Diversifying Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud Episode 430)

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We talk a lot on this show about diversifying away from Big Tech generally, and about diversifying away from Google, specifically. Which is great in theory. But it can be hard to do in practice. As one listener of the show said recently, “People are already overwhelmed with the amount of social media they manage.” Even if you want to diversify, it can be tough to find the time and resources and budget to make that happen.

So, what can you do? How can you diversify your marketing mix when there’s too much to do? How can you manage new channels and new messages when you’re already overwhelmed? And, most importantly, how can you reduce your dependence on Google and Big Tech without killing your business? That’s what this week’s episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Diversifying Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud Episode 430) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

• Google Loses its Antitrust Case: Why That Matters for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 429)
• Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424)
• The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) – Tim Peter & Associates
• Partnerships Between Brands and Creators Will Define the Next Generation of Travel Marketing | HSMAI Americas
• How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428)
• Is Social Media Anti-Social for your Brand Now? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 391)
• What Good is Social in An AI-Driven World? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 246)
• The 4 Ds of Time Management | Definition and Overview

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

Free Downloads

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

• A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you.
• Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:
  • Customer Focus
  • Strategy
  • Technology
  • Operations
  • Culture
  • Data

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Running time: 22m 04s

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Transcript: Diversifying Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 430 of The Big Show and thank you so much for tuning in.

In some ways, this episode is a follow up to the episode we did last week about how Google lost its antitrust case and why that matters to you. And the reason I say in some ways is because I’ve talked at length both in that episode and in a bunch of other episodes this year about why you need to think about diversifying your traffic, why you need to think about becoming less dependent on Google.

And it led for a marketing manager to send me a comment and ask, "people are already overwhelmed with the amount of social media they manage, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, the list goes on and on. How is it possible to really do this? How is it possible to manage all of these different things and, and, you know, diversify away from Google?"

That’s a really fair question. I do think people are already overwhelmed. I do talk to people all the time that go, "I just can’t keep up." So I understand that completely. And I thought it would make sense to talk a little bit today about how you can do this very effectively. And there’s a few things that I don’t want to say they’re simple. But they require a certain level of focus, a certain level of attention, and they can help you manage it a little better.

First, you’ve heard me mention Core and Explore many times over the years. Core focuses on the things that always work. The channels that deliver the most business to you today, the channels that deliver the most revenue today, and the channels that tend to have the best return on spend for you today. And that could be spend in terms of actual dollars that you’re putting out in terms of buying, you know, paid search ads or paid social ads. Or it could be in what are generally referred to as soft dollars. Like your people’s time, the amount of time that they spend on those things.

Core is going to take up roughly 75 to 80 percent of your time. That’s just a fact. That’s why you want them to be the things that are most productive for your business. So, right out of the gate, if things are not generating really good return for you, or they’re really not benefiting you, they should be moved out of the core, pretty much immediately. You want to focus on those areas that work best for you. The

Explore phase of the Core & Explore methodology is where you try new things. And Explore is going to take up maybe 15-20 percent of your time. These channels, these areas, may be things that you haven’t figured out how to use yet. You know, you might be testing something new to think about and see if it works. But you’re learning to see is this something that works for us and is it something that I need to get better at. So you’re going to spend only 15 to 20 percent of your time there. And again you’re going to be somewhat judicious in how much time you put into each of those things.

It’s reasonable to ask how do you find the time to explore? You’re already doing so much. As my commenter noted, “people are already overwhelmed.”

Well, it starts with knowing where you are. It starts with knowing where your time actually goes. Sometimes it’s tough to know where you’re spending 75 of your time or 20 percent of your time if you’re not actually aware of where the time goes.

When I was younger, when I was earlier in my career, a mentor of mine sat me down and said, “It’s really important when you’re overwhelmed to take an audit of how you’re spending your time.”

You can just jot it down on a piece of paper, you can type it into a spreadsheet, you can use one of the many, many fine time tracking apps that are out there, and you can track in increments. Maybe 10 minute increments, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 5 minutes, depending on what’s important to you. But it’s worthwhile for a few weeks to simply note where your time goes. Just keep a record of it. Then take a look at where you’re spending your time.

