The #1 Promoting Business Mistake Entrepreneurs Make... and don't even know it!

Have you ever wondered what are some of the biggest mistakes that us entrepreneurs make when it comes to promoting our businesses and attracting those clients?

Well hello everyone and welcome to this episode of the virtual entrepreneur.

I am your host, Herbert innocent and if you are new to this podcast, I want to welcome you and give you a very warm welcome.

This is the go to podcast for entrepreneurs who see their business as a vehicle for change. And on this podcast on this show I have taken the stage as a student of success and successful entrepreneurship, with one goal to go into the world and to study what other very powerful and successful businesses and entrepreneurs are doing so I can bring it to you.

Right, so I put aside all my expertise and bring all these I'm learning to do and essentially the aim here is

I bring you the tips the tricks and the big secrets the how-tos and the success stories, and in a success knowledge from entrepreneurs around the globe and in today's episode I'm going to be talking about.

We know some of the well-known mistakes, but very well understood by new entrepreneurs that are very damaging, these are very damaging mistakes. And the idea here is to talk about these so that early entrepreneurs can avoid can understand them and avoid them, so they can start driving traffic that will result in a lot of sales and very little complaints, into their, to their website offers, and all those other stuff.

Now in our previous episode, we had an interview with Thomas on building a winning team if you didn't get a chance to go and listen to that interview. I want you to stop this, go and listen to that interview, you'll get a tonne of value on building yourself a team that will support you.

Stay keep you staying motivated and also help your business grow to the next stage. Listen, growing your business as a solopreneur, will only take you so far at one stage, if you want to grow you need more people, otherwise, you just stopped.

And once you stop growing, you start shrinking, there is no staying in one place in the, in this world of business because the environment is changing our currency is changing, you know, getting inflated every single day. And if you're staying in one place, the chances are you are losing a lot of those valuable resources that are at your disposal.

If you need help with that, just reach out to the laws of communities with intrapreneurs we're ready to help you take your business to the next level.

Now let's jump into today's episode where we're going to be talking about mistakes, and in particular I want to cover a few of those very powerful mistakes that really, you know, prevent us from going forward and the first mistake that entrepreneurs make in promoting their business, is they go and try to target, everyone, you know, and I think.

So you know they try to target everyone as their customer. And I think that's a very, very difficult and a very

it's a very damaging thing to be doing to your business because when you start targeting those customers you're gonna be spending effort your money and your time getting to them. And the reason why this is very damaging when you try to target every customer is this.

Imagine you're in the room, and in the room there's kids, there's parents, they is toddlers, these teenagers, they he is taxi drivers these train drivers they, they, whatever you call them train driver is pilots, there is nurses, there's doctors there is, you know, pharmacist, there is teachers that is principals, and they just stop talking, too often, the chances are they all one Listen, some of them won't even care. They won't even know who you're talking to the tunnels will be too busy running around, playing by themselves, you know, the nurses and the doctors will just face each other talking Oh, ignore you. And the reason is very very simple.

If you try to talk to everyone. Nobody listens, this is a lesson from psychology right there is this thing called the bystander effect and it can be very deadly when put in the wrong place, you know, which happens in other places in our society, but yet as business owners we make the mistake of trying to do this in our businesses, right, and the bystander effect is, you know, people could see something and they'll all think someone else will do it, they'll just think it's for someone else to do and not for them. Right.

And in the world of social psychology, the examples being used are quite bad really which results in a lot of bad things, but as an entrepreneur, you need to master one powerful skill, whether it's with your team, or with your clients, you need to be able to tell them, Listen, I need you to do this right, directing your attention to one person, regardless to how many, we are talking to.

At the end of the day, you are talking to a lot of people but one at a time, whether it's videos whether it's audio, whether it's, you know, written content, you are talking to a lot of people, but addressing them as one at a time, and that is the goal in being able to make your marketing effective and if you're addressing one at a time. You need to narrow it down to. Who exactly I going to start.

Talk to First, right. So for example, if you're talking to, you know if your business does services for other businesses, or if it does, if it sells products, then you want to target, who in your market research have you discovered that who really need this product more than anyone else, right. So if your services how businesses make money or business need to make money but who will need it the most.

The solo entrepreneur, the entrepreneur with a team of five to 10 people, or the entrepreneur the team of 50 to 100 people who will need it the most, right, because the chances are the one who pays the most. The one who needs the most is the one who's most likely to pay for it the most. And those may be the first initial customer you want to target. And once you have really built a relationship and you're serving them, you can then look at the opportunities to expand, another target market, but you change your message because your message won't speak the same to all of these people.

Because here's the thing if you start talking about revenue, a lot of photographers and business owners in the creative businesses will think that the message doesn't speak to them, right, because for them, they see themselves as a creative business, they don't even think of the business services for some of them right.

They see it as a creative business even though it's a service. And because some of their services are not directly linked to sales processes, they'll also see, you know, they fit in this particular area, they don't see that, you know, they, their services have some sort of correlation or some sort of a link to indirectly but there's a link that links back to the revenue of the companies that they provide the services to the right.

So, you need to be careful that your message really speaks to a very small group of clients, ideally, right, and when you master that, you'll notice that all those clients who feel that the same need will start gravitating because now they're like, Oh, I think I need this, right, and so they're curious, they come in there, but, but if you try to make it, you know, speak to everybody, then you lose everyone because it's like it's not speaking to me, right, for example, if your message is about children, and then you target everybody because they may have sisters and brothers, and brothers young sisters or young brothers, then you're going to lose all of them, because a parent will be very very more conscious of their children.

