436: Striking the Right Marketing Balance
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Have you looked at your marketing lately? Do you have a clear, consistent strategy? On this podcast episode, we discuss the two types of marketing growth strategies and when it’s best to use them. As you move potential clients through your marketing funnel, you deploy both sales activation and brand building techniques. It’s important to find the right balance, otherwise you’ll either have a lot of one-off clients, or never truly convert a potential client. We walk through ways of implementing them in your business and how to measure their success.
Main topics:
What is your marketing getting you?
Transactional
Relational
When to use them
How to measure success
Main takeaway: Using a combination of both strategies will keep new passionate clients coming into your business, while also helping convert them to paying customers!
Links:
The Long and Short of It by Binet and Field 2013: https://amzn.to/3sebC9Y
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, people, marketing, clients, business, pet, messaging, tactic, pet sitters, short term, transactional, company, services, long term, building, talking, activation, discount, brand, confessional
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:02
Hello, welcome to pet sitter confessional an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you to pet sitters associates and our wonderful Patreon members for supporting today's show, we always talk about Patreon members and how awesome they are. And they really are because they give a few dollars of their hard earned company money every month. And we are very grateful for that they help keep the podcast going. But there are a few other ways that you can help support you can leave us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Or you could tell a friend that has a pet sitting dog walking business or wants to start one.
Collin Funkhouser 00:33
Or if you're interested in checking out some pets or confessional merchandise, including stickers, mugs, T shirts, and a variety of other things. You can check out that as well. But it's
Meghan 00:44
not all about spending money, you could just share it with a friend.
Collin Funkhouser 00:46
Yeah, absolutely. Yep. To learn more about all of those options, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support.
Meghan 00:53
We talk a lot about marketing. But what is your marketing strategy? Do you even have one? Is it good? Or do you need to refine it a little bit more?
Collin Funkhouser 01:01
Well, we spend a lot of time doing what we think is marketing. And it's important to step back and ask what is our marketing? Getting us? What are we actually putting out there are we satisfied with the kind of clients that we're getting? Are we satisfied with the kind of business that we're running, and one of the aspects that we have to look at is the marketing style that we are implementing in our business.
Meghan 01:24
Because whatever we do has to be intentional. And we have to understand what we are doing. So that we can be intentional and not wasting our time, we want to be as efficient as possible in our businesses. There are two types of marketing results, the boom and bust and the long term growth. So they're known as firt. The first one is known as the short term or transactional marketing, it's mostly known as the sales activation. So it's when you offer big sales, and you're really flashy, and it's for a short amount of time. The other one is the long term or relational marketing. And so you can probably guess what that is, I mean, you're building those relationships over a long time with clients think of it as the brand building side of it. And it's
Collin Funkhouser 02:04
important to note that both of these are great at getting new clients, there's no right or wrong aspect to these. And
Meghan 02:11
you will use both of these over the years in your business during various times.
Collin Funkhouser 02:15
But again, it's important to note and look at your marketing. And as we describe the short term versus long term or the transactional versus relational, you should be thinking about what kind of content that you have been putting out there. And if you find yourself that you are leaning heavily into one of these over and against the other and you are importantly and you are not happy with the kind of clients that you're getting, or the kind of cycles that your business does or does not go through, it may be time to make an adjustment to your marketing style, change your wording, change how you run sales, change how you run your ads, to get at more long term or short term, whatever your goal is you're trying to match up here. That's why when we look at our businesses, and we sat down those 135 1015 20 year long goals, we have to set ways in order to get to them. And one of those is our marketing strategy. If we don't have a strategy, we're just going to kind of throw things at the wall and see if it's going to stick or not. And then look up and be unhappy with it. So if you are unhappy with the cycle that your business is in, if you feel like you can't get traction and you're not growing, pay attention to the differences between these and then go scroll through your Facebook, go look at your email newsletters, go look at the flyers, the ads, the cards that you're handing out and see how they're matching up against these, and then make the appropriate change,
Meghan 03:35
it is important to analyze it because if you don't look back at what you have done previously, you're not going to know how to look ahead and move forward with the strategy that you actually want to use. With the short term marketing. It's often called the boom marketing because it focuses on the quick sales, the quick results and the clients that are coming through your door fast and heavy. You know, that's the traffic and the tactics that convert right now. So you are not sacrificing quality for this necessarily. You're not taking on the aggressive dogs, you're not taking on the human reactive dogs, you are just trying to get more people in your door as soon as possible.
