Random Acts of Marketing Won’t Move the Needle
Random marketing is like fishing with donuts! It doesn’t work. I’ll help you avoid that so you can reel in leads and customers, not fish…
Introduction
Do you feel stuck in your marketing efforts? Every business has participated in marketing: building a website, posting on social media, advertising, even the logo on your truck. That’s all marketing.
But do you ever feel like your efforts are leading you nowhere? You’re not alone. Many small businesses face this dilemma, but random acts of marketing here and there aren’t going to get you where you want to be.
Marketing does take time, yes, but consistency, strategy and measuring our successes and failures are what make marketing a worthwhile investment. In this article, I’m going to cover random acts of marketing regarding social media, advertising and SEO. I’ll help you better understand these elements so that you can see how they factor into a comprehensive marketing strategy.
What do you mean by random acts of marketing?
This is kind of a play on ‘random acts of kindness.’ Random acts of kindness are awesome! I agree that random acts of kindness go a long way in making the world a better place. Random acts of marketing, not so much.
Good marketing isn’t random. I think people get a misconception of that because they look at a random advertising campaign that went viral, that generated a buzz, that appeared simple, yet effective. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
The truth of the matter is that advertising, which is a component of marketing, not marketing as a whole, takes countless hours of creative testing, copywriting, audience building, measurement and tracking parameters and budget adjustments. In other words, if you see something that worked for a brand, it took them a long time to get to that place. They failed more times than they won.
I work exclusively with small businesses where the owner is the operator, the salesman, the tech, the accountant, the marketer, etc. There’s so many hats a small business owner wears and I don’t blame them for not thinking highly of marketing.
Here’s my definition of effective marketing:
Effective marketing is the process of doing multiple things correctly and consistently along with the ability to measure results and make smarter decisions over time.
When it comes to why some small businesses have had bad experiences with marketing, it comes down to: a poor strategy, lack of consistency, poor measurability, and no adaptability over time. Let’s dive into common cases of ‘Random Acts of Marketing’
Social Media
This is the most common random act of marketing: getting super stoked about social media, posting like crazy, then burnout.
Social media gets a lot of people excited. It gives you a platform to create, to share ideas, speak out, and engage with diverse communities. But here’s where it goes wrong for many business owners:
They post too much too early - I’m talking 4 times or more per day
They are spread too thin - You are a one man house painter who doesn't need to be posting 4 times a day to FB,IG,Tiktok, LinkedIn, X and have a YouTube channel.
No one engages with their content: It sucks creating and posting to get 10 views from personal friends.
Boosted posts didn’t get any calls
After doing all of this with no results, you gave up. I mean insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. I don’t blame you.
Here’s how to avoid the random act of marketing known as insane social media:
Understand what social media is: Social media is where you create fans of your brand. For a home service business, you are using your channels to communicate your offerings and build trust in your abilities to provide an awesome service.
Your customers are picky about who they are going to let into their homes. They are judging your social media to make sure you are trustworthy. Trust as we all know is earned in a lifetime and killed in an instant. By overloading your socials and then burning out from fatigue, you are communicating that you are short term, and not long term. That you aren’t going to last, that you don’t have what it takes.
Pro tip: Get on a consistent posting schedule. Set a goal for 3 posts per week. That’s it. Don’t overdo it. 30 posts evenly distributed over 90 days is more valuable than 30 posts in the first month and then 60 days of nothing. By doing this, you aren’t occupying too much time on social media. You have more important things to focus on. For more information, check out this link from planable which will walk you through building a social media calendar.
Pro tip: You don’t need to be on every social media platform.
The worst marketing advice I’ve ever come across is the idea that you need to be everywhere.
You need to be where your customers are and be effective in that space. Simply being there doesn’t move the needle if your offer is not being communicated appropriately. Your customers are not everywhere, and different social media platforms have different intents and purposes. For example, if I’m trying to hire a local plumber, I’m not going to LinkedIn. I’m going to be on Facebook and likely a part of a local business group and seeing who responds to my inquiry. You need to be where it makes sense.
