Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Tim Fitzpatrick | When You Confuse, You Lose… SO Create a CLEAR Marketing Plan

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Most small business owners make marketing too complicated, says Tim Fitzpatrick of Rialto Marketing.

Even with all the channels out there like social media, SEO, online video, web content, and more… the noise… if you stick to the fundamentals, you can cut through the clutter and reach your prospects and customers with your message.

Tim shares what those fundamentals are, which he says you must learn first before spending one dollar on Facebook ads, an email marketing campaign, or anything else.

Tune in to discover…

  • What Michael Jordan can teach you about marketing
  • The key to differentiating yourself from the competition
  • Vital parts of your marketing plan you’re probably neglecting
  • The first thing you must do if your current marketing isn’t working
  • And more

Mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Voiceover: This is Blue Collar Culture where you don't need ping pong tables, a cereal bar or nap pods to attract and retain real A players. Join us for the next hour where we speak with down to earth leaders that understand what it takes to win with a blue collar culture. Now here are your hosts, Jeremy Macliver and Ryan Englin.

Ryan Englin: Welcome back to another episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast. I'm your co-host, Ryan Englin, and I am here with Jeremy Macliver.

Jeremy Macliver: Welcome back, everyone.

Ryan: So today's topic is going to be a fun one. It's actually something that a lot of business owners are challenged with, and that's the topic of marketing. And when we say marketing, everybody's got a different definition for what that is. Some are really complex, some are super simple and targeted. But today's guest actually has a really great way of breaking marketing down into the fundamentals for small and growing businesses. So I want to welcome today's guest, Tim Fitzpatrick, from Rialto Marketing. Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Ryan, Jeremy, thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.

Ryan: So as I mentioned before, marketing is one of those really complex, sometimes scary subjects, or sometimes people tend to oversimplify it. But when it comes to marketing, what is one of the biggest myths out there?

Marketing Doesn’t Have to be Complicated

Tim: I think one of the biggest myths with marketing is that it's complicated. You know, there are so many different marketing channels today, it is really easy to get lost in all the noise but it doesn't have to be complicated. It really does not have to be that way. And that's why we're going to chat about the fundamentals today.

Ryan: So it doesn't have to be complicated. Help me understand that. Because if I googled marketing my small business right now, there'd probably be over a billion results. So how is it not complicated? Help me understand that.

Tim:  To me, it's about going back to the fundamentals. Marketing is complicated because people skip the fundamentals. The fundamentals aren't cool, they're not sexy, you know, it's not the latest search engine optimization tactic or the latest social media channel. They're not cool. Most people start getting tactical with their marketing immediately. Like, need to be on Facebook, or I need to have SEO.

And when they skip the fundamentals, they run into problems. It's just like, if you were to, you could never step up to the plate and hit a major league fastball until you have the fundamentals of actually how to stand at the plate, how to hold the bat, hand-eye coordination, you have to have the fundamentals down in any discipline to reach any level of success. But with marketing, most people skip the fundamentals. They throw spaghetti up against the wall hoping it sticks, and it doesn't. And then they sit there and they wonder Why is this not working?

Ryan: Hmm. So before we get into those fundamentals, because I'm really excited to hear what they are, you're not saying that if you start with the fundamentals that you aren't going to get results. Like, you can you're going to get even better results if you start with the fundamentals. Is that correct?

Tim:  Yes. So I love this quote from Michael Jordan. He said, Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise. When you have the fundamentals in place, everything you do after that works better and more efficiently, right? That's not to say that you're going to do, that everything you do is going to work. That's totally unrealistic. But what you do has a much better opportunity of working once the fundamentals are in place.

Ryan: Got it. So thinking about what Rialto does for its clients and what you do over there, what are your top two amazing results that you've gotten for clients because you focused on these fundamentals first?

Fundamentals First

Tim: So the first one that comes to mind is a local retail client that we worked with. And we knew exactly who their, you know, who their target market was, they have really good messaging, they knew what was going on but they really didn't have a good plan of how they wanted to attract and bring more visitors into their store. So when we got started working with them, we started with the, you know, the fundamentals of local search engine optimization to help them attract more people to their store.

