How to Identify Your Target Market and Ideal Customer Profile with Tim Fitzpatrick

In part 2 of our Masterclass Series on Building a Strategic Marketing Plan for Your Business, host Eric Dickmann interviews Tim Fitzpatrick, President of Rialto Marketing, about how to identify your target market and build an ideal customer profile to help focus your strategic marketing activities.

Tim is an entrepreneur/business owner with expertise in marketing and business growth. He has 20+ years of entrepreneurial experience with a passion for developing and growing businesses. He started Rialto Marketing in 2013 and has been helping service businesses simplify marketing so they can grow with less stress. Most people overcomplicate marketing. It doesn't have to be that way.

To learn more about identifying your target market and ideal customer profile, visit our Masterclass webpage for additional content and resources at https://fiveechelon.com/masterclass

For more information about Eric Dickmann, The Five Echelon Group, and this Masterclass Series, visit https://fiveechelon.com or https://linkedin.com/in/edickmann

For more information about Tim Fitzpatrick and Rialto Marketing, visit https://rialtomarketing.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/timpfitzpatrick/

Episode Bonus: For free assets to help you get started, visit https://www.rialtomarketing.com/virtual-cmo

Episode #53

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Marketing Automation with HubSpot
Try HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing software to simplify campaign management and drive new leads.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Carla: 0:01

The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group. If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit Five Echelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.

Eric Dickmann: 0:24

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. I'm excited that you've joined us today in part two of our Masterclass Series,"How to build a strategic marketing plan for your business." Today's guest is Tim Fitzpatrick. Tim is the President of Rialto Marketing and he comes on board today to discuss the very important topic of identifying your target market and ideal customer profile. This is such an important area of your strategic marketing plan, because everything within that plan depends on understanding what the market is that you're going after and narrowly identifying where you can be successful. And what does that ideal customer look like? Who are they? Where are they online? How can you reach them? What are their wants and needs? And how can you solve specific pain points for them? Tim and I get into a great conversation and I think you're really going to love this second Masterclass episode. Tim. Hey, welcome to The Virtual CMO Podcast. I'm so glad that you could join us today.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 1:42

Eric. Thanks for having me super excited to be here. Excited to dig into this today.

Eric Dickmann: 1:47

Yeah, this is going to be fun because what we've decided to qdo this year is really focused on what we're calling a Masterclass, all around building a strategic marketing plan. Last week I laid out what we're going to be the 15 steps or so that are required for businesses to build a strategic marketing plan. I'm very curious to get some of your thoughts on this because in my experience, in dealing with businesses, what I've seen is one of two common problems. The first is that businesses can tend to cast a very wide net. They don't really focus in on a specific niche. They don't really understand who their target profile customer is. And so what they do is they spend a lot of marketing money going after a very broad market segment and they get frustrated by the results. And I think on the other side of that, what I see them is.beIng too narrow in their focus either in terms of their spending or in terms of their target. And when you are inconsistent with your marketing spend it's easy to be disappointed in the results because you know, results require long-term consistency. And if you're marketing to too small, a niche, obviously you're leaving money on the table, I'm really glad that you're the first guest as part of the season, because we're going to dig into this quite a bit further understanding target markets, understanding your ideal customer profile. Before we get into that discussion, just give the audience a little bit of background on yourself and your firm.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 3:19

Sure. I was born and raised in Northern California Um, in the Bay area I can't say it was, you know, grew up being a natural entrepreneur. I fell into it when I got them graduated from college. The first company I was a partner in, was a wholesale distribution company. We built that over 10 years. We sold it. I spent some time in real estate, residential real estate for awhile. Couldn't stand it. And that's when I shifted gears and got into marketing. And I've been doing that since 2013 timeframe. Now, my company RIALTO Marketing, we've primarily worked with service-based businesses and we just help them simplify marketing so that they can grow with less stress. We find that so many people are just they're battling information overload when it comes to marketing. They feel overwhelmed because of that, and they can't create a plan when you're confused and battling all of this information. You can't create a plan, but you gotta have a plan if you want to succeed. So that's what we do. We see the exact same things that you just touched on, and that's why we really do is focus on those fundamentals first, know, your target market. Making sure that you have great messaging. And having a plan in place. Those are the fundamentals that are going to lay the foundation for long-term success. And that's what most people skip and why they throw tactics against the wall and go, Oh yeah, I did SEO where I did social media and it can work. Oftentimes that's not really the case. It's the right tactic. It was just done at the wrong time.

