181: Busting the Myth – There’s No One-Size-Fits-All in Marketing!
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formula, there's a silver bullet, there's a do this and your marketing will work solution out there. And that's not the case because fundamentally no two businesses are apples to apples comparison.

You guys, welcome back to the B word today. My guest is Taylor Cusick Holman. And Oh my gosh, this is one of those conversations I could nerd out about for weeks and weeks on end. Taylor is an expert in marketing and specifically some of the data behind marketing. Now, it's

Stay with me here, friends. For you that are like, oh, the data scares me. Here's where it gets really juicy. We're talking about it from a marketing sense, from a serial entrepreneur sense. I got super stoked by the conversation. In fact, I'm probably going to go look up several of the articles that she told me to read because it's going to make me a better entrepreneur. So

Buckle up, Buttercups. We are about to start an episode that has got me so fired up that I need you to share it with all of your entrepreneurial friends who are in that marketing zone for their business. Welcome in Taylor Cusick-Holman. Hey, Taylor. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I am super stoked for this conversation. All Things Marketing is my jam and you are the one to bring in. So can you start us off a little bit by sharing a little tad bit about your journey and what inspired you to become a marketing consultant?

You know, I think like a lot of people, my life ended up being this twisty turny ziggy zaggy sort of experience versus the linear path that, you know, the very type A me thought I would take.

And I thought that I was going to spend my career in a classroom teaching community college students all about sociology. And that was going to be my happy place. But as a geriatric millennial, I have the extreme pleasure of, you know, graduating from grad school in like one of the worst times to try to go find a grown up job. And so, you know, it was 2010 and

I just, it wasn't going to happen. And so what I ended up doing was I ran an afterschool program for the YMCA for about four years where I had a hundred middle school kids that I was in charge of every single day. Yeah. So not a parent, but have all of the opinions of parenting. Well, I currently have a middle schooler, so bless your heart.

heart? You know, I learned a lot about myself and people and all that kind of stuff. But as much as I really enjoyed that job, it wasn't for me, shocker. And so, or wasn't for me for the long term. And so I ended up doing one good college try at a corporate job. And

And I just really realized very quickly that it was such a small sandbox to play in. And that's where I really discovered my like entrepreneurial marketing spirit. And again, after my short stint, I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm going to do something that's not this.

And I eventually ended up getting connected with some small business owners here in San Diego who just needed some finger quote help with things. And, you know, I jumped in and that's where I really took the little bit of marketing that I had been doing at the YMCA and at my corporate job and really honed it for the small business space and eventually ended up with clients and all of a sudden was like,

I spend my time thinking about marketing and doing marketing things. And so nine years later, that's still where I am. It's absolutely what I love doing. And I think it's really important for people to realize that a lot of really good marketers that we look up to do not have a background in marketing.

And so if it's totally possible for someone who thought they were going to be a teacher or, you know, work in some other field to learn what it takes to do a good job at marketing that any, any business owner or someone who's trying to build something for their, for themselves can as well. I love that so much because you're right. And so,

So many of us never take the time to really pinpoint right there. Most of the people you're looking to hire, you're looking up to, you think they're these phenomenal people in their industry or niche. Like they didn't get an education in what they're doing today. Nope. They pivoted from something else and they became passionate about it. And when you become passionate about something and you dive all in like you and you get obsessed with it, you know, you get really good at it. I mean,

Hell, podcasting was not even out when I came out of college. I think I exited the building of college a few years before you, like three or four. And NPR was about the only option for this kind of thing. So I went from consulting into real estate and now I'm in podcasting. And only because I'm absolutely obsessed with both the marketing element of life. I have a marketing degree and podcasting.

Podcasting and combining the two, like that's the only reason I've become good at what I'm doing. Yeah. It's most things in life are learned skills. And it's, it's so interesting to me that so many people put themselves down or they just don't think that it's a possibility for them to become good at something because they didn't go to school for it. And so, you know, when you're trying to build a business and a brand for yourself, you're

Unless you are working at a, well, I'll rephrase that. If you are trying to build a business and a brand for yourself, it is extremely unlikely that you're ever going to work with someone who did go to school for business. Like you end up in this corner of the universe where we are all super scrappy and just figure it out, get it done kind of people. And so you're one of the rare ones, the outliers who have an educational background in this thing that we're all like, well,

I'll just figure it out. And every time I have the chance to talk with someone who does have an actual educational background in marketing, it's different in a very fun and interesting way. Because you just think about... You think about marketing differently than I think about marketing as someone who's self-taught. But they're both...

super valid and can be very impactful approaches. You just have a little bit of a leg up of like, hey, I've read some books and maybe there are some mistakes that I got to avoid because I had like, you know, I spent some time studying this. Okay, but I will say yes and no.

