Episode 1 - Busting Marketing Myths Part 1 - a podcast by Vanessa Shepherd & Terrica Strozier of Shes Got Vision

Marketing Myths: "Marketing & advertising are the same thing" and "Facebook ads are like an ATM".

Show Description

In this episode, we're busting these marketing myths: "Marketing & advertising are the same thing" and "Facebook ads are like an ATM". Myths can be so damaging to entrepreneurs and business owners who decide to make decisions based on them. We've heard both of these myths so many times in online business, and it's about time that someone set the record straight!

Show Notes

[00:00:00] Terrica: Welcome to the marketing and cocktails podcast. We're your hosts. Terrick Strozier, that's me, a brand designer and sugar addict, and Vanessa Shepherd, launch strategist and content creator with a love of all things Disney. Each week you'll hear our behind the scenes conversations and expert advice on marketing and launching your next offer while doing it all ethically and organically. While giving that bro marketer advice the boot. Thanks for spending some time with us today. Grab a drink. And let's jump into today's episode.

Welcome to episode one of the marketing and cocktails podcast today, we're talking about debunking marketing myths. So we're going to break this up probably to maybe one to two part episode, and we're going to debunk five of the marketing myths that we have heard so much, and we want to just address them.

So here we go.

Vanessa: Alrighty. Let's debunk some marketing myths. Marketing and advertising are the [00:01:00] same thing. Not. Big time, not. I hate when people say that they're not the same thing. They're very related. Advertising is a part of marketing, but they're different. So marketing is that kind of ongoing end to end plan that covers  everything you do, the entire process, your business should follow how it provides products or services to the people you serve.

That includes everything like designing a price of the product, deciding where it will be sold, how to persuade people to buy it. All the branding,  all of that stuff is related to marketing. Whereas advertising is only one teeny tiny piece of the marketing plan pizza. So it's more focused on creating and placing ads to help spread the word about all the amazing products or services that you actually have to offer.

[00:02:00] Terrica: Does that make sense then? I feel like everybody puts it together. Cause you, you watch the TV shows and you see the people on the ad team and they're creating these  jingles   and commercials and all that jazz. And then people are like, Oh, they're marketing the product. So it's the same thing and they're designing it and they have a script.

So.  in,  my marketing plan, I'm supposed to write about X, Y, and Z. So that means that marketing and advertising are the same thing.

Vanessa: I get that. I get that. It's funny how,  we don't, people don't see the back end. Like they don't see that the ads on TV are like one tiny thing. And there's a lot of overlap, especially if you're getting into  the online space, you can have  a lot of people use the copy from their emails, the copy from their social media posts, or  that pool of content that you create.

They pull from that and use it  in their like Facebook ads or in their Pinterest ads or wherever they're blasting things out to their audience. So there's a lot of overlap, but the strategies have to, I think they have to work together and they have to be really specific to what your goals are.

[00:03:00] For each piece of the puzzle,  you'll have overall marketing goals about how you want to communicate the things you want to achieve related to the big picture. And you have advertising goals, like how well you want your Facebook ads to do, or your Pinterest ads to do, or the TV and radio ads that you might run.

You have to be able to define. How that one little piece of the advertising puzzle will perform and then how all the other marketing around that product or service will perform.  most people think about it as this one big piece of the puzzle.  I'm gonna throw up ads and I'm gonna do a thousand sales total, and I'm going to expect all of that to come up, come from ads and they don't have to do anything else.

When the reality is you have to be communicating or marketing your product in. So many different ways and some people never, ever put up ads and that's totally fine because they have a rock solid  marketing strategy that is so on point with the messaging and the offers for their audience, that advertising just helps to [00:04:00] amplify those positive things.

And see,

Terrica: I think that's the difference is that everybody feels  in order to make money, You have to have ads, even though people tell you that you can do it organically. There's usually the big people don't show you that, , An actual viable Avenue. It just feels like, Oh, they tell me that, but it's organic because they put up ads and then all these people are coming to their stuff.

So they already love them. And nobody knows me because nobody knows me. I have to pay to play. I need ads.

Vanessa: Yeah. And those are the, like the surface level stories are so aggravating.  what's that when we keep hearing from Gary V all the time, he was , Putting stuff out there and creating content and marketing his stuff,

Terrica: right?