Collin Funkhouser 04:13
Exactly think that you've all experienced this whenever there's the big mattress sales that go on, they're never really not on sale. They're just constantly from one sale to the next sale to the next sale trying to juice those numbers, get more people in the doors with bigger, grander, better kind of sales or attractions or add on services or whatever. Because they just people always need a mattress. So there always needs to be a mattress that's on sale. If you are running these kinds of ads, you may be running these after the holidays when things are dying down or you're trying to combat seasonal downturns or basically you're trying to get put your service in front of somebody right now right when they need it when they have that problem. There's the back to school events where people put on sales for teachers and they get a discount. Well, teachers need them right now during this Sweet when they're going back to school, you don't run that ad at any other point during the year, most of the time, it's okay, going back to school teacher going back to school sale for teachers. And
Meghan 05:10
that's a great thing for dog walking companies to do too, because we are interested in teachers and they need their dogs walked during their school days. And so you can kind of see how this is ebbs and flows with who you are targeting during specific times. And you can pop up a flash sale, exactly,
Collin Funkhouser 05:25
we're trying to drive short term uplift in our business revenue. And there's a lot of ways that you can do this, we've mentioned a few of them. But these these promotional offers these flash sales, maybe deep discounts for a particular group or subgroup of people, seasonal campaigns, or maybe you just put out really urgent calls to action that you're trying to get this immediate response from your potential clients or maybe existing clients to get them off of the fence and back into your company. If you say, Oh no, this sale ends in 24 hours, you know, that's a really effective way to get people to take action as quickly as possible this the short term, these transactional marketing, these sales activation, the entire goal, the entire ethos about these is just to get as many people in to use your service quickly as possible, and not necessarily retain them. Just
Meghan 06:16
making sure that you do this with integrity as well. If you say that the sale ends in 24 hours, make sure that it does indeed end in 24 hours, and you don't keep extending it because a lot of companies do that. And I personally think that's a little bit of a sleazy tactic of oh, well, I didn't actually, I now don't believe you when you say this thing, because you weren't truthful with me when the sale was going on. And as we are talking about discounts here, making sure that you still know your worth, that you are charging appropriately, that you are not discounting too much to where you feel uncomfortable with it. We're
Collin Funkhouser 06:48
not necessarily saying that you need to discount in order to do this. But these are just possible techniques that businesses used in the sales activation, kind of marketing. And it's important to note that the while these strategies for marketing, they're going to provide that sudden boom in sales, they're not actually going to sustain that customer loyalty or engagement in the long term. If this is what you only use, if these are the only tactics that you use to get clients in your door, there's going to be no brand loyalty. Or even if you just use it excessively, maybe that's not the only thing that you market out, but they rely heavily on this, you're going to get a lot of one off clients in this aspect, because they have no need to stay with you. If they can just bounce from one thing to another. They're not convinced in using your company for your company's sake, they just using you because you're hitting a price point for a timeline that they need at this time. It's really meant to drive metrics like conversion rates, immediate ROI and sales quotas. If you have these in your head of I've got to hit numbers, I've got to hit new client acquisition rates. This is a tactic that you would use. But again, it's not like they're going to be sticking to your company
Meghan 07:57
well, and that's why this can go wrong if you don't use this appropriately. So if you use this short term sales during the Thanksgiving and holiday period, that's probably not the best tactic for your company, because you're going to be churning through clients who are not going to stick with you. And it's all about that client retention that we love those repeat clients. And so if you say I'm offering a $5 discount for the week of Thanksgiving only, obviously there's going to be a lot of people that jump on that. But it could be just because they want the discount, and they're not going to stay with you. Something that's not here for the short term is pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. And that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help. for over 20 years they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote at pets@llc.com. You can get a discount when you join by clicking membership petsitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance. And once again, at pets@llc.com. We just discussed the short term transactional marketing. Now there is the long term relational marketing. This approach builds the branding builds the relationship with the client, it's long term, you're not doing quick sales. It is about establishing your brand identity, your mission vision and values your messaging that is constant and consistent over time, it fosters that know like and trust factor in that loyalty among consumers. You're building that memory of your potential clients when they see your logo. They know Oh, this is them when they hear this type of language or these phrases. They know Oh, I know that I can trust these people because I've heard this before. It's that consistency that really builds that trust. You'll
Collin Funkhouser 09:52
