The Key Problems With Digital Marketing In 2021

welcome back everybody it is the next episode of the fearless business podcast i'm your host robin wait the fearless business coach we're going to be talking all things content and digital marketing today and i have a very esteemed guest the new york times calls him the web marketing guru but what i call him is the author of one of the finest books i think out there marketing wise it's marcus sheridan welcome to the show marcus best thing as well is like the principles and they ask you answer it like they are simple principles that pretty much any business owner can apply 100 and any of us can sit and write something it is not above anybody listening to this nobody here will read they ask you answer and say there's no way i could do this they're going to read it and say what the heck why am i not doing this right now that's what you're going to say if you read it i had a really interesting disagreement with somebody in a room on clubhouse recently about content marketing and we're all talking about different strategies and things like that and i introduced them to the sort of you know thought processes behind sort of they ask you answer and i kid you not i went oh has anybody remembered this little app called google and somebody laughed at me and i was like 80 90 of traffic when somebody is searching for something still goes through google you know it's a it's one of the first websites that people go to to actually search for information which then leads them into youtube which is the second biggest search engine it's owned by google it's still so relevant you know you can get a website up online the problem is robin is not cool to talk about that and that's the issue if it's not super cool not super sexy then people are trying to come up with fancy stuff that sounds cool or sounds better but the reality is we all pretty much for the most part the majority of us learn about our purchasing decisions the same way to your point we're still for the majority of us using google and a very high percentage of us are going to youtube we're watching videos about it and then we're making our decisions do we use some social yes absolutely does it work differently on occasions yes absolutely but that's still the horse that's the lead horse and so you probably should make the lead horse happy if you can and you want to make the customer happy if you can as well that's what's beautiful about the ask you answer oh by the way that's all that google is they're trying to answer your questions as best they possibly can and they give you like clues as well it's like with the little social snippets where it's got the questions at the top you click on it and they expand out and you click on it and they expand out and things like that and one of the other five pillars you mentioned about reviews as well you know google review you can get trustpilot and you can get facebook reviews and all these different review platforms but actually you know on google website where people are actually going and searching for this stuff if they find your website and next to it it's got 105 star reviews it's a no-brainer which business do you think they're going to be drawn to first irrespective whether they buy or not but they're going to go to your website so it's taking care of like two out of your five core principles there just in one simple app 100 in terms of the pool business river pools how did you start that in the first place did you wake up you know as a teenager nobody ever says i want to be a pool guy when i grow up i mean that you just don't hear that but i had just gotten out of university and my two buddies had started this business i was actually their first employee and i became a partner at six months and that's the thing you know i think we focus too much on the industry because it's funny to me when i became a pool guy a family member came up to me marcus uh so i heard you're gonna be a pool guy i said yeah and this person said what a waste what a waste and that always stuck with me and of course i've had people around the world come up to me around the world all over the world and said you're that pool guy right you're that pool guy right i read about you and the point is i realized that it wasn't about pools for me you don't have to be passionate about the industry per se it's what you're doing within the industry i'm passionate about growing stuff and watching it turn into something really magical so i grew in this case a pool company and i've grown an agency and i've grown other stuff i like to grow stuff and i like to communicate along the way and i like to see the patterns along the way it just happened that i was a pool guy at first this whole idea about i would never work in that industry man people that think like that that is so myopic it is naive it is missing the mark and let me tell you when it comes to blue collar industries there's so much money so much opportunity to be made for those that don't think they're too good for blue collar jobs it's really fascinating actually my guest marcus that literally i recorded before this the previous episode brian he made his blue collar business was mowing lawns his dad's one day said i'll stop playing on nintendo our neighbor wants his lawnmower going own some money and he got 20 bucks for his first laundry mode and grew that business to be 10 million dollars so in you know plus a year today we've got it covered because we've got the landscaping the pool which the two go hand in hand together and you're both incredibly successful both incredibly like motivational people who other business owners will look up to and aspire to and i hope that that family member has since looked back and said well congratulations marcus i was wrong i don't know if they have or haven't and i don't care if they do because the path i have taken has been a glorious beautiful path and i just i think it's important that we all remember that it's not about the industry it's about what you're doing within it so as to satiate your gifts and your talents and i clearly satiated mine and i wouldn't be a professional speaker today i wouldn't have traveled the world today had i not started off as a pool guy everybody resonates with the pool guy story it was like a pool guy can do it why can't i do it that's a beautiful thing yeah they don't listen to me and say my goodness he's such a high iq individual there's no way i can do that they're like that guy right there can do this there's no reason why i can't do that myself that's a good thing i think it's obvious i mean like the energy which you carry up how do you keep that sort of going what gets you up up in the morning and sort of it's not caffeine i could tell you that i don't do caffeine i don't need caffeine you know people ask me marcus why are you so excited about this stuff because i would have lost my home my 16 employees would have lost their jobs in 2009 had i not embraced these simple philosophies that are available to anybody and so to me it's like we've got these opportunities there's never been a better time to be a business owner than right stinking now because you can be a small player but a big fish man it's so fun and the internet is the great equalizer i don't care what type of budget some of these companies have to throw money at the tv and run ads they're not creative thinkers i'm creative i think like buyers and because of that i'm able to do things at a scale some of these massive multi-billion dollar companies can do you couldn't do that 50 years ago you couldn't do it 25 years ago when the internet just started just started 25 years ago we're still at the beginning man this is exciting stuff and it changes lives i live in a place of financial peace today right but for the first probably 34 35 maybe almost years of my life i never made more than a hundred thousand dollars a year and now i'm in a place of of financial peace and prosperity all because of adhering to simple common sense principles where i started with what what i want is the buyer as the customer applied it to my business then many businesses and it's like wow that's amazing i think one of the things which i've noticed is that people just want like something for nothing now they want to do it super fast and the internet i think has given us this false perception that you can kind of launch a business and lo and behold make a million bucks in the year and everything's really easy and the reality is you know to draw a comparison to brian my previous guest as well there is an element of like the slow steady approach which means that you're laying really solid foundations for your business and again that's the principle which i took from they ask you answer it wasn't just about 10 articles that you know you just happened to be lucky with those 10 articles you wrote and you wrote and you wrote you wrote hundreds or something like 1200 articles in a year didn't you well yeah i mean it's like i wrote one article a day um actually i did it at night after the kids and my wife had gone to bed i sat there and typed at the kitchen table i did one a day every day for two years until we became the most trafficked swimming website in the world and i did that because i didn't have any other choice i didn't have any other options you know what i'm saying and to your point the quote that i always and i've come to appreciate this so stinking much is the idea of we oftentimes overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate and what we can do in 10. what has happened to me in my life in the last 10 years is absolutely stunned 43 years old if you'd said to me at 33 you're gonna have this this and this and achieve this and this by the time you're 43 i'd say no way now seriously no 10 years man everything can change