Like, like 10 years or something crazy. He has stuff on YouTube from forever that people are now finding. And he was , I was making that when nobody knew who I was and nobody was really listening to me.

Vanessa: Yeah. So  his content fell [00:05:00] on deaf ears the same way. Like lots of regular people feel that our content falls on deaf ears too.

marketing can take time, especially. If you, if you're not paying the play, if you're not like putting some ad spend behind it to help it reach market, it's really, really hard to have your stuff be seen when there's 10,000 other people out there,  putting out the same message at the same time.

Terrica: So then I know somebody is listening to this and thinking  well, I thought I knew what my marketing plan was. So now my marketing plan has to include advertising or am I missing something or am I okay with this current marketing plan I have, which may be.  a combination of I'm going to do  these launches, I'm going to design my offers, these what this way, and this is my funnel, but I didn't even think about advertising.

And I guess I'm missing out. Cause I don't have advertising.

Vanessa: And some people are definitely going [00:06:00] to feel that way. But the, the great part is  not everybody run out. It's not every business out there is running ads and making sales and hitting,  four figures figures, six figures, seven figures a month.

I've worked with a lot of people who really didn't start ads until they'd hit a really, really solid place in their business.  they nailed their organic strategy. They made sure that their messaging knocked it out of the park, that their funnel worked flawlessly, that they were having everything was at the conversion rate that they really wanted to see from it so that they knew that when they did finally put ad spend behind it, That it would get to this place of only amplifying what was working the worst part of advertising is people jumping in too soon when their messaging is not really refined or they don't really have a lock on their audience, or maybe it's a brand new offer.

And they're not really sure how it's going to convert. A lot of people go out and jump into ads. A lot of [00:07:00] people, unfortunately have really bad experiences with ads managers who don't look at the bigger marketing picture too, so that layers into it. And then they're like, Oh, well, ads don't work for me because I lost a whole bunch of money.

When the reality of it is their marketing just wasn't solid before they went in and ran ads. So it's almost better to go at it from following a markerting strategy, and a marketing plan a little bit more organically, nailing things down, and then adding advertising to it when you're ready, instead of going the opposite direction, because paid ads really.

They only amplify what does and doesn't work. And the something doesn't work. Say your email sequence isn't converting, or maybe you're landing page design just sucks, right? Advertising is only going to amplify that. And, and it's only going to show you that you have problems, and you're going to have to read the lines between the data to be able to figure out that you have these problems.

And not everybody is really proficient at being able to, to [00:08:00] read that data, to figure out where all those problems lie.

Terrica: So with that being said, I feel like this then segways into the next myth, which is that Facebook ads are like an ATM.

Vanessa: Yes. Oh my gosh. If I have to hear somebody say that one more time and we're going to hear it, it's an online space.

That's why some of these awesome bro marketers do their like Facebook ads or like an ATM. I put money in. I get my money back out. Sometimes I get more money out. Which actually sounds more like a slot machine than an ATM, but whatever. Um, or

Terrica: one of those little change machines at the laundry mat.

Vanessa: I put it, I put a dollar bill and I got a .

whole bunch of quarters out it's fine. Um, Facebook ads are not an ATM machine. It can feel like that. You can definitely get to the point where it feels like money in and more money out. It covers my expenses. I make a profit from it, but that's not the reality for everybody.  we can put ads that maybe it's the wrong time, or maybe it's the wrong [00:09:00] offer.

Or maybe the photo just didn't stand up enough to be noticed. Like you never know how things are gonna are gonna do until you like test them.

Terrica: But testing costs, money,

Vanessa: Testing costs money. and especially if you don't have say you don't have that marketing strategy on lock, you don't have a clear plan. You're not creating content consistently.

You're hiding behind a computer screen. You're not going on video. People don't know who you are when you put an ad up, they're still not going to know who you are. So if you don't have  that content marketing foundation, plus your advertising kind of strategy, all working together and working harmoniously, Facebook ads are going to feel more like running your money through a shredder, then popping out whole bunch of dollar bills every single day.

