So what is the Golden Tap system? This is your organic lead nurture strategy. It fits into your overall marketing program running alongside your paid advertising and email funnel, which we are going to be working on soon if you’re working through my program. But first we need to get this organic opportunity underway so that we can actually test how your audience responds to all this messaging work we have been doing.

This is not only, it is not solely a social media strategy, you should also apply it to your email marketing. And I recommend it because it positions you as an expert, not by telling people that you are an expert, but actually by demonstrating your expertise. So you don’t have to do any convincing or proving, you can just show people your expertise. There’s this maximum marketing show, don’t tell. We’re going to just demonstrate how good you are at your work. And by doing this, this is how we create inbound leads.

Now a quick definition, inbound leads, yes, that does mean people jumping into your inbox, but also in this context, it means people raising their hands or showing buying behavior. That also qualifies as an inbound lead, even if you are the one who moves the conversation forward in the DMs, for example. So what do I mean by buying behavior? I mean looking at your email CRM and seeing who is clicking your links, who is opening your emails every single time, who is responding to relevant posts on social media, even if they’re not directly in your DMs, they are indicating buying behavior, which qualifies them as an inbound lead. Inbound leads is not limited to random people popping up in your DMs, even though we love those people dearly.

I also recommend this strategy because it gives a rhythm and rationale to your content creation, so you’re not confused about what needs to be said or in what order or when. And the other wonderful thing about it is it allows you to analyze your marketing and see what does and doesn’t work. And when we see what doesn’t work, it means we can therefore improve it. So in other words, it’s an efficient strategy. It’s an efficient strategy. I have a very rich and full life and I’m sure you do too. And so I wanted to find a way to create the largest number possible of qualified leads from the smallest amount of social media content.

Now of course there is a payoff. Of course I could grow my audience faster if I worked harder at my marketing, but ultimately I don’t want to. I’m very happy with the rate of business growth, especially when I measure it against the small amount of time I spend creating content for social media. So it is efficient and ultimately it is designed so that you will be able to hand off, delegate, automate, systematize 90% of what is involved in the strategy so that for you personally, your time on social media or your time spent on marketing is creating the content you were put here for, fulfilling your life’s work, creating a body of work, developing your expertise and cementing your place in the marketplace, your position in the marketplace, and making sales. And eventually you can delegate that too.

So what does it look like when we get the golden tap flowing? How do we measure success? How do we see, where do we see the magic? Okay, so here’s some indicators. One, you start to see more conversations with hot hot leads happening in your DMs. Some of them, as they say, will be spontaneous. Other ones you will lead, but every week you will see new conversations being added to your CRM. Two, you will start to experience more energy and inspiration around your organic marketing and also more engagement, more reach, more conversations, seeing more buying behaviors. Not all of these are vanity metrics. There are metrics that matter around your social media content, your social media marketing, the most crucial one obviously being the number of conversations you have and the number of sales you make. And also feeling your personal energy and inspiration increase, which always follows another level of clarity about your work and your expertise and your mission.

So how do we do all this? This is all laid out in the workbook, but the foundational piece, the centerpiece of the golden tap, the core of the pipe, if you like, is one chunky, valuable, meaty, potentially life-changing piece of content that you will create regularly and consistently, but at a rhythm that suits you. So I recommend at least once a month, ideally twice a month. And if you can, once a week, once you get into the swing of it, you will be surprised how easily this content comes through you. And the purpose of this is to, as I say, to demonstrate your expertise. You could be offering a change in perspective with a thought piece, or it could be a class on a practical element of something that you teach, or it could be sharing a particular energy tool in a way that is kind of unique to do. So think of this as the work that you have been born to. If you ever imagined yourself writing a book or giving a keynote speech, this is where you begin. This is where you start to build out your body of work as a professional and expert in your field.

So yes, I’m talking about articles, video classes, podcast episodes, however you like to create, canva graphics, PDFs, written lessons, whatever lights you up and is easy for you. Choose that as your next thing to publish. After this thought leadership piece of content is created, the focus of your social media marketing becomes very, very clear. Yes, it becomes to, your objective is to make sure that as many people as you can receive this wisdom and insight from the thought leadership you have created. You want to articulate as clearly and as often as possible how and why people should view it, how and why they should consume it. Ostensibly, to get as many people as possible to watch it, and of course we want them to receive that knowledge, receive that perspective shift and experience a mini transformation just from reading or watching the thing you created. But actually we want to get those people into conversation with you and of course move those conversations towards the sale which is of course the purpose of any marketing strategy.

So what happens next? Go through the teachings on the golden tap strategy. I recommend that you dedicate your next 30 to 45 days or to visibility, to re-establishing your new voice. Follow the golden tap strategy as it is laid out in your workbook as best as you can, understanding that it will feel wobbly at first but it is absolutely worth the growing pains because again this is designed to be endlessly repeatable and eventually so many parts of this process can be automated or delegated so that your only input is sales, conversations and deepening into your own practice and leadership. The lessons on Thinkific will give you an overview and about a week’s worth of content for you to use while you are creating your first chunky thought leadership piece and yes I invite you to dedicate the next four to six weeks to finding out as much as you can about what your audience responds to. Our goal is to help people feel the most important emotional state, the emotional condition for buying which is they want to feel confident that you can help them and I think you can see how over time the cumulative effect of this type of content and this strategy supporting it will really help people to feel more confident that you can help them which ultimately is what is going to encourage them to part with their money.

Before you do this work it’s definitely worth reviewing the previous messaging work you have done on Hot Hot Leads and your Uncommon Method and your competitor analysis. This is all valuable content there’s so much value in there that you can pull out and use for supporting content during this period of visibility. There are lots of examples in the workbook and before I go add to your hyper sigil. This work can and will be delegated, automated, systematized with all the content pulled from your one thought leadership piece which you can ultimately publish monthly or even less frequently than that so your precise marketing actions will be vastly vastly diminished so write about that future reality now in your hyper sigil and who you will be seeking to support you with this and then just to remind you of your next steps after spending this time on your organic process we’re going to do your work on setting up your strong dose funnel which you can send lots of traffic to with ads but we need the wisdom of this experience that we’re gaining over the next few weeks to take your new message to the world.

