Marketing Mistakes Hair Business Owners Make: Episode 11

Let's Talk Marketing!

Marketing is one of the most important elements of your hair business! You can have the best weave, but if you can't communicate your marketing message to your potential clients, you will not see the sales you might have expected. In this episode of Hair Biz Radio, we brought in a marketing expert to talk about getting your beautiful bundles in front of potential customers. We want to help you sell more of the everything from the stunning Raw Indian Hair to Edge Control. You can listen to the podcast or read below! <

Episode 11

(Zakiyrah / Mikey / Sherman) Welcome to Episode 11 of Hair Biz Radio with your hosts Zakiyrah and Mikey And we have the amazing Sherman Stanberry with one of the founders of Lyfe Marketing which is a full-service marketing agency here in Atlanta, and he's gonna be talking to us about some mistakes that small businesses make when they're first starting out in their businesses.

Sherman Stanberry of Lyfe Marketing

Great. Thank you guys for having me, first and foremost. I've known Mikey for a long time, Zakiyrah I've worked with you, we went to school together as well. So it's a great pleasure to be on this podcast, I'm excited to share some knowledge with you guys that I think will hopefully help you all take your hair business to the next level. I gotta say, this is actually pretty special, because I've seen these guys grow over the past couple of years. It's not just them personally, but the business, and it's like we're on the same track. We're just both blowing up, so it's so exciting just to have you on here as part of something else that we're doing, kind of an extension of our business. I mean, I know you're such a knowledgeable guy and myself and the Lyfe Marketing team, every quarter or so we get together and have a lunch and trade our inside, like that juicy marketing idea that's absolutely crushing it. So we always share ideas and everything else, so it's great to have him here on the podcast here. We are live in our Start A Hair Business Facebook Group, which is a community of over 7,000 looking for more information about the hair business, so we got a lot of listeners live and then, of course, you can subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher Radio. And today, we're gonna talk about some marketing mistakes that small businesses make. So not everybody might be at the point ... You kinda have to graduate, right, to the point where you would hire Lyfe Marketing? Right. You know, not all small businesses ... Like, they just opened today, they're gonna have to get their feet wet a little bit, maybe some sales. Not everyone has the budget, but when they do, and they're busy or something else, maybe they need an extra hand, that's when they would come to a company like yourself, right? Right. So in the beginning, just to get them to that point, I'm sure you talk to businesses every single day, and you ask them, "What are you guys doing for your marketing?" And they tell you, X, Y, and Z, and you should be like, "Hey, you need to do A, B, C." Right? So today we're gonna talk a lot about that. And Zakiyrah actually used to work with Lyfe Marketing many years ago. How many years ago was that, three years ago? No, it was longer than three years ago. Maybe three, four? Four, five? Three, four years ago? Maybe four or five years ago. Yeah, four or five years ago. Yeah, when they were in the 444 Building, in that small office. Yeah, they were crammed into office kinda like we are today. They've already expanded to their nice, huge space. They have what, how many employees now? We have about 23 employees right now. Whoo. Twenty three. Twenty three, yeah. Here, we had about four or five people, that's when we were getting it, every day, cold-calling, grinding, doing everything we can to push it to the next level. And hopefully, some of the mistakes we've made are something that will be able to help people get through as well, is just how to grow fast, so they don't have to have those small hiccups down the road and to expedite their business. But yeah, we're growing, we're happy, we have about 250 clients right now, which is awesome. And primarily what we focus on is all our marketing stuff and things to that nature as well. Creating jobs in Atlanta right there. Oh yes. So one of the cool things that I really like about you guys is that when you started, it was three young men from Georgia State University. Still in school right? They're done now. Not anymore. No, when you first started. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they were still in school, and they were working on the business and their degrees. So they literally grew a business while all of them were still getting their bachelor's degrees. So that's one of the cool things. And then of course statistics show that women are more bound to start businesses and flourish in the entrepreneurship and business community, but it was just nice to see three young men doing it.

Marketing Mistakes Hair Companies Make

Yeah, very cool. So let's, I would say, just hit it off real quick. What are some of the mistakes, just from the start? Let's talk about it and kinda go from there. So there's plenty of mistakes that I see small businesses make with marketing, but when I think about the topic of today's conversation, it's really two ways that I categorize it. One is, most small-business owners have no idea what it means to do marketing in 2017, 2018. That's A. B; if you do know what marketing really means today, you lack maturity and discipline to commit and continue to commit to that strategy on a continuous basis. So everything that I say will come back down to whether or not you know how to do marketing, you know what it is, you have the knowledge, you have the experience or B, you're not giving it enough time, you're quitting after two, three weeks, or two, three months, and you're not committing to the process of it. So that's what I would say. I think a good example of that, I just talked to a hair business yesterday. This is a true story, and she's making about $1.2 million a year, she has stores in South Atlanta and a store in East Atlanta, in like South DeKalb mall, and she's selling hair extensions. And she says she's down this year, she's lost $62,000 in revenue, and she's trying to figure out what's going on. She's looking at us, we do her marketing, and people like to point at us. We point back at 'em, and we try to figure it out. So basically, in short, I ask her what she's doing in email marketing. I know Mikey; he's making tons of money through email marketing, I know that was the topic of last week's conversation or last podcast conversation.