For some people, and in some cases, many people, it’s not that you don’t have enough time. It’s that, you don’t know where it goes, or you’re not making tough choices about where to spend it. So, it starts by getting that picture of where are you today.

Once you see where your time goes, you can then prioritize. And sure, we’ve all heard about, oh, setting priorities and things along those lines.

But I would argue that truly prioritizing means deciding what not to do. It’s not about saying, “this is the most important thing.” It’s about saying, “this is the least important thing. This is something that is not worth my time.” And deciding to either put it aside for now… or choose not to do it at all.

If you think about this, the word decide is the same root word as things like homicide. You’re literally killing options when you decide. You’re saying, “nope, that’s gone. I’m not going to worry about it.”

I legitimately have a “to don’t list.” When I write down things that, you know, I start to think about that I could do, I’ll put them on a list of “to don’t.” These are things I’m not going to focus on because they’re a distraction from the things I do need to focus on.

Warren Buffett has a similar exercise he recommends. He says that you should make a list of the 25 things that are most important to you. Then you want to order the items on the list from the most important to the 25th most important. Once you’ve got those written down on a list, what you’re going to do is you’re going to throw away number 6 through 25. Just cross them off.

And the reason you’re going to do that is, either you don’t have enough time to do them, so you’re probably not going to do them anyway, or they’re going to distract you from doing a great job on the things that are most important to you, the five things that are most important to you, or, if you’re like many people, a little bit of both. You’re gonna do kind of a bad job at everything because you’re trying to do too much.

Of course, if you finish your five most important priorities, if you succeed on accomplishing your five most important priorities, you can always move on to numbers six to ten, and then again, eleven to fifteen, and then again, sixteen to twenty, if you get there.

I’d argue it’s much more likely you’ll get there if you focus on numbers one to five. So go ahead, just put them on your “to don’t” list. Don’t worry about them.

To bring this back to your marketing activities, You don’t have to be on every social platform or every marketing channel that exists out there.

You’re much better served doing a fantastic job in just a few places than doing a half assed job in many, many places. My company’s entire marketing strategy focuses on a relatively small number of channels. We focus on our website and blog. We focus on this podcast that we do distribute through Spotify and YouTube, along with a few other channels to get it more traction. We focus on email marketing, which is powered primarily by our podcast and blog. We focused on LinkedIn. And we focus on guest writing for a few other online publications in hospitality and digital marketing. That’s it. That’s all we do.

We don’t really do an Instagram. We don’t really do Facebook. They’re just not that important to us, so we don’t really worry about them. Those areas that I mentioned are where our customers live. So that’s where we focus.

There’s another great prioritization method that I want to talk about that you can also use called he “Four D’s.” Same basic
idea:

• Do
• Defer
• Delegate
• Delete.

If you notice, we’ve already kind of talked about the Delete and to a lesser degree Defer. When we talk about a “to don’t” list or we talk about deprioritizing those items 6 through 25, you’re deferring them or deleting them.

What I want to talk about, though, is delegate. When we think about delegation, we think, “Oh, well, we delegate to somebody on our team.” You know, we delegate to somebody who reports to us. But that’s not really true. You can delegate down, obviously. You can delegate sideways. You can delegate up, and you can delegate outside your organization.

As a friend of mine puts it, "Think who, not how." It’s about getting help, not just figuring out how to do the thing yourself.

Now in marketing, and especially in social marketing, there’s a lot of people who can help you. There are influencers and creators, which are a tremendous way to improve your social media presence without you doing the work. 7 to 10 people, 69 percent of all Americans aged 16 to 54, follow creators and influencers.

And of those that do, 55 percent researched a brand’s website after hearing about that brand from a creator. 46 percent followed a brand on social media after hearing about it from a creator. 43% — 43 percent! — purchased from a brand after hearing about it from a creator. And 42 percent recommended a brand to someone.

That’s fantastic. This is a remarkable opportunity for you to reach out to creators to help you tell a great story on your brand’s behalf.

