Marketing can be confusing at times, listen in to learn how to gain more confidence with it. Robert Palinkas has been on a journey of deeply understanding, and stripping back the universal principles that make marketing successful and sustainable. And since marketing is one of “necessary evils” of business that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with, Robert made it his mission to assist. He joins host Justin Recla to explore how entrepreneurs can master marketing and use proper marketing systems to maximize their businesses. 

Welcome to Incorporating SuperPowers. I’m your host, Justin Recla, and today we’re talking to Robert Palinkas, who is really just doing some great stuff in the marketing world.

So, we’re going to be talking to Robert about how you can gain competence with innovative marketing strategies. 

I’m super excited to have Robert on the show. He’s doing some really great things out there in the world. We met on the Marketer’s Cruise, cruising down to Mexico, so we had a lot of fun there. 

Robert, thank you so much for being on the show.

And thank you for having me. It’s great.

Okay, so as we do it with every show, Robert, we like to call the elephant out in the room as to what’s going on in the industry. Everybody’s kind of looking at and seeing, and then understands what’s going on out there, but they don’t really like what’s going on, and so what is the elephant in the room when it comes to marketing that people see and they’re just not really calling out?

I think that one of the main things that nobody’s actually even talking about, because it’s so obvious and it’s kind of a can’t see the forest through the trees situation, is that we allowed the whole marketing area to be dominated and the conversation to be dominated by tools providers, and everybody is working with these bright and shiny objects and nobody seems to know any more about the basics of marketing are, and I think that’s one of the biggest problems, and the other one I see is that innovation is kind of almost extinct. Everybody’s copying what they are doing. So creativity is almost an unknown quality at this point. Nobody’s creating anything. It’s just, let’s copy what someone else is doing. It’s well proven systems where there are step-by-step blueprints and whatnot, but almost nobody seems to be doing is something new, something actually innovative.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s that it seems that businesses have fallen victim to just, it’s the way you do things. It seems that we’re all at the mercy of Google or we’re all at the mercy of Facebook, and all it takes is any one of those platforms to make a slight tweak in their algorithms and their keywords, and now all of the marketing.

Yeah.

All the marketing that you did is gone, is worthless, and they do it intentionally, and they do it because they know that by adjusting, they can charge you more money. Now you’re going to have to jump through hoops and try to figure out what their systems are, because every time you crack the code, and they see this. We see it in Facebook. Facebook did it with Facebook Groups. Facebook Groups where this thing, and then all of a sudden you were talking to your entire audience of 3, 4, 5,000 people in your group, and now they throttle it and you’re only talking to a hundred people. So, talk to me, what are some innovative things that people can be doing for marketing themselves that doesn’t keep them enslaved to some of these tools?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think the slavery that you’re talking about comes from people not paying attention to the fundamentals anymore, but paying attention to what tweak can I do or what little tools I can insert into my process, and trying to see everything through numbers and conversions, and the human element is kind of missing, but if you think about it, it’s like the market itself in the marketing is where people are supposed to meet and exchange something valuable for something valuable. That’s the basic fundamental concept of marketing, but that’s the least thing people pay attention to these days. They have the tools and they think that they are just one tool away from having this great success. So what I think they should be doing is looking at the actual fundamentals, and I have my own approach to this, and I broke it down into three very simple elements that if you do them, if you pay attention to them, then what you’re going to end up with is valuable marketing assets that you can just invest in.

You invest in advertising and they will always return a profit for you, and those two things are first value, which is obvious. It’s very obvious that you have to provide value, but no one seems to talk about the details of how you do that. I’m going to get back to that one. The second one is you need to prove that value. Something that is valuable in your mind is not enough. So I’m a testing maniac personally. So what I teach people is that the biggest mistake they can make in marketing is coming with an idea and then implementing it. That’s the biggest mistake you can make. The step that is missing is testing and proving your idea, because you only want to invest in something that is actually a profitable investment. If you don’t test your ideas, then you are going to lose your investment obviously.

