0:00 Pat

Hi, Pat the podcast editor here. Have you ever fallen into the trap of flashy Instagram business gurus selling overpriced lies and empty promises? Well, in today’s episode, Dan and Lloyd discuss the 10 marketing lies you’ve been told.

00:15 Dan

I think, alarm bells always go for me when someone because I’ve been speaking at events before and other speakers and stuff have said, it should be a three and a half minute video that’s posted at 2 pm on a Tuesday on Instagram stories with three and a half hashtags. And it’s like, what, that doesn’t make any sense.

0:033 Pat

You’ll also hear Lloyd give his spin on some popular marketing phrases.

00:37 Lloyd </p

Build it? And no one will know you’ve built it, build it and shout about it. And people might come. Sounds rubbish. But that’s what they should say.

Pat 0:47

Right? Let’s get stuck in lie detectors at the ready. This is episode 95 of the business anchors podcast.

01:08 Lloyd

How is an episode about marketing lies going to help our audience, Dan?

01:12 Dan

Well, it does sound like a bit of a weird one. But for any marketer listening, we’re going to be shining the light on some of the things that lots of people talk about in the marketing world that we don’t believe is true. And I think understanding why these things aren’t true will help you improve your marketing. So hopefully, it’s going to be an interesting discussion.

01:33 Lloyd

It will, so we’re going to be talking about lies that are often told in the mark, that sound quite that people lying to people.

01:42 Dan

Also, this is subjective as well. So this is our opinion. So again, anything you hear take with a pinch of salt.

01:49 Lloyd

But our opinions are better than anyone else’s opinions. So that kind of balances it out.

01:55 Dan

So we’ve each kind of thought about some different things that we’ve heard in the marketing world that we don’t believe are true, and we’re going to start some discussions around those different points. So Lloyd, yeah, tell us one of your marketing lies. What have you heard in the marketing world that you don’t think is true?

02:11 Lloyd

Okay. Tell you what you should do. You should analyze your local competition. Okay, I can tell you why I think that’s not good. Because I think you should be aiming higher than that. So, often businesses are told to write what they need to do and analyse what their local competitors are, which, to an extent, I don’t think is bad. Competitor research is helpful. But I think people are limiting themselves in this new online, new online age, not new sound like an absolute boomer there, we got the interweb to use. I don’t think people should be comparing themselves to the business down the road that does the same. And well, I suppose I don’t want them only to compare themselves to that.

And how can we be? So we’re Locksmiths? We’re Mr Lucky locksmith? Yeah. And you’re going oh, this is Mr. padlock locksmith down there. We just need to make sure we’re better than them. I think to look at the biggest locksmith in the USA, look at the biggest locksmith in Sussex, look at the biggest locksmith in Essex, what the best businesses are doing and compare yourself to that and take inspiration from that. Rather than saying, I’m gonna compare myself to the one that’s closest to me, and just trying to be a bit better than that.

03:35 Dan

And we’ve even got a lot of value from looking at other businesses completely outside our industry. So that can be useful as well. Like, we get some of our biggest inspiration for our marketing from campaigns that are being run in other countries for completely different businesses, for our kind of content.

03:32 Lloyd

In our scripts, get you, we get our inspiration from massive global or British comedies and sitcoms and the comedy in that rather than. Can anyone think of a funny advert they’ve seen, you know, like you’re saying outside of your industry looking for that inspiration, looking for the best of the best and aiming for that rather than? Can we just be a bit better than this company? It can be the same for big brands as well.

You know, if you are a drinks brand, right, um, Corona that took me a while. Yeah. And that’s a big brand that probably will be looking at other competition but looking outside of their industry for competition, like who’s, who’s marketing their product in the best way not which beer is marketing their product in the best way? Who out of all the businesses in the world is doing something that we can take inspiration from and improve our own business?

04:50 Dan

So competitive research is still good.

04:53 Lloyd

Yeah.

04:53 Dan

But just doing it now. I believe what you’re saying is just don’t do it. Just a local level. Do it on a global level on look at the real big players, because you can learn a lot from that.

05:02 Lloyd

Even small businesses, we’ve got the internet now you can look at businesses like yours in South Africa that smashing it and take inspiration from them. You have access to every business in the world now, so take advantage of that. That’ll be mine. So, do you want to go headlong yours, Dan?

05:20 Dan

Yes. Have you ever heard build it and they will come?

05:24 Lloyd

Do you know what Dan? I have. And it was actually on my list. You stole it.

