we work with first is the target market. Who are your ideal clients? You know, we want to have that in our plan. We wanna understand who those people are. 

In my opinion, you should not have more than three. I think you should start with one. Otherwise, you dilute your focus. But we gotta keep them at the top of the plan, cuz you want to just keep reminding yourself each and every day who the hell we intend to work with. 

The second is what's your goal? Okay. It's gonna be, it's time bound cuz it's a 90-day plan. It needs to be specific and measurable. Typically, this is gonna be kind of the next step for a longer-term goal, right? 

Might be I intend to attract five new clients. I intend to bring on five new clients in the next 90 days. I think it's important to have an idea of where you're headed, but a goal like this is also what I call an outcome-based goal, where there are a lot of things beyond your control that may impact your ability to hit this.

So, if you're one of those people, like if you don't hit your goal, the wheels come off. Like, please be careful. Don't get too wrapped up in it. But I do think it's important to know where you're going. Further down, you'll see where I really focus all of my efforts on things that you can control. 

So, the third, what's your budget and what are your resources? This step gives us an idea of what we have to work with, how much we can bite off on our plan. Because if you bite off too much, you don't implement and execute well. If you bite off too little, well then, you're not doing enough, right? And you're slowing down your growth. 

So, we need to know what we have to work with. Do you have $500 a month? Do you have 50,000 a month? 

What kind of resources do you have? Are you outsourcing things? Do you have staff internally? And what are their skillset? 

You know, if Kendra, you're on my team and I want you to do LinkedIn, and you're like, what? Well, that's not gonna work, right? I need to level up your skills, or I need to put you in a different place. But we have to have an idea of what we have to work with, and that's what we're doing in this step.

The fourth step is what's our current plan? Now, I know some people may not have a plan, and that's totally okay. What we're doing here is getting a baseline of where we're starting from. You cannot create a plan to get from where you are to where you want to be if you don't understand where the hell you're starting from.

It's like my GPS. GPS can't tell me how to get to Denver International Airport until I tell it I'm starting at Highlands Ranch. So that's exactly what we're doing here. I want you to, like, if you were working with us, we actually, we would do a deep dive assessment. Everything that you're doing right from a marketing standpoint, what's working, what's not.

If you're doing this yourself, that's okay. Just start to catalog what you're doing from a marketing perspective. What do you have in place? What are you doing on a regular basis, so you know where you're starting from. 

Then in the fifth step, that's where you outline your priorities for the next 90 days. What do you focus on? Well, it depends on where you're starting, and in step three what our budget and our resources are. 

The easiest place everybody goes, what? Where should I start? I'll give low hanging fruit One, your target market and your messaging. If you do not have that dialed in, you have to start there because everything else depends on it.

Two is your website. I don't care if you're a hundred percent referral business, people are still going to your website and if it looks like it was built in 1995, you're losing referrals and you don't even know it. 

So, everything you do from a marketing standpoint goes, drives people back to your site. It has to be good, has to have good messaging, has to have a clear path that drives people down and it has to have a really good call to action.

The third bit of low hanging fruit is what's already working. If you've been in business, something's working for you. So many of us are like, oh, I got, I'm chasing the newest shiny marketing object. 

No, don't jump into other channels until you fully optimized what's already working. Referrals is a perfect example. Lot of people generate tons of business from referrals. It's a great way to generate new business. 

You ask, how are you doing that? Oh, well, it just happens. Like there's no process. What happens if you actually put in a process? Maybe you have a referral program. Maybe you ask for referrals at key points in the customer journey, right?

Simple little things. We wanna fill the gaps, and then we wanna do more of what's already working in that process. So that's super low hanging fruit. If you want quick results, that's the place I would go first. 

The other thing, low hanging fruit. What did you used to do that was working that you stopped doing? Because you wanted to chase the shiny object and when you chase the shiny object, you stopped doing something that was working. Those two things are really low hanging fruit. So those are the three things I would focus on first. 

But in this fifth step, you're outlining your priorities. What happens when you know what your priorities are? You have clarity, your stress goes down. You have the ability, when some new marketing guru comes across your screen next week and says, you need to be here. 

You can have the discipline to go, you know what, no. It's not no forever. It's just no right now, because that's not one of my priorities. 

And then in the sixth step metrics, what are we going to track?

You will never know where you need to make course corrections and whether things are working, if you don't track the right metrics. So, we've gotta outline the metrics that we're gonna track. 

I'm gonna give you three simple metrics to start, okay? Cuz a lot of people aren't tracking much of anything. 

One leads. How many leads are you generating each month? You need to determine what the threshold is to become a lead. But once you've determined that, then how many leads am I generating each month? 

Two lead sources, where are the leads coming from? When you know where the leads are coming from, you know which activities that you're using in your marketing plan are actually working.

