Are you ready for your next launch?
When I was growing up, my dad owned an appliance store. We lived in a small town and our store was the only privately owned store that sold appliances. There were a couple of discount stores that had an appliance department but they didn’t offer service calls or training. I learned early on that understanding your customers' needs and offering a solution to those needs set you apart from your competition, no matter how big they were. It wasn’t just about trading money for a widget, it was about creating an experience and making your customers feel seen. When I started my first business, I employed those same principles. I chose to serve a demographic that was underserved. In my mortgage business, I intentionally chose to work with customers who had less than perfect credit to help them realize the dream of homeownership. At first, it was a hard sell because they had been conditioned to believe without a perfect credit history there was no hope for them. With education and targeted marketing, I created a niche that was competitor-free. I reached out to realtors who wanted to close more businesses and shared our business model. Within months, we had a referral-based business that was closing 15 - 20 loans per month. We began to grow a reputation for being the mortgage company that could close “un-closable” files. That was a game-changer for our company. We were closing files that had been declined by other lenders and deemed impossible. We leveraged our relationships with underwriters and learned that how a file was packaged was as important as the contents of the file. The easier the file was to process and reduce the number of times they had to handle the file gave us leverage to ask for exceptions. We made it easy for them to say “YES.” That’s what we all want in our business, isn’t it? We want to make it easy for our customers to say “YES!” to work with us. That means changing things up and teaching them how to create a blue ocean for their business. That requires them to have the courage it takes to do things others have said can’t be done. When I started my coaching business, I watched my customers struggle to reach their sales goals. I saw their disappointment after each failed launch. It was sad to see many give up before they found their tribe of dream clients. Now, I’m not discounting the weight that mindset has in business building, but today I want to focus on the nuts and bolts of scaling a business. No matter what system or platform you use, you need three basic elements needed for success:
The Right Audience
The Right Message
The Right Offer
Over and over I witnessed my clients rush through or overlook the importance of building out their dream client's avatar. They didn't grasp the value of knowing how their potential clients made decisions, or what their lifestyle looked like. They would rush the process and reduce their avatar to a simple list of demographics like age ranges, gender, and family status. While useful, that type of data is not enough. Messaging and offer creation start with knowing precisely who you’re talking to. Data can help you do that! Social media platforms, Siri, and location trackers collect data on each of us all day every day and big businesses know how to leverage that data in their marketing campaigns. And, we think you should utilize that knowledge too! That is why we have been working diligently to create our own proprietary framework for curated audience building with our team of outsourced data scientists. It sounds geeky, I know, but it’s game-changing and Audientum is the ONLY agency in the small business space offering this level of precision audience-building methods to their clients! How would your marketing change if you knew exactly who you were talking to and where they hang out? I’m here to tell you it’s possible to take the guesswork out of who sees your paid ads. With our service, you can create a highly-defined avatar and turn it over to our team of data scientists to hand pick an audience filled with people who have been prequalified to your unique specifications. It sounds like science fiction, right? Just like technology has evolved over the past decade, so have lead generation tools and techniques. Big businesses use this method every single day and it’s time that small businesses tap into this science, too! Our team has the capability to use the data you provide for your avatar and marry it to real-life people to locate your dream clients. But, that’s not all, they run multiple simulations and modeling to analyze buying habits and interests to determine if they are interested in your products and services. This narrows down the size of your curated audience and puts you in front of the right people. Data is everywhere. It’s available through public records, but it’s time consuming for ordinary people like you and me to collect that information manually let alone make meaningful sense out of it. That’s why my data scientists are so essential to our process. We’re not just manipulating the antiquated system in ads manager to try to get your better results or help the algorithm learn your dream client faster. We are actually providing data that can be uploaded to FB, LI and YT with the precise details and criteria that was thoughtfully and carefully constructed on the front end of the process. The entire process takes 6 - 8 weeks. It’s not a simple process of toggling some switches on or off and spitting out a list that is sold and resold. It is a customized audience that is generated through multiple tedious processes that narrows down the scope of people to a specific selection that:
Has an expressed interest in your product or service
Has the financial means to purchase your product or service
Our audience is what we like to call the “Goldilocks Zone” because it is a custom fit for your business needs. It is going to save you time and money because:
You’ll stop building separate audiences on multiple platforms - your customized portable audience has already been created using precise data points that matter to you.
You’ll stop looking at metrics that don’t matter like impressions - you’ll start looking at conversions and ROI.
You’ll stop wasting time and money paying for ads that are going to bots and fake accounts - you’ll market to real human beings.
You’ll stop paying for the algorithms to learn who should see your ads - you can upload your data to any platform so you’ll know exactly who sees your ads (each record has a unique identifier for each social media platform)
You’ll stop spending endless hours mining for leads in FB groups.
You’ll stop going through FB, IG and LI profiles hoping to find your dream customer.
You’ll begin to take control of your life and business and start to:
Focus on the things that matter in your business...like building relationships.
Fill your conversation events with interested people.
Sell out your paid programs with people who are excited to work with you.
Scale your business and make a bigger impact by serving more people.
Work smarter and not harder to create a business that supports your lifestyle.
As you continue to scale your business, ask yourself the following questions...
What is your blue ocean? - how are you creating a competition-free zone?
What do you need to do differently to get better results?
What is eating up your time but not providing an ROI?
Who do you need to collaborate or partner with to get to the next level?
How do you need to refine your messaging or offer to appeal to your dream customer?
It’s never too late to pause and regroup. If you haven’t taken the time to define and refine your dream client's avatar, there is no time like the present. Gaining clarity on who you are talking to could be the shot in the arm your messaging needs to start converting leads into paying clients in your very next launch!