05:30 Dan

I just think this is absolute rubbish. Imagine, like, if this was true, our jobs where we wouldn’t have jobs would be because we’re marketers that help get attention.

05:40 Lloyd

I think the true thing is, to build it and probably will. No, no, no, no, you’ve built it. Yeah. That should be the saying. Yeah.

05:49 Dan

I mean, sounds like crap saying though doesn’t it Yeah, yeah. So there are so many things, trying to fight for our attention, that it’s important as a business that we need to work hard to go out there and be one of the things that are captivating our customer’s attention, rather than just being part of the noise.

06:05 Lloyd

I think it’s a little bit vain, actually, they’ll build it and they will kind of you’re basically, you’re saying, If I build a business or do something, that’s good enough, people will find me. And the reality is like saying there’s so much competition for attention, they won’t like someone can just put, do a pay per click ad for the name of your business. And they will probably get the attention before it gets to you.

06:29 Dan

And I think we’ve experienced this growing our business like we especially in the early days, when no one’s heard of you, like everyone who’s started a business knows that in the early days no one knows you. And we had to fight so hard to get our name out there go to every networking event we possibly could to build our social channels to create content to get to, for people to know us, it’s, it just takes a lot of time to get people to know.

06:54 Lloyd

Yeah. So build it, and now know you’ve built it. Build it, and shout about it. And people might come. And what’s your next one? Lloyd. So my next one is anyone can build a business and market a business that’s gonna make you millions. Because from personal experience, I think even though I’m good at a lot of business stuff, without you, I couldn’t have had a business as successful as this.

So I think the thing online of people saying like it’s really easy to build and market a new business, they don’t say it’s easy, but they say you just need to buy this $5,000 course. And then anyone can do it. I just think it isn’t true.

07:36 Dan

There’s so much more to think about than you think when starting. We talked about this a lot how we’ve got completely different sets of skills, and it works well. And at the start, if I would have known how many different things you need to know to run a successful business I probably wouldn’t have started one.

07:54 Lloyd

Yeah definitely. And I, I don’t know, I think for lots of people, they would be far better, far happier, far more successful, make more money, like maybe managing a department in a business or being a brilliant Freelancer at they do, than trying to build a business that’s going to make them millions, because I think this is specific sets of skills that not everyone does have or would be suited too.

08:22 Dan

I guess you don’t know until you start, like how did we know that we would enjoy this? we didn’t do?

08:30 Lloyd

I think it’s fine for people to try and run businesses and I don’t think it’s good that people say anyone can do this. Because you should try if that’s what you want to do. And I’m not saying people shouldn’t try new things. But don’t then if it doesn’t work, don’t think well, there must be something wrong with me because they said anyone can do it.

Because the truth is building a business and marketing a new business or brand or product or service is difficult. So sometimes, it’s your skills might not be suited to that. But I’m not saying don’t try just I don’t like it when people these gurus say anyone can build a seven-figure business.

09:10 Dan

I think this is one of the key themes for all of these types of people. They’re always oversimplifying everything. The honest thing about running a successful business is that from our experience, it takes years of working hard, making mistakes and figuring things out. You can’t just do something in three simple steps. From a marketer’s perspective, I understand that to make something hooky and catchy you know, we do it with our podcasts and stuff like here’s three ways you can do this thing.

09:41 Lloyd

Probably with this podcast.

09:42 Dan

Yeah. But I imagine if you did a podcast like here are 10,000 things you can do across seven years to maybe run an OK business. No one going to listen to a good episode. Yeah, yeah. So I think yeah, a lot of these things are kind of oversimplified to make it sound catchy, but You need to understand the truth that 99% of successful businesses take years of doing 1000s of different things and making mistakes to be somewhat successful.

That’s, that’s the truth, isn’t it? Yeah, I think something that isn’t good is that a lot of light is shone on this kind of unicorns like, you know, texts, like Facebook. And companies like that. And like in our industry think company like a social chain that is like one day, they’re one employee, then they’re 10,000 the next day.

10:34 Lloyd

They don’t talk about the 500 social agencies in the last three years that I’ve set up, and then they fail. And they don’t exist anymore. So yeah, I think that’s a good point. So Dan, do you have another one?

10:47 Dan

Yes, I do. So another lie, a lie. Something that I don’t agree with is you should just increase your prices?

10:56 Lloyd

Do you know that’s so good? It’s also on my list? Yeah, completely agree.

