All right, guys, let’s talk about intention, and not in the way that necessarily everybody else is talking about intention, but when it comes to your marketing because, real talk, if you don’t know why you’re saying something or you don’t know what it is that you want your community to do, they won’t either.
I know, it sounds simple, but it’s often a skipped step. Figuring out what your intention is for every piece of content that goes from you to your audience is critical. This means blog posts, podcast, videos, emails, social media posts, Facebook lives, Facebook posts, Instagram stories, Instagram lives, tweets, LinkedIn posts, guest posts, interviews, everything. If you don’t know why you don’t know what the next step is, they won’t either, and it’s really hard for them to take the next step when they don’t know what it is.
All jobs ultimately come down to one thing: moving someone from problem to solution.
That’s your whole job. No matter what your business is, no matter what role it is you hold in your company, your job is to move someone, something from problem to solution, and that starts with value and our marketing stuff, and it ultimately moves to investment and getting them to not just buy something but then take action on those things.
We talk about this a lot with our agency clients. If hiring us is not enough, you have to be able to work with us and partner with us to tell us what’s happening in your business. You have to be moving people through a program. I can sell them a program, but it’s you who’s going to move them through the program, get them the results, and that’s what gets the testimonials and the glowing social media love and all of those things. It comes from that piece upfront of “here’s the point of this, here is the reason behind it.” That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about this intention.
Your clarity, your understanding of “why” is the critical piece.
If right now you find that you’re putting a lot of stuff out that’s just not getting you anywhere, that’s just not getting them anywhere, then it’s time to take a step back and look at the intention behind literally everything that’s going out.
Idea is big picture, and we’re going to talk about that more in a minute, but I want to first shift gears just a little bit and talk about what I mean by intention. If the idea, as you’re listening to me, of putting an intention behind every single thing you put out seems wildly overwhelming, let me break this down a little. Not all pieces are going to have the intention of selling something. It is completely acceptable, understandable, necessary for you to also have intentions like community growth or providing value or teaching something. It’s just got to be something. I don’t ever want there to be the intention of putting something out is just to get something out. That’s not what we’re looking for.
Instead, we’re talking about a story where we’re giving a tip because it came up in a conversation. We have the client that day, and you’re like, “This is something everyone needs to know.” Do you hop on Instagram stories and you share that tip? The intention was to educate, and that’s great. That’s perfect. Maybe it’s introducing a new team member. The intention is to grow your know-like-trust factor, and not just with you, but with your team member as well. Wonderful intention.
Your intention is to share something and encourage your audience to share it with others because your ultimate intention is community growth, getting in front of that new audience. This is the perfect example of an intention behind doing interviews, like podcast interviews, guest posts, those kinds of thing. The intention can be getting in front of new eyes and providing value in a new space. Great intention.
But also, occasionally, those intentions are going to be to get someone to buy something. My intention when it comes to sales intentions often stems from what do I want the end result for them to be. Right now, the intention for Q4 for my business was really to build more strategies. That could be through VIP Days. That could be through one-on-one strategy, sort of the done-for-you side of our strategies, but ultimately, the intention was to have more female-led businesses go into 2019 with a plan for their marketing with an understanding of what they were selling, when they were selling, how they were selling it so that they could make more money, very simply. That was my intention for this quarter and continues to be my intention for this quarter so that I can provide that.
Now that tracks back to a sales goal or a sales intention of selling so many strategies, booking so many VIP Days. We’re booking VIP Days not just for this year. I got a couple more in November. I don’t do strategies or sales VIP Days in December. Then we do them in January. We’re selling Q1. Q1’s almost sold out. I think we have three spots left for the first three months of the year.
Figuring those things out is wildly valuable, so look at where can you build out those intentions.
Not just those big ones, not just those sales ones, not just those “big solutions for your clients” kind of ones, but those little ones, those community growth ones, those new audience, recognition, building know-like-trust, educating, those things, because also those smaller intentions build towards the bigger intentions. Building up that audience growth, educating my audience, getting the know-like-trust factor up, all of that stuff leads to those sales, which leads to getting people into the program or service, which then leads them to getting the results that I intended to get for them in the first place. Does that make sense? I hope it does.
That’s what I want you to look at as you’re breaking down your intentions. They can be these micro commitments as we call them in marketing, those micro intentions of getting someone to say a small yes so that you can get them to say a bigger yes down the road, those are good too. Those are super valuable.
A great example of this from a marketing micro commitment perspective is those Q&A or question stuff in stories or getting you to answer a poll in stories.