Marketing is so varied. You know, my background and my degree in marketing really wasn't how I use marketing today per se. Like we weren't talking about email sequences or copywriting or the message wording piece of marketing. It was more sales like in-person sales, which really helped out when I went into real estate.

Not really necessarily relevant for everything I do now, although, yes, I can pull snippets versus what you do. And what I love so much, I want to dive in because this is the perfect segue into what you do. You fully believe that marketing is not one size fits all. And you're really in your business tailoring the marketing experience and journey to your client. So can you tell

just expel a little bit on that theory and how it's serving your clients. You know, there are, I love talking about this because it's,

If you're a human who spends time on the internet, then you are inundated with messages and social media posts and all this kind of content that positions itself as steal my strategy kind of stuff, right? We've all seen it. I saw your eyes get, you're like, yep, it's out there. And so we're all being sold on this idea that there is a magic magic

There's a silver bullet. There's a do this and your marketing will work solution out there. And that's not the case because fundamentally no two businesses are apples to apples comparisons. And when, and that's because the market that you operate in, who you think of as your ideal clients and customers, your, the audience that you've built or trying to build and even fundamentally

fundamentally your goals for your business, it's all different. And so you can't just take someone else's strategy and hit, you know, command C, command V on it and think that it's going to give you the same results because there are so many variables that are different. And so the thing that I think is really important for everyone to really just

like right across their forehead, burn into their brain is that everything about your marketing needs to be done for your ideal customers and clients. Like the mechanics of,

of doing marketing can be similar. Like you can take, hey, someone who's operating in a similar space is telling me that these three marketing channels are the most impactful for them. You can take that and say, okay, well, maybe I should focus on these three channels. But everything about your creative, everything about your messaging, you can't just copy and paste it and think you're going to make

six figures off of it, despite what the ads tell you. Okay. So let's take a second and indulge me because I am such a numbers nerd.

And what I really caught from what you were saying there was you got to look at the mechanics and everyone's is different. So how much does data analysis play a part in a marketing strategy? It plays a big part. And, you know, depending on there are lots of people who are very afraid of numbers. I mean, I think if you polled your average person and asked them, do you like numbers and math? They'd go, no, I do not.

They equally will tell you they don't like words. So it's like, okay, well, how do you communicate if you don't like, how do you do marketing if you don't look at numbers and you also don't like words? That's another chat for another day. But it doesn't matter how big or small your business is or your brand is because the numbers are,

the thing that you can use to take your intuition and what you feel is just right in your gut. And then those numbers are like the bumpers, right? They're going to back you up or they're not. They're going to say like, you can pass go and collect $200 or like, please don't do this because the numbers don't back it up and aren't helping you to understand that this is a really smart decision to make. And so...

The thing about numbers and data in marketing is it is a giant black hole of things where there's, right? Like there's a hundred million ways that you could look at numbers for your business. And I think that's why a lot of people decide it's just easier to not and always operate off of their gut because it's so overwhelming to try to figure out what numbers do you track? What do you not? But yeah,

fundamentally, if you want to know what part of your marketing is bringing you the most business, then at minimum, you should be tracking numbers that help you see how many sales, how many leads or anything else like that are coming by marketing channel, like at minimum.

And that's not a complicated thing to do, but it gives you so much insight and it helps you make decisions about where you're going to spend your time and energy on marketing. Okay. So I was speaking at a women's event last week. And when we sat down at the panel afterward, one of the questions that I got asked was for the entrepreneur who hates numbers and is scared of it because they're scared of seeing a failing number.

you know, like that's holding them back from really seeing the number. They ask, what is the one thing you would start tracking? And honestly,

You know, from my perspective, I just threw out, I was like, well, I would start with a UTM, you know, because that way, you know, where your traffic is coming in from. Of course, they looked at me with a glazed eye and they were like, what's a UTM? And so I got to explain, you guys, it's just that little bitty data that you stick on the end of your URL so that you know where people are coming from. Are they coming from Pinterest? Are they coming from Facebook, Instagram, your blog? Yeah.

