41. Elevate Your Business: Find Your Unique Marketing Recipe for Success with Dean Mercado

Sarah Noel Block: The intro and the outro afterwards. So we could just start talking now. Perfect. First off, do you want to introduce yourself to the audience?

Dean Mercado: I'd be happy to. I'm Dean Mercado. I run two companies. One is Online Marketing Muscle, which is a marketing and sales automation agency. Been around since 2004 with that one.

Dean Mercado: My second business that I run, One, is a business coaching company which is aimed at helping small businesses and entrepreneurs step into their power, help them optimize, grow, scale, so on and so forth. That's essentially in a nutshell. I'm also an author, a best selling author of the book behind me, The Mind Stretch.

Sarah Noel Block: Bring it over, let's take a look.

Dean Mercado: Sure, I'd be happy to. This is the Mind Stretch right here. And surprisingly, and amazingly, this book was written about a dozen years ago. About ten years ago. It is a 1000 page book that we boiled down to 100 pages.

Sarah Noel Block: Really? I was like, 1000 pages. That's a commitment.

Dean Mercado: What happened is I have a co author on the book. His name is Barry Laub. Barry Laube and I had connected many, many years ago. We were both in the coaching vein. And we said, you know what?

Dean Mercado: We've got to do more to help. We've got to give people guideline, we've got to give them structure, we've got to lend something. So we spoke and brainstormed for about a year and a half on this book. Came out with 1000 pages. And we were just, at the time, stepping into the Twitter generation.

Dean Mercado: So it was like, people don't have that kind of attention span anymore. We better take a different approach. So me being the younger of the crowd and the more social, active person of the crowd, of the two of us, I said, we really need to be boiling this thing down. And then we spent a significant amount of time kind of just getting it down to its essence. I used to say, well, what are you trying to say?

Dean Mercado: You give me all this junk. Well, what are you trying to say? What's your point? Right.

Sarah Noel Block: I mean, that's something that you can really do with all pieces of content. People don't have big attention spans. So that hour long video that used to people used to be into, they aren't anymore. So you can cut that video down into little five minute clips and it'll do so much better. Even 22nd clips for, like, shorts.

Dean Mercado: Absolutely. And that's why, like I was telling you earlier, that I was thrilled to see your repurposing methodology because that in itself will help you simplify your content, strengthen your message, get a little bit more pinpointed as you try and break things apart and put them into little pieces that are more purposeful, more impactful. Right?

Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. I subscribe to a core content method, create something robust, and then you can whittle it down and create net new content. It's not recycling what's already been said a million times it's creating something new from it.

Dean Mercado: And that's where we went with the Mind Stretch, by the way. Exactly what we did. We took the big enormous piece and then we said, you know what, let's give them the sound bites and let's see if they want more. If they want more, they'll ask for it and then we'll elaborate and that's what we did.

Sarah Noel Block: That's exactly right. And with that you can create a series if you wanted to take like repurpose those thousand pages that didn't get used or you could create a course that goes with that.

Dean Mercado: Exactly now. Yeah. When we first did this, people were like, well, it's just 100 pages. How good of a book could it be? And that was just a mindset was still a little bit still stuck in the yesteryear.

Dean Mercado: Not everybody was adopting this deprevity we use these days where it just get to the point, what do you got? Right.

Sarah Noel Block: I read so many business books and there's just like tangents that don't matter in them. Everybody skips around when they're reading business books. I just go to the chapters that matter.

Dean Mercado: Right, exactly. And that's what we were banking on back in the day. And I think we were onto something because we saw everything just shift that way over the last decade or so. That's great. That's been impactful and it's still alive and well.

Dean Mercado: This book to this day, the stuff in it is just as relevant today, if not more relevant than it was when we wrote it a dozen years ago or so.

Sarah Noel Block: Speaking of, we will be talking about the unique recipe for success today, which is in your book. Right.

Dean Mercado: Tangentially. Now, this book is written through my Dean Mercado company. Your unique marketing recipe is really more my online marketing muscle kind of methodologies and formulas. They do this, but we use the branding on more of the automation side of the company or the automation company, not necessarily the coaching.

Sarah Noel Block: Okay, that makes sense. So can you explain what the unique recipe for success is?

Dean Mercado: Sure. Well, in all we do, we believe that in order to stand out from the clutter, from all the garbage that's out there, we believe that everybody has a specific unique way about them, something special, their superpower that will allow them and empower them to stand out from everything else. All the clutter, all the junk. Right.

Sarah Noel Block: Unique value proposition for a personal brand.

