Episode Summary 

When a potential client comes to your website, what do they see? Are you talking about you and all the things you know and offer? It’s so easy to talk about yourself too much. You feel the need to explain your services, your story, your background experience, etc.

But that’s not what people want to see or read when they land at your website or social media pages.  

We get it, as a business you feel like it’s your job to talk about yourself so others understand your credentials and why you could be a great fit for them…but the harsh truth is – no one cares!

What’s more important is getting down to the nitty-gritty psychology of your client. Address The Pains That Your Audience Is Experiencing instead of defining yourself and your services. Meaning, talk about the problems your potential client is having and how YOU can SOLVE those problems for them. Get emotional.

Describe a transformation: the solution to their problem from their perspective. That’s where you want to spend 80% of your efforts in your marketing.

• Think about yourself when you’re hiring someone or buying something.  
• What are your habits?
• What are you looking for in your research?
  • Immediate solutions, vetted opinions, testimony, brand value

Be a resource to nurture your audience. The only way to nurture a lead into a client is by engaging with them and providing value. You need to have something that your potential clients want. You might think that people want your product or service, but more often than not, what people really want is WHAT your product or service can provide them.

Landscaping Example:

People don’t wake up wanting to hire a landscaper, they wake up wanting a beautiful yard. Spend your time describing your client’s problem yard. Use your knowledge to become a trusted advisor on the topic of landscaping and how if they hire you they’ll spend more time with their family and less time mowing the lawn.

Wedding Example:

Brides don’t have the desire to hire a hairdresser, they just want to look good for the wedding.  

This kind of thinking is really powerful because oftentimes your potential clients don’t even know to look for your services.  They are just living their lives and find themselves needing a solution…market the SOLUTION, not a general list of what you offer.

So, think about the marketing and content you’ve been making and ask yourself…Am I just talking about myself here? If the answer is YES, it’s time to flip the script and re-work your marketing messaging.

These are the things you should be utilizing in your marketing to really connect and engage with your audience.  Think of how you can provide value for your potential clients and speak to the things they care about – themselves. 

We like to keep a Google Doc with these ideas on it so that whenever it’s time to write some marketing content, we can refer back and double-check that we aren’t just spending all our time talking about ourselves.  Hopefully this is something that you can all start to implement in your own marketing to make it a little more effective and a lot more engaging for your audience!

Quick-Wins

1. Start by listing the BENEFITS your potential clients would enjoy if they hired you or bought your product/service.  
2. List the CHALLENGES you help your clients solve.  
3. Think of the PAIN that causes your potential clients to look for your service. 
4. Think of what your potential clients might be SAYING or THINKING.

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses.  

Recommended Resources 

VIDEO: Why You Need A Brand Guide
BNI

The post Quick-Win Episode 8: Stop Talking About Yourself appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Episode Summary 

I know what you’re thinking; “Never finish your To-Do list is bad advice.”  But hear us out!  You always need to have something on your list to keep you moving forward. If you have completed everything on your list and have nothing left to do, this means you aren’t working towards anything.

In order to be successful in your business, it’s extremely important to eliminate stress, be efficient, and make sure you are always moving towards your goals. We’ve noticed that things that generate a lot of stress for self-employed business owners are often related to their To-Do lists.  

Three common To DO list stressors business owners struggle with are:

1. Unrealistic To-Do lists
2. Not knowing what to do next
3. The “Getting Ahead” Myth

How to Overcome Stress from Unrealistic To-Do Lists

We’ve all been guilty of creating To-Do lists that go on forever and are impossible to complete. We think that writing everything down on an epic list is the perfect way to relieve the stress we have of keeping everything in our heads.  The reality is, these impossible To-Do lists end up adding to our stress because they are impossible to complete!  This means we end every day with a never-ending list of things we didn’t get done and it’s deflating.

The way to fix this problem is to focus on making different To-Do lists.  Your Daily To-Do list should only include tasks that you can actually complete that day.  Force yourself to really consider how long something will take you to complete and make sure you are breaking down your tasks into their smallest form so you can easily check things off as you go.  It’s not helpful to have giant tasks on your To-Do list that require multiple steps.  This means that as you complete each step you have nothing to check off so it never feels like you are making progress.  This can lead to stress!  After focusing on your daily To-Do lists, think about breaking things down into different categories and making different lists to work off of.