Email Marketing

She said, "Yes, I'm using email marketing." My next question was, "Okay, what platform do you use?" You know a lot of people use MailChimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, et cetera. She says, "I use GoDaddy." I'm like, okay, wait a minute. For email marketing? For email marketing. She says she uses GoDaddy. Oh, Mikey. You must have just had a heart attack. I am falling out of my seat, when people do hosting with GoDaddy, I about die, but email marketing? She says she was doing email marketing through GoDaddy. I said, "Okay, pull up your account. Let me take a look at it." I have actually never heard of an email newsletter template. I haven't either. In GoDaddy. That's why I look. So I said, "Okay, let's pull it up." So she's literally sending a text email, it has two sentences that say, "Thank you for subscribing, call me if you need me," and her phone number. That was it. And I thought about that. I was like, well most people, even she's making a million dollars a year, still have no idea what they're doing. So I think that's just a good example of it. So you just opened up a whole 'another can of whoop ass for me, because I always give GoDaddy ... I always say, register your domain, domain name only, GoDaddy is amazing. Anything else, and I usually mean like hosting, building your own website, but now email marketing, I can put that in the list of things to say, "Don't make this mistake." 'Cause it's like these mistakes that people make in the beginning, they don't realize how much it's costing them. It's unbelievable. It's really unbelievable. So I 100% I get it right there. That's incredible. Doing a million dollars a year, and she's sending crappy emails. Imagine what she could do with un-crappy emails. Yeah, I know, it's crazy. Two million.

Hair Extension Sales in the USA

And the hair extension business is what, $20 billion worth? Ten billion, something like that. Ten billion? Last time I checked it was $15 billion. Yeah, I know, but for her, a small-business owner who has no idea what they're doing, purely word of mouth ... I mean, hair extensions are selling like crack right now, basically. I mean, people are just going crazy over it. So for someone who has no experience doing marketing, making a million dollars, I can only imagine what someone who's marketing expert like Mikey, you guys, what they could do with a real marketing campaign in this specific field. That's incredible. And those are the kind of things, you know, that we try to teach our clients as much as possible, just because you know, when we first started out marketing in the hair extension industry, we weren't great. We had good concepts of marketing, this, that, the other. We've gone through and made all these mistakes, and we just don't want the people that we work with and our clients and listeners, we don't want them to make the same mistakes. Because they don't just cost you money like you're paying for ads that you shouldn't be running, or something else. But it's the lost sales. Think about the lost sales for her. It's even more.

What is your Opportunity Cost?

Opportunity cost. Yeah, the opportunity cost is more so than just even putting the money out there. That's incredible. Yeah, there's a speaker on that. I mean, if you're losing money through your Facebook ads or your social media pages, not only is it costing you, like you said Mikey, it's costing you lost sales, but you as a business owner ... If most people who're probably watching this had to do this themselves, you're also losing opportunities to grow your business, expand your product line, network, whatever it may be, so you really have to think really hard on that. So I think to avoid a lot of the mistakes associated with marketing is obtaining as much knowledge as you possibly can up front, so you don't have to incur those costly mistakes. It's interesting, 'cause I'm so big on the email marketing, Zakiyrah and I, we always talk about how we're always talking about our classes ... We're recording this right before Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day, I'm creating the free classes for our Dropship Bundles website, so when people sign up, and then how to manage your website, the free class, but I'm gonna have a paid class for email marketing that if people actually do everything I say in this, and I'm gonna walk you through A to Z and probably use MailChimp as an example, it is so worth the money, I promise you. I just met with a couple that drove here from Miami, just to meet us, meet the team. I just took them out to lunch, Tacos and Tequilas here in Atlanta, one of my favorite places, just took them out to lunch and I gave them the checklist, and one of them was ... They hadn't signed up for an email account, and I said, "MailChimp's free, up to 2,000 subscribers." But it's not just having the email account. It's using it properly, right? So what do you think would be something else that you see people making mistakes with?

Should You Be Blogging?

Well, we can go through any part of online. We could start with blogging. If you're not blogging, you're missing out on money; you're missing out on website traffic. For example, there's this statistic. It says, "Companies that blog at least 16 times per month receive four times as much traffic than companies who don't. Companies that blog 16 times per month see eight times the amount of conversions than companies who don't. Companies who blog 16 times per month report that their leads are more qualified, more educated, and they do more repeat business than those who don't." So I think if we start off with the content side alone, if you're not blogging at all, you're missing opportunities to grow your traffic, grow your leads, grow your conversions, grow your sales, your repeat sales, and alone, you're just missing opportunities. So I can go from blogs, social media, email as we already kinda discussed, SEO or even doing videos. But I think the first thing I would say is just get started with having a blog. I think the next thing is what do you blog about, and we can talk about that as well, but I think that would be a point for me. Okay, so if someone is not blogging ... You hear these numbers here; these are real statistics. These are real statistics. I know your statistical guy. These are real statistics. He went to school for accounting, right? Yeah, he's an accounting, master CPA now, right? Yeah, CPA. I mean this guy, we're talking numbers here, CPA numbers here, okay? This isn't just made up stuff, like how I just come makeup with my numbers. Oh, yeah. CPA numbers here. Say someone has their website, okay, this is my question for you. If someone has their website, and they're not blogging even though they could be blogging and they understand that. You know, hey, they're not getting the sales, but you hear the numbers, and they're not blogging, and they're not getting these sales, whose fault is that? It's their fault. 100%. It's 110% their fault. And they have 100% control over doing this, right? One thing I talk about all the time is "Focus on what you can control." If you can blog and write ... You might not be a great writer; it's okay. Use Grammarly. If you're not familiar with Grammarly, look it up, I'll put it in the show notes. It's amazing.