I see business owners pressured into being everywhere. Each social media platform requires its own unique strategy to leverage the platform in a way that achieves your goals. Therefore, master 3 platforms. That way you don’t spread yourself too thin and you contribute to where your customers are and not the platforms you would like to be on.
Pro tip: social media is more than posting. One of the reasons people get discouraged from social media is because they don’t get engagements on posts. Here’s what you can do. Follow pages in your community like other local businesses, brands you like, and community groups like ‘local business network pages’.
From there, engage in comments, provide insights about your industry, invite those you are engaging with to like your page, etc. Social media growth is not just about post likes and shares. Yes those matter, but the pages that get all of the likes and shares aren’t just posting - they are engaging, they are involved in multiple communities and conversations.
Boosting posts aren’t as easy as FB/IG make them out to be.
Boosted posts need to be treated like any other ad: You need to make enticing ad copy, have well defined, high intent audiences, have a strong budget, see a campaign run at least a month, optimize your ads, have compelling visuals, have a defined geo target, be able to measure results, have targeting and retargetting in place, rinse and repeat. In other words, boosted posts are a lot of work, just like paid ads.
My biggest gripe with Instagram and Facebook is that when you post, there’s a pop up that says ‘for $5 a day 1k people will see this ad’. Yes, that is true, more people will see the post, but that doesn’t mean important people will see the post. If your expectation is just impressions/views and not conversions, that’s fine, but I see many business owners get deflated by this as it’s easy to mistake impressions for progress. I mean, you’d think that 1k views can land 1, just one conversion right? Not always the case.
If your ad isn’t being shown to the right audience, at the right time, then nothing is going to happen. For example, if I boost a Facebook post for a local roofing company and place my ad in Indiana, then it will be seen, but who is converting? No one! The same theory applies here. Boosted posts don’t equal sales, unless you take the time and effort to set them up correctly and treat them just like a normal ad.
Advertising
Advertising has intents and purposes like everything else in marketing. Let’s break this down into two baskets: visibility and targeting those with high intent to use your services.
If you’ve ever put an ad out in the newspaper, paid for a billboard space, made a TV commercial, then you are partaking in a high visibility campaign. That’s perfectly fine, visibility matters. These types of campaigns lift you out from the underworld and get you noticed.
However, there needs to be a clear expectation of what visibility campaigns can and can not do. So if you’ve tried high visibility campaigns once maybe even a couple of times and they didn’t produce more calls or web form submissions, here’s why:
These campaigns aren’t designed to do that. Let’s look at the billboard example. These get your name out there, but they don’t elicit immediate action? Why? Because drivers are busy driving! Oftentimes at high speeds, they aren’t going to call you on the road, or be able to take a picture of your billboard, or remember the phone number or website from viewing it once on their way to the grocery store.
This is why to run effective advertising you need to mix your strategy. Visibility gets your name out there. That’s the goal, to stick in people’s minds, i.e. think of Frank Azar. That guy invests a ton of money and years and years of experimentation to stick in people’s minds. He’s maybe an example of putting all of his eggs in one basket, which is visibility.
For smaller brands, that’s not going to be realistic. That’s why running a mix of high visibility campaigns and targeted audience specific campaigns is important.
Next time you see your ‘boost your post’ option on Facebook or Instagram, understand that those are visibility campaigns, they will spread the word and get in front of people. To get leads and phone calls, you want to dive deeper into your demographics and customer profiles to set up high intent conversion campaigns.
This is an oversimplification as it takes time to find out who your high intent target audience is. By understanding advertising types though, you can make better informed decisions on which campaigns you should focus on and have realistic expectations.
SEO
Good SEO takes time. SEO to be effective can’t exist in a bubble and no amount of good SEO will make up for business process shortcomings. I’ve audited businesses that wanted to hire me strictly for SEO work and I’ve turned down clients because they needed to fix bad processes.