And we don't have to overcomplicate this. I mean, there are things that you can measure, certainly, from a marketing standpoint. But this could be as simple as just asking when you know somebody schedules a call with you, is that gonna be perfect? No, but it's a hell of a lot better than what most people are doing right now. So just ask and then keep track of it.

And then the third one is, how many new clients am I getting each month? With those three numbers, we'll know how many leads we need to convert to get a client and we'll know where they're coming. 

Now we, Kendra, you and I both know this, you can track so many other marketing metrics, and that's not to say that there aren't other important marketing metrics. I think there are, but there are a lot of marketing metrics that don't mean a damn thing. 

Like how many people are going to your website, how many people are on your email list, how many fans do you have on Facebook? 

Who cares? 

Are you generating leads that are converting to customers? If you're not from those channels, and who cares?

So keep it simple and then you can expand out and get more sophisticated. But you gotta walk before you run. So that's the six step 90-day marketing plan we use. This can be literally on one sheet of paper. 

Kendra Corman: 

Okay. So, if you've been listening to that, I want you to rewind it and then write it all down.

No, I'll put, I'll put some of this in the show notes for you guys so that you can just copy and paste, because I think that that was, I mean, that's it. If you've not done a plan or you've done a plan and not been able to stick to it, I think that this sixth step, there's so much gold in here that I don't want you guys to overlook any of it.

And so, for instance, just to like, you know, give you some idea that 90 days, that's 12 weeks, that's one quarter, right? 

I love, I talk about my full focus planner all the time, and it's, you know, unsponsored, but it's based on a 12 system. You know, yes, I have annual goals, but then I break them down by quarter and I focus on two or three a quarter.

And that's what helps you move the needle because annual goals are just too far off. They're too lofty. And you lose track of them because you can't make as big an impact on a. Annual goal as you can, a quarterly goal, right? In one day. 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

Planning in shorter sprints helps you focus on the simple next measurable steps you can take, right?

It's not like I'm trying to, you know, skip 10 miles ahead. I'm just taking the next two feet in front of me. And when we do that, because it can be really overwhelming, right? 

As an entrepreneur, like you think about all the things you have to do. You can just get totally overwhelmed and you're just, you're battling all this information overload.

But when you can break 'em down and just, oh gosh, all I have to do is take one step in front of me. Well, I can do that. And then when you take that step, you're like, oh, I can take the next one and the next one and the next one, then all of a sudden, you're two miles down the road. Right? 

But I think breaking it down, keeping it simple, helps tremendously.

Kendra Corman: 

Well, yeah, and I think following these steps and building this plan is so important to two of the questions that, that you asked. You know, what's already working and what did you stop doing? It's, this is going to give you the confidence to know what's working and to not get off track and stop doing something else that is working.

Because that's scary. I do VIP Days where I spend a day with people, and I work through their marketing plan and we start with their goals and their target audience, and we come up with a 90-day plan at the end. 

But it, I mean, it's a full eight-hour day, six to eight hours, and there's a lot of work that we do in it. So, there's a lot to the planning. Not to underscore any of it, but I've had multiple people now after a VIP Day tell me that they went to a networking event and someone was telling them something about Instagram or TikTok or whatever it happens to be, be real now. Mastodon, which is another one I've heard of social media network-wise. 

Cuz social media networks seem to be the big conversation at these places, and a couple of them told they get to leave the event, and in the past, they would've been like, "oh, I need to do that. They're seeing results there. I need to do that." 

But now they have the, because they have a plan, they have the confidence to look at that plan and say, "Nope, I'm not doing that. You know, what I'm doing is working. My audience is here. Once I figure all of that out, then I can go and add that on. I'll write it down in an ideas folder." 

The end. 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

Yeah. It's like we're not saying no forever. We're just saying no right now. Put it on the list and you can circle back to it. 

Most businesses do not need that many marketing channels to be incredibly successful. You know, it's overwhelming because it, when I first got started, my professional career, I was in wholesale distribution. This was in the mid-nineties. Websites were informational brochures, right? 

There weren't nearly the digital marketing channels that there are today. And it can be so overwhelming just going, oh my gosh, I've got, I gotta be here and I gotta be there.

And no, you don't. Most businesses, you could be two, three different places and have a wildly successful business. I don't think you wanna rely too heavily on any one channel or lead gen tactic. 

I think you wanna have multiple, but you don't need to be everywhere.

Kendra Corman: 

And I think that it's important to note one, another important nugget that you just said is that you don't wanna necessarily, you wanna diversify a little bit. You don't wanna rely on one. Cuz what happens when Facebook goes down, right? 

But a lot of people that are listening, especially those in the B2B space, are probably thinking to themselves right now. Oh, but I'm referral based. But I think, again, another nugget that you said is where did those referrals come from? 