Dean Mercado: Yes. It kind of spans off of that. This is a formula that we created probably going back almost 20 years and it's as relevant and it works today just like it always has. Right. The key is getting clear.

Dean Mercado: Stop following the follower and start stepping into your own power. Figure out what that is.

Sarah Noel Block: How do you figure it out?

Dean Mercado: That's the good part. The first part is you always have to know. You have to understand who your target market really is you have to really dig deep. Who are they? What's their financial fitness?

Dean Mercado: How much can they afford? What's important to them, what's not important to them. The more you know about them, the better this will all work. Then you need to understand that there's really only three purposes of marketing, and one is to expand your reach. That means finding new and new and new audiences all over the place.

Dean Mercado: Another is expanding your visibility with the audience that do know of you. Right. You want to expand your visibility, get in front of them. That's the repetitions, right?

Sarah Noel Block: Yes. Consistency.

Dean Mercado: Exactly. And then you have to build your credibility. You have to be able to not only get in front of them, but when you do, when you open your mouth, make sure you're saying something that's important and relevant and not overused.

Sarah Noel Block: Something that provides value.

Dean Mercado: Yes, exactly. Something that allows your brand to start showing up, allows your superpower to start coming to the forefront of the conversation. So then on top of that, where the rubber hits the road. We've identified several different kinds of people, and I'll give you them in a nutshell right now. And one of them is what we call the writer.

Dean Mercado: So those of us who have that gift of writing, we just have a way with words. That particular person, there's going to be certain types of marketing that we will recommend based on that fact. Like, for example, if you're a great writer, maybe you should consider blogging. Maybe you should consider writing great posts on your favorite social media channel. Maybe you should consider writing a book.

Dean Mercado: Right. There's lots of ways. Maybe you should consider email marketing, right.

Sarah Noel Block: Guest posting and other publications posting.

Dean Mercado: Exactly. So there's so many different tactics you can choose when you have that gift of words. Very powerful gift. Most unfortunately use it, in my opinion, incorrectly. They tend to add more blah to the garbage that's already out there we don't care about.

Dean Mercado: Yes, exactly. Show me something. Give me some. Why am I listening to you? Why am I reading your stuff?

Dean Mercado: So your unique marketing recipe when it comes to the writer is about allowing them to, number one, identify that that is a superpower of theirs, show them the array of possibility in front of them and then helping them maximize their use of those. And this is where your repurposing technique is wonderful.

Sarah Noel Block: You know, I love it.

Dean Mercado: Yeah. They could take one piece of content, as you had mentioned earlier, one large piece of beautiful content and break that up into so many different pieces. One grand blog post can become 40, 50 different social media posts and broken up into all different ways. You could take that one big one blog post and expand it into a full book. So it could work both ways.

Dean Mercado: You could scale it up and scale it down so that's the writer then we also have what we called the promoter. That's the person who has the gift of gab. They love being on camera, they love being on stage. They are perfectly suited for what we're doing right now. They're perfectly suited for getting on places like YouTube and TikTok and shooting video shorts and getting on big stages and speaking in that way.

Dean Mercado: So podcasting, anything of that nature, typically, they tend to be more extroverted.

Sarah Noel Block: They've got a personality.

Dean Mercado: Yes, they got a personality. They got that something right. They got it in their eye and you can see it a mile away. They've got confidence, right? So that's our presenter.

Dean Mercado: And then thirdly, we've got what we call our schmoozer. Our schmoozer is that person who loves people. They love being around people. Their genius happens when they're in a room full of people. You put me in front of people, and when I can have one on one or even one on many, and I'm going to make things happen.

Dean Mercado: So that's where what was once old comes back and becomes new again.

Sarah Noel Block: People miss people. After a couple of years, again, we want to shake hands.

Dean Mercado: And it's really come to the forefront as of late where we're seeing more and more of a movement back toward what used to be so popular. I'm based out of Long Island, New York, and we used to call that the networking capital of the world. Every moment you turned around, there were another ten networking groups going on at any given time on every single day of the week. And then we had our challenge the last couple of years, and that all died down as everybody was afraid of each other all of a sudden. But now people are fed up.

Dean Mercado: They're sick of it. They miss each other, they want to hug, they want to connect, they want to shake hands again. They want to feel that energy you get when you walk into a room. And it's that combination of a little bit of nervous energy, but powerful energy.

Sarah Noel Block: That'S a good description for it. That's exactly how I feel when I collect my not working event. A little nervous, a little excited.