So remember the goal of this strategy is for anyone in your audience to be able to get to know you and your method very quickly but in a way that does not drain your creativity and energy with a vast amount of content. The golden tap is powered by one central piece of content per month and then the task of social media is very simply to promote your thought leadership. This is how you can make sales even when you’re not actively promoting something. The golden tap is powered by one central piece of content per month and then the rest of your social media is very simple it is to promote your thought leadership to send people to read or watch or view this thing that you created that you’re proud of and to engage them in conversation and qualify them as whether they are potential sales or not.

If you haven’t had your mercury messaging call with me go and complete that preparatory work and book your messaging intensive so that you can start marketing with this exciting new look for your brand. So remember the goal of this strategy is for anyone in your audience to be able to get to know you and your method very quickly but in a way that does not drain your creativity and energy by requiring a huge amount of content. The golden tap is powered by one central piece per month and then the task of your social media is very simple it is to promote your own thought leadership to send people to read or watch or consume this thing you have created that you’re proud of. This is how you create sales this is how you make sales and get inbound leads even when you are not actively promoting a particular offer or service. If you haven’t yet had your mercury messaging call with me go and complete that preparatory work and book your messaging intensive so that you can get started introducing this exciting new look for your brand to the world.

Only those who risk going too far find out how far it is possible to go. Isn’t that a wonderful quote? TS Eliot. I heard it today.

Now you’re gonna get used to me looking away. I’m recording here but I’m teaching here. I’m on a call here. So we’re gonna talk about the eight critical elements for setting up your baby business, by which I mean anything below 100k, for growth. Now, this is not gonna get you all the way to where you want to go, but it’s gonna create an incredible foundation that will just raise your whole game for the next stage of your business growth.

Now, you can get rich quick. I promise you can get rich quick. There are certain business models that have capacity, that do genuinely have capacity for massive growth year on year. Business systems including content creation. Yes, scalable services, right? The kind of businesses that you are in, there is potential for massive growth, and you know, 200% growth a year is not unrealistic.

So if you have a calculator nearby, just grab your calculator. Put in what has been your gross revenue, your total sales over the last 12 months, and then double it, and then double it again, and double it again, and it’s probably not very long. It’s probably like three to four to six maximum years until you hit a million. Now of course it’s not as simple as just hitting equals equals on a calculator. Of course, we all wish it was, but that like a hundred percent growth minimum year on year is entirely possible if you pick the correct strategy and also have some other attributes like being really agile in terms of who you are becoming at each stage of your business.

That is get rich quick. Are you kidding me? A million in like three to four years? That is get rich quick by anybody’s standards, right? Is it easy? No. Are the results guaranteed? No, they are not. Again, it’s uncomfortable. Alas, no, it is not comfortable either, but it is exhilarating, it’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s fulfilling and rewarding. And when it works, it is one of the only ways that you can legitimately make a great deal of money unless you are, you know, like a talented professional athlete or rock star or movie star, in which case you’re probably not here watching this video.

So let’s get into these eight coins. This is my just slightly esoteric spin on the business and energetic structures that are required to get your business from like 20k a year to the six-figure level and then above and beyond. So let’s get into them. What are they?

Number one, an incredible offer. An offer so good it almost sells itself. Most of you have heard me say before there is no right offer. There’s just the offer that you choose, that you love, that you are so committed to, that you just can’t wait to talk about it all the time. Okay, that’s part one: a really amazing offer.

Part two, Saturn’s game. Knowing which metrics to track and I mean even before that, just tracking your metrics. Okay, this is just like a basic non-negotiable for anybody who is serious about growing their business. You have to be tracking your numbers, my friend. You need to know to the penny how many sales you are making each month, how much profit you are making each month, how many conversations you are having, how many clients you have, even if it feels like a futile exercise because the numbers are so small. It’s only when you start tracking them that you see them starting to expand. There is a whole training on this on my YouTube channel. Saturn rules numbers and numbers love to behave as we expect, and the terrible thing is when you take your eye off them, it’s when you take your eye off them that they can start to misbehave and get up to mischief. So let’s be tracking our numbers. There are lots of other things you can track, you can see them in the video, but let’s start doing that as of today.

The third thing that is really helpful in growing a business is an understanding of the concepts of demand, how to create demand in your audience, how to identify the demand, how to create more of it, how to increase it, how to manage it, and how to manage demands, the demands placed on you as a business owner, and indeed how to make demands as a powerful business owner.

The fourth thing that’s really valuable to have is an energetically clean sales process so that you and your clients feel really aligned in the whole process and the exchange, the financial exchange, just feels like a magical part of the process.

The fifth thing you need is a consistent strategy for growing your audience. We don’t need to go viral, we don’t need to grow by thousands at a time, but that drip drip drip, the cumulative effect of a small number of people joining your audience every day over time, is what is going to allow you to have the greatest impact, right? If you can sell a million of anything to anyone, you’re going to be extremely rich. If you can sell thousands of units at the right price, you are going to be extremely rich. So you can see that it’s imperative that we decide on an ongoing, consistent strategy to just create more people to sell to, more people in our ecosystem, more potential customers. This is not the same thing as growing your social media following. This is growing an email list, and there will be different strategies according to the stage of business you are at.