basically take that first slot in their memory bank whenever they have store because you're competing for people's time and attention and a memory space. Because there's so much going on, people are taking in a lot of things throughout their day, they're exposed to so many things that they it's easy to forget. So how do we get lodged in that front aspect of the brain just as a, as a quick example of this, go ahead and take some time out. And I'm going to give you an industry a little category. And you're going to list as many brands as you can for this category. And the category is toothpaste. Okay, how many brands can you list right now? off of your off the top of your head? And I think I have three, three, okay, see, I got two. And it's not even the two that we use. I don't just don't know the name of our other one. But I if we did a poll of everybody, I guess you can write this in 95% of you probably have the first one or two toothpaste brands, name. Colgate and crest I guarantee you, it's somewhere in that first one, two, maybe three of your if you're one that uses not there. How do we get in this aspect, that's what this is talking about this long term, getting stuck in people's brains, when they think
Meghan 11:11
of when they think of pets, they think of Joe's pet sitting exactly
Collin Funkhouser 11:15
like this, we're building that memory in their brain. And you can do this in a lot of different ways. It may involve content marketing, community engagement, customer service, excellence for people experience, your your, your, your company, and how you operate, you may offer loyalty programs, storytelling. So the story brand framework is another great way to get connected with people. All of these are aimed at forming a strong emotional connection with the audience. And that's key. This is all about emotional priming, when they feel what do they feel when they think of you. And that's
Meghan 11:49
why it's so important to have this stuff written down somewhere, whether it's on your computer, or a notepad that you carry around of what exactly your company stands for your, again, your mission, vision and values, where you are going and your exact messaging, and you're ultimately your target avatar, who you are talking to at the basis of all of this brass tacks is who are you talking to who do you want to purchase your services from you when you know all of that you can be consistent in your messaging, and then you can build that trust over time. Because people know, when I again, when I hear this phrase, when I when I see these words, when I see this picture, I know or these colors, I know that it's this brand. And I like them. So I want to engage with their content.
Collin Funkhouser 12:34
And it's important that you said over time, because unlike the short term, that transactional marketing, where you can pretty much run an ad in the morning and have many sales by that afternoon, or that evening, where you're trying to get everybody in the door. This is a multi month, multi year, game play, right, you're not going to lead to immediate sales spikes or conversions at all through this kind of marketing. And you're thinking in six months, 12 month chunks of messaging REITs trying to get this things out at a time.
Meghan 13:05
I know we focus on a lot of social media for our own pet business. But this is also email marketing as well, or even boots on the ground marketing of going and talking with people using the same language when you go to drop off flyers or go to vets offices. We just had an episode recently about joining the Chamber of Commerce. And this is another strategy of building those those relationships. And using those same messaging, when you go to the events,
Collin Funkhouser 13:31
this this tactic is going to help you build that that strong stable customer base with with brand loyalty where you're going to get more consistent, long term streams of income from your clients. Instead of evaluating this in immediate ROI or conversion rates. You're you're looking at this as a measure of success. If you get things like your customer lifetime value, how many how much money does this customer spend with you year after year after year, that's not something you can measure with short term transactional marketing, or maybe just brand awareness levels, if you can put out surveys into your, into your into your community or maybe as you're going and talking to people making mental notes of when I go to introduce myself, do their eyes light up and they go oh, I've heard of you. Oh, I've seen you. I see these things. That's a brand awareness level. And then this also looking at your customer retention rate. So calculating I had how many customers at the start of the year, I brought in how many new ones? And how many are still left with me using me on whatever metric you want to use consistent basis by the end of the year. Again, looking at this on an annual basis, not day to day. Well. And this
Meghan 14:39
is also a great reminder to talk to people about how they found out about you. So whether it's a phone call, whether it's through your software, whether it's in email, whenever somebody touches your company and inquires about your services, asking them how did you find out about us because that that's going to tell you if the banner that you put up at the kid's softball game is actually Prof. suitable for you and worth the money to do again next year. This is
Collin Funkhouser 15:04
all about telling the why and then waiting for the when talking about why people use you, or why they will need you, and then waiting for the customer to actually need your services. So I'm doing a quick breakdown of this, actually, and just asking how many people at least in the United States travel each year, but digging into this, the numbers are a little fuzzy in depending on who you look at. And what it is it breaks down to roughly 63% of the population says they're going to take a vacation. And of that 47% say they're going to travel for the holidays exclusively. And so our job is how do I market to them, and stay on top of mind to them for 51 weeks out of the year.