Terrica: And that's so interesting because I hear so many online business owners or business owners in general will say, you know what  you finally have that offer or I decided to do a [00:10:00] sale. And all I have to do is put, is  put up some ads. It's going to open up my audience in this arena to like millions of people.

And then the money will flow in is all I have to do. And only money that I have to put behind it besides ad spend is I just have to find an ad manager. Some people try to  dive in it themselves, but even. I will say from a personal experience, all I tried to do was boost a post, which I've learned from Vanessa, that's not the way to go, but even just doing that, I was like, Oh, this is confusing as hell on the back end.

I don't know what any of this stuff means. I don't know how anybody decides to do ads by themselves and put thousands of dollars. If you're one of those people not talking about you, but more power to you. I couldn't do it. I'm I'm not risk adverse like thats not the way to go. But it's interesting. Cause  you've run.

I don't know, probably at this point, thousands of ads, and [00:11:00] it's almost like a different viewpoint that people you're saying that  Hey, just because you put the money behind, it doesn't mean that people will come not like field of dreams, you build it. They will come.

Vanessa: Yeah. You run an ad. They won't flock to it.

You hope they will. You hope that they'll get a viable ad and they'll flock to it, but. I've seen so many times,  people say, well, my product sells.  I sold it to a hundred people that must mean it. It really sells. Okay, cool. Were those people already on your email list or they already kind of knowing you loving you if you run ads and put it up and it goes straight to your warm audience and your warm audience is kind of like.

Small to midsize. Yeah. Those ads should convert like gangbusters, because you should know your people so well that you've written this ad that like connects to them on this like deep level. I'm like, yes, that's me. That's my problem. That's my thing. And, Oh my gosh, you have a product. It's going to super connect with me.

I love it. I'm in, I'm going to pay you like right now, I take my money, [00:12:00] but all the rest of the people, the other millions of people on the internet out there in the world, they haven't met you yet. They have no clue who you are. Those people are going to take a lot more convincing. You're really going to have to know their pain points.

And if you get into this position where you have say a few hundred people, or even a few thousand people on an email list, those people are all different. They all have different motivations, pain points, different levels of money in their bank account. What motivates each and every person on that thing, you're going to have to suss out, like, where are those common threads are, and really get specific on who you want to have buy your product because.

You can't throw up. We could like 10 million ads speaking to all those individual people, but that is going to take a lot of time, a lot of money, and it's going to be really ineffective. Whereas if you  focus on one or maybe two kind of people that are your ideal, knock it out of the park, dream people, and your offer speaks to them.

It solves a problem. It's really [00:13:00] clear when they see that, then it's, it's really gonna resonate with them then. Cool. Then the ads can work. Quite well, but they're always going to be more expensive than targeting your warm audience. So if you take the time to  get people in, get them into a lead magnet, warm them up, or maybe you're going to do a whole bunch of Facebook lives and just put your face out there and have people hearing you and connecting to you.

You're gonna have to take the time to let people really get to know you and your brand and what you offer and who you are and what makes you different. There's a lot of mistrust out there, especially when it comes to ads popping up in your feed. And do you have to, you have to cut through that. You have to be able to connect with people, the people that are really able to do that and do that well, who can get that sense of realness across and they show up and show up consistently those people, when they run ads, they do really, really well.

The rest of the people that don't do those things tank almost every time.

Terrica: So, because [00:14:00] I know you, and I know where your focus is. When it comes to the foundation for a really good ad, but , what about the people that all I need is an amazing sales page, right? So I'm going to find this template, or I'm gonna pay this designer and they're  gonna create me this beautiful sales page and like subsequent.

Funnels, maybe a tripwire page. Thank you page and all of that. And it looks gorgeous and I'm going to focus on my copy and I'm going to hit those pain points and that's all I need for my ad to convert. And then if it doesn't, then there's obviously something wrong with these people,  in the universe who are hopping on my stuff.

Cause it's beautiful. My copies on point and my offer is amazing. But I know that there is another elephant in the room, as they say. And then what if that person has no [00:15:00] content, someone decides to say, Oh, they're offer looks interesting. Let me like deep dive into their brand. I want to see what else they're about.