The sixth thing, this is so important, we want to take advantage of the golden window of opportunity where people are positively predisposed towards your business right at the moment of deciding to join your email list. They are positively predisposed towards you, they have a cognitive bias towards receiving and absorbing and appreciating your wisdom. So we’re going to make the most of that with a simple email sequence. That’s what we’re talking about. It’s a handful of emails to write, it’s the work of a couple of hours to set it up, and it’s going to be the most valuable asset in your business. This is how we take people from stranger to client. This is how we do it without it taking more and more of your energy every day.

The seventh thing that we have to talk about, the seventh coin, is the energetics of success. The energetics of having more, holding more, serving more clients, being on the receiving end of more opinions, more judgments, more praise, more appreciation, more refund requests, more pain in the ass clients, more money, more problems. The scope of what you are dealing with as the leader of your business changes very rapidly when growth is rapid. It’s essential that you have a scaffolding of magical and mundane support around you so that you can create profits, so that you can create assets, content marketing systems that deliver profit into your business month by month, week by week, and are profitable over the long term. In other words, you work hard on a particular asset, a particular structure in your business for a few weeks, and it delivers profit to your business over and over and over again long after you have completed the project.

The final point, number eight, the last piece that needs to be in place is the embodiment of mastery. Mastery of your craft, attaining better and better results for your clients because that in return creates more and more demand for your work and is the driver behind the value of your business. Ultimately, the value of your business will be predicated on the results that you get for your clients and the profit that you make while doing so. So gaining mastery, improving your craft, improving your results, working with better and better clients at a deeper and deeper level to make a more profound impact in your field, is the final piece in the puzzle of growing a business which really is a legacy to your vision and your mission.

There is another essential tool I should mention. It’s not part of the eight coins as such, but it’s kind of like a booster, a magic money-making ingredient that I call the summoning. It is a strategy that we can layer on top of all of these other pieces that we’ve put in place as a way to make sales and demand with no copywriting, no sales page, no email, and no circus tricks. And I love, love, love teaching this methodology, and in fact, I often give it away for free on my own live events. My clients use it, as I say, to create a cash injection while setting up the evergreen system, for example, setting up their email sequence. And they can repeat it in cycles to create a bump in income, and who doesn’t love a bump in income, right?

If you’re missing any of these eight coins, I guarantee that there is more money, more impact, more time, and more freedom available to you. Here they are: an incredible offer so good it sells itself, Saturn’s game and tracking your metrics, a deep understanding of how to create demand in your audience and how to take advantage of it, an energetically clean sales process that you and your clients love, a repeatable system for growing your audience, a simple email sequence to welcome people into your world, an understanding of the energetics of success, an embodiment of the energetics of success, and finally, the last one being mastery, mastery of your craft and of your marketing results, as well as of your business growth.

If you would like to talk about how any of this could apply to your business, have a look around on this page. There will be a link to DM me or to book a call, and I would love to talk about this with you some more.

Why do some brands consistently enjoy more demand than they can meet and others seem to struggle for attention? If there is no demand for your work, you don’t actually have a business. And this is the big purpose of marketing generally, right? It’s not to communicate about the details, the information about your work. The big purpose of marketing is to create demand. And the demand for our work that we create also informs how we structure our offers and our businesses in order to manage and meet that demand.

You have probably heard about a small business that has actually been broken from over demand. For example, you know, like a skincare company that goes viral on TikTok and is suddenly overwhelmed with demand for their products, which they just can’t meet. So that’s at one end of the scale, but what does it feel like when there is no demand for your work or very little demand for your work? So obviously that means sales are slow. You’re having to spend a lot of time persuading and convincing people as to why they should work with you. And at the end of it all, they’re just not saying yes.

I want to use the next 10 minutes or so to give you a brief overview of demand positioning and why it works to create a consistent client flow. And why it is so very important to do this right now, like as soon as you have a business, as soon as you have proof of concept, you’ve served clients, you’ve delivered results so that you can come to actually enjoy and work purposefully without spinning your wheels at your marketing and at closing sales, which is what it’s all about, right? So this is all about positioning, demand positioning.

Before we begin, my name is Anna Ballisma. I am a marketing witch and strategy dominatrix. I am a creator of potential and possibility if you choose to avail yourself of it. And I have helped hundreds of online experts, healers, teachers, coaches, consultants to sign more and higher value clients without having to spend more time on their marketing. We are talking about 400% revenue increase. We are talking about adding 100k to an annual income.

Now, this is a huge topic. The topic of demand, it’s vast. The energetics of demand is almost more important than any other piece. So do have a look in the worksheet that comes with this class. Have a look for the masterclass that I taught on the subject of demand a little while ago. I will link it for you. Honestly, it is the most valuable time you will spend and it makes everything else, every hour that you work, every investment you make, every strategy you adopt, it makes it more effective and more beneficial for your business. So let’s now take a look at demand positioning.

If you did not have a background in marketing, logic would tell you that unless there are people, if you don’t see people clamoring at the door to work with you, then there is low to no demand. Your brain would report that as a logical conclusion based on the reality it sees. And you might also therefore conclude that demand gradually increases in direct correlation to the size of your audience and the success of your marketing. So it would go like this. You get much better audience growth and you get clearer with your messaging and you get better at defining your niche and you get really, really good at all of these things, not like you are now. And then if you’re lucky, you also get more people signing on as clients.

But in fact, as long as you believe there is demand for your work, go and watch that masterclass, you can create demand. How do I know this? Because I know that a business with nothing but an offer or a product or a new idea can go to a marketing agency and tell them, can pay them to create demand. If I had a new health drink and budget, I could go to a marketing agency and say, I want to make a big splash with this new drink. I want people to be excited to taste it for the first time. I want to create a global buzz. And as long as I have the budget, that marketing agency would be able to create demand for my product in the online space.