And the third step is actually profiting on that investment, which is the point where you’re at having the marketing assets that works for you. So you don’t have to slave in marketing all the time. You either have a marketing job or you have marketing assets. You can choose which one works. It’s either you or the asset, and I thought that I wanted to get back to the value thing for a moment because it’s so interesting. I’ve been doing so much research on this and this is one of the most exciting parts for me because it’s so simple, but people don’t know how to do it. You go online and you search for advice on what should I do to get insert any topic here, like more traffic, more conversions, more visitors, more customers, and the advice goes.

Yeah and we’re in and we’re in the era of, that’s where people go to get advice. They go to YouTube and they go to everybody out there that’s doing something and they’re trying to figure out if it’s going to work. So, what’s the secret sauce?

Well, I was just going to say, they go through this big pile of whatever. That’s what the internet has become. The polite name to call it is content. The real name is more like a dumpster content. There’s so much stuff, and the advice goes something like, “If you want to have more conversions or if you want a better content, then make sure it’s something that is valuable to your target audience.” Thanks for the great advice. How do I know what is valuable to me? It’s always the same but it’s still academic. How do you create more value? Well, I have a very simple formula for that. Value is created by difference, and that is true in so many ways. I have more than a dozen tools just to help you find differences that you can insert into your marketing, and even product development, and then you made the value something bigger, better, nicer, whatever.

They will increase the value. Just a few examples. Companies get into a price war often. It’s the only differentiating factor they can think about is the price. So why is that? Because that difference versus their competitors is not that big. So the three that I told you about, this value proof and profit only works if the first thing is right, which is you have to have value, which means difference. How does it work? So if you make such a small difference in someone’s life, like you’re selling toothpicks, then your profit margin is going to be very thin. If you are selling something that is so different from everything out there. I don’t like using this example because everybody’s using it, but let’s say Tesla. They are making cars that are so different. Some people like them, some people hate them, but what does it do?

They have such a different product from everybody else that they are getting all this free attention and attention is a very scarce and expensive resource. So just by having that product so different from everything else, they’re getting all the free attention that is literally worth billions of dollars, and they’re getting it entirely free. A more down to earth, everyday example would be if you have a certain service and you take your clients from that from point A to point B, that’s your customer journey they get from having a problem to having the problem solved. Then just a simple exploration of how the journey is, or what is before point, and maybe you can start at a different point. Maybe you can go to a different point B. You can go to point C and take them further than your competitors, and those are simple differences you can find in your field and it starts with the marketing but continues with everything else you’re doing. I’m going to give you a very silly example again. So let’s say that you’re an airline, because that’s a very simple A to B example.

We could frame that up in her heads.

Yep. They take me from point A to point B. So which airline takes me from my door to the exact destination I want to go? None of them.

You got to take a cab. You got to get a ride. You’ve got to go. All sorts of different things in order to get on that airplane.

Yeah. So do you think that if there was an airline where the tickets were, let’s say 20% more expensive, but they would pick you up at your home for the price of the ticket and your ride to destination would be included in, that would be the ticket. So they wouldn’t be selling the commodity that they have, which is seats on the airplane, but it would be selling the door to door service. Do you think people would pay more for that?

Absolutely. They always do, because they’re solving a problem that people are going to have to figure it out on their own anyways, so that has value. Robert, let’s take a quick pause right quick because I want to dive down this rabbit hole a little bit further with you. There’s so much value to this, and when you’re listening to this audio, you can see that the difference to doing innovative marketing is super important, and adding value is really the key place to where it starts. 

Robert, where can people go find more information about you before we take a break?

I have a very simple website. It just called Fix My Marketing, and I’ll tell you everything I know about that. There’s no signup or I’m not asking for emails or anything. Just go there and see what I do.

Perfect. Fix My Marketing. So that’s awesome. Go check that out. Stay with us. We’re talking to Robert Palinkas about how to gain more confidence with innovative marketing. We’ll be right back.

To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.