Not a Great Writer? Technology Can Help!

I love Grammarly. Grammarly, yeah, me and Zakiyrah, I give everybody my account. Sorry, Grammarly. I have that pro account, super mag daddy version, 'cause my grammar's horrible, but with Grammarly, I look amazing. So it's like, you have control over doing this. So you can't complain about not seeing results when you have direct ... You have that direct effect that you can do, and you're not doing it. You have to blog. Exactly. And I think, to add to that, a lot of people think they need money to blog or do marketing or to do advertising. That's another big mistake. These are things that are completely free, and all you have to do is put the time in, the hustle in, figure out how to blog, where to post your blog, and literally if you put the time in and you actually commit, like I told you earlier, you will see the results from blogging, for example. Or any type of marketing that we're discussing. So that' another thing, is that you don't have to have a lot of money to start a WordPress blog. It's completely free. Or Shopify or whatever platform that you're using. So I think I just want to add that on to convo as well. And if you're not doing it and need a little motivation, go back to listen to I think Episode 8 with Kendall Ficklin. He's got a word for ya, okay? Sherman knows Kendall, so yeah. Kendall's got a word for you about not doing that. So we touched on email marketing. Yeah, I wanna talk about the blogs. You mentioned that they should be blogging. So for those of you who don't know how to even start with a blog, a lot of people may already have a website, because they have an e-commerce store, so all you would need to do is add a blog tab to your website, and then you can start blogging. I don't know what you would recommend ... 'Cause we blog every day. But if you're just starting out, maybe two blogs a week or - Anything. Yeah, at least something. If you have nothing right now if you put out one blog for the whole quarter, that's progress. If you put out one blog a month, that's progress. Our company ... Mikey may be able to attest to this as well. We try to blog every day, 'cause we've seen our traffic go from 100 visitors to 1,000, to 10,000, to 20,000 hits in a month. So we are firm believers that if you just keep blogging, you will continue to get that traffic. But I think to answer your question, is just as many times as you possibly can, blog as much as you can, and it will show, as long as you commit to it. Yeah, so if you guys do not have a blog for your business, I would suggest getting one.

Wordpress is King!

And any of the websites that you got from us at dropshipbundles.com, so we sell the full e-commerce sites. They're all on WordPress, and as we know, WordPress is the best platform. Absolute best platform. Absolutely the best platform for blogging. It's hands down ... 38% of all websites are on WordPress. Hands down, best blogging platform, so you guys that have the sites and I've got a lot of clients that have done that, you need to be blogging. Absolutely. Don't just read my article that I wrote on privatelabelextensions.com about blogging and how it can boost your business. These are real numbers, we got professional marketer, hundreds of clients, killing it in Atlanta, and he's telling you-you need to blog it. So here's your second dose, right here. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and just as follow up, WordPress is great. It has thousands of features, it's open-source, so anything that you want your website to do, you can, and it's great for SEO. The best possible plug-in or it's the best tool that you can use for blogging. And that's actually how WordPress started, is as a blog website alone. So make sure that you use it. Mikey has done a great job of obviously selling or offering websites that are hosted on the WordPress platform. I think that's a tremendous benefit. Oh yeah.

Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

So we talked about email marketing, we talked about blogging. What's the next segment we can talk about here? Uh, we can jump down social media a little bit. That's a good one. That's a big one. That's a big one. So I think the biggest mistake that I see small business owners make when it comes to social media is kinda relevant to posting. We think, and a lot of our clients, when they contact me, they say, "Hey, I need help posting to my Facebook page." Or creating content. Or "I need that scheduler thing on Buffer or Hootsuite. Can you schedule my post out and go to it?" A lot of people think that's all social media is, when in fact that's just one piece of the process. So a lot of people, they create their business page and start posting. I look at, when I'm analyzing our clients, their social media pages, I see that, like "Hey man, you've been doing a great job posting, like for the last two years, but there's absolutely nobody seeing your content. You have no visitors, so you're basically wasting your time." And their mouths are falling to the floor when I tell them this, because they're like, "Wow, that makes so much sense, I only have 31 fans on my page, and I've been talking only to my friends and family, who consist of those 31 people." So I think they need to really define what their social media strategy is. And I think the way I break it down to our clients is that, if you're posting content, you need to start building your followers and building your engagement. You can do that through page advertising, and if you don't have much of a budget, there are also organic things you can do. But that's more of a brand awareness play. It is important that you can identify the difference between brand awareness and actually driving traffic to your website. Because on the opposite side, you can have ads that go directly to your website store, where you're trying to get people leads, you're trying to get email addresses, you're trying to get sales specifically, or promoting the blogs that we just discussed. So if you're trying to develop a traffic strategy, you can place ads on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and drive traffic immediately to your website, which is more of a short-term strategy. Then if you wanna post, you can build your followers and engagement and build a community focused on relevant content and building a community, I think that would be my biggest tips for avoiding the social media trap of thinking it's just about having a page and posting stuff. So that's what I would say. So what are two tips you give people to organically grow their social media following, two things they could do?