It's really easy to implement from Google Analytics, but I would love to know what your advice would have been on that panel for what's the one way the tech scared, afraid to fail entrepreneur can start tracking. You know,

I love that we both, we said a very similar thing just in different ways, right? And I think that the first step that I would encourage people to take is to actually set up their Google Analytics.

Ooh, that's okay. Good. That's what I told him too. Yes. Yeah. Like set up your Google analytics friends, because like, if you do that, then you, you've taken the step that you need in order to have this information and you can grow into how you're using those numbers over time. Like maybe setting up a UTM, you're like, you know, you're making crazy faces and you, it just feels like an impossibility. Um,

for now, but as you start to familiarize yourself with a platform like Google Analytics, it's really not as scary as people think. You can use it in a very basic way. And then over time, you're going to be like, oh, yeah, Joanne told me to set up a UTM.

I'm totally, I can totally do that. I am going to do that. And then I'm going to understand exactly where my website traffic is coming from, which is super, super powerful. Well, and here's the thing that I love to always point out, and I'm sure you can agree with this, but if you don't like, tell me why, because if I'm telling people wrong, like, please correct me here.

When you set up Google Analytics, even if you set them up today, like in the next hour and a half after listening to this episode, and you have no idea what you're doing, at least you have set and laid a brick for future down the road so that a year from now or six months from now, when in the business, you're ready to go back and dive in those analytics. You have them because the brick and the foundation has been laid versus six to eight months from now. If you're finally like, oh my God,

Taylor and Joanne told me to start looking at my analytics, my data to know how to do my marketing. And you haven't already set it up. You have no data to look at. Exactly.

Exactly. You're like, you've kind of dug yourself into a hole and then you're trying to play catch up. And it's, I give that same sort of advice when it comes to installing the meta tracking pixel on your website. You know, maybe doing social media advertising and retargeting ads, you know, on meta platforms is not something that you're thinking about today, but maybe

When you install that pixel on your website, you're giving meta the ability to do the learning that it needs in order to better optimize your ads once you are ready to advertise. And so there are these really foundational pieces that, like you said, they're bricks that you put down and you're like, okay, you are there. I will use you when I am ready and willing and able.

And, but it's there. And emotionally what that does is that eliminates the, the scramble of, you know, you feeling like,

of desperate to fix something and not having equipped yourself to make that fix quickly. Right? Like, so those are two big things that Taylor and Joanne say you should do. So please. You heard it here today. Yes. You heard it here. I mean, it's like you want to go run a marathon. You can't just the day before, if you're out of shape, go run a marathon. You have to start getting ready to run the marathon. Mm-hmm.

Even if you aren't sure you're actually going to run the marathon, you've got to start getting your body in shape and eating the right things and doing the walking and doing the running so that if one day you decided to run a marathon, you'd be ready. Like it just doesn't happen overnight. We wish it did, folks. We wish it did. We wish.

So with all the fibers in our being, but it doesn't. Oh my God. If I could wave a wand like Harry Potter and just make the marketing happen and make the data appear, know the right words to use on the ad. Like if I could bottle that up, what a different world it would be. I know we'd all be, we'd all be outside playing most of the time instead of worrying about our marketing. Yeah.

Okay, so as close as I could get to bottling up the magic would probably be the company that you founded, Engie. How do you pronounce it? Engie. Engie. Okay, so yeah, you take a Southern girl and you just put a word in front of her and I'm like, I have been calling it wrong in my head this entire time. It's Engie. Okay. Okay.

So we've got Engie. That's what you have founded. It's the company that you run. How do we, as a consumer, how would we use Engie as a tool to help create the marketing plans? And how would we work with this company to improve our processes? You

You know, one of the things that I have learned over the past nine years of being a marketing consultant is that we are all fighting time, right? Like that is the thing across many aspects of our lives, personal and professional. Time is always the limiting factor because there's not enough of it.

you know, things take it from us or things take too long. And so what I wanted to create was a piece of software that really essentially kind of like

takes away all of our excuses to not do our marketing. That's my personal goal as a marketing consultant. I'm like, none of y'all are gonna be able to tell me that you don't have time to do these things because I am building software to make it super fast. You solve this problem.

