Paid ads won’t save your small business! the Marketing Pyramid - where to start marketing your SMB

whenever I hear from or talk to a small business owner often they want to run ads to see if they can generate more business get more clients get more traffic whatever it is and a lot of times they are starting in the wrong place you've got to start with the very Basics first get those taken care of before you move into running ads and trying to pay to get traffic in fact most of the time when a business if they're a small local business which is mostly who I work with we've worked with hundreds of

local small businesses service providers local bakeries local retail stores the first thing you got to do is go through the marketing pyramid so I want to talk about that today these are the steps you should take to get started right from the beginning so step number one is you need to Define your brand you need to understand what that is yes you should have a logo you should know your colors you should know your brand personality what do you want people to know about you and think about you when they hear of your brand okay

once you know once you have those things in place then you need to know your who your who is your target audience this is someone who or this is the the audience that you want to work with the most are you going after a premium audience are you going after a discount audience are you going after an emergency audience let's say you're a plumber and you love installing high-end uh you know Plumbing equipment toilets and sinks and things into high-end bathrooms well that's much different than the service provider Who Wants to Be an emergency service

provider when someone's bathroom's flooding they want to come out and take care of that as quickly as possible very different situations very different defined individuals of your target audience once you know you're who then it's important to identify and to talk about their why you might have a why for why you went in business but this is the why someone would pick you over your competitors why would they pick you what's the differentiator and if someone's in a hurry you should make sure you tell people about that so I think the basis of marketing is

knowing who you're talking to and why they should care and then telling them about it over and over and over again and just repeating yourself and saying here's why you should do business with us um so that's step one in the marketing pyramid Define your brand and then Define your who and your why once you've done that then it's time to say okay let's get on the search engines at least at the most basic level which is your business profiles you can get your Google business profile set up these are all free your Bing places

profile set up and your Apple business profile setup I talked to a friend today he's a a physical therapist and he's like uh we don't show up on Apple business or Apple Maps and I was like well have you set up with apple business connect and he's like no I didn't know that was a thing so make sure you're doing at least these three you should get as many local citations as you can register for any free accounts that are available but these three are the kings in fact Google is the king of all the

kings and so make sure you have a Google business profile set up and established get verified do whatever you need to do follow the steps Apple's going to give you I'll do another video on how to optimize your Google business profile there's some things you can do that are really really powerful in doing that so that is step two in the marketing pyramid step three is now get a website uh a lot of people start with a website I think a website's great but if you have a Google business profile people can find you even

without a website almost 60% of internet traffic for local service providers is not going to a website they're clicking on the information on your Google business profile they're either calling you or getting directions to your location on that uh on that listing on that profile so now it's time to make a website though because people will research you they want to make sure you are legit that you do know what you're talking about and that you have an established business so creating a website following the launced format you can find that on our website at

Ryan spells. marketing and just search for launchs scape but launch scape is really a layout of how a website should be structured in order to sell a lot of times websites are just informational if you're a local service provider you want to take a customer by the hand lead them down a path so that they will do business with you they'll either call you and ask for a free estimate or free Bid or they'll you know click on a form and fill out a form or a little chatbot or something some way they're going to

get a a hold of you and let you know they're raising their hand and saying I want to do business with you so make sure you get your website and get it set up properly follow the launch scape format there's also a article on the site called 24 points to a perfect website that is making sure you've hit all the marks so that you can be registered and show up on search engines it takes time to do that and it takes it's called SEO search engine optimization but make sure your website is structured properly from

the start so that you can do that now it's time to set up your social media channels and honestly you could do social media before websites if you wanted but both of those come you know about the same time after you've set up your business you've got your brand and your who and your why your business profiles are set up now it's time to do social media and website uh a lot of the younger generation research a company by going to their website or or they'll go to their social medias and and see what they're

like you don't have to be a social media personality but you do need to show up there so if somebody's researching you they can go in and say oh okay yeah these guys are doing business um they're these are the things I'm looking for they look like they're they're legitimate and that's who I want to do business with next is build a list I got to tell you this is more important than you realize one of the most valuable assets you will own as a business owner is your customer list if you're not staying in

touch with your customers and continually uh offering and telling people about what you're doing and the changes you've made in your business you're missing out I have a um a customer that is a deck builder started off as a deck builder they started making you know out outdoor backyard escapes well they moved into doing bathroom and kitchen and basement remodels well with their list they're able to say hey everybody we did your deck over the last decade but we also do kitchens and bathrooms we don't know if you knew that so being able to communicate

new things new offerings to your list is really important and it's also a great way to remind people you exist you're not going to get referrals unless you tell people hey we uh remember us we did your deck we would love your friends or we have this new special coming out or did you hear about this new debt cover we have that you know um is really cool there there's so many things you can do with your customer list and if if you're ever selling your business the buyer should be asking how many people are

on your email list how many people or within your CRM uh so part of building a list is getting a good CRM something that you can refer back to and use for keeping in touch with your clients uh you know that you can use to keep track of what contact you've had with them what have you said to them over the years and you can even segment it so you could say okay these are customers that we built a website for um and do they know that we do SEO do they know that we have

paid ad campaigns and programs like make sure that people know what you have available make sure you're communicating with them I use my email list to educate so that I can teach people more about marketing so things like this where I can help new businesses know where to start what to do before they get to paid ads um the next step is to make a plan because if you're just like I'm going to run ads and people are going to call me it's just not how it works you've got to make sure you know who

you're talking to why they would uh do business with you then you got to figure out where they hang out so if you're going for a high-end clientele they're probably hanging out in a different place than somebody who's looking for or looking for services in a different place than somebody who's looking for discounts right so think about where that person is think about how to touch them on multiple touch points you know get a get multiple channels going at once so you can get them to see you and hear from you in more ways than

one and do all of that before you run paid ads once you get to paid ads that's great now you can run ads but you'll also be testing and qualifying those are they hit your target audience are they getting the right people to click through to your website are those people converting you've got to give the platforms time to get things right but and they will hone in on these things but you need to know what you're doing beforehand and you should do all of these things before you ever pay for an ad uh I

highly recommend that so if you need help with it you can talk to us we do these things for people all the day we can all day long every day we we can help with any step in this tunnel or in this funnel um pyramid thing uh you can get some free tools from Ryan belts. marketing and click on free tools or scan that little QR code and uh you can check them out so uh hopefully that helps and uh we'll talk to you soon