Grow Your Following!

I would say Facebook is hard, because it's kind of become a pay-to-play type of platform, but if you're getting groups like the group that Mikey is referring to that has 7,000 members, show your brand network, and not just those type of groups, but groups where your audience is located, try to add value, build relationships and don't try to sell your products, because people will skip that. Literally try to add to the conversation and network, almost as if you would at a real networking event. So that's one, just joining groups and taking advantage of that. Secondly, on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, there's a lot of ways for small businesses to reach out to people. You can use hashtags. Hashtags are killer. I have a client who does nothing but post content and use hashtags, relevant hashtags, and they're getting hundreds of followers to their page every month, and it's because people are searching for high-volume hashtags. And if you don't know what that is, that's basically categories of content that people are searching for. Then you could also follow people, and then also just make sure that you have good content. Because if people click your page, they look at the hashtags and it doesn't grab their attention, they're just gonna keep on reading and skip past you. So just make sure you have good content that people actually engage with and want to share. That's good info. Yeah, I would say, to recap on that, two things is, going back to the blogs, blogs are great things that you can post on your Facebook. Like on your Facebook page. It's not just, hey, buy this product, hey buy this product. People, they're gonna skip over that. If it's something that's relevant to your audience, stuff like what we write of how to start a hair business, but maybe how to make this awesome bob, or how to color the hair, or you made this awesome wig, how to do it step-by-step with photos and video and all that. You can create the content so that it's not just for your website but it's promoting it into these channels, right? So the blogs work out really well. Another thing with the Facebook groups, there are a lot of Facebook groups that you can post in, and you can't be sales-y. I know there's one if you search on Facebook, and I'll put a link in the show notes. I think it's part of the hairstylists' education forum. I think it has about 80,000 members. And there are all sorts of posts in there, and if you're gonna post and try to grow your audience in there, I think it's real important, you can put your blog posts in there if it's not sales-y. Or you can also say, "Hey, I'm looking to connect with stylists to do some different colored features, or to make a wig and showcase it," blah-blah-blah, "Reach out to me." So as long as you're not sales-y in these groups, then I think you can definitely start getting an audience from there. Exactly. Yeah, really good. So we talked about social media on Facebook and Instagram. What do you think about, what're some tips for YouTube? What are you seeing people do, not using YouTube, that's a mistake.

Is YouTube Really That Important?

The mistake is not using YouTube. And then if they are ... Yeah, not using is one of the things. But I mean, YouTube, as most people don't know, is the number two search engine in the world next to Google, so it's pretty important. So what kind of information could you give us on YouTube? Yeah, so like you just hit it dead on the nail. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, and you cannot skip by that. It's huge. Your customers use it every day. I use it every day. In terms of how to use it, I would say first off start making videos. It doesn't have to be complicated videos. Our company, we create YouTube videos that are literally just PowerPoints, just explaining stuff to people. And some of those videos have thousands of views. So regardless of what you think your video capabilities are, I would just say, "Start to try to off with something where you can add value." And once you figure that out, you record it; you upload it. The second thing is just making sure that people, again like we said with social media, find those videos. There are a few ways that you can do that. One, the title tag, what you name your video on YouTube is extremely important because when you think about a search engine, people search words and you have to have those words in your title. So that's point one. Point two is your description. Just like your title, have a meaty, lengthy description that really has, includes those buzz words that explain what your video's about. But also, maybe something that people search for on YouTube. Those would be two tips that I have. But I think the mistake is obviously not having any video on YouTube or any video presence. And not only is video becoming important on YouTube, but Facebook is also leaning heavily towards video content. If you're watching us on Facebook, you probably see on your timeline this video. It's a great example of it, as well as any other video content you see on your newsfeed.

Don't Forget a Great Video Description!