Eric Dickmann: 4:48

Yeah. And it's going to be interesting to dive into the details of this because, let's put one thing on the table right up front, a marketing budget is not a marketing plan. Oftentimes what I see is people setting aside buckets of money to do certain things, whether it's advertising or content creation or tools or whatnot, and that becomes their marketing plan. But that's not a plan, that's just buckets of money assigned to certain expenses. Do you see that as well? When you're talking with clients?

Tim Fitzpatrick: 5:18

Yes. The way I look at it is your budget and your resources is part of your plan. It's an element of the plan. But it's not the plan itself. I also find too that a lot of people don't they don't have a plan period, or they're thinking about their plan. but it's in their head and it's very haphazard., it's not written down. And when they do have a plan, it's too complicated. It's this long, one year, two year plan. Our businesses are evolving quickly with it. you know, We recommend and use a 90 day plan plan because that's a long enough period of time to spend on different tactics and see some results. But it's short enough where you can make course corrections and adjustments along the way. And to me, success in marketing is about those small incremental adjustments over time that lead to exponential improvement.

Eric Dickmann: 6:11

That's so important because marketing is part art, part science. right there. Isn't a guaranteed path of success. You have to try things, you have to experiment. It is a process of trial and error. And You have to build that into your plan to say, we're going to try this, we're going to look at it. We're going to evaluate it. See if it worked,, make some adjustments and then move on. know, We talked about the fact that a marketing plan is not a marketing budget, but what a marketing plan really is, it's the interrelationship of all of these tactics that you're doing. So that one thing can build on another, right? So you're not executing a bunch of tactics in isolation, you wa you want to get exponential use of the things that you're doing, not just have a bunch of one-offs.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 6:57

Yes. You can't have the right hand, not working with the left. You know, It needs to be cohesive. And if it's not, you're going to run into challenges. That's another big thing that I see with businesses. A lot of times, depending on how big the businesses, the owner is heavily involved in the marketing, they're managing marketing people. Maybe they have people on staff or they're using outside vendors and they don't know what those vendors are supposed to be doing. And They're managing a website guy over here and there's an SEO person here and a social media person over here. It's totally disjointed because the owner doesn't know what each of those people are supposed to be doing and the social media person doesn't know what the SEO person is doing. And all These things need to be on the same page if they're gonna work as well as they should.

Eric Dickmann: 7:39

That's so true and certainly that's the foundation of my business, where I offer fractional CMO services to businesses, to be able to say, let's coordinate your marketing activities, and that's also the benefit of working with an agency, right? As you can have a partner who will take all of these areas and help you put together that plan and manage that plan. I think this is a really good way to kick off this conversation as you're building out your plan, one of the first things that you have to understand is what is your target market? Who are you going to market to? So talk to me a little bit about when you engage with your clients, how do you start to broach this topic of target market? It sounds simple, but I think many people truly don't understand who they're marketing to.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 8:25

Yeah. And I think it's, like I said, we focus on those fundamentals in the first fundamental is your target market. That's where everything start What you're really trying to do when you hone in on your target market is create that perfect vision of your ideal or your dream customers. I think most businesses have anywhere from one to three ideal client types or they should. if you have more than three, it can become really difficult. It's too broad. So we need to niche down and really identify who our ideal client types are. Here's the thing that most people don't realize. There's a lot of benefits to doing this. One, it becomes easier to figure out where people congregate. Where do your ideal clients congregate? If it's too broad, it becomes really difficult. If you narrow it down and you can identify where they start to congregate. It helps direct your sales and your marketing efforts to the right people. Your marketing ends up becoming a lot more effective. because you're going into channels where your ideal clients are, you're getting in front of the right people. It becomes easier to create messaging that attracts and engages those people. If you're too broad you may not really understand all of their problems, or all their challenges or the results that they want to see. But when you hone in and you really understand your ideal clients, almost better or if not better than they know themselves, you can create messaging that is going to resonate with those people, and you're going to convert more customers because of that. You You're also going to attract customers that are more profitable because your ideal client should be customers that are profitable. And you're going to get more referrals because you should be attracting those ideal client types that you do your best work for too. As you target these ideal client types, going to be more profitable, you're going to generate more referrals. There's just so many benefits. Those are the big ones by doing it.