Meghan 15:49
And this is assuming you are a pet sitting company, if you are a strictly dog walking company, you will not necessarily have this problem, because those are two different avatars. Yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 15:57
but in this case, most of our clients are out of our market for most of the year. So I have to talk to somebody who's not interested in using my services. And because it can be really easy as a business owner, to feel like I keep talking to these people, I keep talking to the people, and nobody needs me, well, they only need you until they need you. So how do you stay connected with them? It's this long term thinking, it's this marketing, that is going to be building your reputation and trust and not just trying to throw off sales or one time quick hits. Conversely, I was doing some research about, you know, people who commute to work, this is an immediate problem that they have, right here. Today, they're left for work this morning, they're sitting at work, and they are worried about their dog across the country, some 90% of people still have some sort of commute to their job. And then you can actually find these, these statistics on your state's Labor Statistics Bureau. And we did for hours. And we found that some of the local communities that we're encountering are somewhere between 18 and 24 minutes. And so that's somebody who's spending basically 20 minutes away from home to get to work, they don't have the time to get back home, still have a lunch and then get back. And after letting their dog out. How do we engage with them in that day, that's a little bit more of that sales activation, that transactional like I need to be in front of you right now. And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, until they start to see that they actually have this problem that we can help solve. And then when you balance this out, and that's the other thing about this is that there is a balance, it's not all one and nothing of the other, you have to use both of these imbalance and, and simultaneously as well, going I can have my seasonal activation rates, I can have my long term, brand building, but I have to see and be able to, as you said, make an earlier measure the results of those to make sure that I'm actually having the results that I'm looking for. Well,
Meghan 17:57
and in the example you just gave of the commute times, that's assuming that you don't want the work from home clients or that that's not your target client. If you if you are wanting those people who are still working from home or may have transitioned home over the past few years, then you aren't going to be talking about is your commute too long? Are you irritated at how much time you have in the car and away from your pet, you know, you're not going to use that sort of messaging, it's going to be much different of Does your dog bark on Zoom calls or does your dog you know it messaging like that.
Collin Funkhouser 18:28
But that is an activation kind of marketing, because that's something they are experiencing today. That's a pain point they have today, and you're trying to get them off the fence today to start using your services. If you'd like to learn more about this balancing of of how you make these two ways of marketing work, there's an amazing book out there called the long and short of it by Vinay and fate field from 20 to 13. There's going to be a link for that in the show notes about putting all of this together, they've got great charts and graphs in there to see really the impact of each marketing on revenue versus new client acquisition versus more long term thinking.
Meghan 19:07
If you imagine your marketing as a big funnel or a big tornado at the top, you're going to have the unawareness, the potential client that doesn't really know who you are, but you are using as many tactics as possible to try to target them. So that's not just social media. That's your website. That's your Google My Business that's boots on the ground stuff of passing out flyers and business cards and going to networking events and, and meeting people on the street and all of these different things that you are trying to attract people into letting them know about who you are. And then you tell them who you are. I am a dog walking and pet sitting company. This is what we do. This is what we stand for so that they can more comprehend exactly what you do. Because again, what we do is different. It's not really the standard. And so people are often very intrigued about what we do, then you're going to be building that brand loyalty, that consistency over time of your messaging and this is what we do This is what we stand for. This is who we are. And so as you work your way down the funnel you're going to switch from doing, the more the branding and the talking more about yourself into more of the sales of trying to get them to buy from you. So the immediate action if you have tried either of these methods in your business, we would love to know how they worked out for you or if they didn't, you can email us at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional. Thank you for listening to this today. We hope you found value in it. If you did, please share it with a friend. Thank you also to pet sitters associates and our wonderful Patreon members. Thank you and we'll talk with you next time. Bye