Okay, so just to break it down a little bit more. So you say a meaty description, right? So my idea of what this meat could be, I want people to be using, put in the filet mignon up there, not the skirt steak. Exactly. So when you say meaty description, about how many words would you say that is? Well, the longer, the better, but if you really want to have a good description, I would probably say around 500 words. If it even allows you to get to that much. I'd have to research and see what the exact amount of words that you can have. Yeah, it does. But honestly, the longer your descriptions are, and the more times you can include those buzz words in a way that makes sense, the better. So I'd honestly keep writing as much as you can, especially if you can't afford YouTube ads and the other types of placement. Just try really hard, making sure you name your video. Like the file you save on your computer needs to include the keywords, the title, the descriptions and a whole lot of other stuff, that you can't even really imagine really factors into where those videos are placed in the search engines. You took my next tip right out of my mouth. This is just a quick little YouTube SEO hack, is make sure the video file you upload, so the actual file that you're about to upload to YouTube, don't have it say, 128B. Oh, Mikey got on me so hard when I used to do that. I would literally upload images that literally said img1214. He's like, "What are you doing?" You literally thought that you shot my cat and ran over it with your car when someone would upload something that is not perfect, but it goes to YouTube. Make sure you name it, and you can do a space. So My-hair-color-tutorial. But now I understand it's for SEO purposes. Yeah, and it's just something you have control over. It doesn't cost anything to name it. But a lot of it's the education; you have to spend the time for the education. Because you can make such a beautiful video, but if you don't use the proper title, a meaty filet mignon description, okay, name your video in the keywords and everything else, your awesome video's just not gonna get the attention it deserves. So you spend all this time making this awesome video, make sure you spend enough time on the other stuff that's important, so it gets out there.

What Not To Do With Your YouTube Video

And also I would say Facebook and YouTube, they're not best friends. Not at all. So just because you have this awesome video and you upload it natively to YouTube if you think you're gonna take your YouTube link and post it on Facebook, what's gonna happen when you post it on your Facebook page? Anyone see it? Nobody. Nobody. Nobody's gonna see it. No, Facebook's gonna be like, YouTube link? Nope. They don't wanna promote YouTube. They don't wanna. Really? Not at all. I never knew that. Yeah, because Facebook is trying to take from YouTube, right? Kinda like Snapchat, they just copy everything. Now they are trying to copy everything. You'll see the channels now on Facebook, I just set mine up 'cause I always say that I'm gonna start Vlogging again, and I just never get to it. But they're gonna copy everything they're gonna do and just do it better. You have to upload that video directly to your page on Facebook. Exactly. Got it. Don't share the link. No, don't let on. I mean, Facebook ... Mikey is 110% correct; we're not making this stuff up. Facebook, they do not, want to promote YouTube at all, so you put a link up, they want it to be the norm that people use Facebook to upload their videos. And I think what you all really have to do is think about these platforms in general, like YouTube, right? How in the world could they rank your video? The only way they can do that is they have to associate your video with the words in it. So I've even had ... Like there's YouTube SEO guys who literally not only worry about the file that this saved as, but there are actual ways that you can edit the description of the foul before you even upload it to video. Now I don't wanna get too technical, but literally, there's a lot of advanced stuff that you can do within your file that you're saving to include those keywords.

Keywords are Crucial

There are also tags that you can tag your videos as, basically like hashtags on Facebook or Instagram that YouTube has tagged as well, that you can use to also help your video show up for those words. So I absolutely agree with everything that Mikey is saying. And I would encourage everybody to start doing YouTube as soon as possible. Yeah, for this industry. Especially the hair industry, YouTube is everything. It's so huge. Let's talk a little bit about ... So we talked about, we got the emails, the social media, the blogging, we got YouTube which is part of the social media. Let's talk a little bit about paid ads on say Facebook or Instagram and Google Adwords can be expensive, and your take, what you see, what's going on right now in the industry as far as that type of marketing.

Paid Advertising

What I see, I've run ads for hair extension companies specifically on Facebook, Instagram and on Google. For people watching, social media, Facebook, Instagram ads ... And also listening, Facebook and Instagram ads, they're so good because it's cheap, right? You can spend $5 to $10 literally and reach 1,000 people. So if you do that on drugs, you spend $100, or $200 or $1,000 you can reach a ton of people for a fraction of the cost that it would take you through printing out fliers and networking across the whole city that you live. Or doing the television ads, the bus ads, and all that stuff. You can literally reach thousands of people through Facebook and Instagram through advertising. So that's kind of the benefit there. And when we use it for our clients, that's how we're using it, is just to try and reach as many people in their market as possible and trying to generate interest. Now Google, Google is really good because it's hot traffic. People are searching for hair extensions, right? So I wish I could go to work one day and just have 100 people who want exactly what I offer without having to search for it. Or having to sell to them. So that's why Google's very good. But as Mikey said, it is more expensive to advertise on Google. The clicks could be higher than it is on Facebook, so what I recommend our clients do is you should try doing both. Try running your Facebook and your Instagram ads. There are some advanced things that we may get into that I know Mikey knows like the back of his head. Like, look at like audiences, remarketing audiences that can make your Facebook advertising campaign way more efficient. And then on Google, there's also some things like product listing ads gets way lower cost per clicks, so if you don't do the text ads, you do the product ads, you can get clicks that are between 50 cents and a dollar and drive a lot of traffic to your website as well. But then there's also remarketing ads through Google. So I know I'm a little long-winded, sorry, but that's what I would say in terms of why you should use it and how you should use it, and hoping to continue the dialogue around it. One thing I would say that is really important is being able to track how much you spend, and what your return is. It's getting a little bit more difficult if you're advertising on multiple platforms 'cause Google's conversion will count it, even if maybe they saw the ad on Facebook, 'cause the way they track everything so that it can be a little bit tricky. But still, you have a general idea.