And you shouldn't answer, "I don't know" to any of those. Because are you in a B and I or an L B N networking group? Are you in your chamber networking group? Are you in, you know, where are you just networking with other IT professionals?

I don't Whatever the specialty happens to be, where are you getting your business? You need to know that.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

Right. You know, the other thing too, Kendra with referrals is one, they're not predictable, they're not scalable, right? There are plenty of people out there that have built fairly large businesses on referral.

I guarantee you, you will reach a place that you cannot push through on referrals alone. You have to expand into other channels. 

I also think too, you know, I'm dating myself here, but the older people get, the more they kind of lean on referrals. But do people in their early twenties and late twenties depend on referral as much as somebody that's in their sixties or fifties?

I may be wrong, but I don't think so at all. Those people are going, they're going online. They're getting information from social media, reviews. They're reaching out to people that they connect with online, which I guess you could say is, is referral, but it's not really referral in the more traditional sense.

I think if you're heavily referral based and you want to grow, you need to expand into the digital realm in some way, shape, or form. 

Kendra Corman: 

Yeah, and I think referrals can be cyclical. Because who's to say that one of your referral partners is meeting with your ideal client. 

You know, you're not controlling their schedule. They may not have any meetings with your ideal client for a while. 

I was at max capacity most of last year, and I pretty much, I think, I feel like I live at Max capacity, so I don't have a ton of prospecting meetings, so if someone's relying on me for referrals, they're not gonna get a ton. These last couple of years, right?

Before that, maybe they, when I was starting, they probably got more. I had more capacity, so I was out there more, and I had more plate people to refer to them. So, it ebbs and flows. 

And then whether or not your top of mind, you can't control all of that, you can influence it to an extent. But again, talking about stuff that's outta your control. 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

I got a perfect example for you. I have a good friend of mine, his referral partner base, all mortgage brokers for a long time. He killed it, and we all know what has happened with interest rates over the last six to 12 months. 

Their leads haven't dried up, but they're significantly down. You know, because there are mortgage brokers that we're making tons of money that are trying to figure out how the heck they're gonna make a living right now. 

It's just not predictable. It can be a good source of leads, but it's not predictable and it's not consistent.

Kendra Corman: 

I like that. And I, I'm not a fan of putting my business, and again, this is coming from someone who used to be a hundred percent referral. I don't like putting the control of my business growth in other people's hands.

That includes social media, you know? Facebook goes down, Instagram goes down, Twitter has a really good day. All of these things. 

So, I mean, that's why personally I'm a fan of email marketing, but I like things I can control. And you can't control referrals. 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

No, you can't. And I don't know if we want to go down this path, but you said you were, you started talking about email marketing.

I also think with your, with your plan, it's really important to think about rented versus owned marketing channels. 

Social media, paid advertising. Those are rented channels. You do not own those. You do not control them. 

There's nothing wrong with using them, but it is so important to use those rented channels to get people the channels that you own, your website, you know, blog, email, marketing.

You always want to drive people back to places that you can control, that you own. Cuz, like you said, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. Your account could get shut down. I mean, if they're gonna shut down, you know, the President Trump, they're gonna shut, they can shut down anybody. 

And if that's how you're generating all of your business and it goes down, you're outta business overnight. It's not a good place to be. So, you wanna have some. 

Kendra Corman: 

It's scary,

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

some stability and diversity across your marketing. 

Kendra Corman: 

Yes. Social media's rented land. You own email marketing. Yeah. 

You cannot, if you export your Facebook friends right now, which you can do depending on everybody's privacy settings. Which by the way, everybody's smarter at privacy settings. You can't get their email address out of there.

So, if that's where you find them, there's no way to do it otherwise. I love that. I love, I'm, I'm a control freak. So that, so that helps me. 

So, going into that a little bit, and, and I just wanna ask you your personal opinion on or professional opinion on something.

So, something I get from a lot of clients is, sometimes they wanna like boost posts and do different, I would call things that drive. I always say that they drive surface metrics, they're not driving leads and new clients necessarily. 

Yes, I do believe in branding. I believe in building your brand. I believe in awareness, like I do believe in all that stuff.

I don't like paying for things that don't get me results. Like if there's not a potential to get. I'm a recession style marketer, cuz I grew up in Chrysler in the mid-2000s, right?

I took the buyout from Chrysler at the end of 2008. Most people know what happened between 2008 and 2011. Yes. It was not pretty. Luckily, I got out of automotive. 

But when you look at it like I just didn't like paying for things that weren't gonna move the needle. There's always that balance, but I'd rather put in time in something that's gonna bring out some awareness or brand identity, and I'd rather put money into things that are gonna drive leads.

What are your thoughts on that? 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

I completely agree with you. I'm sitting here like nodding yes. 