And they, they navigate and find their way to your social media page or even your website. And it's, it's nothing there. And. It seems like for most people they don't connect that. It's just like, well, my ad is amazing, so people should buy it. Does it matter if I don't write blog posts? I don't like writing blog posts or Instagram get's on my nerves.

Vanessa: there'll be a lot of people who say that lots, like tons buckets of them. We've seen it over and over and over again, but I've got  thousands of emails that come through. My mini inboxes kind of a bit of an addiction guys. I have emails that just collect emails from other people. That's awesome. The people that do that,  I don't know, it comes across spammy and salesy and really  narrow focused because you got this we're human beings, everybody around here, human [00:16:00] beings.

We have this desire to know who and what we're buying from. It's no different than you walking into the store. If the store feels  super sketchy and  thrown up and kind of like janky for lack of a better word, you're not gonna, you're not gonna want to shop there. You're going to be like, is this guy gonna steal all my credit card information?

If I buy one thing from him and then is he going to  drain my bank account? And I have to fight with him for five years to get my money back. You're going to leave every time. Online businesses, are no different, except you're not physically walking into the store. You're landing on somebody's sales page, you're landing on somebodies website.

You check them out on social media.  if you look on the backend, when you run ads, if you're doing things right, and you connect all the different pieces of the puzzle, you can actually paint this really crazy looking picture of all the different touch points that somebody has and the people who. I don't have that sense of trust.

The touch points that it takes before you hit conversion are  between anywhere from  minimum seven, for [00:17:00] somebody who gets it right away, all the way up to  20 or 30 touchpoints.

Terrica: Wow. That's massive man,

Vanessa: which is insane. Absolutely insane. So somebody is going to see your, your stuff that many times before they buy.

So maybe they've seen your ad 20 or 30 times. And then landing on your landing pages and all that stuff. You can speed up that process by having good quality content that connects to people. You have to engage with them. It has to inspire them or entertain them, or let them get to know you and who you are whole lot faster.

If you don't put up content, man, that customer journey takes four AV or, but  to put up that content. Then it shortens that window. I think it gets it down to a point where you can speed that process up and convert those cold people a whole lot faster. Maybe you're gonna decide to do some videos and cause you hate blog posts.

Maybe you're gonna figure out your audience. Isn't on Instagram and they're over on Pinterest. [00:18:00] So you're going to promote some of your best performing pins. That'll all help shorten that window of conversion. Otherwise, if you're just focusing on one piece of the puzzle, if you're just buying a beautiful sales page, we've done it we  had people, I've had people design, gorgeous sales pages and websites, and they look really pretty.

They never freaking converted. I basically threw my money into the wood chipper and watched it burn a few times over. And that helped to like reinforce Oh, conversion is a big thing. Pretty. Yeah, it matters, but it has to be pretty. And it has to hit the points before you like, just focus on the pretty you have to focus on.

Maybe you have lots of pictures on your page and it slows down the time. It takes those things, those pages to load that matters people. Aren't going to wait. 30 seconds. They're not even going to wait five or eight seconds. They have to have everything optimizing and [00:19:00] loading super fast on your sites.

Otherwise people bounce. We have very short attention spans and marketers and  website designers and all those. fun people they've learned that, that you have to have something that. Converts, but it also loads fast and it gets to the heart of whatever you're trying to convey to them. Build trust really quickly.

Otherwise you're spending a whole bunch of money on a pretty sales page or a pretty landing page. You might as well just burn it and just go knocking doors because it's going to take the same amount of time to actually get a sale. So that wraps up

Terrica: today's episode. We have covered two of our marketing myths, , Facebook ads are like an ATM.

And marketing and advertising. Aren't the same thing. , stay tuned for the next episode. We're going to cover everything about content, how everyone is not your customer and wrapping up, everything about a marketing plan and when you don't have the expertise to market to your audience. [00:20:00] So stay tuned for the next episode.

Thanks so much for listening. You can find the show notes at she's got vision.com/podcasts. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, please leave a review and subscribe to the podcast. And because word of mouth is still the best marketing Avenue. Please tell a friend or share it. If you do, don't forget to tag us.

Follow at She's got vision on all platforms! Until next time, y'all we're wishing you much success. And remember, there's always time for cocktails.

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