Create a Marketing Budget

So one thing, before you start spending real money and real budgets on this stuff, like give us a couple of smaller campaigns, not too big of a deal, you really have to learn, and it's not something that we can talk about specifically in this podcast, just too technical to set up, you have to learn how to set up your conversion tracking for your advertising. Because if you're spending and you don't know what you're getting in return, it's very difficult to take that dial. So I look at a dial, and it starts pretty much at $5 a day. It's very difficult to turn it to $10 a day and $20 a day, to $100 a day, to $1,000 a day. Right? Would you agree? Oh yeah. Do you see people probably advertise on these different platforms and not have any conversion, and you ask them, "Hey, what's your return on these?" And they're like, "I don't know."

Know Your ROI

Yeah. I mean I see, and it's a bad thing. Obviously our clients, they don't have those issues, 'cause we help them see their conversions. So the biggest takeaway from Mikey, you said is make sure that if you're spending a dime that you have conversion tracking set up, and that you can literally pinpoint the exact ROI. But I have plenty of people come to me after spending $10,000 in Facebook ads, and I'm like, "Okay, what's your CPA? What's your cost-per-acquisition?" And they're like, "What? I don't know. How do you do that?" And I was like, "Wow, man. So we can't even use the data?" And they're saying, "I don't think it's working." I'm like, "It's probably not." I would just strongly advise that people set up conversion tracking. It will give you the most insight into your campaigns and help you really pinpoint your cost-per-acquisition and continue to increase your sales in a predictable and measurable way. It's just like anything, anything in business or just in your life. You're always gonna do better or be more aggressive when it's something you can track and really know the numbers, right? You weigh yourself every single day, I promise you there's a better chance of you losing weight if you wanna lose weight than if you never weigh yourself. It's something that you can track, and it's always on your mind. And you have to really be able to see these numbers, especially if you wanna scale something. If you've never done an ad on Facebook and you boost a post for $5 or something, okay, it's not the biggest deal in the world. But once you really start getting into this, and you're really serious, and hopefully a lot of our listeners are very serious about the business, these are the kinda things ... We're not just making up; this is so important. We wanna watch what you do with your money. Whether you're a client of ours or not, you're just listening? Cool. That's fine. But we want our clients to be very careful. Like in this meeting, a couple came from Miami, we were sitting down, and I was like, "Stop spending money right now until we get some of the stuff figured out." Right? You don't have your Facebook pixel set up, so you're trying to spend money to send traffic there, and you're not building your traffic list. You don't have your email setup, you don't have your abandon cart email setup, so it's spending the money without having at least the basics which are very inexpensive to nothing, cost nothing, without this stuff set up, having this stuff set up. And you're just missing out. There's no way that you're gonna be successful without getting the basics done. Would you agree? Exactly. No, that goes back to my first point. People do not know how to market in 2017, 2018 the right way. So you have to literally get the knowledge of what Facebook ads are. Most people who call us, they're like, "Hey, I did the boost post thing on Facebook, I spent $500 and nothing happened." And I'm like, "Hey dude, do you know that there's a whole ads manager that you can use to really do more than just the basic stuff that Facebook is doing to get your money?" They make it really easy to get your money really fast. But they don't even know what ads manager is. So I think it's that most people, they don't have the basic knowledge that it takes to really run a successful Facebook advertising or Google advertising campaign.

Learn About Ad Spend Before Spending!

And I think it comes from thorough learning, too, is a lot like you can't just say, "I have a hair business, I wanna go create a Facebook ad." And then you go create it, then you end up spending thousands and thousands of dollars and you're not getting a return on it. So I would definitely recommend that if you're going to do Facebook advertising and you're not gonna hire anyone, use YouTube tutorials, Facebook tutorials to learn how to set an effective Facebook ad. And then as Mikey said, start with $5 a day. Yeah, I agree 100%. Lynda, I know Mikey is a big fan of Lynda. Oh, I love Lynda. Yeah Lynda costs $20 a month. Listen, Lynda, listen. It costs $20 bucks a month and you can learn anything in the world. YouTube. A lot of people in the digital marketing space, even our own company, we learned through online videos or trial-and-pissed-off- client but we figured it out one way or another, so that's what I would say. I'm glad you mentioned that. Just try to learn through all the online tools that you have.

Our New Education Platform!