11:00 Dan

But yeah, I think I’ve heard several kinds of people saying this, and I just don’t agree with it. Because I think for young, naive sort of business owners starting, they just again, it’s oversimplifying, it’s another thing of, oh, I’m not earning enough money, I don’t have enough clients.

So I’ll just increase my prices. That’s not a good idea. Because one, you’re gonna increase your prices, but your the quality of what you’re doing probably isn’t in line with that. So you’re going to lose customers, and you’re gonna put other people off? And it’s just not.

11:33 Lloyd

I think there’s, there’s, it’s a bit of a trend over the last year or so for that to be business advice, like, you’re not making enough money double your prices. And the reality is, that’s probably bad advice.

11:39 Dan

Like, it can be good advice. It can be good advice, in a way thinking of our previous episode about capacity planning, if you’ve always got too much work, and you have to let customers down and say, no, that could be a time when it’s like, oh, you know, in terms of supply and demand, there’s more demand than there is supply. So let’s increase the price.

12:08 Lloyd

But a lot of the time the advice is given to the businesses or the people that haven’t got enough work, like, I haven’t got any customers, double your prices, it’s the opposite of that. Oh, so then you’ll have half as many opportunities to get business and they still won’t work with you. So yeah, I completely agree with this one.

12:28 Dan

What I would say is, so instead of doubling your prices, I’d focus on double the amounts of your energy and getting better at what do because of how good you are at what you do because then that will lead to being able to double your prices. After all, the demand for your service will increase.

12:46 Lloyd

Double how good your service or product is, and you’ll have double the amount of people that want it. And then you can double your prices. Again, sounds rubbish. But that’s what they should say.

12:58 Dan

I think so many people are going to be put off from like starting businesses and listening to this episode because we’re just saying, do things for years. And it might work.

13:09 Lloyd

I think it’s far better to be realistic than or, you know, don’t forget anyone listen to this, you could ignore this advice and have this unicorn business that ends up being the next Tesla, but you probably won’t so.

12:23 Dan

Anything else. What other lies have you heard Lloyd?

13:26 Lloyd

So very marketing, one, you need to be on this platform. Otherwise, you know, everyone’s gonna be on this, you’ll fail if you don’t. There’s no social media platform or certain website you need to be on to have success. So some are there are very successful businesses, massive businesses that aren’t on Twitter. There are massive businesses that aren’t on Facebook. There are massive businesses that aren’t on this website that this local guy and networking meeting says you have to be on. And you have to pay him 20 pounds a month to be on it.

I think everyone has their expertise and pushes what they know and what they’re good at. But your business doesn’t necessarily need it. So don’t listen to someone if they’re like, you’ve got to be on TikTok at the moment for a lot of businesses, I would say probably a good idea to explore tick tock, you don’t need to be on it. I don’t know. What do you think?

14:25 Dan

Yeah, I think like you say some businesses are hugely successful just through email marketing, but a lot of people now would say that that’s not gonna work. I think this is a trend especially with marketers though because there are so many new platforms coming out.

After all, things change so all the time. marketers want to be the first to adopt everything because I think that kind of first mover strategy of if I’m the first person to join this new platform, and it blows up, then I’ll be like, influential on there. Yeah, but because there are so many platforms like when clubhouse came around. Yeah. Some people invested crazy amounts of time because of the way the platform was built, you had to be on it live, having a chat for it to get exposure. So people just spent so much time.

15:12 Lloyd

Marketers who were then experts in the clubhouse were telling all of their clients and their audience that they need to be in the clubhouse because that’s beneficial to them. They’re not saying you have to be in the clubhouse because your business has to be in the clubhouse.

So like you said, we analyse the club clubhouse and realised it wasn’t worth us investing the time, or we didn’t think so at that point, in three years, the clubhouse may adapt and change. And we might think it’s worth it. But I just think, I think to be aware of marketers that push, you have to do this, you have to be on this because that’s usually in their best interest, or it’s just what they know the most about. So they’re saying, you have to do this.

15:48 Dan

I think this has been a shift in the way we communicate over the years. Because early on, I was one of the people that said, You got to be on LinkedIn, you got to be on Facebook, do Facebook ads, because that was working for us. I was like, oh, it’s gonna work for everyone.

16:05 Lloyd

It’s what we felt most comfortable with. We knew we can deliver value to clients on that because we were good at it.

16:10 Dan

And now I’m way more like, whenever we talk about and all these podcast episodes, we kind of let give context that listens to this because this is what’s worked for us.