You don’t have to do the work. You can delegate the work. And there are literally tens of millions of creators using social to connect with their audiences. The largest share of creators, those with 10,000 followers or less, make around $14,000 per year. Even those creators with 10,000 to 50,000 followers average less than $50,000 in income. In other words, these levels of creators can be very affordable for individual marketers to work with.

The key is that you’re not really looking at the creator. You’re looking at their audience. You’re looking at, is their audience your audience? Do these creators talk to the people you want to talk to? Do they help you reach the people you want to reach? It doesn’t matter how many people are in the audience. It matters that they’re engaged and they’re the customer types you want to engage with.

There’s lots of great ways to find these creators. There’s tools like SparkToro. Or you can simply ask your customers where are the places where they follow people on YouTube, or they follow people on Instagram, or they follow people on LinkedIn, who they find interesting. Because those are the people you want to talk to. They’re all about helping you reach your customers better without you having to do all the heavy lifting.

Speaking of customers, your customers, in a way, are creators and influencers, too. They create reviews, they talk to friends and family on social about great experiences that they’ve had. And ultimately, everything we do is about our customer. Given all the changes around AI and technology more broadly, the way we can compete is focusing most on how we help our customers.

I’ve said for years that social is people and all marketing is social. My friend Mark Schaefer likes to say, “the most human company wins.” I think he’s absolutely right. When you give your customers a great experience, they’re going to tell their friends and family and fans and followers about it. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve talked about things like we need, we owe it to our customers to make their lives better. It’s the core of everything you do. It’s another way of saying something you’ve heard me say many times on this show that customer experience is queen.

You’re trying to encourage your customers to work on your behalf to tell a really positive brand story. I can tell you I’ve sold really great products and companies in my life and I’ve sold really not so great products or companies in my life and selling a great product is so much easier. Right?

It’s much easier to tell a great story that cost about a product or service that customers love. And it just makes the marketing easier. You don’t have to work as hard or work your butt off to be on all of these channels. Your customers and creators will be falling all over themselves to do it for you. So, focusing on your customer experience is an amazing way to improve the value of everything you do.

Now, you might say, sure, but isn’t providing a great experience expensive? It is, it absolutely is, or it can be. It’s also much cheaper than providing a bad experience. Are guests canceling their reservations at your hotel or restaurant cheap? Are returns of your product cheap? Are refunds because people weren’t satisfied with the service you gave them cheap? Do you think that bad reviews don’t cost you money? Do you think you’re going to drive business value if you don’t take care of your customers?

Your customers rely on their friends and family and influencers and creators to help them find products and services that work for their needs. You’re going to have such an easier time reaching them if people are telling a great story on behalf of your brand.

So the fundamental point here is that you need to focus on customer experience so that you don’t have to work so hard to market in the first place. Then, when you are marketing, I go back to saying:

• Look at core and explore.
• Look at where your time goes.
• Look at making sure you’re ready to prioritize and putting your priorities in the areas that are most important to your business.
• Decide what you’re going to do and decide what you’re not going to do. Remember, deciding means you’re killing options. You’re saying, this isn’t important to our business.
• Then you can think about where do we actually need to be and who can help us be the places we want to be or we want to test over time.
• And if you create a great experience for your customers, you’re going to find yourself in a much better place in terms of reaching them.

Ultimately, that will make your job a lot easier and will prevent you from being overwhelmed or struggling to figure out how to reach the folks you want to reach. And that will help you diversify away from Google over time. Because what people will search for is not a company in your niche or a solution to their problem. They’ll come looking for you by name. And no matter what happens to Google in the future, you’ll be well positioned because you’ll be in all of the places your customers need you to be without having to do so much work to be there.

That allows you to gain the benefits that you want, to grow your business, and to do it without being so overwhelmed. And that’s the best place to be.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 430

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Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot. But I want you to know how thrilled I am, and I really am thrilled that you listen to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show, you are the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you just as I did with the commenter this week. I want to hear what’s going on in your world and learn how we can do a better job building all the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. And I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please, be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.