Another day, another conversation around strategy. We’ve been talking a ton about this, and the reason for that is because I believe strategies, when it comes to your marketing, are a game-changer for your business as a whole for a couple of reasons. Number one, it keeps us from buying courses we don’t really need, meaning we go, “Oh yeah, I want to do XYZ. That means I clearly need to buy this 400th course today.” No, not necessarily.
It also allows us to actually utilize the courses and coaching investments we do make because we know where it fits into a plan. We know why we’re checking that box because it results in something else. It also keeps us from falling prey to system jumping. Oftentimes, we’ll think, “Well, if I just have a new social media tool, or if I just have a new website, or if I just have a new content management system, or if I just have a new video tool or whatever, then my marketing will be easy.” But the reality is the tools do not make the marketing easy. The strategy, and the plan, and being able to execute something you already created. It’s what makes this work.
It also helps us move through resistance. I know for me I often run into resistance when it comes to my marketing. But in having a strategy and a plan, I’m able to sidestep that really, really quickly because I’m just executing tasks. I don’t have to think about how all the pieces fit together because I’ve already thought of that stuff. Now, I’m in a place where I’m just checking off boxes and marking things off of my to-do list, and that’s a much more comfortable place to be, which can allow us to be, on a lot of cases, more effective.
So that’s why I want you to start thinking about the strategy stuff as the core responsibility when it comes to your marketing. With all of that said, I want to dig in today on the two things you have to figure out before you build the plan. I’m talking about these because they are things that we go round and round about with clients over and over and over and over again because these are not set in for any kind of decisions. These will be things that ebb and flow based on what you’re doing that month, quarter, year, whatever.
It’s something that you may need to revisit. It may also be something you need to fine-tune and tweak as you go into different seasons in your business. We’re going to talk a little bit about what I mean by that as we dig in.
Who is your ideal client?
So, thing number one, and you’ve heard me say this before, and I promise, my friend, you will hear me say it again. Who are you talking to? Who are your ideal clients? Who do you want to buy the thing? Whose life are you going to change? Whose perception do you need to be paying attention to? Whose questions are you answering? If you don’t know who it is you’re speaking to, it will be really hard to find the right words. At the core of ideal clients, you figure out the answer to all of your marketing questions. So before you sit down and you say, “What am I selling?” Before you sit down and you say, “What networks am I on?” Before you sit down and say, “How often do I put out content?” You first have to step back and say, “Who do I serve? Who am I working with? Who is my audience? Who is my customer base?” Because until you figure out that piece, nothing is going to quite land right, and you’re going to end up working through a ton of frustration, and I’d like to avoid that.
So sit down and look at who are you working with. Now, I mentioned a little bit ago that sometimes this needs fine-tuning. Sometimes, this needs tweaking. That’s because, in a lot of cases, we work with clients in different ways. For example, I think … I’m just going to take my stuff because it’s the easiest and just transparency, right? We’ve got a lot of different offerings inside of The Stacey Harris, and even into the agency side of my big-picture structure.
So running through the spectrum here, we’ve got Hit the Mic Backstage. We’ve got the Backstage Amplifier Mastermind. We have VIP strategy days. We have done-for-you strategy builds, and we have ongoing done-for-you marketing services, where we’re essentially your contract marketing department. That’s a big spectrum. Although all of my clients across that spectrum from backstage, full DIY, to done-for-you contract marketing department on the agency side. All the clients inside of that spectrum have a lot of things in common because I tend to work and want my team to work with a certain personality type, because there are people who I just best work with.
On the flip side of that, they’re not all in the same space in their business. Somebody joining us for $40 a month inside of Hit the Mic Backstage is generally not business-wise in the same place that somebody who hires my agency and my team as their contract marketing department isn’t. It’s not to say one is better than the other. I want to just nip that in the bud right now. One is not better than another ever, ever, ever. They’re just in different places in the journey. It’s not necessarily I have found super attached to X amount of years in business.