So we focused on their online reviews, their Google reviews. You know, in the first six months, we took them from about 30 reviews to 120 which pulled them all the way above all of their competition by far. And then we took some time, made sure that their Google My Business Page was set up correctly, took care of their directory and citation listings.

And in their market which was not super competitive, I will tell you that, within that six-month period, their traffic, it increased, they were in the top three in the Google map pack and in organic. And, you know, I don't want to say that that's, it's going to be that way for everybody because it really does depend on your industry. But with this particular client, just focusing on those small, simple fundamentals really made a huge, huge difference and they saw really great results from it.

Ryan: That's great. So do you have another one? So, people that aren't in retail, what are, what's another option out there, another industry? Remember, a lot of our listeners are going to be in the trades. So retail sometimes struggled to connect to that.

Tim:  Yep, we've got a commercial cleaning client right now that we got involved with. They're working, we help them with their messaging, right? What they say, how they say it, right? Because most, when you look at commercial cleaning, most of them say the same darn thing. There's no differentiation in their messaging. We help them create a really clear, consistent message that differentiated their business from their competitors.

We then implemented that into their website, we implemented it into their email marketing, so as they're, as the outreach to clients on a consistent basis. And then we put together a Google Ads campaign. So they're doing pay per click advertising. But they can see a consistent flow of leads each and every month that are helping them reach their goals. But it's that differentiation in their message that makes a huge, huge difference in their results.

Ryan: Wow. So when you think about these clients and the other success stories you have with clients, I know you've got plenty of them, what is the one thing that you find that holds businesses back when it comes to their marketing?

Tim: Confusion. So they're battling confusion when it comes to marketing. And when you're confused, you have no idea what to do. You have no idea what, you know, why is my marketing not working? What are the next steps I should take to get to where, from where I currently am to where I want to be? I mean, there's so many different levels or elements that play into confusion. But when you're confused, it makes it really hard to do anything effectively.

Ryan: Yeah, we have a saying, when you confuse you lose. And it's so true, and especially in marketing, and I'm gonna guess, correct me if I'm wrong, but the message that you share with your target market is really one of the most critical things. And I find so often what business owners think that you do, isn't what people are paying for

Tim:  Yeah, that's absolutely correct.

Ryan: And that's where a lot of that confusion comes from. So let's do this. I really want to know what these fundamentals are. I would love to have you break them down for us. Share with our listeners why they're so important because I think that's one of the biggest challenges that I've seen in the work that I do in helping clients recruit people because recruiting employees is marketing.

And a lot of times, the reason they can't find the right people is because they haven't done some of the fundamentals, like figure out who the right people are. And so until they're able to get clear on that, it's really a challenge to do it. So let's break down those three fundamentals you were talking about. I'd love for you to share with us how they can actually take that and do something with it.

The Three Unsexy Fundamentals of Marketing

Tim: Yep. So, Ryan, I think you're gonna find that these fundamentals can be applied right over to recruiting. They're, I mean, they're simple, right? I like to call them the marketing strategy trilogy. First, you have to know who your target market is. Okay, so who are your ideal clients? Just like, who are your ideal employees, right? So when we look at our ideal clients, most businesses have one to three ideal client types.

Okay, you have to narrow your focus because if you try to reach everyone, it's impossible. You end up speaking to no one, it becomes totally over complicated and it's not successful. You have to narrow it down to who are you going to serve and how are you going to serve those people? And for existing businesses, I think the easiest place to start to identify your ideal clients is ask yourself three questions. One, who do you enjoy working with the most?

What types of clients do you enjoy working with? We all started our businesses because we want to have fun, right? If you're not having fun serving the people that you're serving, then you're serving the wrong customer base. The second question is who are your most profitable clients, right? We obviously want our business because we want to be profitable and we want to make money. You need to identify who your most profitable clients are.