Now, there are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of books written on exactly this topic. Every book on marketing is essentially dealing with this topic. How do we create demand for our work? And the fact that so much is written about it, I want you to understand that this means there is a system. There are strategies and tactics that anyone can use to generate demand, especially in the digital marketplace where we have access to the eyes and the attention of millions upon millions of people in the global audience. And you and I have the benefit that we don’t even need thousands or probably even hundreds of people to buy. If our offer is priced profitably and designed well, we need tens of people to buy. And that is eminently achievable, right? You can do what a marketing agency can do on a smaller scale. You can, but only if you believe it is possible because you get what you expect, right? We get what we expect.

So the first task is to believe that there is demand for your work. Consult the spirit of your business. Get into a space where instead of feeling anxious about marketing, you feel supported. I want you to understand that you weren’t given this idea. You weren’t gifted with this idea for a business as a cruel prank by the universe. You were given it because there is demand for your work and not just for the work you do generally, but for your particular and unique flavor and methodology of doing it. And once you are in that headspace, you are ready to go to work.

So here are the three concrete steps to position your brand, your methodology, your offer in a way that makes it sought after, effective, popular, the only solution worth listening to. And this way you can create, not create, you can reveal, you can discover, you can see the people who want your work. You can get those people to actually step forward, raise their hands and say, yes, I want to work with you.

Now on the whole, people will believe what you tell them about your business. So here’s a list of what you need to know. Number one, you need to know why your work is so cool and awesome. Okay, you need to know what it is about your work, your specific work, which is so very, very good. This requires some market research. Now this is not about comparison. If you get upset looking at what other people in your industry are doing, it is time to put on your bigger underwear and get down to some strategic problem solving. This is about understanding the landscape that you’re operating in and seeing what other people say about their work. See where there are gaps. You don’t have to be in a category of one. Don’t try to be in a category of one, but you do need to be able to say why your solution is better than this one or that one.

You need to know what sets you apart. What is specifically the thing that makes yours a better solution? What is it about your experience, your expertise, the results you get, the innovation you bring forth, the methodology that’s unique? What little piece is so uniquely you that it makes your solution just such a perfect fit for your audience? Now in business, we call this your value proposition. What is unique about your work and why this uniqueness actually makes your solution, your work better for your audience than other options they may have seen or considered? Why your work is so cool and awesome, also known as your value proposition.

The second thing you need to do, and there’s some overlap here guys, but the second thing you need to do is you need to check in with your audience. You are going to have to get to know your audience really, really well. If you don’t know them, you need to set up some research calls and get to know them because it is vital. I can’t tell you how critical it is to know what motivates your audience and what challenges them. For most of us, this can be kind of a time traveling exercise because for a lot of us, our clients are who we were six months ago, a year ago, two years ago. But if it is in the distant past or if you can’t remember what it was like to be in that position or if indeed your clients are not you of a little while ago, you need to find out what motivates and challenges them. Because once you understand these things, then you are in a position to describe your offer, to present your offer to them as the thing that is filling the gap, the thing that is missing in what they are when they’re looking for a solution, what they’re seeing, your solution can be the thing that fills the gap.

Now, I created an offer a little while ago, six months ago or something, and I went about it like this. You can do the same thing, you can go through the same process. I spoke to somebody who was exactly my ideal client. Obviously, there was already a relationship with them because I nurture my leads. So, there was a relationship there. There was some considerable goodwill between us. And so, I asked her two questions. And if you’ve worked with me, you’ll recognize these questions from the offer audit. The questions were, “What do you wake up wanting and what support would you need in order to do that?” So, I went to my client. I said, “What do you wake up wanting?” She said, “I want to sign clients without feeling like I have to be on social media 24/7. I want to sign clients without feeling like I have to be always on and burning myself out.” And I said, “What support would you need to be able to do that?” And she said, “Without hesitation, I would need an expert to be fully immersed, fully in my business. I would need them to understand all about my brand, my offers, my marketing systems, my social media, my messaging, and I would need them to tell me exactly what to do and when and in what order.” I said, “Awesome. That sounds like a vice president of marketing position.” Yes, exactly. That’s what it is.

So, the next day, I used her language and a little bit of mine, one social media post, and sold a spot at Five Figures. That doesn’t happen in isolation, okay? Of course, I am always doing work to create demand for my work and nurturing relationships with my audience, but I am always listening to my audience several calls a week, just listening and hearing what is going on with people and what people are concerned about, what people are trying to achieve, and what is challenging them in getting there. Because if one person is struggling with it, there are 10 people. If there are 10, there are 100. Nobody is that unique in their struggles and challenges that they are the only ones. So, if you don’t know what your audience wants, what motivates them, and what challenges them, you really need to find out so that you can position your offer as the complete and total and no-brainer and no other solution worth listening for answer to their problem.

Okay. I said this a bit before. On the whole, people will believe what you tell them about your business. So, to be in demand, you have to say you are in demand. You have to sound like you’re in demand. You need to act like you’re in demand. You need to believe you are in demand. This is the basic rules of manifestation, acting as if, again, books and books and books written on this. Any reason why you are giving yourself or why this is impossible for you, it’s just stories. It’s just beliefs. Just things you are telling yourself, but which are absolutely not a barrier to success.

So, once we’ve done the above, we’ve understood our value proposition, why your work is cool and awesome. And once we have understood the gap in the market, what our client really wants and really needs and can’t find, and you’ve got your head in the game with believing in the demand for your work. Here are some practical things that you can do to create more demand energy. These things are more marketing than positioning, really, but I wanted to give you some short-term practical concrete actions. So, share recommendations, testimonials, reviews, case studies. If you don’t have them, get them. That is your first priority. Share them often. Share them widely.

Operate like there is demand. Don’t wait for the demand to show up first. So, what would that look like? If you knew there were people queuing up to work with you, you might offer limited spots so that too many people don’t come in at once. You might offer timers to encourage people to act more in terms of your timeframe than theirs. You might lean a little bit on fear of missing out, and you might think that, “Ooh, gross, inauthentic.” But this is part of the marketing game and how we build the business that we want rather than responding to the business that we believe we have.