And that's one of the reasons why Zakiyrah and I are working on the platform for education. I don't even know if I told you specifically even before this, that we've been working on this, and it's sometimes. What I've learned just from this industry, and I've learned a lot, specifically a lot of our clients that just don't get it, even though we sent them to other places to learn, they still just can't get all the information to take away, 'cause it's not really in the terms that they totally understand. So that's kinda what's gonna make Zakiyrah and I's platform and everything we're doing, the education very different because it's all gonna be related to the hair industry. It's gold. It's like, they're gonna be able to relate. Like I'm creating, just for the websites, we've been sending them to WooCommerce, which is the plugin, WooCommerce plugin for WordPress, obviously, it says, "You want to change the pricing and the variations on this site or the other, different links, you can just do it right here." But the example's like a t-shirt or something that and they just can't relate it that well. So a lot of the videos that I'm working on now, it shows them specifically for the hair industry, and I think it's gonna knock their socks off, 'cause they're just 100% gonna get it, because when you're trying to learn, it's hard enough, right? But when it's trying to learn and you don't really get the products that you're learning or something else. You gotta find that information and try to make sense out of it. Yeah, it's like a double whammy. So if I can take one of those and make it easier for people, I think the second step will follow and it'll be a lot easier for them. So maybe we can have you guys have a class on that, it'd be pretty fun. Sure. Yeah, we can definitely look into that. And honestly, I think that is golden. I don't know how much money I would've paid for any business that I start, but specifically even my agency, if I had someone say "Hey, Sherman, this is what an agency is. This is how you market your agency; these are the emails you use for your agency, this is what your Facebook ads should look like." Who knows? The two to three years that I spent doing absolutely nothing in terms of generating. How much, what kind of money would that have? Exactly, I would pay any dollar amount to get that knowledge right in front of me. So if someone, whether it's a hair business or who knows what business, if someone laid out the framework, I don't know how easier it could get, especially from someone who's an expert and has already done it themselves. I'll pay an endless amount for it. Well, let me tell you, as I've talked before we have some real high-level consultants. We basically pay six figures a year so that we don't make the exponential growth. So we've gotten pretty far already, but to get us to that really crazy, high up level, like I've never been there before. So you've got to pay for this information with certain people that will take you there, and yeah, people are like. Because when I tell my friends the exact numbers, they're like, "Wait, what? Do you know how much money that is?" And I was like, "I know. But do you know how much it can make us?" You gotta think, what I'm implementing now, it's gonna take a little bit of time, and with all this stuff that we're talking about, I'd love for you to iterate that your results don't happen overnight, especially with blogging, with vlogging, with any of the ads or anything. It takes time. What's your take on that, how you see companies make the mistake of cutting their campaign short, stop blogging because they're like, "I'm not getting traffic, and I've written three blog posts." Exactly.

Being Great at Marketing Takes Time!

What are some of the mistakes you see people make with that? That goes to the second point is the maturity. So first we said, some people don't have the experience and knowledge. Now we're past the knowledge part, right? So now is, "Okay, how long does it take for me to get results?" And time and time again, people are not committing to the process. I think it comes down to most small business owners think that. I don't know if they talk to their accountant or something, they're like, "Hey, what's the ROI?" They're like, "What's the ROI?" I get on the phone with a client who's interested in our services, and he wanna know, "What is the ROI, can you tell me what it is if I spend $500 am I gonna get $1,000 back in two weeks?" That's just how people are thinking. And I like to think of it like you're building an asset. You're building a construction site, who knows, you're building up something from nothing. Let's be honest; your customers don't know you exist. So you're trying to get ROI, but first, we have to kind of take steps and say, okay, I need awareness. I need a website. I need a blog. And I think the harsh reality is that a lot of people don't wanna face is that it takes six to 12 months to really even start seeing this snowball turn into a larger snowball.

Have Patience for Results

So I think patience is the key. That's my number one recommendation, is if you really think all of this makes sense, you already know that you need a blog, you get the social media stuff, you know what AdWords is, but you're not seeing the results, I promise you something you're dealing with, you're not giving it enough time, or you don't have enough resources to even do it yourself. But that's kinda what I would say about that. That was really good info. Really, really, really good. So to wrap this up, I have one more topic that I think's kinda true to heart, so important, that I see a lot of mistakes and I think you'll agree and I just want it to be reiterated on this when people listen to this, and they can really sit down and say, "Okay, let me listen to what they're saying. I haven't been doing this. I haven't been blogging this. I haven't been seeing the results. But wait, I'm not gonna see the results for six to twelve months, let me pump the brakes, calm down a little bit, switch to decaf." Like I'm on decaf now, I had to switch to decaf. The regular, I just came in too amped. I came in too amped. Usually, actually I park my car a block away, I put on my headphones now 'cause they switched me over to Apple so I got those Airpod things. I put on my Fit Radio like the hip-hop DJ makes, I'm like Rick Ross rolling through the door, I came in. But with the coffee, people were like, "Mikey, calm down, you're way too excited." It would be like the smallest thing and I'm like "What?" Mikey's on ten without coffee. Yeah, so that's why I switched to decaf and it didn't make too much of a difference, but yeah. So the key is to understand that yeah, it's gonna take a while, even if you're really good. But when you're really good, the key is to be consistent. Exactly.

Consistency is Key!

You can't post five times on Instagram today, not do it for a week, and then post once again and be like, "Wait, where are my results?" What do you think about consistency with marketing that goes with all of these topics? How important is consistency? It's the most important, once you get the knowledge down. I'm not sure if you guys or the listeners know who Gary Vaynerchuk is? Gary V. Oh yeah. We just talked about this the last time, I got the Gary Vs coming, the shoes. You saw the Gary V shoes? They already came. Oh yeah, I already got 'em. I haven't worn them yet. They're sitting there. Sitting there. K-Swiss? K-Swiss. He got the shoe deal. I talked about 'em on the last episode.