But it may not be for you, there may be something better for you like your skills may be matched with a different platform with a tip different type of marketing, your audience may not be on any of the platforms we’re talking about. So definitely take every piece of advice from marketers you hear with a pinch of salt, especially us because we’re just sharing, this is what this podcast is all about sharing our experience.

16:38 Lloyd

I think I’ve realised the big marketing lie as well. And that’s that the title of this, I think, is 10 marketing lies. And I haven’t kept track of how many there are. But I think we’ve doubled up I don’t think there’s 10 So just another example of how marketers lie to you. Yeah, okay. 10 sounded good. So we put it in the title.

16:56 Dan

I mean, before you said that, we could have just changed your title to the number it was. Yeah, that we said, Yeah, that would have been fine, too.

17:02 Lloyd

Yeah. But I want to lie to him. This is just a show you, that even people you trust can lie to your face. Yeah. You’ve got any more Dan?

17:13 Dan

Yeah, I’ve got another one.

17:14 Lloyd

Cool, who knows how many? not 10.

17:15 Dan

I’ve got up to 10. All of our attention spans are shrinking. Yeah. So and I’ve again as I fall into the trap of saying this as well. I think previously, everyone’s attention spans are shrinking. I don’t believe that. What I believe is our options are widening. If you think about it, our options for where our attention is widening, because I mentioned this earlier, because of the internet, we now have so much information accessible to us on so many different platforms that we have to divvy up that time accordingly.

So it’s making it more difficult for brands and marketers to get in front of someone and hold their attention. Because especially when you think of like TikTok, so TikTok is blown up through snackable. Short, like 10/22 endless videos. How can you compete with that? It’s very difficult to compete with when this algorithm is literally like manipulating you just stay on this platform for hours swiping, swiping it’s difficult to get people’s attention.

18:25 Lloyd

It’s interesting, because yeah, so so like you’re saying our option, we’ve got options of what we want to give our attention to. But like YouTube and Netflix, people watch for hours. And we don’t say, Oh, we got you got to make YouTube videos that are 30 seconds long, or on Netflix, we need to change our programmes to make it three minutes long. Because the content is good enough for that audience where people will watch it for hours.

And people say, Oh, no one watches TV for six hours each evening anymore with our ads. You know, no one can concentrate like they’re concentrating on their favorite YouTuber for four hours in the same evening. So I think it’s a very good excuse for people who don’t have the knowledge and how to get people’s attention or can’t create content good enough to go. Yeah, it will have to be five seconds long, because anything longer now and watches it.

19:13 Dan

And I think being open, realising this was a game changer for our business. And this is why we’ve shaped our whole business around creating marketing content marketing campaigns that serve the end customer first, rather than help the brands we want to work with first, because if we just focused on this product brand coming to us and pushing their product, by this product by this product, that may work in the short term, but eventually people are gonna get turned off. And that’s not what they want to see.

Like we said before, they want to be educated, entertained, and inspired by the content they’re consuming. So this is why we try and focus on and I think all marketers should focus on What content you do your customers want to listen to, like take this podcast, for example. In this podcast, how often do we say to you, buy Knowlton services and become a customer, we’ll help you with your marketing? We don’t we rarely say that.

Because we know that you won’t like that listeners and viewers like you’re not interested in that what we think maybe we’re wrong you’re interested in is learning from our experiences of marketing, what’s working for us what we think about the industry so that you can gain value from that first. And yes, we do have a strategy behind this podcast, we do mention campaigns, we run like the cool campaign we did with a top 10 Netflix show recently and a global brand to kind of show you that we’re good at what we do. And if you do ever want to work with us you can, but most of it is focused on actually trying to provide value for you.

20:31 Lloyd

That’s the funny thing. So you guys listen to us for like half an hour at a time. And we’ve got loyal listeners that listen to almost every episode. So thank you, everyone. But we could have done this podcast differently, just like selling our business. We’d look at the graphs, and they only listen for three minutes, and then they go off and then we’d be going, your podcasts have got to be three minutes long.

Because no one wants to listen for longer than three minutes. So no, actually, if you create a shit podcast people don’t want to listen to, then it has to be three minutes long because they’ll give up after that. But you know, Joe Rogan, and some of the big podcasters they’ve had at some of the podcasts I listen to, there’s been ones that are almost two hours long. And I put and I even like, I don’t have time to listen to them in one go.

So I divvy up, and I go back to them. Because I have such a, I have a long attention span for those things, because it’s so good. And people always come to us. So how long this should this video be? And my they want a quite often when we have like kickoff calls or clients, they want us to go on Instagram, it should be one minute 36. That’s an awesome time. The real answer is, that it should be as long as it is interesting.