Eric Dickmann: 10:16

Let me give an example to the audience because I was just talking with a client the other day and they sell home theater solutions to very high end individuals who are looking for these very fancy home theaters. So if you think about that, their target market would be luxury homeowners who have, the available income to install one of these large theaters. But if you start to then think about who your ideal customer is and who your, truelly trying to target here. Are you going to be getting celebrities coming to your website, giving you their email address and phone number so that you can follow up with them about that? Or is it actually going to be the builder or the interior designer or whatnot? So your market may include people that aren't actually the people that you ultimately want to interact with. And I think you need to understand who your buyer is, right. And who is the person who you need to build that relationship for? You may need. to build awareness beyond that, but who is the person that is ultimately going to be the person that you engage with?

Tim Fitzpatrick: 11:23

Here's another analogy K. outside of business. When we want to find our, you know, our partner, you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, whatever. You could go out to the bars and just start chatting with anybody, but most of us know that long-term that doesn't usually work for most of us. And how do we really end up finding that person that we want to spend the rest of our life with? Well, we start to think about. what do they look like? You know, But what What are their interests? What are their values? We're starting to hone in on these attributes that, that partner, that ideal partner that we want has. And then we have a barometer that we can measure it up against so that that when we, when we meet somebody, we can start asking the right questions. And really start to hone in on, gosh, is this person going to be a good fit for me? Or are they not? You know, Because if they're not going to be a good fit, why are you going to waste your time date and somebody for two years, if you really want to get married? And then it ends up not working out because now you're two years down the road. And you're behind it's no different with your customers. You need to identify who these people are. What they're like, why their ideal customers for you and you need to understand them. so that you can create messaging. When they read it, they're like, Oh my God! Were they in the meeting that we had a couple of weeks ago or did, were they in my head when I was thinking that last night, that's what you want to have happen.

Eric Dickmann: 12:41

When I think this is a great example because it's something everybody can relate to. And I think it's important to sort of drill into this just a little bit, because Again, if you take this idea of dating and you're looking for a man or a woman between the ages of 25 and 35, who single, right.? That is your target market. So there is somebody within that, then becomes your ideal customer. right? The ideal customer is a subset of that, but your target market is wider because too often, if you niche down all the way, and we see this sometimes on dating sites where you meet all of these very specific criteria. You're going to be looking and looking, and looking because you are so focused on so many specific criteria that it's going to be very hard to execute any marketing to any effectiveness, because you're just too specific. You have to understand the broader market, the pool of potential customers that you will find your ideal customer in, but then you need to know what that ideal customer would be.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 13:41

Yeah. Yeah, Absolutely, I think that's totally fair because it's like you said when you're looking at the demographics. Yes. That may be your target market, but not everybody in that specific target market is going to be an ideal customer for you, you know? so for example, right. We're we're in marketing. Okay. Well, we work with a lot of service-based businesses. So one of the, our ideal clients is coaches and consultants, but every coach and consultant is not a great fit for us. If they're not in a place where they want to grow their business and they're committed to investing in the growth of that business. They're not a good client for me. That's what we do- we help people grow their businesses. We bring in leads so that they can generate new customers and sales and grow. Well, if they're happy with where they're at and they're not really committed to investing in that, then. I can't help those people. They may be in my target market, but they're not one of my ideal clients.

Eric Dickmann: 14:30

And that's the challenge when we were talking about businesses, casting a very wide net. Sometimes that can be the problem because they're so worried about giving up any business yet they will take business from anywhere they can find it. And sometimes that can actually be very detrimental to the business because now you're engaging with customers who are not really the right customers for your business, which can lead to dissatisfaction. It can lead to, service problems and whatnot. So It really is important to understand what is the market that you want to serve? So as you interact with your clients, walk me through what are three steps in really defining that target market and your ideal client?