And the third one, show up, show up, show up as the in-demand business. Be at events, whether they are online or in person, as the in-demand, oversubscribed business. Collaborate, partner up. Whatever resources you have, whatever audiences you have access to, connect and share and engage and be generous. Because if you were oversubscribed, if you knew there was so much demand for your work, you wouldn’t worry. You wouldn’t be worrying about giving away too much value online. That is just not an issue for the oversubscribed business.

So, all of these, yes, they require a good mix of planning, research, consistent action. Yes, they do. And they are effective and proven to build demand and increase just like that baseline of demand in your audience so that everything you do in terms of marketing and making offers and selling is more effective.

I have a bonus step for you. Adapting, being adaptive. Everything in business is dynamic. So, what worked in the past, it can stop working. And things that didn’t work in the past can start. Your mission is to evolve, evolve, evolve. How do I feel about my clients, my marketing, my offers, my messaging this week? What do I want to change?

Okay. So, our three key takeaways. Know why your work is so cool, your value proposition. Know what your client needs and position your offer, your service to fill that gap and act as if, build as if, show up as if, move through the world as if, do your marketing as if there is so, so much demand for your work.

Well, as you can tell, I am fairly excited and animated by this topic because if you believe there is no demand for your work, it just makes everything really, really difficult. So, learning how to manage this and control it and manipulate it is super important. It’s one of the three things I teach in the demand system. Emotional messaging. If you haven’t watched that class, go and watch it now. It is linked in your worksheet. Demand positioning, which we’ve spoken about today. And the Goldilocks marketing ecosystem, which does the heavy lifting for you in terms of creating a ready to buy audience.

Now, if you already know you want more inbound leads, more people reaching out to work with you, that’s what this is all about. When there’s demand for your work, that’s when you’re getting inbound leads, people popping into your DMs, your emails asking to work with you. If you are ready to be in demand like that and also to hold that and manage it, this is your invitation to message me. Hop onto Facebook right now or in your email, send me a quick note so that we can talk about where the current gaps are in this system and where you are leaving money on the table and how we would apply the demand system so that you can sign more clients this month than ever before.

Thank you so much for watching. There is so much demand for your work and I will see you next time.

Having addressed your emotive messaging and your demand positioning, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about go back and watch the other two videos that are linked in the workbook, how do you actually turn this into customers and money in the bank? Your messaging, your positioning are vitally, vitally important, but you also need an effective way to deliver that communication out to your audience. You need an efficient way to deliver it more clearly, more frequently to more people, because the best messaging in the world isn’t going to convert anybody if nobody reads it, right? That makes sense.

So we need to summon the souls. We need to give them a strong dose of your unique and brilliant medicine, and we need a strategy for taking their money, a conversion strategy. That meets both the people who are ready now, ready to pay you now, want to give you their money, and also nurtures and loves and takes on a journey, a customer journey, the people who need a little bit longer. If any of these pieces are missing, you’re leaving money on the table. In fact, if you take away any one of these elements, the machine just stops working. It looks like nothing is happening, and that’s why I refer to it as an ecosystem. It has a number of discrete elements which interplay, and it’s finely balanced. If you overcomplicate it, it won’t work. If you oversimplify it, likewise, it just kind of grinds to a halt and it looks like nothing is happening.

So for the next little while, I’m going to share what my version of a beautiful marketing and sales ecosystem looks like and how it creates a consistent flow of hot, hot leads into your business so that you can sign more clients without having to spend any more time on marketing than you already are. You do not need to work harder. So before I dive in, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Annabelissima. I am a marketing witch and strategy dominatrix, and I am a creator of potential and possibility in your business if you choose to avail yourself of it. I’ve helped hundreds of online experts, healers, teachers, coaches, consultants to sign more and higher value clients without having to relentlessly create content and reels and being on social media from dawn till dusk.

Now, you are in business, so this is not brand new information to you. You know, I’m sure about funnels and email marketing and offer creation and sales copy, but what is new is how we approach it in a holistic and integrated way. We approach it in the most energy and resource-efficient way possible. Congruent to the stage you are at in your business and set in place a repeatable rich for sale, some activities that you can do every month or every six weeks to add fuel to the fire and close those clients.

Now, I know some of you are thinking this sounds just too good to be true, that marketing is hard work, it’s relentless, it’s difficult, it’s frustrating, and it’s true. It is those things if you are not following a system, and if you haven’t done the work of the previous two videos on your memorable emotive messaging and your demand positioning. But again, there is a system. There are strategies and tactics that anyone can execute to create hot leads for their business. You don’t need thousands. You don’t need thousands and thousands of hot leads. If your offer is priced profitably, you probably only need a handful of people and there is nothing that you can say to convince me that this is not attainable for you. You have brains in your head, you have smarts and drive and commitment and a can-do problem-solving attitude, and you absolutely can do this, especially with the right support.

So let’s put together your 90-day marketing strategy right now. Let’s plan out your marketing ecosystem. Number one, audience growth. If your business isn’t growing, there’s a fairly good chance that your audience isn’t growing either. Unless of course you’re doing the audience growth piece, but not making offers, which we will come to, but let’s work through this chronologically. So if your business isn’t growing, check and see if your audience is growing. The question is where will you go to find more people who look like your clients and how will you get their attention? Where are you going to find traffic? This is about finding a mass of people. Where is there a mass of people on the internet? Social media, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, SEO, Pinterest, LinkedIn. All of these can be addressed organically and after a while for most of you, you are going to be using ads and organic growth because ultimately you can grow a lot faster by investing a little bit of money in it than you can by investing a lot of time and energetic resource into it.