And then the last question you need to ask yourself is, who do you do your best work for? Because if you love the people that you're working with, they are overly profitable and you do your best work for those people, those clients are going to be happy, they're going to talk about you, they're going to refer your business. That's the best place to start. If you can identify that one group that falls into those three questions, then you can start to dig a little bit deeper into that group and see which subgroups come to the surface. And those are going to end up being your ideal client types.

Ryan: I think that's great. It reminded me a second Mike Michalowiczs' book, The Pumpkin Plan. I run into business owners all the time that they take anybody that shows up. Like, if they have money to give me I'll do business for them. And they're usually not the profitable clients, they're usually not the ones you're going to do your best work for.

They're usually the ones that you don't like to do the work for. And so I love that digging into not just identifying a market, like a theoretical out there, but actually, looking at your client base and saying, Hey, who really brings the profits in and who do we really do great work for? Who's going to become that raving fan? I love that.

Tim: Because here's the other thing, once you know who those people are, now it's so much easier to identify where they are, right? Where do you need to go to get in front of those people? But if you're just trying to target everybody, it's just, it's too big of an ocean, right? You need to bring it down to these small ponds so that you know exactly where you need to go to get in front of those specific clients.

Jeremy: Exactly right, Tim, on this. You know, we work with it when we're getting the leadership team clear on what kind of company they're building, what's it going to look like, feel like, what's that culture going to be like? The kind of clients they bring in is going to be integral to it. Just like Ryan's figuring out who we want to hire, the people that we bring on as clients, that's going to create the dynamics of the company.

And I love the question there, who do you enjoy working with? Who are the most profitable clients? And who gets the most amazing results from that? I love that. I have a client we're working with that, they're in professional services and they, so they deal with a lot of other professional service type companies. It's a very stagnant industry, very boring. And as we dug into this, they answered these three questions. And when we really dug into this, now, a warning, fair warning to everybody, it's not 100% politically correct.

But when they really dug into who did they really enjoy, like they had a ball with, they got great results, they made good money, the clients just had the most amazing, like, the whole experience was wonderful. They realized it was middle-aged women who were divorced and had a drinking problem. Which happened also be like what they were. We'll just say it that way. So it wasn't anything else crazy.

But they ended up turning this boring bureaucratic type meetings to Casino Night. Party. And people came out of the woodwork, like this is so much fun. This company's doing a Bingo Night. And they run over there. And then there'll be some big old people would be like, I'd never go do that. Like, so what? We don't want to work with you. So I love how we get really, really clear on, it's a win-win for both. And when that match happens, they perpetuate it for you. They start telling everybody about it.

Clear and Consistent Marketing Message

Tim: Yeah. That's it. That's the power of knowing who your target market is. You can't then take the next step with the fundamentals, which is your messaging, without first understanding your target market. You almost have to be in their head. You want your target market to say, Oh, my God, we're Ryan and Jeremy inside my head or in that meeting the other day? They knew exactly what I'm thinking, right? So once we know who the target market is, then we can start to create messaging that is clear. As you touched on before, Ryan, if you confuse people, you lose them.

And so many of us confuse people. They land on our website and they read the message right at the top and they have no idea what the hell we do and how it's gonna benefit them. So we've got to be clear with our messaging, we've got to be consistent. And when we do that, it makes our company memorable and it makes it magnetic so that people, they know exactly what you are all about. And how we do that is we use a storytelling framework. Okay, I didn't invent this. I wish I could say I did, but it's based on a storytelling framework called The Hero's Journey.

And it was, from a marketing standpoint, it was really popularized by a company by the name a Story Brand. But when you use a storytelling framework, it allows you to invite your customer into a story where they are the hero or the main character and your business as the guide. Our customers are not looking for a hero, they're looking for a guy that knows how to solve the problem that they have so that they can get from where they currently are to where they want to be.

When you use this framework, you can go back to it. We call it a playbook. When we put this playbook together, anytime you are going to create messaging in any way, shape, or form, it could be email, it could be networking, speaking opportunities in your paid ads. It could be in conversations that you have with potential employees, right? To let them know what you do and how you do it. You always go back to the playbook and you pull elements from the playbook to create that messaging.