Tim Fitzpatrick: 15:08

Yeah. So I like to keep things as simple as possible. It's so easy to over-complicate things. That first step really is brainstorming. You're going to just get your thoughts down on paper and for an it firm. Existing businesses, the best place to start brainstorming is to look at your current or past customer base and what you really want to do to really hone in on who your ideal clients is ask yourself three questions. Okay. Who do we enjoy working with? Okay. We didn't start our businesses to work with people that make our lives miserable. You need to identify those clients. you love working with. Two, who are your most profitable clients. We need to stay in business. We need to make money. So we obviously want to work with more profitable clients. Third question is who do we do our best work for? If you do work for clients that you get great results for all the time. It's like I touched on before. You're naturally going to get a ton of referrals because you're generating results for them. So you need to ask yourself those three questions. You're going to have this group of people. and it's that group of people that you can then start to brainstorm and your one to three ideal client types will tend to fall right out of that, that larger group. Okay, so once you've done that, then you can start to really dig into the brainstorming. And I love to start by looking at what are the problems that these people have in common. What are the questions that they have as it relates to what we do? What are the roadblocks that they have, so I don't have enough time to do that. Or do you know this won't work for my type of business, right? Those are examples of roadblocks. What results do they want to see and just dump your ideas down on paper. Get 10 to 15 ideas down for each one of those. And all you're doing is just taking, Hey, what are, what my perceptions of my ideal clients are in getting those down on paper. Then you can start to look at the demographics for the people in that group. How old are they? You know, It depends on if you're B to B or B to C Do they live in certain areas? Do they live in a certain houses over$500,000, whatever it may be. You're looking at the numbers here. You know, In specific attributes or traits of these people. Are they in certain businesses do have age? Do they have certain titles, all of those things or demographics that you can look at? And then the third thing is the psychographics, which I think the psychographics are equally, if not more important than the demographics. The psychographics are- What are their thoughts? What are their motivations, their aspirations, their attitudes, so that the psychographics come back to what I mentioned earlier. For us, they have to want to grow their business. They have to be open to working with an outside partner to do that. If they're not, then then I can't help those people. You don't also, the psychographics are really, really important. And the other thing too, with the psychographics is when you understand their thoughts and their motivations, you can cater your messaging to trigger on those specific thoughts and motivations, and that can be incredibly engaging. So you, you gotta brainstorm first. That's the best place to start.

Eric Dickmann: 18:09

You gave us a lot of great information there and I want to drill into some of it. One of the first things that really sort of caught my attention is that when you're talking about your best customers, Your best customers don't necessarily become the ones who drive the most revenue, right? it's customers who are the most profitable customers, because you can have customers that you spend a lot of time and energy on and that the do a lot of business with you. But at the end of the day, they're not actually very profitable for you. And in fact, they consume a lot of resources. So how do you help clients look at that and say- Well, what truly is my best customer?

Tim Fitzpatrick: 18:47

It goes back to those three questions. You pointed it out just because somebody is driving a lot of volume for your business doesn't mean that they're a great customer. if they're low margin and they're taking up resources, as you pointed out, Eric. Well, your ideal clients, you might be able to serve three or four additional clients rather than the one and drive equally or more revenue and more profit. So that's why I focus on those three questions. that you look at your existing customer base and not look at total revenue because total revenue for a client doesn't necessarily mean that they're a great client. Frankly, they may be driving a bunch of volume, but you can't stay in working with them. Well, who cares? If you don't like working with them, what's the point? They're just creating headaches for you. Those headaches then transfer over whether they intend to or not. They end up transferring over into other aspects of your business and affecting your ability to perform and do what you need to do within your business.

Eric Dickmann: 19:41

Yeah, I love the way that you talked about, who are the customers that you really enjoy working for? Because chances are, if you're enjoying working for them, they're enjoying working with you as well. and building those relationships and then figuring out who they are and saying- Well, where can I find more people like this, more people that have the same characteristics? And I think you've articulated that very well, but this is really an important discussion to have, to be able to build this out during the brainstorming sessions that you're talking about and really get this on paper. WE talk about avatars or this ideal customer profile and some people will take it to the point of my ideal customer is John Smith. He's you know, got a wife and two kids, you know, he lives in a$250,000 house and drives to cars wonder, which is the BMW. and So You can really be very specific. The point of all of that is so that you really get yourself and your team focused on these are the kinds of people that we want to go after. Where can we find them? One of the things that's so great and bad in some ways about marketing in this day and age is we have tools like Facebook advertising, where you can go in and literally get down to very specific interests to target people for your advertising. That's why that platform has grown the way it has. It's also caused some real issues, but we have an ability to target people. You know, I still go to my mailbox every day and I'm amazed at how much junk mail I get that is completely wrong for me. It's just their blanketing, a zip code. We don't have to do that anymore as marketers. We can be very specific, but unless, you know, the criteria that you're going for, you can't pinpoint those advertisements or that content development towards that ideal audience. This is an exercise that is well worth your team's time to do.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 21:35