Dean Mercado: And when you work with clients to help them understand how to maximize and take advantage of that nervous energy, which is good energy to have, right? That nervous energy, if you use it to work for you, it could be extremely powerful. If you allow it to consume you, you're done. Smoother is the wrong vein for you. So the unique marketing recipe was aimed at helping people understand which part of the marketing they had the biggest problem with, whether it's they needed to increase their visibility, their credibility, or their reach, and then helping them see themselves as one of those other three paradigms of are you a schmoozer, are you a presenter?

Dean Mercado: Are you a writer? And then we marry those together and come up with a formula.

Sarah Noel Block: Okay, I have some questions, please.

Dean Mercado: Shoot.

Sarah Noel Block: Let's start from the beginning of this. How do you figure out who your ideal customer is in the first place?

Dean Mercado: Right? Well, there's a lot of things that we do when we look at that. I mean, in an ideal world, we'd get to cherry pick what we do, how we do it, who we do it with and for. Right. So it is about knowing that target market.

Dean Mercado: It is about knowing what's important to them. So if you're, let's say, a schmoozer, go to the groups, go to the networking groups where those people hang out, go find them, go hang out with them, get involved in the groups on LinkedIn or on Facebook or wherever they're hanging out, go where they are, listen, pay attention. I think that's one skill that we've all lost sight of is our listening skills. And because we don't listen so well, it's so much harder to find out what's important to the people we want to serve. Right?

Dean Mercado: Please.

Sarah Noel Block: Yeah, I hit something with you. Yeah. Because I create a lot of content strategies for my clients. So this is something that I have to do a lot. And so I end up educating people on how to really listen even when you're not with the person, because so many people are going online and complaining about their problems in some sort of fashion.

Sarah Noel Block: You can be listening and no one even realizes it because they're talking on forums. They are putting reviews out there. They're going to the business books that they read, and those three star reviews are giving you gold, telling you exactly what's missing from that book. So if you're looking at the service or the product that you provide, they're telling you, right, there something that could be your unique value proposition. Because they're like, this is missing this.

Sarah Noel Block: And you're like, oh, okay, so it turns out this group of people need that.

Dean Mercado: Correct. Absolutely brilliant, Sarah. Absolutely brilliant. And that little nugget that you just passed on, if people would listen to what you just said and take action, bold action based on that, start paying attention. All the information we need is out there already.

Dean Mercado: It's in front of us. But we're so busy being full of ourselves that we're not listening to those that we're trying to say we want to serve.

Sarah Noel Block: Yeah, it's all out there already. Even if you're starting off and you have no audience at all, so you don't have someone to schmooze with or talk to, they're talking about it in forums and online. You can find that information still.

Dean Mercado: That's the beauty of where the business world is today versus 20 years ago when I started online marketing muscle, the Internet was kind of still new on the scene. Most businesses, most small businesses in particular, didn't even have websites yet. So, yeah, I'm dating myself a little bit there. I get it. But it's a testament that what we're telling you here today is true and it's real and it works.

Dean Mercado: And it is about coming back to ground zero again, reality, and saying, you know what, I get that. There's all this distraction out there, all these fancy new things, and here I am getting on here saying the schmoozer should go out and network.

Sarah Noel Block: Whatever works for you.

Dean Mercado: You got to find what works and stop worrying about what's the new hot thing right now. Yeah. If you could take advantage of that or add that into and use it to supplement what it is you need to be doing, your strategy and your tactic. Great. Fantastic.

Dean Mercado: If you could find a way to leverage it, perfect. But don't throw away what's working on the bandwagon of what everybody else is doing. Because your buddy down over here and your friend over there and this one over here is saying, why aren't you using this yet? What's wrong with you? Everybody?

Dean Mercado: You're missing out. Really?

Sarah Noel Block: If you're a schmoozer, you can still apply that to online marketing and make it work with online communities creating a membership.

Dean Mercado: Yes, I'm living proof of that.

Sarah Noel Block: Yeah, you're a schmoozer and your business is all around online marketing.

Dean Mercado: Absolutely. And that's why when I started online marketing muscle, as funny as it sounds, I got laughed at, I got made fun.

Sarah Noel Block: Why?

Dean Mercado: Because they said, we thought you were smart. You're willing to limit yourself and put yourself into this tiny little box that is called Internet.

Sarah Noel Block: And it works.

Dean Mercado: This thing called an Internet. Internet is just a fad. That's what I was being told.

Sarah Noel Block: What year was this?

Dean Mercado: Oh my good, you're going back to the early 20 01 20 02 20 03 I'm telling you, it wasn't really picked up yet. People were still relying on they had their mindset was in old school marketing mentality, this new way of marketing. Right. the.com bubble just burst in the year 2000. People were afraid because of that.