And then the next question, when we know where we’re going to find this traffic, is what is going to be the thing you offer these people? What do I mean by an offer? Something you want in exchange for something they want. You want their email address, their follow, their subscription, their connection request, whatever it is. And what are you going to offer them in return? So that could be a Facebook group, a free recorded training, a sales page, a signup page. What is going to be the thing that you give them? A newsletter on a topic they’re interested in, a PDF, an audio. We all know what effective and good lead magnets look like.

Okay, so we’ve talked about how to grow an audience. The second thing we need to have is a customer journey. Once we have a new person in our world, what are we going to do with them? How do we take their money if they’re ready? And if they’re not ready immediately, then what? And this is the piece I most often see falling down with people who come to work with me. That there isn’t a thought through strategic plan for how to move someone from new to your world to paying client. In the rapidest possible speed that is right for your client. You both have needs. They have needs for how long they take to make a decision. People operate in different ways. We have early adopters who are ready like that. And we have people who love to mull and think and feel super, super comfortable before they move. But you have needs too. Your business needs cash flow and you have bills to pay. So what other points of nurture does somebody need in order to be drawn closer and learn more and more about your work? They’ve had their interest piqued. You’ve offered them something in exchange for their ongoing attention. And how are you going to actually honor that prize, that gift of their attention by giving them what they want?

It’s important to remember that when somebody joins your world, they want to know more. They want ways to engage with you and your work. I call refer to this as the golden window. And it’s the time when there is a positive cognitive bias towards your work. Don’t miss that opportunity. It’s important to remember that when somebody joins your world, they want to know more. They want other ways to engage with your work. I refer to this brief window of time as the golden window. And it’s the short period of time after somebody first joins your audience, during which time they are positively predisposed. They have a bias toward you and your work. So take advantage of that phenomenon and plan out what a customer journey might look like.

And it’s important to note that there is probably going to be more than one. There are going to be multiple nurture points. So there could be your email sequence, a Facebook group. There could be live events. There could be recorded teachings that you offer people. How can you strategize both to take the money of the people who are ready to buy now and love on and prepare the others to become customers? Demand for your work. Does that mean that you just ignore the people who aren’t ready now? Of course not. You love them and trust them to buy as soon as they have the resources they need, whether that’s the money, the time, the confidence, the self-management to implement what it is that you’re teaching. Of course you are not going to ignore the people who aren’t ready to buy immediately.

And then the third part that every marketing ecosystem absolutely must have is a conversion process. Now, strictly speaking, this falls outside of the scope of marketing. But a lot of people conflate marketing and sales. And I’m including it here because if you’re not signing a lot of clients and we have talked about the holy grail of inbound leads. And unless you have a very, very big audience, the number of people who spontaneously drop into your email or your DMs and ask how to work with you may never be a large enough number to meet your goals. Even as you grow, you may never have enough inbound inquiries to grow at the rate you wish to grow because of course as your business grows, so do your targets, right? So every single business needs an outbound sales strategy. If you are not actively asking for the sale, you are leaving thousands of pounds, thousands of dollars on the table. I promise you. There are people in your audience right now today who are super, super interested in working with you, but you haven’t asked them. They don’t know what your offers are. They don’t know what they cost. They don’t know if it’s right for them because you’re not telling them and you’re not asking them, hey, are you in?

So what does this look like? What does the conversion process look like in your marketing strategy? It looks like a core offer or methodology that you talk about regularly and frequently as part of your marketing. You need to make those offer posts. You need to pitch the sale. A lead generation strategy to get people to raise their hand and say they’re interested in what you’re selling. So that looks like social content, live events like this one. Lots of ways to get people to indicate that they that they’re into you, that they’re into your work. And you need an outbound strategy to initiate contact with people who you have vetted and determined to be a good fit for your work. A conversion strategy. Are you going to send people to a sales page? Will you have a basic Google document that you can send out or a PDF you can send out? Are you going to get on sales calls? Are you going to close your sales in the DMs? Are you going to absent yourself from that process and just let people go to a sales page and decide or not to buy from there? There are lots and lots of considerations based on you, your personal preferences, your resources, the time you have available, the offer, the price in the audience. But generally speaking, the higher the cost relative to your audience and your brand, the more energetic input from you is is appropriate.

OK, as a bonus point, a bonus strategy, a seamless onboarding. If you know that signing a client is kind of painful with contracts, setting up payment links, giving them access to materials or groups, if all of that is kind of difficult and clumsy and time consuming, that will create some energetic resistance for you in selling. Now, this doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t have to be seamless from the very beginning. But basically, all the time you are improving the way you deliver everything, including the results you help your clients get, making it all better and easier and more efficient and smoother. There are two things to focus on as a business owner. I tell my clients only to everything else is a distraction, getting better results for your clients and getting better at your marketing.

Now, any reason that you might be giving yourself for why this is impossible for you is bullshit and you know it. This is 100 percent achievable for anyone with their head in the game, determined to move strategically, systematically, consistently, adaptively. As a business owner yourself, you are constantly evolving. And the person your business requires to show up constantly evolves. And so does your offer, your audience, your strategy, your support, your methodology. You can change any of these things and it will take you in a completely new trajectory. Sometimes it really just is a case of deciding differently. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

So to summarize the components of your marketing ecosystem, traffic and audience growth, where are you going to find people and how are you going to get their attention? Customer journey, how you can quickly and efficiently educate people about your work so that the only people who stick around are people who are interested in working with you. We are not interested in building an audience of people who are never going to buy. And the conversion strategy, what you offer, when and how, so that you can take the money of the two or three percent of people in your joining your world who are ready to buy straight away and cultivate your relationship with the rest of them.

OK, so, so much we could talk about, so much I could share that specific to your business and preferences. But I hope you can see how these pieces fit together to build an audience of people who are really good fit potential buyers and how this increases the base level of demand. That exists in your audience and how you can strategize to increase that base level of demand over the long term as well as boost it at specific points in the month or the year when you want to tickle the energy, create more bars and create more sales. Building out the marketing ecosystem bespoke to your business is one of the things we do in the demand system. We work on your emotional messaging, how we make people move. We work on your demand positioning, how we can use positioning to decide and determine how people think about and interact with your business. And we use the Goldilocks marketing ecosystem. Talked about it today. The actual marketing assets and actions that deliver your messaging and positioning to the largest number of people as clearly and as frequently as possible.

If you want to be in demand, if you want more hot leads, if you want more inbound leads, more confidence with your sales process, more clients saying yes. If you are ready to hold all that comes with it, more client work, more onboarding, more money, more taxes, more demands on your time, more invitations to set and hold boundaries. Your invitation is to message me. Log into Facebook in your email. Send me a quick note so I can show you the money you’re leaving on the table and how we can apply the demand system to your business to make that money magically appear in your bank account.

Thank you so much for watching me. There is so much demand for your work and I will see you soon.

We are going to do some brainstorming for lots of brilliant ideas for content creation. We’ve been talking about your offer, making offers, and messaging. But what do you do with that messaging? How do you actually use it in your day-to-day? How does that translate into the actual content that you publish on the internet to lure your people in?

If you have had the chance to review or have done fairly recently the Mercury messaging workshop, of which there is a recording in paid, you’re going to find this easiest because you’ve already got your kind of map of an offer and the big promise and the three pillars that hold it all up. We did that in the Mercury messaging workshop. If you haven’t done that, just hang in there and keep up. There’ll be a replay of this and there’s a replay of that. It’s all good, and you’ll get the gist. It’s still good.

So you might be feeling one of these things at the moment. You might be feeling like, oh, I’m just blocked. I sit down, you know, I open Facebook to write my content and I’m just like, I don’t know what to say, drawing a blank, creatively blocked. You might feel like you are doing quite well, you know, you’re posting anyway, but just not getting anything back. No traction, no engagement, no feedback—a screaming into the void moment. Or you might feel like you’ve got a little core group of cheerleaders who enjoy and engage on and comment and like the things you post, but they are already people who have said no. It’s like your auntie; it’s people who aren’t buying from you right now.

So if you’re posting and you’re getting engagement and interest from people who are buying from you, then keep doing what you’re doing. But if you’re one of those three things—like you’re blocked, you’re just getting nothing back, or you’re getting some engagement but no sales—then stay tuned.

If you are drawing a blank, it is very often—well, for me anyway, and I suspect for you too—that somewhere inside I am feeling detached from my highest calling and my strongest self and my favourite self. It means that somewhere inside I am thinking that I am not prepared enough, not professional enough, not coherent enough, that my offer isn’t good enough, that my audience is wrong. I’ve already decided that there’s some really good reason why anything that I write will be wrong and won’t achieve what I want it to achieve.

So if you’re feeling blocked—and I could and probably should run an entire session on getting over writer’s block, creative block—but if you’re in that position, then for goodness’ sake, and for all of our sakes, and for your sake, and for your business’ sake, don’t just sit there flogging it. If that’s how you’re feeling, you have to get into a place where you are sold on what you’re selling. You have to be sold on you before you can sell you. So whatever that means you need to do, whether you need to do a breathwork practice or whether you need to do a Netflix and ice cream binge, whether you need to scream it out, whether you need to walk in nature, whether you need to connect with the elements, whatever you need to do. You need to like down tools and the amount that the first aid is to be given to your committed surrender to the spirit of your business and being sold on you. It’s all a process and it increases, and it becomes easier. If you can even just raise that percentage by just 2%, everything else is going to feel 25%, 50%, 100% easier.

If you are in the next category of people where you’re posting fairly regularly but you’re just not getting engagement, then I would like you to invent—I’m just writing down a neck-to-client meditation; that would be a good one, wouldn’t it?—but to sit down and attune to your ideal client. Rather than trying to think about who they are, try to feel their energy. This becomes confusing when we imagine, like, I have to imagine a specific person, but you can invent this person. Your ideal client can be simply a figment of your imagination. But you can flesh that person out, use your imagination, your whole daydream, and get into their energy and then ask, what does this person need to hear today?

So then it becomes more of a channeling exercise rather than thinking, how am I going to convince somebody, or what do I need to say in this post? It will also awaken you to the energetics of the language that you’re using. This often happens, right? This very, very often happens. I see this in copy all over the internet, where people are—you may be doing this too; I know I have definitely still done it more often than I would wish—but you are going after the wrong client. Our natural tendency is to go into explaining and persuading mode. But those aren’t our ideal clients, and I’m going to give you a concrete example of how those two types of language compare. The secret of really persuasive copywriting is so incredibly easy that it’s actually really hard to get.

Let me finish telling you about what I mean by going after the wrong client. If you are attuning to a client who is really struggling, like a huge percentage of the world’s population, it can be difficult to remember this as kind of self-actualized or actualizing beings, but a huge percentage of the population, the communities that we live in, live within us just basically struggling to get through every single day. If you’re talking to those people and trying to inspire people about how amazing it’s going to be after working with you, it can be really difficult for people to even have the headspace. It can feel painful, you know? If people are really going through some shit, and you tell them that they can transform their life, that can be painful to hear because it’s like, no, it’s not that easy.

It can be really hard to inspire people who are going through shit. I don’t know if you’ve ever been—if you’ve ever sat with somebody who’s going through a really hard time. What you want to be doing in that situation as a friend is not trying to inspire them; it’s to hold space for them. But if you’re marketing, if you’re trying to promote your goods and services to somebody who’s not in a space where they’re really able to be inspired in that moment, you’re making it a lot harder on yourself.