Unfortunately, I had a case where I made recommendations on what the business should improve on and then come back to me in 6 months and they ended up going with an ‘SEO’ agency that just sold them, and who didn’t even look at their business. That’s a bad partnership.
The truth is, good SEO works when you are working with an awesome business. From a marketing perspective, if you run a kick ass business I can work with you. It doesn’t matter if you have few followers on social media, you don’t have a website, etc. If you do things the right way, make your customers happy, then I can market your business.
Having said that, even with the perfect client scenario laid out, SEO takes time. Realistically you will start seeing tangible results (i.e. traffic and conversion increases) around that 4 months to 1 year time frame. That’s a long time, and contrary to what you’ll find from ‘marketing gurus’ on LinkedIn, traffic from SEO is not cheap.
I get annoyed with SEO’s (that can be a person, search engine optimization specialists) who sell their services that way. I mean, you have to pay them and usually that’s on a monthly basis and it’s scary for a small business owner to make payments on an investment that might pay off, which assumes they hired the right SEO people for their business.
When done correctly, you can see actual results from SEO in less time than I laid out. You might see you have specific pages ranking higher, blog posts are bringing in more traffic, etc. I like to think of these as dividend payments. You are getting small residuals, but you are still waiting for the big payout.
SEO always needs to be a part of a new website build. I build websites, and I never ever just build a website without a solid SEO foundation. A website is really just a fancy brochure without SEO. People won’t find you, no matter how nice your website looks. That’s why it’s important to go with a designer, or agency that will do both for you.
SEO is oftentimes misunderstood and small business owners who are super busy running every aspect of their business fail at this because SEO in itself is a full time job. This is especially true if your business has never had a website and you are starting from scratch.
This isn’t to gloat or ego-stroke, but here’s a list of tasks I perform as an SEO:
Optimize online listings like Google My Business, Nextdoor, Houzz, Thumbtack, Angie's List, etc.
Create regularly scheduled blog content based on providing quality answers that my client’s customers are actively searching for.
Performing keyword research and creating a strategy to rank pages.
Review generation across Google Business and other review platforms
Performing page speed tests to ensure fast websites, speed matters!
Data analysis on search queries, page indexing and trend analysis on Google Search Console.
Data analysis on Google Analytics that checks bounce rates, average time on page, channel reports, etc.
Content creation to create ‘money pages’ that provide useful information to answer questions our target audience has.
Page title tags and meta description optimization - ensuring that our primary keywords in our pages are featured prominently in these and that there’s a clear CTA to generate clicks.
Auditing websites for broken links, performing 301 redirects, basically making sure page experiences are near perfect.
Resizing images, reducing unused css and other items that slow down pages.
Reaching out to other organizations for guest posting opportunities that generate back links and boost domain authority.
Using scan tools like Ahrefs to audit our website’s SEO performance and spy on competitors.
I might be leaving things out here, but that gives a solid foundation on what SEO entails. It’s nearly impossible for a small business owner who is handling every aspect of marketing on their own to do all of this well and run a kick ass business.
Summary
Marketing isn’t just for big brands but it can be for the little guys too. Where many small business owners get discouraged is by trying a random act of marketing be it, advertising, social media or SEO. The biggest brands in the world were built on longevity and sustainability. The main takeaway is that marketing requires: strategy, time, budget, and the determination to learn and grow. Good marketing is never a one time affair or a random act.
A special note:
Marketing is all about learning. I don’t assume to know everything, nor do I just run with what I’ve been taught years ago. For example, when I got into marketing, ChatGPT was just used by lazy college students to write papers. Now, it’s changed everything. If you are ready to get back out there and give your marketing another chance, I have included some links to either free or low cost resources to level up your skills. Or you can always hire me to do it for you and a strategy call is always on the house!
Marketing Learning Resources:
