4 Mistakes to Avoid with Your Marketing Plan | 120

When it comes to creating a marketing plan, there are a lot of different ways to go about it, and you might find yourself wondering if you’re “doing it right”. After working in the marketing space for a while, I want to share some of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen people make (and that I’ve made myself 🤦‍♀️), and how they affect your growth and sales in business.

#1 A Lack Of Patience And Or Consistency

In the marketing world, it can take a long time for the fruits of our labor to come to fruition. Organic growth can be really slow, and it can feel impossible to break into a saturated market.

There is this false idea that marketing should be easy. We see people that have an “overnight success”, and we think our marketing plan must be wrong. But the reality is, a lot of these “overnight successes” put in a lot of work that went unnoticed before they finally blew up.

It’s tempting to stop sending emails when no one is clicking. Or stop posting on social media when no one is liking your content. However, by consistently showing up, you are still growing. Sometimes we don’t see our growth as it’s happening, but when you look back six months from now, you’ll be able to see those moments of growth.

#2 Assuming That Everything is Going To Stay The Same

When things are going well in our business, you might want to take your foot off the gas and start coasting. For a while, I had a full roster of clients, so I stopped my lead generation for ad clients.

Then, suddenly, I lost four of my clients in six weeks. Because I hadn’t talked about Facebook Ad services for a bit, I was thrown for a loop and I had to scramble to add Facebooks Ads content back to my marketing plan (see I’m not even immune to these mistakes!).

More often than not, it pays to continue with lead generation even when things are going well because you never know when things might suddenly change. You want people to stay in tune with your offers because, as we’ve been talking about, warming people up and marketing takes time!

#3 Stopping Or Pausing Your Lead Generation Efforts

When someone finds you, joins your email list, and starts consuming your content, they often need three to six months to warm up to your offers before they make a purchase.

It’s important to remember that there are always three different people in your audience: those that are ready to buy, those who are warming up to you, and those who just found you.

However, people will eventually land somewhere in that buying cycle within three to six months. If you are not continuously building your audience and getting in front of new people, then when your older audience grows stagnant, your sales might slow down.

#4 Focusing On Band-Aids Instead Of Long-Term Solutions

Sometimes we have a problem in our business that we want to solve right now. For example, your sales might slow down, so you start rushing to think of solutions and creating “band-aids” for that lack of sales.

However, those band-aids don’t exactly solve the long term issue of not generating sales. Instead, you need to create a long term vision and marketing plan to make steps towards that goal. Maybe you want to only work four days a week or be able to quit your 9-5. You can’t make that happen with impulsive decisions - it’s going to take planning and creating a strategic marketing plan.

Are you making any of these mistakes in your marketing?  I’ve definitely made my fair share of all 4 types… but our goal is to fix the mistakes and keep moving forward, never backwards.

Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!

xo, Jenzaia 

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Episode Transcript:

Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious  teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.

This is a Saturday strategy session. Today we are gonna be talking about some mistakes that you are maybe making today, right now in your business that could be impacting you down the road; three, six, twelve months from now. I've talked about this before, but people's buying cycle in the online space right now is longer than it's been in years.

There is a lack of trust. And so it's taking three or six months of someone consuming your content, being nurtured, building that relationship, and really developing trust before they buy. So today we're gonna be talking about some of the things that you may or may not be doing now that could be causing your business to actually hit a standstill or become stagnant in a few months down the road. 

And the good news is, there's also the flip side of it. If you are in a rut right now, you feel like your business is at a standstill, these are some of the things that you could potentially look at starting to do so that your success starts to rebuild, and you'll be feeling those positive impacts down the road.

So the four mistakes that we are gonna chat about are, one, a lack of patience and or consistency. Two, assuming that everything is just going to stay the same. Three, stopping or pausing your lead generation efforts. And then four, focusing on short-term gains or short-term band-aids. Instead of long-term growth or long-term solutions.

Let's dive into number one, lack of patience and or consistency. It takes a long time for things to start working. It feels like organic growth can be slow. Forming relationships for networking opportunities or collaborations can feel slow at first.

It can feel like the market is just so saturated that it's hard to break into, and so it just doesn't feel like what we're doing matters. If it doesn't feel like what we're doing matters and you don't feel like you're ever gonna receive results from it, it can be really easy to give up.

And so I just want you to compare marketing your business to building a house. One of my friends from university is currently in the process of building her house with her husband, and so I've been watching the experience go down. It's so similar because when you're building a house, first they designed it and I remember getting to sit down and look at the plans with her, and then they did the foundation of the house and then the framing, and then I think it was the roof next.

And then all the interior guts, like the electrical, plumbing, hvac, all of those things went in and then they started to really close that off. Build the walls, build the ceilings, the floor, adding those pieces. And then they started to paint. I think they painted before they put the floors down, actually, if I'm not mistaken.

And then the last parts that they did were the floorboards and some of the other details. Like it all is just a process and you can't measure the counter before the foundation's been poured, right? And so there's just this aspect of patience that needs to happen as you're building a house. Your business is a little bit like a house where you have to have the patience to do what you need to do., and as long as it takes to get your results. 

Overnight successes are rarely actually overnight successes. It feels like these businesses blew up and yes, I'm sure you could point out a hundred businesses that legitimately blew up overnight, but you could also find thousands of businesses that had a slow build and they just continued to do the little things again and again and again until it all just compacted, and that's where the consistency comes into play. 

It feels like that live stream, nobody showed up, so why would I do it again next week? It feels like only 10 people liked my post. So why am I gonna post again? It feels like nobody's opened my email, so why am I gonna send another email? But over time, that consistency when people know, oh, there's a podcast episode coming out on Saturday. Jen's episodes always come out Saturday. 

I now have a group of people who listen to the podcast episode before I even wake up on Saturday mornings. I open BuzzSprout and I see that there are people who have already downloaded it because they know the episode is coming. If it's a really great episode, then I have messages before I've even had breakfast on Saturday because people are reaching out. But it was not like that in the beginning. In the beginning there were maybe like two people who had listened to it and one of them was me!

And that was like all the entire weekend. And on Monday I would post a promo and I get a couple of listens. It takes time consistently putting out those episodes every single week, the blog post, every single week, sending the emails consistently every single week, even if it feels like it doesn't matter, because it does matter, even if just one person is opening that email. One person is listening, then you are making an impact. You're building a relationship, and that is going to grow over time, which I wrote in my notes here that it's like a snowball. It doesn't feel like anything's happening, but if you roll a snowball down a hill, it's really small at first, and then it grows.

And then another example that I have about this that you can relate to your marketing is growing your hair. Your hair is constantly growing, and this is more to the long-haired humans out there who like to have longer hair. Your hair's always growing. And it can be hard to notice when you are looking at yourself in the mirror. Every day you're brushing your hair, putting it up in a ponytail or a braid, or a bun, or however you wanna wear it, curling it.

But then one day you wake up and you're kind of looking and you have this feeling of, wow, my hair is just so long. Now, when did that happen? Or maybe you see someone that you haven't seen in a while and they make a comment about how long your hair is, but you hadn't really realized because it's continuing to happen over time without you really realizing.

And so your marketing is like the snowball is like your hair. You might not be noticing. It might feel like nothing's changing, nothing's happening, but over a longer period of time, big shifts are happening. When you look back, those day-to-day changes add up. So really make that consistent effort because it will make an impact.

And that's why you really need to prioritize your marketing. So part of this lack of consistency, lack of patience, is that you're not prioritizing your marketing. And this could happen for a variety of reasons. Maybe you have client work that you're letting take precedence. The number of times I talk with service providers who say, oh, I do it for my clients, but I just don't have the time to do the exact same thing for my business, is mind boggling.

And I understand, but also, you need to put your business as a priority and marketing your business as a priority. The other reason that you could be deprioritizing or just ignoring marketing is because you feel like “I'm just a teacher”. I'm putting those in quotations. “I'm not a business owner”. But you are!

Or I don't have any business or marketing training. You still need to figure out how you're gonna market your business, how you're gonna grow your business, how you're going to get your business in front of new people, and to nurture and grow those relationships with your current people.

So I already said this, but it's just so valuable - you need to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes and just to continue to do the pieces of your business that you've decided are important, like that podcast episode every week, or emailing your audience every week or showing up consistently in your Facebook group. Overnight successes are not a real thing, and it's those choices that will change everything. 

And I had a really hard time emailing my audience before, and then I remember I made a decision like, this is happening. You're going to email your audience every single week. And I'm fairly confident there have been weeks that it just didn't happen. But I would say like 95% of the time, once I made that commitment, there's been a shift.

There has definitely been a shift from when I would email, I would have like a 20% open rate and unsubscribes out the roof. Now, because I consistently email every single week, my open rate is between 50 and 60%. Now, there have been algorithm changes and other pieces that do impact that, but my unsubscribe rate is less than 1%.

In fact, there's many times when I don't even have a single person unsubscribing because I'm emailing on a set schedule and people are expecting the emails. The consistency pays off, and having that patience, knowing that it's going to pay off in the future is so, so important. 

Mistake number two, assuming everything will stay the same. This is a mistake that plagued me. So if we back up to quarter four of 2022. It is now May of 2023, so we're going back like six to nine months. I had a full roster of clients and I was really rocking it. I think everything was going well and I started talking about shifting my business into holistic marketing and offering coaching. I love holistic marketing and I still have coaching applications available. If that is something you're looking for, absolutely send me a dm. 

But what happened is as I shifted my focus away from Facebook ads and towards holistic marketing, I stopped the lead generation coming in for ads clients. Then there were a ton of different things that happened, like a pregnancy and a complete shift in business and a move, and things that are completely out of my control, out of my client's control.

I lost four clients in about six weeks. And because I had shifted my marketing, I hadn't been talking about my ongoing ads management services. I hadn't been talking about ad sprints. I hadn't been talking about Facebook ads for months, and I just hadn't been talking about it. And so that piece of my business had slowed down and was doing its thing, and I thought it was comfortably doing its thing until it wasn't, and then I had to quickly shift and pivot back to Facebook ads. 

And so there were times last year that I actually had a waitlist and I had to tell people I can't start working with you for six or eight weeks, to then crickets. And part of that was my own shift. I lost focus on Facebook ads being my signature offer, being my signature service. And so what I realized is that I need to continue to talk about Facebook ads and continue to talk about Facebook ad marketing and the services that I offer. And then the holistic marketing coaching needs to be on the back burner and just casually mentioned. Because Facebook ads are totally my jam. They make me so happy, and that is my absolute happy place.

So like when my roster was full, it's hard to envision a place when your roster isn't full. If sales are happening every single day in your business and then you forget about the summer slowdown, it can be really hard because sales are happening, sales are happening, your roster's full, and so you either slow down on the marketing or you hit pause. And then the season of your business changes and now there's no leads.

 It's foreseeing what's coming and just continuing to talk about and continuing to sell even if you're currently not in a position where you need that.

And there's a couple business owners that I follow. Lacey Sites is one of them, and Stacey Bateman is the other one. They both have really strong waitlist games. Lacey Sites has a one-on-one coaching business. And she often refers to it as like a 10 seat cocktail bar or something along those lines, because she only does one-on-one.

She has those 10 clients that she works with and has a waitlist of over 400 people. And Lacey emails out every single week specific things for the wait listers. There's also a monthly q and a for waitlisters. She has a strong waitlist game. Stacey Bateman, same thing. She only opens her program in April and November. Stacey also emails weekly to her entire list, but I get two emails from her. The second email is for her wait list only, and so I'm getting those two emails from her every single week.

Her waitlist game is strong because she doesn't stop. Neither one of them stops. Even though Lacey's 10 seats are full, she's constantly talking about her one-on-one services, constantly adding people to that wait list to grow her audience so that she's nurturing people. So when she does have a space, there is a lineup out the door.

And so I highly recommend whatever your business model is trying to figure out how you can continually be selling so that when you offer, there's just a lineup out the door. This also has to do with foreseeing issues, with things like capacity, team demands, client experience, so that you are seeing when mistakes are gonna happen before they happen, so that your systems and procedures and situations don't just completely collapse. You can start to restructure your expectations for your team, or you're gonna hire a position before you absolutely need it.

So just having a pulse on the key metrics of your business to help you have an idea of where things are headed based on those metrics. And just as a quick reminder, in episode 116, I talked about metrics specifically leading and lagging metrics. That's a great episode for this foreseeing issue.

That whole concept of knowing if something is coming, looking at leading and lagging metrics to help you determine where your business is going and what you need to be doing. 

Mistake number three is pausing temporarily or completely stopping all lead generation efforts. And the reason that this is a problem is because right now, there is like a three to six month delay in most businesses' buying cycle.

And when I say buying cycle, what I mean is that someone finds you, then they decide that they're gonna follow you and decide if they like you, like your content, and they start consuming that content. And most people sit in this consumption cycle for quite a while where they're reading your emails, they're listening to your podcast, they're engaging on social media.

Maybe they're just lurking in the background, but they are consuming, right? And then they start to consider buying. Maybe you have a launch. Or they get an email and they start to consider buying, but just aren't quite ready. So they consume more content and decide, okay, now it's not the right time, but maybe in six months.

So I did this. There is a business coaching program that I have my eye on. She only opens three times a year. So March, September, December. So this was for the March opening. I got on a sales call with her. I listened to the entire podcast sequence that she had, all of the emails I went to, the live open house that she hosted.

I did all the things. I was ready to buy, but then there was just something that was holding me back. And so I decided not to. And now I've been consuming her content more and more and more, and just like trying to decide if September is going to be the right time for me. People may also forget that you exist and stop consuming the content or get busy.

There are times like December and the holidays, or if I'm on vacation where I just don't listen to podcasts and I kind of forget about some of the podcasts that I have on my player. And then when I come back and I start consuming again, I catch up on all of my faves first before I then also dive into those other ones that I had forgotten about. And maybe then they participate in another launch. So this is the second one. And finally buy from you. Or maybe they don't and they just stay on your list, consuming more content. And three more launches go by before they buy. 

We never know where somebody is in their buying cycle. Just remember, there's always three different people in your orbit, and those are the ones who are ready to buy yesterday. They've probably been in your audience for a while, consuming your content. The second ones are the ones that are going to find you tomorrow or have just just found you, just getting to know you have no idea what you sell, but are starting to like you and really starting to consume your content.

And then the majority of people are somewhere in between that they've known you for a while, but they're not ready to buy yet. And so taking people through that process of finding you, liking you, knowing you, trusting you, buying from you takes time. But if you stop bringing in new leads, then everybody is gonna be moving through that buying cycle. And eventually you do exhaust your list.

And by exhausting your list, I mean that everyone who is on your email list who is going to buy from you has purchased. There's probably one or two stragglers that are there that might not have bought. But if you're not growing your email list, you will hit a point where 90% of the people on the list have either bought or not bought, and that's their final decision.

And so if you're not growing your email list, you might not see the impact immediately because people are still in that middle phase where they're warming up to buy you. But then three or six months down the road, once everybody has moved through the cycle and kind of got to the point where they're gonna get, those sales will start to slow down.

And so pausing or stopping all lead generation efforts is just an absolute mistake. Now, I'm not saying that means you have to be always running Facebook ads though, but you shouldn't stop some sort of lead generation. So that is making efforts to collaborate, if that is some sort of organic reach strategy, so on TikTok or Reels or your podcast. But always making efforts to grow your email list and generate new leads, growing your audience.

My fourth and final mistake that you might be making that is going to impact your business down the road is focusing too much on short-term gains or band-aids instead of long-term growth and solutions. And so what I mean is that sometimes we wanna solve a problem right now, and this goes back to that patience piece. And I think that this is a common characteristic of entrepreneurs - lacking that patience, wanting to fix the problem with a solution right now. But what's going to give you those short-term gains, may not work down the road. 

