Show notes in full at tashcorbin.com/240
In today's episode, I'm going to talk about why marketing tactics are NOT your biggest challenge in your business, and how to stop playing at the surface.
If you know me, you'll know that I love me some good questions. I love asking questions on social media, in conversations with people and also on my calls in my group program.
I love asking questions because I love understanding how people are identifying what they need to focus on in their business, what their big challenges are and what they want help with, because that helps me to make sure that my content is really relevant and I'm able to support people with the things that they want help with.
When I ask questions about people's biggest challenge with:
They'll ask me questions about why they aren't able to fill their webinar, whether they should be running a 5-day challenge or a webinar instead, why they're struggling with sales calls and having people saying they can't afford to work with them, not knowing how to price their online call or how to write an offer copy or sales page.
People are saying that their biggest challenge with growing their business is actually part of their marketing tactics.
I would say it is around 9/10 people that I speak to who would identify a marketing tactic as their biggest challenge.
But with all of my experience in the people that I've helped in this online business space, I can tell you hand on heart for most people, that is not actually their biggest challenge.
They are misdiagnosing their challenge as being something to do with their marketing strategy or their marketing tactics, when in actual fact, they've got a foundations issue in their business.
The foundations that I am referring to are your niche, value proposition and messaging, and your offer.
Those things need to be solid before any marketing strategy or tactic is actually going to work.
What do I mean by these foundations?
Having a very specific, very tangible niche allows you to:
The riches are in the niches.
All of these sayings are common and consistent because they're so true.
The broader your messaging needs to be to accommodate for a broad niche, the less likely it is to deeply resonate with your audience.
The broader your niche is, the less specific you are able to get about the tangible, practical day-to-day experiences that let your ideal client know they have a challenge.
When you are talking about your ideal client, if you are using the word 'or', 'slash' or 'and', then chances are you're not being specific enough, and therefore, it doesn't matter how great your ad copy is, if it's not specific and tangible, it's not going to resonate with people.
It doesn't matter how much money you put into ads, if you are trying to get in front of hundreds of thousands of people and your messaging isn't clear because you're not niched enough, then you're going to be wasting money on those ads - you're going to be building an audience that may not actually be ready to buy from you.
We want to make sure that we've got that niche foundation clear, first and foremost.
Once you've got that hyper-specific niche, then you can create deeply resonant messaging, and articulate your value proposition in a way that really resonates with your audience and your ideal clients.
That is what we want our online messaging to do.
Get really clear on your value propositioning and your messaging ecosystem.
Remember: Your message is not one sentence, and your value proposition is not three bullet points.
In the Take Off program, we build a messaging onion. That is how we articulate the value proposition and message across the different audiences in your business in a way that deeply resonates with those audiences.
You want to make sure you get that value proposition and messaging really clear as well.
Do you have something that people are ready, willing and able to buy? Have you proven that by making sales?
I would be making sure that you can actually make a sale of your offers and packages before you apply any marketing tactics or strategies to them.
You can make sales through connected conversations and reaching out to your existing networks before you ever need to use any of those broadcast marketing strategies to get in front of a cold audience.
That means that you are building based on tangible, practical results and things you've proven rather than just your theories alone.
Once you've got those three foundations really solid and really clear by making sales, it's then that we start to look at your broadcast marketing tactics.
The next thing I would say is that most people go straight to very high-level broadcast strategies - they go straight to the surface level stuff.
They look at long reach Facebook ads or guest posts on other people's Facebook pages or on other people's blog posts.
They're trying to get in front of as big an audience as possible, so they look at reach and the surface level strategies when it comes to marketing.
But if you focus on your conversion-based marketing activities first - your high touch, high conversion marketing and highly connected reach - rather than broadcast reach, you're then proving that your niche, value proposition and offers work for a warm audience.
The colder the audience, the more nurturing and warming up you're going to need before you get that conversion.
If you jump straight from making two sales to broadcasting and growing your reach by thousands of people without any nurturing or any way to warm that audience up, you're going to have a lot of reach and very little conversion.
We want to grow your business and your marketing strategy and tactics in a way that doesn't just jump straight to the surface, it builds that proof through making sales and growing your income as you go.
If this sounds like a really novel way of doing business to you and you've never heard me talking about Lean business before or getting that niche right first, I would love for you to come and check out my Nail Your Niche training.
You can register for my free Nail Your Niche training so that you can go through that process of making sure:
If that sounds like it might be a good fit for you, you can find that training here: tashcorbin.com/niche
As always, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love for you to give it a review wherever you listen to the podcast.
Please come on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group and let's continue the conversation there.
If you've got more questions, want to talk about your niche, want to share a lightbulb moment that came up for you in this podcast episode, just use #podcastaha, let me know you've been listening to episode number 240 and we'll continue the conversation over there.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.