To solve this problem, you guys, like, you know, all of the text messages and emails and DMs that I get from my small business owning friends. I'm like, this is, this is for you guys. You've only been asking me for a solution for years. And

And so at the core of marketing is having a strategy. And that's something that to someone who didn't go to school for marketing, it's very abstract. And you're like, what even is the strategy? You turn to Google and Google gives you like

All the opinions about what a strategy is. And all of a sudden you're even more confused about how to go about your marketing. And so we make it super easy to create a marketing strategy and all people have to do is play a game of 20 questions with us. And then we customize a marketing strategy to how they answered the questionnaire. And so what that does is it gives people clarity, like step one clarity here, my goals, my

Here's my customers. And these are the places that I'm going to focus on doing my marketing, right? Like these are the channels I'm going to spend my time on. And then from there, it's not just about having a plan. You then have to make the plan, do the plan. Yeah. And so, right. Make the plan, do the plan, make the plan, do the plan.

Just lather, rinse, repeat on that, guys. And so... You have to execute, people. You have to execute. You have to execute. You can pin the best recipes from Pinterest for your healthy eating lifestyle. If you don't, purchase the stuff and then make the meals. Like, it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. So you have to execute. And so what Engie does from there is it doesn't just give you the strategy, but...

Based on your strategy, it lays out these are the tasks that you should be doing in order to make progress toward your goals. And it drops those all on a calendar. And it's got lots of other tools to help you actually do the execution. So marketing campaign templates that spell out these are the steps that you need to take in order to get this campaign running. We have a social media scheduler and AI copywriter so that you can create content that

Quickly, right? And for all the people who hate the words, they love the AI copywriters because it gets the first draft done lickety split.

But then on the back end of all of this is knowing whether your marketing is working, which is a huge question that people have. And so we have a performance dashboard that actually we already have released a Google Analytics integration. So your website metrics automatically get pulled in and turned into performance.

very pretty, easy to read charts. Like you're not looking at spreadsheets with rows and columns and trying to do VLOOKUPs that like, Lord knows I can't do that. But, and we're on the cusp at the time of this recording of releasing our Facebook and Instagram integrations as well to pull in that kind of data. So when I said I am, my mission is to remove all of the excuses.

I am dead serious about that. So I really want people to be able to wrap their arms around their own marketing when they have to do it themselves with confidence and clarity because it's such an important part to the long-term success of all of us building and working toward our dreams.

And it is a, it's a showstopper for a lot of people when you don't do at least a halfway decent job with it. Okay. So we're in this super fast and agile social media and marketing world. And I feel sometimes like things are just

changing on the fly, how often using your software program, like how often should someone go back in and reassess the strategy? You know, I always recommend that in marketing in general, you got to give things a chance to work, right? You know, like you said earlier, things take time. And so with the strategy, I really encourage people to look at their strategy in six or 12 month increments.

Not every quarter, right? Because sometimes you might have a lucky strike where you put a plan in motion and all of a sudden, three months later, you're reaping the rewards already. But marketing is changing so much. And I don't know, I'll have to send you this article if you haven't seen it yet already, Joanne. But funny enough, it was published by Vogue's business division. And it's titled...

Gen Z broke the marketing funnel. Ooh, I want to read that. Yes, I will send it to you. It is a fascinating article and it puts to words what we're all experiencing, where marketing used to be a little bit more formulaic. Like you could...

host a webinar, you could put out an email marketing sequence and you could make a sale. Right. And nowadays,

Marketing is becoming this much more holistic. You've got to have touch points and visibility everywhere or in a lot more, in many more places than we think we need. And so like, that's one of the things, that's one of the big reasons why now, especially I'm like you looking at your strategy every quarter is way too quick to

because marketing is just fundamentally different and is going to continue to change and grow

people, getting people to the know, like, and trust before they buy, it's just taking a lot longer when you have something that's not like a $9 ticket item, right? Like if you're selling any product or service of substance, people take a lot of convincing these days. And so you got to give your strategy time to really understand what's working and what's not. I agree.

