How to Stop Wasting Your Marketing Spend 🗑️

Marketing 101 for entrepreneurs

“That ability to drive enormous amounts of traffic seems great until you discover you’ve spent lots of money and gotten very few customers.”

Most entrepreneurs mess up their first attempts at marketing because they think their core metric is to get in front of as many people as possible. Aaron Dinin calls this needle-in-the-haystack marketing, and it’s time you switched up your tactics to get far more specific. 

It’s a fundamental of advertising that every entrepreneur should learn.

❌ Needle in the haystack marketing — It’s easy to buy ads that get people to your website. But that doesn’t mean you should immediately spend thousands of dollars buying ads. That’s advertising backward. The goal of your ad campaigns shouldn’t be to get as many people as possible to your website. Your goal should be to only attract the right people.

✅ Create ads that filter potential customers — Be hyper-specific in your ads so that people who see them know whether they’re the right potential customers before they ever click. The result? A lower number of higher-quality potential sales leads. A.K.A. — cheaper advertising with better conversions.

👉️ Read Marketing 101 for Entrepreneurs: How to Get Cheaper Advertising With Better Conversion Rates

In the news: X marks the drop

It’s been a year since Elon Musk purchased Twitter X. It’s going… well?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out as Musk pivots to becoming an “everything” app.

Remember the golden rule — when you try to do everything, you often end up doing nothing.

Pricing 101 for entrepreneurs

Let’s face it: pricing isn’t sexy.

But with 50–60+% of businesses falling over within their first three years, this is the part of the marketing equation that’s absolutely critical. If your business isn’t making money, it is certainly not sustaining you or itself over the longer term.

Approaching pricing is hard, especially for women, who form a stronger tie between pricing and their self-worth and self-esteem. If you’re struggling, Kristin Austin has 5 pillars to help you figure it out: 

1. Ask yourself, is your self-doubt true? — Will people laugh? Probably not — especially if you’ve done your research and know what others are pricing similar items/services at. And even if someone does laugh, keep going.

2. Are you worth that much? The answer is yes — If you’ve already helped someone with the problems your business solves, reach out and ask them how they felt after you sorted their problem. You might be amazed at their feedback.

3. Do your research — Look at where others are pricing themselves. You don’t have to place yourself at the top or bottom or even in the middle. BUT…knowing what’s out there will give you a sense of the market range.

4. Keep to the facts and figures — Determine how much it costs to produce your product/service. Think about your overheads — 401K, taxes, utilities, computers, stationery, websites/hosting, marketing, phone calls, rent, bank fees, registrations, vehicles, insurances, accounting, legal advice). List everything you can think of. Then, work out how much you want to earn during the year.

5. If you’re still stuck, work with someone else — Having an objective party challenge your thinking can take any emotional baggage out of your decision-making and ensure that you’re pricing appropriately for your business’s long-term sustainability and your clients/market.

👉️ Learn more about Getting Your Business Pricing Right

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