So if we haven’t got much interesting stuff to say, and we’ve got a really low budget to put into this, and we can only make a brilliant video, that’s 12 seconds long, it should be 12 seconds. If we have a big budget, and we have great stuff to say and to show people, it should be seven minutes.

22: Dan

I think alarm bells always go for me when someone because I’ve been speaking at events before and other speakers and stuff I’ve said it should be a three and a half minute video that’s posted at 2 pm on a Tuesday on Instagram stories with three and a half hashtags. And it’s like, wow, that doesn’t make any sense.

22:24 Lloyd

Some of those details can make a very small difference. But if you’re forgetting the sort of stuff we’re talking about the fundamental stuff is going to be like so the time of day you post could have an impact, it could be like 10%, it might improve or, or make it worse because the audience isn’t online. But what we’re doing, we’re making content that’s good enough for people to want to watch, we’ll make the 1,000% increase.

22:50 Dan

And I think to kind of not contradict what we’re saying. But I think that should be your first focus, focus on the core thing of actually producing content and marketing campaigns that people enjoy. Once you’ve got that, as the foundations there, then it’s about making the incremental improvements of posting time or day or like how you’re promoting, like, for example, this podcast, we’ve we can’t see looking on how to improve and get more people to listen and watch this.

We’ve recently realised that our TikTok clips are performing like the nine by 16, and phone screen sizes are performing much better than our YouTube size 16 by nine, so we’re gonna try and push that more. So now we’ve got the foundations, hopefully writing of like, an interesting podcast to listen to about business and marketing. That’s value adding. Now we’re like, right, what are those small changes we can make to move the needle? Yeah, that is a really good point.

And it is like it’s like a butterfly effect. So those small changes we’re making can completely change the trajectory of the success of lists and our business, like knowing now that those TikTok videos perform 1% better. So we’re going to push those more and focus more on that. Imagine the graph of like doing that too, just sticking with the average stuff that wasn’t working. And even though I know we need to get better at this still, we need to get better at constantly testing and trying new things and testing new ways of doing things that will improve how things are performing.

But I think there’s an action if you’re listening to this and you haven’t tried or tested something new or analysed how what you’re currently doing is performing you should look at that. That’s it. That’s a really important point.

24:29 Lloyd

And if someone says your video has to be one minute 30 seconds long, say to them, I don’t listen to you anymore. Good advice. I think that was good is have we got anything more to say that is as good as that. Have you got more?

24:45 Dan

I’ve got one more. Okay, one more. Yeah, it’s probably not as good as that. But it’s one.

24:50 Lloyd

Bonus Porky pie marketers are telling you.

24:52 Dan

Okay, ready? 10 exit. So there’s a well-known marketer. That’s got a book called 10x or something like that. And his whole mantra is 10x everything. So you’ve got goals to achieve this year, you want to do better 10x them. You want to improve at something 10 exit. And I think, again, this is this, this advice is damaging, because one, it’s doing that thing of oversimplifying everything. Just 10x In your goals isn’t going to help you improve.

There’s a whole load of other work like that it could help you improve to be more ambitious, yes. But once you 10x your goals, you then actually need a whole plan for how you’re going to achieve those 10x results. So that’s another one that I hear thrown around a lot.

24:58 Lloyd

I did it on my fitness pal with my calorie count 10X it. But I’ve been putting on weight.

25:54 Dan

I don’t get that.

25:55 Lloyd

Yeah, I don’t know. I changed my goal to 20,000 calories a day. But I haven’t been losing weight.

26:03 Dan

If anyone can help Lloyd then please do.

26:05 Lloyd

So I don’t think that’s good advice. Okay. Cool, really good advice, Dan. I don’t know if there are 10. I think there were about eight. Possibly, but we lied to you.

26:17 Dan

But this episode is about lying.

26:19 Lloyd

Yeah, we meant to do that.

26:20 Dan

We’ll keep it as 10. But yeah, you know, yeah, there’s a handful for you.

26:24 Lloyd

Yes. A handful. wouldn’t have been as good in the title of it just said a handful. Maybe we’ll call it that. Maybe we have lived throughout this episode. Maybe it’s called that. Okay. Should we see the next one?

26:35 Dan

Yeah, we’ll see you in your ears next week.

26:37 Lloyd

Or maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ve lied. We’re marketers.

Hopefully this has been useful and helped you to understand some of the Marketing lies you’ve been told. If you have any more questions or want to know how Knowlton can support you Start A Conversation.