Marketing is everything
One thing I’ve learned in working with business after business is that many people confuse marketing as being this silo in their company, as though it’s this singular entity unto itself.
The truth is that marketing is everything. Now, this might sound like an exaggeration, but think about it for a second.
Marketing is absolutely everything that has anything to do with your brand. Your online presence, how up-to-date your website is, your customer experience (online or in person) — essentially each and every touchpoint throughout a customer’s journey with your brand is a marketing opportunity that you can either succeed or fail at.
Even our most-recent Marketing Essentials workshop is in and of itself an important venue for brand marketing, in that I am always fascinated by who does and who doesn’t bring business cards with them to what is a huge networking opportunity. Half of our attendees didn’t bring business cards with them, and for those that did bring cards, the quality of those cards varied dramatically. This brings me to my first point.
Business cards still matter. And don’t forget about the quality.
My advice here is to invest in things that are high-quality and that you’re proud to give to people. Don’t skimp on quality just to save a few bucks when it will just reflect poorly on your brand. You’ll feel it, and so will the people whom you give these cards to.
It might seem like business cards are a thing of the past, but they’re really not. They’re still the perfect way to share essential information about your business with people you’d like to explore business opportunities with.
The information I’m referring to is both the literal information — your business name, contact info, a photograph to make it more personal, and so on — as well as intrinsic information you’re communicating about your brand through design, paper quality, and other aesthetic choices you’re telling someone about who you are and what you stand for.
Now, you might think these stylistic choices don’t mean much, but in some ways they’re more important than the words featured on the cards themselves. Make every choice intentional, and don’t lose sight of the details.
Create a landing page
Do you know the difference between a website and a landing page? A website has a wide variety of content, ways in which you can navigate throughout it, as well as many different calls to action.
A landing page, on the other hand, has a singular focus. It’s about one thing. It’s typically a single page. (Well, it should be, anyway.) It has only one call to action. There are no ways in which you can deviate from this specific subject, or, more importantly, what it is that you’re asking visitors to do.
This is always the most important thing in any marketing effort: What are we asking our audience to do? Understand our brand better? Sign up for an event? Subscribe to a podcast?
That’s the power of a landing page, because it focuses our content and their attention on one single decision to make. The customer journey is crystal clear. This leads to higher conversion and more sales.
You can A-B test everything. Headlines. Images. Calls to action. Forms. All of it.
This gives you invaluable data, which helps you understand how you can solve your different types of customers’ distinct problems with better solutions and a shorter sales cycle.
Have a content strategy
For me, my content starts with my podcast. The podcasting that Brandon and I do, separately and together, has had a huge impact on the people who are in Cardone Ventures sphere, both in terms of the clients we’re working with, but also the top talent we’ve been able to recruit.
Here’s why I love podcasting as the center of my content strategy:
- It makes me a better communicator
- They ensure that I know exactly how to pitch different events, products, and services
- They’re easy to produce and publish
- They can be used to create lots of different, equally essential pieces of content
This last point is one of the most important aspects of my content strategy. My podcast is typically recorded in both audio and video formats simultaneously. The audio is edited and then published to my podcast feed. The video can be published in whole to my YouTube channel, or cut up into clips for other platforms like Instagram Reels or TikTok. That same video can be used to grab still photography for social posts and other image-driven mediums.
What’s more, the podcast transcript can then be turned into a blog (this blog, in fact!) which can help further your online reach in establishing yourself as a subject matter expert online.
When it comes to your content strategy, think about where your customers are online, and what other opportunities you have for building an audience, and start creating content that you can then turn into other pieces of content on different platforms. Don’t wait until everything is perfect, just start publishing! Your strengths will start to emerge, as well as ways you can improve, but you’ll never know until you get started, so just do it!
Are you the business owner? Then marketing is YOUR responsibility.
Maybe that’s not what you wanted to hear, but it’s an absolute fact. If you’re the business owner, then marketing is your responsibility. You can’t abdicate it. Yes, of course your business can have marketing professionals, you can work with agencies, and you should be able to trust your team to represent your brand effectively, but only if you have a clear vision for what your brand is that you’ve documented and communicated successfully.
As the owner, you’re at the center of the brand. This should be your visio. Your energy. Your drive. Otherwise…whose brand is it, really?
If you’re a business that works with an agency for your marketing and you’re struggling with getting new flow into the business, whose fault is that? Is it the agency’s? I don’t think so.
There’s no one who is more responsible for coming up with effective messaging based on a clear vision than you are. No one.
Let’s go back to the landing page example. We’ve worked with clients who have never looked at the landing pages created for their businesses. How motivated do you think they are to drive traffic to those pages? How invested do you think they really are?
On the other hand, folks like Grant Cardone, Brandon, and I look at every single landing page that’s created for our businesses. We give feedback on each and every one of them. We want them to sound like us, to be things that we would say, because they’re reflections of our brands.
We want to be proud of them. We want to be at the center of everything when it comes to our marketing. That’s what leaders do.
So, to summarize, four of the most critical ways in which you can up the effectiveness of your marketing this year, is by having a great, high-quality business card that reflects and elevates your brand; embracing the power and insight that comes from the strategic use of landing pages; having a content strategy that is efficient in its ability to turn one piece of well-communicated content into several unique pieces of content that can be shared across a wide variety of platforms; and, last but not least, understanding that you as the business owner play the most critical role in marketing over anyone else in the business, including your own marketing team.
So with that, why wouldn’t you want to attend a Cardone Ventures Marketing Essentials workshop? They’re absolutely jam-packed with marketing insights like these, and you have the opportunity to meet the Cardone Ventures team, as well as a wealth of like-minded business owners you can give your brand-new business cards to!
Our next event is coming up quickly, so I wouldn’t delay. Go to CardoneVentures.com/Marketing to secure your seat. I’ll see you there!