What it is super attached to is X amount of expertise or X amount of financial positioning. A lot of times I have found their goals, big picture, tend to be a little different because they’re in those different places. So maybe somebody who’s in backstage, they just don’t have a desire to have a done-for-them contract marketing department. They want to have somebody who can do some of the stuff, but they want to be doing some of it too. Great, so they’re in a different place.
Again, one is not right, and one is not wrong. I cannot say that enough. With all of that said, although they have some things in common, when I am marketing those different pieces, I have to factor in the additional information of where specifically is the person who’s going to purchase this or hire my team for this or bring us on for whatever. Where are they right now? So I’m speaking to the problems they’re having right now. This doesn’t mean that the other clients are no longer important or that I’m no longer selling those things because across the spectrum, we have a lot of similarities and personality. We have a lot of similarity in core frustrations.
We’re just going about solving them differently. I’m not generally going to lose anybody. I’m going to reinforce trust, but I’m more likely to nail the action-taking part. I’m more likely to land where they’re going to actually do something, if I get specifics to that section of my audience. When I talk about having a focus, that’s where we do that, and we’re going to talk more about that in just a second. But I have to know who that big picture across the spectrum, who that ideal client is and the things that keep them tied together across the whole possibilities of offerings.
Then when I figure out what that what is, then I have to dig even deeper. If you have not yet really looked at each of your offerings, and nailed down who amongst your audience each of those offerings is for, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice, like epic amounts of humongous disservice. I want you to take some time digging into that piece. This is something that we had to do when we launched the VIP strategy days earlier this … Well, it was this late summer. It’s now fall. Yay. This summer, I think we launched them in July or August.
But when we launched the VIP Strategy Days, I had to go, “Okay, so who amongst my overall audience is this VIP strategy day really for? Who is it really going to best serve?” I found that it fell in between people who had maybe even doing BAM for a while, and they wanted to take all the great things we do in BAM over the course of monthly calls and shove it into one day so that they could take massive amounts of action. But I also found that it wasn’t really for my clients who want to just hand everything over.
Those people who want to be involved more, who want to see how these decisions are made, who are still interested in learning some of these things. A lot of times, I’m finding that it’s a better fit for clients who are going to have their own in-house or current existing contract team do their marketing for them over the course of that quarter. It’s more effective if we make those decisions together in a VIP strategy day than if I hand them a document full of decisions I’ve made around what’s best, because again, they have some context, and they have some education around why choices were made and how to tweak those or adjust those, or when is it the right time to say, “You know what? Now, we need to go off-book a little bit and make these choices.”
I had to dig into who that person was so that we could market that offering, okay? So I want you to go through each of your offerings, upsells, downsells, the whole thing, and make sure you know specifically who was the ideal client for that offering. Not just for you, not just for your company, not just for your team, but each of your products and each of your services.
What are you offering them?
The second part … and this one’s going to be more quick, I promise … is what are you trying to do with them right now? I know this seems obvious, but it’s so often we forget. We think, “Okay, these are the six things I sell, so we need to build a strategy to sell all six of these things,” which is probably not going to be super effective. So instead, I want you to look at, “What amongst these six things am I trying to sell right now?”
Again, using my own stuff as an example, at the end of this year, and I think I’ve mentioned this a couple of times now. We’re really shifting into filling the last couple of spots we have for 2018, and I have a very aggressive goal as far as how much of 2019 I’d like to have booked by the time the bell rings on 2019 and we get started. It’s something that I have really decided to focus on, so that’s what our marketing focus is.
As we were going through summer, the marketing focus was really backstage and, “What do we need to do?” I’ve intentionally pulled back on one and pulled into another because I want there to be focus. Here’s the good news though. If somebody is listening to this episode, and they’re in love with the value, but they’re not ready to make the investment or make the decisions or have the conversations that we have in a VIP strategy day. They have other ways to work with me. They can see that stuff on my site.
So I’m building trust with somebody who’s going to join us backstage or somebody who’s going to hire the agency to do their contract marketing work, even though, specifically, my calls to action and my language is speaking specifically to people who I want to be sitting down with for a full day and doing VIP strategy days, because I have that consistent languaging across my clients. But also because I have that consistent messaging that’s speaking directly to them.