I agree wholeheartedly with everything that you're saying. You know, our marketing team just sat down the other day and we were looking through some of our strategies and here's something we discovered because I'm a firm believer that someone needs between 15 and 20 touch points

in order to trust you enough to actually lay down their credit card and start working with you. And so we were going into a launch and we were having some masterclasses, you know, the typical webinar, which I love to do. We implemented an ad strategy on Facebook and Instagram because I was like, we need to fill this funnel. Like I don't have enough people in my email database to

to hit the metrics, to hit the numbers I want to hit to get the KPI. And so we went on this Facebook funnel, you know, ad advertising. We added a lot of people into the database. Here's what we found to be true. End of launch, we closed doors, you know, closed cart,

Every single person who had purchased the product, actually there was a good percentage of them that did attend the mastermind. So that conversion event still worked. However, when we really dove into them, because I told you I'm a numbers nerd, like a data nerd. I like to have proof of concept, right? What we found was the masterclass was a huge conversion event, but almost every single person who purchased had actually been in our email list for six to eight months.

So now I'm looking at it going, okay, I love the thought of creating an ad on Facebook or Instagram in order to fill, I'm air quoting for those of you that are live streaming, you know, watching this on Spotify or YouTube, you know, to fill your database in order to fill the masterclass. But what you're really doing when you run that ad is getting them into your database for your masterclass six months from now. It's

It's not the one that they're going to attend. It's the one they're going to attend, learn about you and stay in your database so that when you roll out your launch or your offer six months from now, then they're ready to purchase. And I find that fascinating. Yeah. It's taking that long to get those touch points. 100%. I mean, so I love, I love that. And I love that, you know, this is why having marketing conversations with marketing folks is so much fun to me. I'm like,

can nerd out you just get it you just get it and you understand uh but that it like i have started

talking about marketing, like marketing is farming. Marketing is not hunting. Sales is hunting. You can go out and you can hunt for something. You can go get it. Quick, quick win, quick sale. Marketing is like farming where you have to plant a seed. You have to cultivate it. You have to care for it over time before you have anything to harvest. And what you just talked about is a perfect

illustration of that, right? Like you have to get someone onto your email list and into your database and cultivate them for six to eight months before they get to the point where they're ready to lay down their credit card. And that's farming like hands down. This is, I love, yeah. Best analogy ever. You guys heard it first. Sales is hunting. Marketing is farming. What

What's actually going to make revenue for you. It's always farming. It's planting the seeds. Yep. Always, always. That makes predictability in your business. And I'm all about some predictability in your business and stability. Yeah. So on that note, Taylor, holy crap.

Tell our audience where and how you would like them to connect with you. So I mentioned earlier, I'm a geriatric millennial. So please don't try to talk to me on TikTok. You're still on Facebook, aren't you? Well, I am, but Instagram is my jam. Like I have a Facebook account. It is one of the tabs that lives perpetually open on my browser. But yeah,

Instagram is where you can find me. And our handle is ENJI underscore CO. And our website is ng.co. I'd love for everyone to give it a try. You can try all the tools free for two weeks.

So you can build your marketing strategy in 10 minutes and see what it spits out and go poke around and experiment. But if you're looking for a way to consolidate your marketing into one spot,

and have fewer tabs and actually start to understand marketing the way that, you know, like Joanne and I look at it, where we see this, we see the machine. That's one of the things that I think is really special about our tools is we're helping people actually build and see their marketing machine so that they can, you know, do the farming and reap the rewards over the long term. Awesome.

Thank you so much, Taylor, for being here. You guys reach out, go find her. You heard it here on the B word. You know, I'm going to always give you the best of the best referrals for your business.

For the technically not savvy, data, not nerdy, glazed-eyed look entrepreneur who is listening right now to this podcast, this is your jam. This is the girl you need to go to. So she'll get you started. She'll get you up and running. Thank you so much for being a part of the B-Word. You guys, I will see you same time, same place next week.

You just finished another episode of the V word podcast. Cheers to you. If I were with you, I would literally pop a big old bottle of Prosecco and for you a glass. Since I'm not, why don't you do the next best thing and share this episode with one of your besties? Because we all know you've got that one girlfriend that needs to hear it. Thanks friends.

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