Video Transcript:

Clate Mask
Because before you get to automation, here’s the key thing Steve Jobs said this, You can’t automate what you haven’t turned into a process. And so a lot of the appeal of automation for entrepreneurs is great. You know, like, yes, we want that.

We want to be able to have the business run in the background, be able to take care of other issues, be with family, go on vacation, be at your child’s soccer game. Business is run in the background.

Oh my gosh, it sounds like magic. So of course we want that, that automation. But in between getting to there and your question about why is marketing so difficult? It’s that we have to have a process. We’ve got to put a process in place.

And so here’s what we’ve learned over nearly two decades working with entrepreneurs. It doesn’t have to be super complicated or super crazy. If you get right down to it, there’s a process for attracting a lead and then converting that lead into a client and then turning that client into a raving fan. So you can think about it

as your audience turned into a lead: a lead, a customer, and a raving fan. So that’s the idea. If we put that into a linear process, person comes into the business, sees your ad or sees something something, or you do a podcast, whatever else. You’ve got

to capture them as the lead. And then you’ve got to follow up with them until they become a client and then continue to follow up with them until they become a raving fan. So if we want to take all the mysticism of what is marketing?

Boil it right down to it’s collecting a lead, turning it into a client and creating a raving fan out of that client. That’s what it is and turning that into a customer lifecycle, a process, that’s really what we need to do.

And so if you if you break it down a little further, you need to have a way to get your message out and collect the lead, and then follow up with that lead and make them an offer, so that they accept the offer and turn into a client, and then follow up by delivering a great service or product that client, following up and staying in front of them and turning them into a brand advocate, a raving fan for your business. So from an audience, to lead to client, to raving fan.

Put that on a straight line. Look at your piece of paper or your whiteboard and say, What are the things we do to talk to the audience to now get get them as a lead and then to take them from a lead to a client?

What things do we do? And usually this is where the marketing mojo stuff kind of breaks down for people, for entrepreneurs. They don’t just put it on a whiteboard and in straight line it out and say, OK, what happens?

We do this, then we do this, then we do this, and we do this. Then they buy. Then after they buy, we do this and this and this. And then if we did this, they would be even more satisfied we can turn them into a raving fan.

And what do raving fans do? The three R’s; reviews, referrals, and repeat business. That’s why we love these raving fans, because they’re the profit that in most every business, because you don’t have to go spend a bunch of money to get more customers, their repeat buyers.

They refer you and they become brand advocates by giving you reviews. And we all know how valuable reviews are today. That’s, by the way, one of the biggest problems that people have when they think about marketing, they forget about the part about Disney and clean bathrooms and clean sidewalks.

You got to turn them into a raving fan so that there you go, then tell other people about it. Right? Reviews become repeat buyers, the three R’s. But hopefully that kind of simplifies all this. “What is marketing?” It’s really just getting your message out, collecting the lead, turning that lead into a client, that client into a raving fan.

Ken Cook
I feel like this is all I talk about all day long with people anymore. We use a little bit different verbiage. Like the “raving fan”, we use Surprise, Delight, and Wow. If you can do that and you can create that experience, it’s going to lead to reviews. It’s going to lead to referrals. It’s going to lead to that repeat business.

Clate Mask
That’s right.

Ken Cook
And if you can simply nurture right and do that core follow up right, and this is what I think one of the big issues is, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I think most entrepreneurs, when they’re doing their advertising, they’re getting leads, when they’re getting the one out of ten laid out sales, right? Yes. And what they’re doing is they’re squandering their money because the other three or the other nine, if you will, that they could be getting.

And if you just get three out of those nine right, you get a third of them. Your acquisition cost just dropped by 300%. And now your business can soar because you’re paying literally a quarter of what it takes to acquire a customer, because the process to suck the rest of the value out of those marketing dollars.

Clate Mask
That’s right. And so if you if you don’t work with those other nine and you get the one sale, your math might barely work or it might not work, meaning you say, Oh, you know, my marketing spend is, you know, I’m not getting ROI on it.

The reason why I say the game changer is follow up. It’s what changes everything. But you don’t have a follow. You can’t put follow up in place if you don’t actually say, Hey, what happens from audience, to lead, to client, to raving fan?

What do we do there? And you’re so busy doing each part of the job that you don’t take time to to map it out and say, Oh, here’s what it is, and we’ve done this with, you know, tens of thousands of clients, and we’ve taught it to hundreds of thousands of

businesses. We, you know, if you go on our website keap.com, you can read all about playbooks and lifecycle marketing and how you do this because it’s those three stages; collect leads, convert clients, create fans, and underneath each of those three stages is three parts that kind of helps you identify, well, where my gaps, what do I need to do? What do I need to improve? And I know you work with clients all the time doing this, so you understand it. But I think we can kind of tie off the “why is marketing so confusing” by saying we need to put it into a process and the name of the game is follow up.

Ken Cook
Yeah, I would agree. 10,000%. I think if you can define marketing is not advertising and realize that follow up and the creation of relationship long term or marketing. That alone changes the game that people are playing.