Absolutely. And if you don't do it, you're not gonna get the results that you should. You know, At the, At the very least, at the worst, you're going to be like- Oh my God, I'm trying every marketing tactic and nothing's working.

Eric Dickmann: 21:46

And, you know, Throughout this Masterclass series, wew are going to be talking a lot about the buyer's journey and the customer's journey. I'd love for you to sort of kick off that discussion a little bit, because truly everything that we are doing in marketing gets tied back to this concept of the buyer's journey from where they first become aware of your product or service all the way through until they make that purchase and I would argue even beyond that into the sales and servicing side, because you want customers to be repeat customers. You want them to come back to you. So marketing truly doesn't end just at the sale. So tee that up a little bit, talk a little bit about the importance of the buyer's journey and how all this fits in here.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 22:26

Yup. I couldn't agree with what you just said more, Eric. you know, We look at the buyer's journey or the customer journey as an hour glass. The hour glass concept of the customer journey was popularized by John Jantz over at Duct Tape Marketing. And he looks at, you know, he said- the customer journey is an hourglass, right? You've got the sand at the top and it's working its way down to the bottom and there's seven steps. There's seven phases to that. There's know, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. Okay. So One more time. Know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. A lot of people look at the journey more as a funnel and it stops the buying process. If you do that, you're missing out on the wealth of business that can be done down at the bottom of the hour glass, which is your repeat and referral business. You can't get repeat and referral business unless you've got great customer service and fulfillment on the back end. If you stop at the funnel, you're missing a really important part on the back end of that. What you really want to do is look at those seven phases, and when you do that, you really understand the customer journey. The journey that your customers go through as they work with you. There's a lot of things. You can do. One, you can optimize the customer experience because you're going to understand what they're doing, what their needs, what their expectations are at each of those phases. And you can optimize that. You can address their needs more successfully. Because If you know that they're expecting a specific thing to happen at the buy phase, you can make sure that you have that process or procedure built into your system so that you can meet and exceed their expectations. You can optimize your lead conversions in your sales process, because again, you understand what they want at each phase, and when you can do that, you can help your prospects and your customers move through that journey more effectively and more efficiently.

Eric Dickmann: 24:16

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO onsulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. This is something we are going to hit on throughout this series over and over again, because these stages are so important and there's actually a lot of proof points that have been developed over time that say for people who are in these different stages, this is the best kind of content that they can consume in these stages. Are they just looking for an introduction to the product? You know, they just want to see maybe some video overviews or is it later in the cycle when maybe they'd want to see a case study or some proof points about, uh, you know, maybe an analyst recommendation or, or a white paper or something like that. But it's important as you're building out your marketing plan to understand how all of your tactics and activities and the content that you create is fitting into this buyer's journey because too often it gets weighted incorrectly, right? There's all this content that maybe is designed for the very early stages of the buyer's journey, but then there's nothing to sort of get them over the goal line at the end to convert. In marketing, we focus on not only generating the leads, but the lead conversion. And we, Once you've got them, the more that you can convert, the more you can up those percentages, the more efficient your marketing operation is going to be. But having that content, those tactics to support the entire buyer's journey is so important. And How can you really do that without a plan?

Tim Fitzpatrick: 26:24

Yup. You have to understand when we get into what we call it- mapping the customer journey. You know, you need to understand what their needs are, wants. What the actions that they're taking, you know, at, at the know phase, Are they talking to friends to get referrals or are they going online and doing a Google search? You need to understand all of those elements, because once you understand those elements at each phase, then you can map what you're going to do to match that, you know, because it's not just the content that you're going to create uh, at each phase that's an important part of it, but it's also what kind of policies and procedures do we need to have within our business to meet their needs and their expectations. you know, What's our customer onboarding? Is that meeting their needs and expectations, if not, we need to plug that gap. They're not going to be happy, and so we have to understand not just the content that they're looking for but the actions they're taking in their expectations, and then we can map. What we need to do to make that happen and meet all of their needs and expectations.