My intention is to, often in those cases, learn from you so I can create more content for you or use better language when it comes to sales pages and messaging and those kinds of things. That intention can be partnered with a micro-commitment of getting you to answer a poll or getting you to submit a question because now you have given me your attention, you’ve responded and engaged with me. Even if it’s just giving me an answer, it’s giving me something, so now we have a two-way street for value, so I’m getting you to make that micro commitment, even in the span of my larger intention. I hope all that makes sense.
I want to wrap this up with where do we start because that’s a lot of intentions, and that can get real muddy real fast. What I like to look at is what is my big global intention for a chunk of time. That can be a quarter. That can be a month. That can be a year. I tend to look at quarterly intentions, so what is my intention for this quarter, and then I break that down into pieces.
If my big global intention for Q4 was to help more female entrepreneurs be more successful in 2019 because they have a strategy in place for their marketing, how do I break that down? Well, I break that down into the services, I sell a strategy through VIP, through done-for-you. It’s a big part of the reason that in this quarter we’re actually shifting a ton of stuff in Backstage, so starting in January, it has a much more strategy-focused because that’s the global intention of my company, period, is to help female-owned companies do better, make more revenue, generate more profit. Because they have a solid, sustainable, systemized marketing plan in place, they’re able to do the things they want to do. That’s the big intention.
We scale that back, so going into 2019 with the strategy, we scaled that back into an offering. Then we scale that back into content. You may have noticed that October content was really strategy-focused. You’re going to see even more of that coming in November and December because, again, all of these intentions, again, my intention here to teach you about the power of intentions in your marketing, is going to help us build out those steps for our audience. That breaks down into social posts.
The social posts tend to be where I get more micro commitment-y, more narrow intention, so an intention to educate, an intention to grow-know-like-trust factor, those kinds of things, that’s where we tend to get real small with our intentions is social posts, but again, it all stems from what is the big picture intention behind what we’re doing. What is the big picture goal behind this?
We’ve talked about this in the past a little bit about how we break down content from an offer. The same thing is true here. We’re just talking about it in a slightly different way. That’s a really great example of where I’m using two pieces of content, which are somewhat similar, to share something in different ways so that I’m ultimately getting you to the same intention, I’m ultimately getting you to the same place, but I’m able to access a different part of how you’re looking at it so that we can really round out your perception so that it can feel good to you to get the result because now you’ve heard it in another way or there’s something here that connected that didn’t connect, or vice versa, there’ll be something there that really landed for you that didn’t land here. That all plays together to, again, get us to that ultimate connection.
I know I’m pulling back the curtain here on how these things are done, but I want to be really transparent with you. This is how you get systemized marketing that works is all of it is built off what is your intention, what is your goal. Whatever language you want to use there, I don’t care. I’m not attached. I just want you to start doing the work so that your audience has a really stupid-clear path to getting the result that you’re wanting for them because without that intention, without you being super clear on how people move through these things, they can’t ever be, so how do these pieces fit together?
Work back from that intention, and fill in your pieces, this is the same thing we do in the Build Your 30-Day Digital Marketing Plan. We start with an end goal, maybe it’s to sell XYZ program, and then we build out content and social posts that speak to what your audience needs to know to get there. All right? All right.
Homework, think about your intention globally, and then every time you go to post something on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever else, I want you to make sure you are actually thinking about why am I posting this, what is the purpose of this post, what is the purpose of this micro conversation, where is it leading, what is the next step, what is the end result, because it may be that it’s not going anywhere. It may be that I want someone to comment because I want to engage because I want to grow my community because I want to deepen the relationship I have with my community. Perfect. But if you don’t know that, it will not happen. It’s as clear as that. All right? All right.
If you have any questions for me at any time, the best place to ask them is Backstage. I think I mentioned this, but I do have a couple spots for VIP open. VIP Days with me, we do this virtually or here in Southern California in person in my office. Those are … I think we have two spots left for November left because we’ve been doing a really good job of filling next year. If you want to go into next year already knowing what you’re doing, November is the time to do it.
We also have, of course, Backstage open. Backstage is currently going through a massive remodel, so joining now means you get to get in on a current price because, spoiler alert, that’s going to change next year, but also, you can see what’s in here. You can see the before and after, live the before and after because big things are coming over the next 30 to 60, really, to 90 days. Incrementally, we’ll be rolling it out slowly but surely. I’m really excited for the first reveal, which will happen by the end of November.
Again, if you have questions, the best place to go is Backstage, and of course, I’d love to connect with you on social. If you have anything you’d like to see me cover next year on the show, be sure to let me know because we are currently finalizing our strategy editorial calendar perspective for next year. It’s so exciting. All right, I’ll talk to you soon. Have a great day. Bye.
Resources
Book your VIP Strategy Day with Stacey
Connect with Me
Connect with me on Facebook
Connect with me on Instagram
Tweet with me and include #HittheMic