Episode 272: Marketing Not Working? This Might Be Why with Victoria Hajjar
Did you know that only 2% of female business owners break the million-dollar mark? If you've ever struggled with marketing thinking it’s just not working, or you’re wondering if you’re wasting marketing dollars on paid ads, today’s guest will show you where to focus.
Victoria Hajjar, founder of Ugli Ventures, specializes in assisting startups in scaling from 6 to 7 figures. She focuses on helping entrepreneurs optimize sales and marketing strategies, team building, and leadership development to establish sustainable and profitable 7-figure enterprises. Her clients have had million-dollar months, earned billion-dollar revenues in their businesses, and she has mentored women who have landed Forbes 40 under 40.
Listen in to what Victoria shares about how to market, the power of your storytelling and the fear that so many of us have around really connecting our stories to our businesses, which is the one thing, especially if you're worried about AI, that will continue to set you apart.
Storytelling the basis of marketing
Victoria remembers becoming enchanted with marketing at a young age. Sitting on the floor of her grandparents’ house, she would read the messages on all the products they had under the bathroom sink.
“I found my way to marketing using storytelling,” says Victoria. “It's something that I've been obsessed with because it doesn't matter what your business is. Doesn't matter if you're a direct to consumer, you're B2B or whatever. We can't deny that storytelling is really the basis of all sales and marketing. It's how we connect, right.”
She says the storytelling really reminds us of how important copy and the words are that we use on landing pages, social posts and sales scripts. This extends to how we talk to people and how we talk to ourselves. If you're marketing is unsuccessful, understanding the discipline of marketing and sales is where to start.
“As a business owner, you need to understand how to sell the words that sell,” says Victoria. “You need to know your customers more than anyone else. And it's not something you can easily outsource 100%”
Brand divide using AI
Victoria says she’s seeing an increasing divide between the brands that are putting genuine effort to create copy that tells stories and the brands that post regurgitated AI. Using AI posts and comments can be an ineffective marketing strategy when people crave effort and authenticity.
But AI lends itself well to help with brainstorming and generating ideas.
“Understanding sort of keywords and how to optimize things for SEO to help with maybe particular hooks or particular subject lines, it's incredibly useful. But to be generating volumes of copy for an AI, I just don't think it's there yet,” she says.
So as business owners, it can take a lot of time to prompt AI properly to get something that sounds genuine and memorable. It’s always going to be human beings, no robots, who are making the decisions about whether revenue is coming into your business. You have to connect with those people and have them see a different future because of what they’re going to purchase.
Don’t waste marketing dollars on social media
Victoria says you can have massive growth writing an amazing blog, doing a podcast – whichever channel you choose to optimize. But it needs to start with something that you like.
If you enjoy podcasts and you want them to be your lead generation tool, there's so many avenues for getting exposure. You could be advertising other podcasts. You don't have to be showing up on social.
You could write an excellent newsletter and really focus on making that newsletter incredibly rich. It doesn't have to be showing up every day on social media in order to connect. Ask where does social media sit in your marketing strategy?
“I think so many of us assume that social media is an awareness strategy, meaning we're going to be reaching brand new people like brand new prospects and leads through social media,” says Victoria. “But the reality is, is if you're not really all in on your social platform, you are not going to be getting exposure to anyone new.”
She says some people believe that they can just take out social ads and that's going to grow. If you're someone that has earned your way into your organic audience on social, then it is a good time to start supplementing that with some paid traffic.
“If you have a zero or less than a thousand followers on Instagram and you want to just be grow, grow, growing with ads, I think it's a waste of time, because whichever channel it is that you choose, you need to go all in,” says Victoria.
She says she’s seen a lot of companies where the owner doesn’t understand what success looks like, and they just want to hire everyone to do it for them. Those business often fail.
“You have to understand how to sell, how to market,” says Victoria. “You need to understand those elements. And then I believe it's the moment where you can start giving it away and you can start outsourcing it and all of those things.”
Sales focused marketing strategy
Victoria says the most important thing to focus on as a business owner is what she calls building out a sales focused marketing strategy.
It’s the steps of your client journey – from finding prospects to converting them. She says the problem is when you learn just the basics and do the minimum at each stage across each channel. You spread yourself too thin and then when the marketing doesn't work as you expect, it’s easy to get discouraged. Learn to do one channel well.
“When you begin to really understand the depth of all of these tactics and really what it takes to have true success, then of course it would be impossible for you to be running all of these different strategies well at the same time,” says Victoria. “So I think that is the number 1 most important thing is to understand this full journey that I call, I call it a 24 by 7 marketing flywheel.”
If you hire people to help with marketing, as a business owner you’re the central communication point. But if you’re talking to everyone in silos, nothing is working together. Victoria says if you want to make a big difference in your business, bring everyone together for a weekly marketing meeting.
“When you bring everyone together to create this flywheel into a room where they're talking and discussing and creatively brainstorming … you're leveraging everyone's experience,” says Victoria. “Oftentimes so much more comes out of it because your social media manager is talking to your ads manager, who's talking to your person who builds your landing pages and the person that's writing the emails. So now everything, it flows because you can't have that magic if no one's talking to each other or looking at the data.”
You don't have to go fast, says Victoria. You just got to keep going, and take the time to do things well.
Free gift for listeners
A Free Guide to End Marketing Overwhelm which teaches the number one marketing system founders need to streamline their marketing effort, measure results, and make data-driven decisions.
Binge More Game On Girlfriend™ Podcast Episodes
GRAB MY FREE FREEDOM CALCULATOR SO YOU CAN:
Learn the exact number you need to feel FREE!
Know exactly what you need to do each day to make more money.
Make tracking your numbers easy with my revenue tracking tool (the same tool I use every day in my own business!)
Learn the TOP 2 mistakes most business owners make when it comes to tracking revenue
It's time to move from "fingers crossed" to clear and successful.