Eric Dickmann: 27:29

Yeah, and this doesn't have to be a super complicated process,right We know everybody's marketing budgets are different. Their plans are going to be different. What does this mapping usually look like? You know, When you're working with clients, does it end up just being a spreadsheet, a PowerPoint? If you're giving some advice to people who maybe haven't done this exercise before, how can they go ahead and create this overall buyer's journey and then focus on mapping their plan to it?

Tim Fitzpatrick: 27:55

For us, it's a spreadsheet. We try to keep it super simple. They're down the left column is each phase know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. Across the top, there's two columns. There's one for the customer, and then there's a second one for what, what do we need to do? In the customer, call them. You're just going to sit there and you're gonna put in what actions are they taking at each phase? What needs do they have? What expectations do they have? You know, Where are they getting their information from? And We're just outlining that and we're just listing it. You know, It doesn't have to be this long. You know, four-paragraph thing. Just list what they're doing. Are they going on Google and doing a Google search. Are they looking at online reviews? Are they reading content, are they going to forums? What are they doing? And then, in that second column for us, we can start to outline what channels do we need to to invest in here to meet what they're doing, you know, or what policies or what procedures do we have in place? What tools do we need to have in place to meet those needs and that's all you're doing. It doesn't have to be complicated. I keep it simple and you can always, as you get more and more experienced, these may change. Well, cool. You can just go back and just make the updates to doesn't overcomplicate it.

Eric Dickmann: 29:08

It's not trying to create something super complicated. This is really a thought provoking exercise to get you thinking about how the activities that you're doing can best support your overall objectives. But you have to understand what those objectives are, the market that you're going for, the target customer that you're after. It's far too easy I think in marketing to sort of go through this rinse and repeat cycle where you take last year's budget out, you tweak some numbers, and then you just repeat the whole thing all over again, without really understanding the effectiveness of it. you know, One of the things we're going to get into in a later episode is we're going to talk about CRM tools, marketing automation and analytics, because it's so important that you understand the number., I think this discussion today was a good way to kick things off because you have to start here. You really have to understand your target market, your ideal customer before you can get into these other things, you don't want to start buying tools or buying the advertising or building content and tell you, understand these things. So I want to give you a final opportunity here just to share any last thoughts and also to talk a little bit about your firm and how people can, uh, can get in touch with you. And Maybe some of the things that you've talked about here today.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 30:23

Sure. My advice from a marketing standpoint is just don't skip those fundamentals You know, we talked about one of them today, which is understanding your target market and your ideal clients. So, so important. You can't skip the fundamentals. you know, You can't expect to stand up to the plate and hit a major league, fast ball until you know how to stand and how to hold the bat and have the fundamentals of hand-eye coordination. You can't have success longterm without getting the fundamentals in place, don't skip them and your marketing will be so much better and more effective long-term. You know, where you can learn more about us. Best place to go is our website, which is rialtomarketing.com. That's R I A L T O marketing.com. If you go to forward slash Virtual dash C M O put together some, some special resources for your listeners, Eric. That touch on those fundamentals, target market messaging, and creating a plan to help them. They can go there and find all our social channels and podcasts and all that good stuff.

Eric Dickmann: 31:20

Tim. That's perfect. I think this was a good discussion. Clearly, this is the kind of discussion that could go on for hours. There's a lot more to this and, I don't want to give any illusion to people that there's not more to this, there's a lot to it. And That's one of the reasons that we try to bring on experts like yourself to really help people understand the importance of these exercise. And Also make sure that people understand that if they need help, there are resources like you and I out there that can really help people build out these plans and understand because marketing is part art, part science, but it is an expense. And What you want to do is you want to be most effective with your marketing efforts so that you see the best results for your company and your team. Thank you so much for being here today. I will have all that information that you listed in the show notes, as well as your contact information so that people can find you. And I appreciate your making some resources available to our audience here.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 32:16

Thank you appreciate it was fun.

Eric Dickmann: 32:18

Thanks again. Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.