Tips on Making Different To-Do Lists:

• Weekly Tasks

These are things that have to be done no matter what, like housekeeping.  It’s not exciting but it’s got to be done.

• Client Tasks

These will constantly change as weeks go by, but if you’ve got a good client workflow process and a project management system in place, it should be simple to manage.

• Internal Business Tasks

Any time an idea pops into your head of something that you want to do or SHOULD do for your business, you need to write it down.  Not on a sticky note, but in an organized place for your business tasks.

How to Overcome Stress from Not Knowing What to Do Next

When you don’t know what you should be doing for your business or your current clients/projects this can be really stressful.  We use WRIKE to manage our projects and when we come up with things that need to be done, we create the task and keep it in a folder that we can pull from when we begin to make our next week’s agenda.  Think of this as your “Backlog” that you can pull from whenever you aren’t sure what to do next or you have extra time.  Believe me, when you properly plan a daily To-Do list, you’ll sometimes have “extra time” and this Backlog will come in really handy to keep things moving forward and avoid time-wasting.

If you have nothing on your list to do, it’s impossible to keep moving forward. For example, I like to always be reading a book so I keep a list of potential books that I can always pull from.  A few months ago, I finished the book I was reading and realized that I didn’t have any more books on my Reading Wish List, and before I knew it an entire week had gone by without me reading!

How to Overcome Stress from The “Getting Ahead” Myth

I used to work tirelessly in my business to try and get EVERYTHING done so I could get ahead and relax.  The reality is, it is impossible to “Get Ahead.”  Think about it,  if I ever actually finished EVERYTHING that needed to be done for our business, it would be the day we were no longer in business.  Finishing your To-Do list means you are out of business. 

There is always client work to do, bookkeeping, business development, organization, etc.  If you actually finished everything, it would be because you had no work and no money coming in and effectively, NO BUSINESS.

Quick-Wins:

1. Organize your To-Do lists into different categories
2. Make realistic daily To-Do lists
3. Create a “Backlog” list with tasks you can pull from when needed
4. Forget about trying to get ahead and focus on always moving forward

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses. 

Recommended Resources 

Wrike Project Management

The post Quick-Win Episode 7: Never Finish Your To-Do List appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Let’s Define Social Media

By now most of us are accustomed to using social media (at least personally) and we know that it seems important to be on there in some capacity.  We see it everywhere, we hear about it, read about it, and we certainly know that it’s here to stay, but almost all of us have zero ideas on what to do or even where to start.  

These are all frequent questions that we are asked during consulting meetings:

• Should I get a Facebook Page? 
• What about Twitter? 
• How do I get immediate business from Instagram? 
• I set up some accounts but that’s basically it. Now what? 
• Should I have a Linkedin because it’s about business?

Before we get into any of this, I want you to understand a realistic perspective that you should have about social media and what it can do for you as a self-employed business owner. 

What Social Media is.

It’s a tool that is used to engage with people. 

That’s it. Think of this as a tool and only a tool. 

It creates top of mind awareness among your customer base.  

Word of mouth referrals happen because of top of mind awareness.  When the timing is right for someone to need your product or service, they will probably talk to someone about how they are looking for “X Product/Service.”  Your followers will be more likely to refer you and your business because they are seeing your regularly posted content, which allows them to recall who you are, what you offer, and why you’d be a good solution for their friend in need.  It’s all about “Top of Mind Awareness.” If you and your business are at the top of their mind, they are MUCH more likely to refer/hire you.

For Example – You own a chiropractic business.  Your patient Jody loves your service and follows you on your social accounts.  You post about your practice and general body health regularly. Jody has a friend Taryn who was mentioning over a luncheon that her sciatic nerve has been bothering her and she needs to find someone to do some bodywork on her.  Jody will most certainly recommend you and your services and she’ll remember to do so because you were at the top of her mind.

It is a resource of information for prospective customers. 

When people go to look up a company, brand, product or service they usually type it into google and look for RELEVANT and RECENT information.  This is incredibly important to understand. You’re creating your own database for your brand. You get the opportunity to educate your clients about who you are, why you do what you do, why they’d want to work with you, and what overall solutions you can provide them. People like to use social feeds to see how legitimate a brand seems before reaching out.