They're the one thing they think about the most, whereas someone's brother or sister, younger brother or sister, they don't really think so much about their younger brother or sister, as much as the parent does, right.

So by targeting the parent, you make your value proposition in much more effective, but he also makes your ability to get your clients much easier and effective because they are going to need the services if it's going to benefit their children, they want to do that because this is the most precious thing for them right now. It's the most valuable thing for them.

Right. And so talking to them about that you get their attention much more immediately. So, with that said, the first mistake here is trying to sell your service to everyone. While everyone may buy your services, but the chances are they buy for different reasons. So ask yourself who will need this the most and why, and that's a very important thing.

Why, right, because if it's very, very crucial and essential for them, then targeting them becomes a very profitable way to get to the market, and that's just the first mistake, right. And so, you may be wondering okay. So, why would you avoid this where you can avoid it because it's going to cost you in your marketing it's going to cost you an effort, it's going to cost you your time if you're doing this one way, right. So what should you do instead?

Well as I said, you want to narrow your message, so you can take the very specific ideal clients right unic build a profile look like people, right, and then once you've done that, If you already made this mistake in the past, the best way to fix it just goes back to your past clients. Look at the clients that you really enjoyed working with, and then take those clients and start working with them, much more.

Right, focus on working with clients with this similar way, when I felt when I was first targeting clients, I noticed that I was targeting business managers right marketing managers and target marketing minute not be this marketing manager, I realized that I went to look at their CV, right, the CV application when they're applying those job applications, I look at the criteria of the things that they were focused because those are the things that they have been paid to do. And those are the things that the top of their mind, and some of them. Some of these things they feel like they're not very good at it, right.

They feel like an imposter their job because they may be missing this one or thing, or they're great but they just don't enjoy doing it. And so that became my place where I started to look at how my business has benefited them. I started looking from that point of view right and then I built everything you build everything from then when you do that your message becomes quite effective in getting responses, meaningful responses, Right. That leads to other business transactions and how to prevent yourself from ever making this mistake in the first place, is make sure that you create a customer avatar.

Now, a customer avatar ideal is you take all those attributes of your ideal clients and you build them into one beautiful, powerful persona, right, this powerful persona represents the key elements that your ideal clients will have, right, and what you will notice is all your ideal clients may not have all these things, but they will come very closely to resembling that person, right to the point when you may be talking to one person one day and realize Wow, these are so much like my ideal clients, and when you can get to that point, then you know you're in the right direction.

And then the next step is asking them to talk about their problem in, and then listen to the words they use, And then using those words to get them to talk, you know, to tell you what it is that they want to tell you what it is that they need to tell you what to really really benefit them in the long term.

To achieve the goals that they've set themselves. So you want to build yourself a powerful customer avatar. Right. And if you want to use what to, if you're wondering what tools can you use to get these results faster, easier and more efficiently. Well, there is a tonne of tools out in the marketplace in terms of using.

And one of the tools, I'll say that you want to use is ideally, if you don't know about market research, you would want to do your own market research, and then hire someone else on Fiverr to do it for you. And this will give you a little bit of an additional extra in depth of things that you may not have considered.

Right. If you hire a very good person. They will help you see things that you haven't considered, but the best way to do this is go to your ideal competition, like, a very good competition that you say they do, they serve the kind of clients I want, and they do a lot of the things that I want to do, and look at what they're doing right, look at the things that they're doing, and then don't copy, but model, how they're doing things in terms of structures, right, in terms of key phrases not their entire words but key phrases because those phrases, I probably the type of phrases that your ideal prospect, your ideal clients will use when describing the problem right now you want to model your competition, who is doing really good, really, really well than you.

And one, two for that is if you go to similar web.com You can put a website in there and then you can look at the details in terms of, you know, what How the website is doing, and when you do that, you'll be able to see if they're getting a lot of traffic, and that means maybe they've narrowed down their ideal customer so they're getting all these people. So that becomes a way for you to have a look.

But you don't necessarily need to use similar levels you can also just go to ads on Facebook and other platforms. So if you go to the ad manager and then start looking at those ads. If their ad has been running for three months or more. The chances. Doing very well. If you use those keywords if those other techniques, targeting the people you want to target.

If you use those keywords, right, if you're using those keywords in those ads, then the chances are you my friend are talking to the people who respond to those kinds of ads, right, you're improving your chances significantly. And the best part is you don't even have to spend anything in terms of getting to your ideal client. So I hope that helps you I mean, that's just one mistake and how to correct it.

We might cover the mistakes in the future so I hope that gave you so much insight and so much of value in taking your business to the next level, look we are entrepreneurs and I believe. Entrepreneurs are the ones who are going to be doing this world for the better, not the businesses, sorry, not the government's, and certainly not the politicians, either telling us things. I want to go there, but I believe you know, business owners like you are going to be the ones who are going to build for us better communities, and change the lives in our countries for the good.

So thank you so much for tuning in on this episode of the virtual entrepreneur, the notes, and you can learn about Thomas was versed for last episode, by going to a bit of marketing helpless calm and the notes for this episode will also be found at Herbet marketing help calm. That is, e r e b e RT marketing helpless comm. And if you have a problem, Don't hesitate to contact me. I promise.

Not last class I don't know, but I'll talk to you soon. And as always, have a wonderful evening.