Dean Mercado: They were like, oh, you saw what happened. All those businesses lost their business. That's what people would tell me. Why would you be so stupid to do this? And I'm like, I'm telling you, the way you succeed in business is you've got to look where things are going.

Sarah Noel Block: Yeah.

Dean Mercado: Not necessarily where they've been. Where are they going now? It doesn't mean you have to change or throw out your strategy. Your strategy should still be kind of the same. Right.

Dean Mercado: And that's where we came up with the visibility, credibility and reach concept. Your strategy should be around that. It doesn't matter what tools are in front of you, what the new hot thing on the block is. It makes no difference. Getting visibility is getting visibility.

Dean Mercado: The tool you use is your choice. Whatever works right now, go with it. Go with it. But you know that your overarching strategy is to improve your visibility, right? Those touch points.

Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. You need people to know you exist in order to be able to sell big time.

Dean Mercado: And with the way things have gone, it's not like in the old days. It'd be like, okay, three touches. It's all it takes, and they're ready to buy. Right? Seven touches.

Dean Mercado: It was for a long time. People say, oh, it's seven touches. That's it. Now it's somewhere like 1000. It's crazy.

Dean Mercado: So distracted. So if your content isn't stellar and your content meaning what you say when you're schmoozing, what you present, how you.

Sarah Noel Block: Show up for your audience, that's beautiful.

Dean Mercado: I love that. How you show up. If that's not unique and it's not you and it doesn't separate you from the rest of the clutter out there, good luck. You're going to struggle.

Sarah Noel Block: How do you find your unique thing?

Dean Mercado: Sometimes it's about talking. Talking to somebody, talking to people. I'll tell everybody, get a coach. Every single business owner on this planet should have a coach and run away from the coach who doesn't have a coach.

Sarah Noel Block: So even coaches explain that to me. Why?

Dean Mercado: What that means is everybody needs that confidant in their corner who's looking at what's going on in their world with an unbiased point of view. Somebody who's going to call you out and tell you straight what you need to hear. Not what you want to hear necessarily, but what you need to hear in order to get you from where you are to where you're saying you want to be. Please.

Sarah Noel Block: Would a coach then be able to help you identify what makes you unique?

Dean Mercado: Bingo. Absolutely. A good coach should. The right kind of coach should not all coaches are the same. There are different coaches for different aspects of business.

Dean Mercado: You have to choose the coach that makes sense for you. One that has the ability to move you toward where it is you're saying you want to be. Right? They have to be willing to listen. They have to be willing to help, guide, hold your hand, mentor when necessary.

Dean Mercado: And that's a little stretch. Some coaches don't want to get into mentoring. I think it's critical, especially in the small business arena. They don't have the ability I'm sorry. I'm a small business.

Dean Mercado: I've been one I've worked with small businesses for 20 years. They don't have the ability to hire 50 coaches like a sports guy might.

Sarah Noel Block: No, they do not.

Dean Mercado: They don't. So the coach you choose better have the ability to help you in a little bit of a broader way. They can help you see a bigger picture. They can help you figure out what your superpower is. They can help you step into it.

Dean Mercado: They can help you become better at it. They can help you refine it. They could show you things like what you're saying, Sarah, about the content. Right. They could show you a framework and say, let's just take your superpower and let's apply this framework to it.

Dean Mercado: And just that alone, when I tell you I've made every single mistake a small business owner can make. And it's been painful. And it wasn't until I got coaching that that changed.

Sarah Noel Block: Well, you and me both, right. I don't know a single business owner who hasn't felt like they made an insane amount of mistakes. So anybody who's listening right now and you're like, I'm ready to give up because I suck at this. I made mistakes. So guy and so has Dean.

Dean Mercado: Yes. All of us. And it's your willingness and ability to push through despite the challenges that you face. Yes, it takes thick skin. Yes, you have.

Dean Mercado: Toughen up. Remember, failure is not a bad thing. Failure just moves you closer to what it is you want.

Sarah Noel Block: Right.

Dean Mercado: Okay. Now that's out of the way. So failure is a learning process.

Sarah Noel Block: I love that you said that. That's something I've been talking about a ton. That marketing is an experiment.

Dean Mercado: Yes.

Sarah Noel Block: And with experiments, you're bound to fail. And that's a good thing because that means you can cut that and you've learned something. That's a learning lesson. And now you know how, like a direction to move.

Dean Mercado: Right.

Sarah Noel Block: It's an educational experience.

Dean Mercado: Absolutely spot on. And the coaching moment there is realize and recognize, folks, that you're not the failure. The tactical or the strategy you use might not be performing well or may have failed. That doesn't mean you as a person failure. Dust yourself off, get back up and say, okay, if that didn't work, something else will.

Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. You're that much closer to success because that thing is done. You tried it, it didn't work. That's cool. Move it over.

Sarah Noel Block: And now you know what direction to go.

Dean Mercado: That's right. It's the best thing that can happen to you. The entrepreneurs that I've coached over the years, the small business owners, the ones that were afraid to fail, were always the one that struggled the longest. When you're not afraid to fail and you fail quick and you fail forward, those are the folks that move through this process, this painful process of learning much quicker.

Sarah Noel Block: Yeah.

Dean Mercado: Amen.

Sarah Noel Block: Dean yeah.

Dean Mercado: Powerful stuff.

Sarah Noel Block: Before we wrap up, can you tell the audience how they can find you online?

Dean Mercado: Sure. Very easy, because I've been around for as long as I have. If you Google my name, Dean Mercado, you will find me everywhere. And that's because of the longevity of being online. But my two main websites, Deemmercado.com, is a great one to go to because that will point you everywhere I am.

Dean Mercado: And onlinemarketingmuscle.com, which is my agency, you can learn a lot more about concepts like this, your unique marketing recipe and others other frameworks and methodologies that we use. So our websites are the perfect place to start and from there you'll find wherever I am.

Sarah Noel Block: And do you have an ebook that you're sharing with the audience?

Dean Mercado: Oh, I have tons of them. But one that I would recommend for a small business owner is this one here. This one you'll find on onlinemarketingmuscle clone.

Sarah Noel Block: The owner listening on the pod.

Dean Mercado: Right. Clony owner. And Cloning owner is about it gets into leverage, getting leverage in your business, building the right systems in your business, knowing how to squeeze more out of less, which is always a pain for small business owners. In coaching so many of them over the years, one of the biggest things I always heard was, if I only had ten of me.

Sarah Noel Block: Yes.

Dean Mercado: And that's what Colonial spawned out of. It spawned out of that statement from so many small business owners that just were getting fed up and frustrated with it being so hard. It doesn't have to be that hard. I could tell you folks get structure.

Sarah Noel Block: Well, you said your agency is an automation agency, so you're cloning the owner with automation.

Dean Mercado: Bingo. Absolutely. So learn to delegate or automate. Delegate or automate. And if it doesn't fit in one of those two things, then chances are you probably shouldn't be doing it.

Dean Mercado: And when I coach clients, I'm usually telling them, usually them as the owner, as the CEO of their company, there are really only three things you should be doing. Everything else should be delegated or automated. Right. We got to stop you from working in your business and start you working on it. Little cliche.

Dean Mercado: Yeah, you've probably heard that before, but are you doing it?

Sarah Noel Block: So what are the three things that they should be doing?

Dean Mercado: Oh, you want more?

Sarah Noel Block: Okay, I'm curious.

Dean Mercado: Well, one is about you as the CEO, as the owner, you need to be the one who creates and establishes the vision. Where are we going? Point the direction. Make it crystal clear where we're going and why. Why it's important that we get there.

Dean Mercado: Right. Your second big thing that you're responsible for is building what I call a rock star team. You need to build a team around you that can help move you from where you are to where your vision is saying you're going. Right? So again, that doesn't mean or in expanding on that, it doesn't mean that you have to hire all these employees.

Dean Mercado: Remember, you can outsource pieces. You can subcontract pieces. You can get virtual assist, find the help wherever you can get it. But you have to be in control of what they're doing for you. You have to know enough to manage it.

Sarah Noel Block: Right.

Dean Mercado: Not to do it yourself. And then when we talk about those two, then it leads us into the third one. You've got to be responsible to manage the cash flow of the business, manage the money of the business. If you don't understand your financial situation, you're going to have problems, period. And I know some of you would be saying, well, that's easy.

Dean Mercado: I got nothing to start with. I got no cash.

Sarah Noel Block: I got no cash, I've got no money. So it's fine.

Dean Mercado: Well, when you show the universe that you can manage the little you have, then the universe will respond in kind and give you more. Think about what I just said. That's a bomb right there.

Sarah Noel Block: It is a bomb.

Dean Mercado: You will not get more until you prove that you're capable of handling what you have. Right? Remember that. Yes. And I can't tell you that enough.

Dean Mercado: Right? So hope that was helpful.

Sarah Noel Block: That was helpful. Thank you for joining me today.

Dean Mercado: Oh, Sarah was my pleasure. I loved meeting you and loved connecting like this.

Sarah Noel Block: It was fun.

Dean Mercado: Yes.

Sarah Noel Block: All right.