What that does, it ensures that your message is consistent because if we say different things each time somebody listens to us, they're going to be confused. They're gonna have no idea what we do. So we need to be clear and we need to be consistent. And that framework helps you do that. And once your messaging to dialed in, there's so many different things you can do. But you've got to know your target market and then you can create your messaging from there.

Ryan: No, I totally get that. And I love the Story Brand framework. But to your point, it really started with the hero's journey. I remember talking to somebody a while back, and we were having this conversation about the hero's journey. And the easiest way for me they were huge Star Wars fan and like, nobody wants you to be Luke Skywalker in their story. They want to be Luke. They want to be the hero. You can be Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan was a great guide for Luke Skywalker. But if you look at how often he was in the movie, it wasn't very long. The movie about Luke. And it's so true.

Tim: But if you think about it, right? Luke is lost. He has no idea what he needs to do. But Obi-Wan, he's already a Jedi. He knows exactly what Luke needs to do to get to where he currently is at. And that's why it's so important to position your company as the guide. Most heroes are not very strong characters. They're lost, they're confused, they have no idea what to do. That's why we want to position ourselves as a guide in the story.

Ryan: Yeah, writing a story about a guide wouldn't be as exciting or is as thrilling as writing it about the hero who's going on this journey, the ups and downs and the things they're learning and the mistakes they're making. I totally get it.

Tim: Yeah, if there's no problem, there's nothing that's bringing people into the story and attracting them to the story. There has to be some challenge, some problem to pique people's interest to bring them in.

Ryan: That's great. So we've got target market, knowing who it is that you need to get this proper message in front of and messaging being the second fundamental. So help us. What's that last one?

90-Day Marketing Plan

Tim: Last one is you got to have a plan. If you fail to plan, you're planning to fail, right? So what your plan does for you that helps you identify when and what you're going to execute on and it eliminates distraction, it's so easy to get lost with marketing because there's a new tactic coming across our inboxes each and every week. And if we don't have a plan, it's easy to chase every single one of those.

But your plan will keep you focused on what you need to do. What I recommend businesses do is they use a simple 90-day marketing plan. Our businesses are changing and evolving too quickly. Spending thousands of dollars on a 12-month marketing plan is a waste of money. It goes into a desk drawer. So I like to look at six steps in the 90-day plan. One is your target market, which we already talked about. Who you're trying to reach? The second is what's your goal?

You have to know where you're gonna, where you're trying, what you're trying to reach. So maybe that's, I want to bring on 500 customers in the next 90 days, okay? Something that's specific, something that's measurable. Then that third step is what's my budget and what are my resources, my staff resources? Because how much money you have to invest and how much time I have is going to impact what I can focus on. Then the fourth step is what's my current marketing plan?

Realizing that most businesses that I'm talking to right now don't even have a plan. That's okay. But we need to look at what we're currently doing right now. It's just like a GPS, okay? Your GPS can't tell you how to get to the airport until you first tell it where you're starting from. When we look at what our current marketing plan is, it's just giving us an idea of where we're currently at so that we can determine what we need to do to get to where we want to be.

So in that current marketing plan, we look at these primary marketing channels, okay? One is your strategy, right? So do you know who your ideal clients are and have you created good messaging? And your website. Content. Are you producing any content? You know, blogs, videos, anything like that. Podcasts. Your search engine optimization. Are you doing anything there? Your social channels,

Are you active on any social media channels? Email marketing, paid advertising, so Google ads, Facebook ads. And then offline marketing. So, you know, people in the trades, are they doing direct mail? Networking groups, leads, groups, those types of things. All we want to do in this current plan section is just take a note of what are we doing in each of those channels? Then, your fifth step is what am I going to focus on in the next 90 days in each of those channels? Now, depending on how much you have to invest in the people you have, you may only focus on one or two of those channels.

So for example, if, from a strategy standpoint, if I don't know who my target market is and my messaging is not dialed in, that's the first thing you need to do. Absolutely the most important thing because the fundamentals are the foundation of your marketing house. If you build a house without a foundation, it is not going to stay up very long. So you got to get those fundamentals in place first, right? Then I can start to look at, my website is the single most important marketing asset I have.