For small businesses. Now this may be different. You know, the larger you get, you know, if you're an Amazon or a Coke or what. Okay. You know, you can do some brand building things, but for small businesses, I think brand building should be a byproduct of the marketing activity that you're taking.

But I don't believe that you should be investing heavily in building your brand. I think the marketing activities you invest in should be able to measure to determine whether they're working or not. 

Cuz, you don't, you don't have an unlimited budget. You need to get a return on that investment. And if you're not, you know, brand building takes, look, the reality is most things in marketing take time.

So, you have to be able to, you have to think long term and you have to be consistent over time. Most small businesses do not have the budget to brand build effectively long term without getting a return. 

So, focus on getting, on investing in channels where you're gonna get that return. Brand building, I believe, is just gonna be a natural byproduct to that, you know? 

So, I totally agree with you. You should be investing in channels that you can measure. Now look, some marketing can be kind of difficult to measure, right? But let's do the best we can and really dig deep and figure out what we can track that's gonna help give us an indication of whether this is working or not.

And, you know, if you can't measure it, I think you should probably look at something else. 

Kendra Corman: 

I agree. I agree. If you're investing money, and again, we all have limited resources. And even some of the larger and mid-size companies are getting into places right now where their resources are becoming a lot more limited than they were, you know, a year or two ago, right? 

So, you need to be looking at things that are driving results and that's why I loved the idea of the tracking. Cuz yes, there are indicators, key performance indicators. You can track the size of your email list. You can track the number of opens you have. 

Which by the way, opens are worthless because Apple is pre-opening your emails. So, if you wanna feel good about your emails, go look at your open rates increasing. But outside of that, you know, it's not driving results. 

Those metrics aren't driving results. They may be indicators of where you're headed. So, if you start to see your list size going down, cuz a bunch of people are unsubscribing and they're not subscribing to your new content, then that might mean your list is changing its demographics, or the content that you're doing is not resonating with them anymore and it's an indicator that you should do something different.

Because that does factor into your leads and your, uh, number of new clients and things like that. But ultimately, the only thing that matters is leads. 

I just got a lead today from somebody asking me if, uh, I was interested in a project and it's not a good fit. So, I said no, and I referred them to somebody else. That was a lead. 

There's a lead source that goes with that. Yeah, I know where that came from. And by the way, it came from an email newsletter because they've known me for years, but they were reminded that I do what I do by my email newsletter. 

And so, you know, again, they, it actually goes back to the original source. But you know, again, it's hawks about what you need to do. Being consistent, following through on what you say you're gonna do is gonna build your brand. There is a byproduct. And I love that point that you made, so that's, that's fantastic. 

Okay, so just to reiterate, we got, you're gonna, your six step marketing plan here from Tim is to identify your target market, determine your goal for 90 days, determine your budget and your resources.

Cuz a lot of things in money are, I'm gonna use air quotes "free". They're not really free cuz nothing's free. It takes time and effort. So that's a resource, right? 

Thinking about what your current plan is as step four, identifying your priorities for the next 90 days, and then measuring with metrics. I think that if you can take that away and implement that after this, after listening to this podcast, that would be amazing. And I think it's definitely steps that you can take. 

Before I wrap up and let you go, Tim, though, I do wanna ask you a question I ask all of my guests, because marketing is anything but perfect. And this show is called Imperfect Marketing. 

So, what's been your biggest marketing lesson learned? 

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

Oh man, Kendra, God, there's so many. I gotta pick one? Let's play off imperfect marketing, okay? 

The reality is, and a lot of marketers will not tell you this, most marketing you do is not going to work, and that's totally okay. That's just the reality of it. 

So that's why testing is so, so important, right?

If most is not gonna work, we need to test, we need to measure, and we need to learn from that so that we can identify what's working and what's not as quickly as possible and make course corrections. 

So, was that tight enough? 

Kendra Corman: 

That is, that is. It goes to that 80 20 rule. 80% of what you're gonna get is gonna come from 20% of your efforts.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 

That's right. 

Kendra Corman: 

But if you're not doing, you know, a hundred percent of it, you're gonna be missing out on less, you know? 

So, no, but I think that that's a really good point. So, if you loved talking with Tim as much as I did, be sure to check the show notes to find out how to connect with him. He has a scorecard downloadable and of course a free consultation meeting with Rialto Marketing if you're interested in that.

He is also the host of the Rialto Marketing Podcast, so if you wanna check any of that out, we'll have links to those in the show notes. Again, I hope you got a lot out of this conversation with Tim. I think it was fantastic. 

I appreciate your time so much, Tim, and for all of you listening, if you got something out of this, please rate and subscribe wherever you're listening.

That always helps me out and feel free to share with a friend. Otherwise, I'll see you on another episode of Imperfect Marketing. Have a great rest of your day!