I’m really capturing both audiences even though I’m approaching this with a very singular focus. I want you to look at where’s your focus, because when you look at where’s your focus, you get the stuff that’s next to it as well. You’ll get the fall-off as well. Whereas when you jump from thing to thing to thing, trying to sell all six of your things at once, people will leave confused, and in a lot of cases, feeling like nothing but sales have been broadcast at them.
So do you see the difference there? I want you to focus on, “Here’s what we’re selling. Here’s who we’re selling it to. Here is the value that we can provide to ensure that that message is getting out.” Then provide that value. Then when you provide that value, again, you get the runoff where clients are like, “This sounds great, but that’s not right for me. But oh sweet, this thing over here is great for me. I’m in.” You get the people who are like, “Oh, this value was exactly for me, and I’m super ready.” So it’s win-win from a value-backed focus because you knew what you were doing, what you were talking about, and who you were talking to.
I want you to really let that set in. Everything stems from knowing who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about. I don’t mean that in a super general sense. I mean that in a really stupid, specific sense. I mean, I’m talking about VIP strategy days. Because I’m talking about VIP strategy days, I want to talk a lot about the importance of having a strategy, the pieces of a strategy. How to implement it, how to build it. I’ve literally given you guys over the last month everything you need to build a strategy, and we’re going to keep talking about this. Don’t you get me wrong.
But I’ve given you all the pieces, so you could do this work yourself. There’s a section of the audience who listens to this show who will go and do this themselves, and that’s phenomenal. But there’s also a section of the audience who’s going to go, “I don’t want to. I don’t want to at all, and I certainly don’t want to alone,” and that’s where they start figuring in what’s the best way to get them the results they want.
But that comes again from knowing exactly what I was promoting, exactly who I was talking to, and doing the math backwards. Going through the stuff we talked about in that 30-day strategy training to funnel out my email conversations, my podcast conversations, my Facebook Live conversations, my social media posts. All of that stuff is built off knowing those first two things. All right?
All right, so I want you to do some work. I want you to look at those two things. I want you to figure out big picture. Who is your ideal client? Then I want you to really dig in for each of your offerings who is your ideal client for each of those offerings. Then I want you to look at the Build Your 30-day Social … or Build Your 30-Day Digital Marketing Strategy. That’s what it’s called. I’m still looking for a better name guys. Keep those coming.
Go through the Build Your 30-Day Digital Marketing Strategy training. Choosing one of those, just one of those offerings to focus on, look at who your ideal client is for that. Look at what that offering is and backtrack all your content for a 30-day strategy. That is what I want you to do. That is your assigned homework for this class, okay? As you have questions, which you inevitably will because this is new, and it’s not easy. I’m sorry. It’s just not.
Head over to Facebook or Instagram and leave them for me. We’re going to talk a little bit more about this on Thursday during the live show, so join me there. It’s a great place to ask your questions. If you’re already a member of Hit the Mic Backstage, that’s an even better place to ask your questions. You can actually take this even a step further and do your Q4 strategy build, which there’s a training for that in there.
If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “I don’t want to do this, and I don’t want to do this alone,” head over to my website. Check out the VIP strategy days. See if there’s a fit for you. Book a preview call. It’s a free conversation, you and me, half hour. I promise you will leave that with next steps whether that’s to hire me or to hire someone else or just some homework. You will leave with an action plan. So, head over and do that.
With all of that said, I thank you for listening. If you love this show or you think it would be helpful for somebody in your community, I would really appreciate you sharing it. I would also love you heading over to iTunes and leaving a review, an honest review with five stars. Otherwise, just lie. Sound good? Okay. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being a part of this community, and I will see you on Thursday for the live show because I’m just going to assume that you listen to this the day it comes out on Tuesday, and you gobble it up, and you take action, and then you already have me on your calendars for 2:00 PM on Thursday.
We’re going to do super fun times then. I think that’s fair. Do you think that’s fair? I think that’s fair. All right. I’ll see you Thursday. Bye.
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