Everything I do is driving people back to that. So if that outside of the fundamentals, if that's not where it needs to be, I need to focus on that and then I can start to expand into other channels. And the last step here is what metrics are you going to track? The metrics are going to help you determine whether the actions you're taking are helping you get towards your goal. That's it. Use that six-step plan. At the end of every 90 days, you look at what worked, what didn't, make course corrections, and just wash, rinse and repeat over and over again.

Jeremy: That is great. Could you just run down for our audience, I think you just ran down a whole bunch of stuff. There's a ton of pack there. But just run down that list bullet point, just the bullet points, none of the stuff in it. I think that right there is gold.

Tim: So six steps. Target market. Who is it? What's your marketing goal? What is your marketing budget and your staff resources? What are you currently doing? What's your current marketing plan? What are you going to focus on in the next 90 days? And then what metrics are you going to track to help determine whether the actions you're taking are making impact?

Jeremy: That is fantastic there. So when we look at this, are we talking like three sheets of paper? Are we talking 17 sheets of paper? What are we talking like, to put all this together?

Tim: No, Jeremy,  you're talking two pages, max. Maybe three if you're a long-winded writer. But again, we keep, most of the things that we've invested in, we never do anything with because it's just too complicated. We have to keep this simple. It's really easy to make things complicated. It's much harder to make them simple. But if you focus on these, these are the important things that are going to help you determine kind of where you're currently at and what you need to do.

And that's it. Because it is, like I said, it's so easy to just get distracted. But if you've got a plan, and you know, hey, I'm gonna focus on my target market and my messaging over the next 90 days and next week, you get an email from some guru that says, Oh my god, you have to be on Tik Tok. You can say, You know what? I'm good. I'll put this on my list. Maybe I'll look at this later, though, right now, for the next 90 days, I'm not doing that. I need to focus on these two things that are on my plan.

Ryan: I was just gonna say, Tim, you've given us a ton of stuff here. Like, if I'm listening to this for the first time, I'm sitting here thinking, Okay, wait a minute, we got these three fundamentals, we've got this six-step plan. Like, what's the one thing that I want, that we need to challenge our listeners with to go do this week so they can start seeing these amazing principles, these fundamentals and this plan that you've outlined here, so they can start seeing results from it? What's the one thing they need to start with?

Tim: I would interview three to five minimum of my best clients. So those clients, remember that I said, Who do you enjoy working with? Who's profitable? And who do you do your best work for? identify three to five of those people and get them on the phone and just talk to them. 15-minute phone call, maybe? And you're going to ask them questions, like how did you find us? Why did you choose to work with us? What do you love about working with us? You know, is there anything that we're not doing that we could be doing?

Those types of things to understand really what it is you do best and what makes you different. It's very difficult for us as business owners, oftentimes, to articulate the value that we provide because we can't see the forest through the trees. Our customers can oftentimes communicate that very clearly. And the information you will gain from talking to three to five years most valuable customers, you will be amazed how much information you gain from it.

Jeremy: Tim, this has been a great addition. I'm so excited to have all of our listeners hearing all this great value. If they get stuck on this journey in creating this plan how can you help them do this? Where can they go? What resources do you have?

Tim: Yeah, tell them they can go to rialtomarketing.com, which is RIALTOmarketing.com/blue-collar-culture, put a number of resources together for your Blue Collar Culture listeners. One of the documents on there is called the Customer Insight Survey. If they click on that and print that out, that lists every single question they can ask those three to five customers when they talk to.

Jeremy: Absolutely, everybody. So go out there, go to rialtomarketing.com/blue-collar-culture and get that survey, start with it now. I definitely would encourage you. We talk about taking clarity breaks that encourage you to stop just really look at where did these clients come from? Where did that happen? Ask them these questions. Thank you so much, Tim, for being on with us. We appreciate it so much.

Tim: Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity.

Voiceover The Blue Collar Culture Podcast is sponsored by bluecollarculture.com. We help entrepreneurs create a healthy culture and build a self-managing business. To learn more, go to bluecollarculture.com.

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