It creates a brand voice and a perceived brand value.

Your brand voice is what will turn casual followers into fans.  People want to be educated and entertained and you get to choose how you present yourself via your messaging.  Perceived brand value comes when people believe something is valuable based on the way that it’s presented and understood.  We all know that a pair of gas station sunglasses cost $5 and we’re totally okay with the fact that a pair of Rayban Sunglasses can cost upwards of $200.  That’s brand value and it begins when people assume value and are 100% excited to be a customer.

It helps create brand fans and convert them into customers.

This is your chance to build a relationship with your customers and fan base through conversations.  The more you engage with your audience, the more meaningful of a relationship you create with them. When your audience becomes champions for your brand, you’ll certainly begin to see a lot of word of mouth (WOM) referrals and repeat business.

What Social Media is not.

It is not a gauge of your success

Do not use followers or likes as a business thermometer. We’ve seen it hundreds of times where our clients will wonder what they’re doing wrong in their business because they’re not amassing followers like they thought they would.  The internet is a busy place and it takes a lot of time and money to grow a social account. On the plus side, there are a lot of people there too, so be sure to regularly post valuable content and you’ll start to see followers convert to customers over time.

It is not the be-all-end-all of your business

Do not put all of your stock into social platforms.  You do not own your accounts and you can’t control what happens to algorithm changes, ad revenues, etc. A lot of people think that likes, followers, fans, and re-tweets are a measure of success and that is simply not true.  So much of these “metrics” are meaningless and the statistics hold no weight for your business. It’s much better to have meaningful conversations with a smaller number of followers than to have an inflated following of random people with little to no engagement.

It is not an immediate ROI

It takes a lot, I mean A LOT, of time and energy to successfully build and run a social account.  It will be extremely beneficial and valuable to your business, but not immediately. Again, initially, we’re looking for the top of mind awareness among our followers and we’re posting as an informational resource for prospective followers to read up on you and your brand.

It’s not worth stressing or obsessing over

Just know that you should be posting regularly and don’t worry about likes, engagements, stats or metrics.  To be clear, we’re not looking to post our valued content into the void of the internet for no one to see it.  You should be posting once a day or once every other day in order to keep your brand current and relevant. Regardless, it’s important to not beat yourself up about a lack of engagement or viewership on what you post.  Just focus on the goals and keep sharing valuable content for those that do see it…it will all work itself out over time.

Mindset

We often lose sight of why we’re on these social platforms in the first place.  The endgame with social media is to create more customers. That’s it. 

The problem that arises is that our ego takes over and we begin to seek external validation.  While doing this we begin to compare ourselves to everyone else, and it’s really easy to fall into the trap of envy and comparison. Likes and follows are not a metric that should be driving your business strategy.  Genuine conversations in comments or groups, email subscribers, and direct messages are how you can get the most “ROI” from social platforms.  

Unless you are a 100% Social Media brand and putting in 100% effort daily, it’s not worth the constant let down, especially while you’re in grow-mode.

That said, it is extremely important to have a social media strategy.  If you do not plan your content, implement a content creation strategy and distribution workflow, you WILL get BURNT OUT VERY QUICKLY!  If you think that you just need to sit down each day and write a quick post, I’m here to tell you that it’s much harder and more time-consuming than that.  You should be able to write out a month’s worth of content in one writing session and then use a scheduler to ensure that you’re not chasing your tail each day trying to keep up with your daily posts.

Even if you don’t have many followers at the beginning, it’s easy to overlook the people who are constantly interacting with you.  Don’t write them off, they are actually the people that matter the most. Each person that is a fan of your business is connected to at least 200 people.  Just remember that there is value in each and every person who supports your business. Stop worrying about who isn’t there yet and nurture those who show support.

The moral of the story.

Understand that this is a long game of creating a brand voice, brand value, and loyal fans of your brand.  Having an active social media account does matter in today’s landscape, but it should supplement what you’re doing offline and you shouldn’t get caught up in chasing likes or getting let down when your accounts don’t grow as fast as you thought they would. Keep yourself focused on providing value and getting new customers, both online and offline, and you’ll begin to see your business grow to new heights.

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