If you were just like, what can I do right now? Right now is not going to solve the problem long term. This also goes towards your goals and your vision. If you don't have some sort of goals and vision that you're working for long term, then you don't have anything anchoring you for your decision. So I have my long-term goal for like 5 to 10 years down the road. My husband and I want to live abroad for a couple years with our kids. We're thinking of Europe. I don't think I can convince my husband to move to Asia, though I would absolutely love to move back to Southeast Asia.

So we're talking about moving to Europe and living there for a couple years, which would be so cool. And that anchors all of my decisions. Elon Musk’s decision anchor is “will this get humans closer to living on Mars?” 

So those are decision anchors, and having that long-term vision, that long-term goal is helpful so that you can make those decisions easier. Now, there are some things, those big, gigantic goals that we need to break down into many milestones, which will help move towards that goal. 

Sometimes you're gonna need to make some sort of investment in the short-term for the long-term value, the long-term solution. So what I mean by this is you may need to put in extra hours creating SOPs and training a VA today, so that in a month from now, three months from now, that VA or that assistant, can take over some of the responsibilities and take it off your plate.

But in the short term, you're investing more time and energy into the training so that the solution has been solved long-term. And so focusing on that long-term solution, long-term growth is really, really important. But not necessarily refusing to do the things in the short term to get you there.

And so when this comes to your business and the mistake that's impacting your future, if you're refusing to hire the VA because you don't have time to train them or you don't have the time to create the SOPs or whatever it might be…I went through this. I had a couple of bad VA experiences, and I really, really held off because I just couldn't handle another rough experience with a virtual assistant. I just didn't want to deal with it. 

And so I held off and held off and held off, and my workload was piling up. Like that's one of the times when an email just didn't go out, was when I was in this phase where I needed to hire a virtual assistant to really help me out. So I had to put in that extra time, that extra energy in the short term, get the VA hired for the long term benefits of taking the things off of my plate. 

And then the last thing that I just wanna say, Is about what you can do in the interim. So if you do feel like you are stuck right now, you don't have any leads coming in, sales are really slow. You don't have any clients, you're not booking any discovery calls, whatever it might be. Some of the things that you can do to get the ball running again, are to just continue to pick whatever consistency it is that you want to put your content out. And be consistent. 

Now, if you currently aren't creating long form content and you also aren't emailing your list, and you also aren't doing any sort of community building, then I really want you to go back and listen to some of my episodes about holistic marketing. 

And what I really emphasize in those episodes is that you pick one to focus on so that you can stack your efforts on top of each other. For example, I didn't start emailing my list until my podcast was up and running, and so the episodes that I have about holistic marketing, really just talk about how you can create that plan to ease your mind so that you know, okay, here's the plan. But just getting consistent, saying, I am going to work on step one. I'm gonna put out that podcast every single week. It doesn't matter how many people listen.

The second thing you can do is schedule some time every single day or a few times a week to do personal outreach and relationship building. This is not salesy. This is legitimately building relationships in your niche with other people who might have connections. You really need to put the time and the energy into building those friendships, building those relationships before they start to pay off. 

Another thing that you could do is a flash sale. Just offering a flash sale could bring in a kick of money. So either a sale or just opening the doors, some sort of bonus.

The fourth thing is a paid workshop or paid experience of some sort. That's a smaller ticket, and this would likely be something new so that your audience can pay you for this live experience. And then the final one is affiliate marketing. So finding a program that you're part of that you love, or a product that you're using that you love and doing some sort of mini launch for that program or product. 

Just to recap, the four mistakes that you might be making that could potentially impact your marketing in the future are, number one, a lack of consistency or patience. Two, assuming that everything is going to stay the same. Three, pausing or stopping your lead generation efforts, especially if it's because you have enough leads. And then number four, focusing on short-term gains instead of long-term growth or short-term band-aids instead of long-term solutions.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!