Gary Vaynerchuck Speaks the Truth!

That's whassup. Gary Vaynerchuk says something that just made this way more sense to me, for anybody to understand. He said, "I know exactly how to get a six-pack. But I don't have one, and I think it comes down to consistency." It's not rocket science. We all know what it takes to get to losing weight or whatever type of result that you're getting if you go on a cleanse or diet if you're trying to do whatever. But I think people don't literally want to take the steps to get there. They cannot commit to the process. And I think it's underrated when we talk about consistency. Because a lot of people do not, whatever goal they have, they're just not consistent in the implementation of it. So obviously if you're listening to the podcast or you're watching us on Facebook, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's an act of consistency. You have to literally go and work on something every single day in order for it to get results. And that's not just marketing. That's anything in life that you want. So I think it's one of the most important items once you actually understand what's going on. So that's how I would respond to the consistency component. Yeah, and we stress that too. Our clients, people in the group all the time. Consistency produces results. Definitely. Exactly. Yeah, so I think that's more information than most people need. Sherman came in and killed it. Just, I can't believe it. There's a lot probably compressing in your mind right now. Don't worry, you can always listen to this episode multiple times. We're gonna have plenty of information and links to the show notes, especially links over to where you can find Sherman. They have an awesome marketing blog at Lyfe Marketing. It's L-Y-F-E marketing.com, we'll have a link in the show notes so you don't have to miss 'em. Where else can people find you? You know, just check out the blog. Read that. From an education standpoint, I think that's the best thing for anybody to do. Our website's obviously Lyfe Marketing, our phone number's on our website, but we really try to add... If you like listening to some of the stuff we discussed today, we try to show you a little bit of how you can do it. So if you just need more content to learn, that's great. And also i know that Mikey's coming out with a killer program, so I'm excited to see that myself. Let's see if we can get you on there. I think it would be a good complement to everything we're doing, 'cause Zakiyrah and I are huge on we understand that we can't do everything ourselves, and we've been here, Private Label Extensions, you probably noticed when you went over there. You're like, "Wait a second. They have a lot more people, a lot more offices." That's what I said, find Zakiyrah. It is. It's built up and when we move to our new space here in six weeks, two months, whatever it is, it's gonna be whole next level. So even maybe being part of, Zakiyrah and I are planning on doing seminars, smaller classes where it's not like ... We actually will teach you stuff. 'Cause obviously, some of these seminars, I swear people go just because someone has all these Instagram followers, and it's like, "Oh, come to this marketing thing." I'm like, you do ... I look at their stuff and I'm like, "Okay, let's be real." Are you really a marketer? You have a lot of Instagram followers, and yeah you might be attractive, cool. But to actually learn about marketing, like the stuff we're talking about here, they do not do any of that stuff. I mean, do you agree? Do you see that? Yeah, there's a lot of people who talk the talk but don't walk the walk. Yeah, so it's just like we're Private Labels Extensions lease. We're behind the scenes, we're not as flashy with a lot of stuff, but trust me, behind the scenes you see and Zakiyrah knows. We're beasts but we wanna teach more people. That's our passion is not only be best selling, the hair is just one component. And then we have the whole education side to us, and it's more fulfilling that allows us to do more things, more charity stuff. It's just so exciting that having you on our podcast. Oh yeah, this was great. And your company, Lyfe Marketing's been killing it, growing like crazy. Every time I sit down they have what, 23 employees? Twenty three. That's incredible. Really incredible. Zakiyrah, what else you got for 'em? All right. Guys, don't forget about the giveaway, make sure you enter the giveaway. You can go to Episode 10 and comment, like the podcast, download it, and make sure you give us some feedback. And we are giving away a logo. A logo, so if you're just now starting - Logo design. So if you're just now starting your hair business, you don't have anything, one of the top five things that you need is a logo, so we'll be giving that away. So make sure that you check out the podcast and leave us some feedback. Yeah, and just real quick about the logo. We have the logo service on our website, and what's great about it is, after you purchase the logo, it sends you an email, and you fill out this whole long form about describing what you want the logo to look like, and we take all that information, and then our designers come back with six different logo designs, and you can kind of go from there and say, "Hey, I like a little bit from design 1, but I want it to look more like design 6, stuff like that." And eventually morphing it together, and we've had some really happy clients with the logos. Oh yeah, they do a great job on the logos. For sure. I didn't know you all were doing that. That's awesome. Full service. Full service over here. We're a hair agency, one-stop shop. Logos, packaging, branding, drop shipping the actual hair, education. Just like Lyfe Marketing. We've been growing. That's awesome, man. Oh yeah, for sure. So thank you guys for tuning in to Episode 11, we had the amazing Sherman Stanberry of Lyfe Marketing who dropped some great information along with Mikey. I was kinda sitting over here like "Huh, I didn't know some of that stuff." But it was a great episode. Make sure you guys subscribe, subscribe, subscribe, and tune in the next time on Hair Biz Radio.