So instead, you can make the decision when you’re imagining this ideal client. You can attune, you can decide that they are a person who is empowered, who is taking action, who is already looking for your solution. Now that they’ve heard of life coaching, they’re looking for a life coach. They want to see what life coaching can do for them. Or they have decided that they want to find a psychic medium that they can check in with on a regular basis. So attune yourself to a client who is ready to buy rather than a client who needs a lot of persuading to get there. Those clients in that group, the struggling group, if they’re meant to be for you, they will find you by you using this language.

Now let me give you an example of the two different kinds of language. I’m keeping this very general and not to a specific niche, but okay, so here’s example number one. Open quotes: Do you feel like you’ve tried everything? Do you feel exhausted and frustrated and that nothing you do will work? Okay, that’s example one. What kind of client, what kind of person do you think is going to resonate with that kind of statement? This is what I mean by the energetics of language. Compared to: Open quotes: Which, you know, you would meant for more in this one and beautiful life, let’s go. Okay, what kind of client is going to resonate with that kind of language?

So just like this is a muscle. It’s not easy, but it’s something that when you have in mind, it can be as simple as a note to say, my future client is empowered and looking for a solution, and she’s ready to spend her money on me. So you remember that you’re not talking to somebody who is identifying as somebody who stays stuck. Do you see? I’m going to read that first statement again, the one that we don’t want to do: Do you feel like you’ve tried everything? Do you feel exhausted and frustrated and stuck? We don’t want to attract people who identify as stuck. Guess what kind of clients they’re going to turn out to be? Are they the kind of clients that are going to get the best results from working with you? Or is it the ones who go like, okay, let’s go. This is going to be great. Jump in. I know you’re ready. Those are the people that you want to work with, and those are the people who act.

It’s like no disrespect at all to the people who are struggling, but you’re here running a business, not a charity. As they say, you’re here running a business, and if they want you, they will find their way to you. So attuning your language, attuning to the language: Does your ideal client resonate with ideas of struggle, or is she looking for a solution? If she’s looking for a solution, all you have to tell her is how cool yours is. Say, oh, you’re looking for a solution. I’ve got one. Here, we do this.

Following this strategy, you are going to appeal to the thinkers and you’re going to appeal to the feelers. We’re all led by feelings, but some people like to think they’re led by logic. They’re wrong. We’re all just led by our heart. But let’s not focus our attention on the people who are really connected to and attached to struggle.

If you are getting engagement on your social media content, you’re putting it out there, you’re getting engagement, but you’re not making sales, this is going to become less of an issue when you are talking to the right clients. When you are talking to the right people, if you’re getting engagement on your post, then those people are hot leads, and they’re much easier to sell to than those other people. So it will be less of an issue, but what you will have in mind is, what energy am I bringing into my copy? Where am I holding back? How can I make sure that my content is ultimately pointing people towards purchasing from me?

So in other words, being strategic about your content. This is something that we talk about in paid, and we talk about in demand as well. Because when you’re attracting the right people into your orbit, into your energy field, and they’re ready to buy, it’s just—there’s just some simple steps to move to hit. I say move through, but people don’t always go through them consecutively. There are certain points in the journey between being a stranger and being a customer. So we just want to make sure that your content is hitting those marks somewhat, rather than always be connecting with people but never selling, or always be teaching but never showing your warm fuzzy side.

Let’s talk about your content map thing. I’ve put it away again.

Before I do that, I know there’s a temptation when I like blah lots and lots of information at you. For you to think that you need to implement it all, you do not. The algorithm cares less and less about your consistency, about how consistent you are. So don’t bother posting every single day unless you’re feeling it. And save your genius for when you are actually promoting something. Don’t, like, don’t flog yourself to grow an audience. It’ll catch up when you’re promoting something. But what you can be consistent with is like moving forward with heart.

The absolute 100% best content that you can put out there aside maybe from testimonials. But it’s just, it’s you. It’s your authentic self-expression. It’s you teaching on things that interest you. It’s you doing what lights you up. It’s you embodying the work you do. It’s you demonstrating how you embody the work you do. It’s like showing it. And then you are a walking, talking advertisement for your work. We’ve all heard about the like no like and trust thing. People become customers when they know you and like you and trust you. It’s hackneyed. It’s a cliche. But if people seeing you walking, you’re, you know, doing what you say you do, living as expansively as you promise that they will, then the trust part is there. Not all mouth and trousers.

So as a very blunt example, is that even if saying I feel like that used to be a saying it was here anyway, a very blunt example. If you promise if you are like a sovereignty coach and you’re complaining all the time on your feet. OK. That would be a big one. It just like creates a dissident, a cognitive dissonance in your audience. The thing or she’s saying one thing, but look.

So let’s talk about creating content. So start with your big map and your big map, your big message map has in the middle what is essentially your offer. It may not be that lovely, catchy, illustrative name that you have chosen for it. Not talking about naming it. But what is like the big promise or the big solution, big problem. So first think about the big thing your audience wants. And if it’s something like I’m going to pick an example because this has come up in the last week. If somebody wants to have finished writing their first book, just dig a little bit deeper than that. Why do they want it? Why do they want that? And what’s the real one reason, the big reason, the one that like the true reason that they haven’t already done it.

OK, so that’s the those things in some combination of a big promise of your offer. It’s either like get something or fix something. Right. The next, if you recall, it ends up looking like spider like this, or it could also look like a family tree with the offer at the top. And then beneath that, you have the three, the three main blocks, barriers, challenges in the person’s way that why they haven’t got it already, why they haven’t written their book already. They’re creatively blocked. They don’t have a consistent writing practice and they don’t have accountability or three reasons why they’re not living their healthiest, vibrant life. They don’t know what to eat. They have a sedentary life and they secretly hate themselves. I don’t know. Like what are the three, the three main things. And then if you remember, again, from the messaging workshop, we are going to promise we’re going to reverse engineer three lovely, happy outcomes, which are the opposite of those challenges or problems.

So instead of secretly hating yourself, you will outwardly love yourself. Instead of living a sedentary lifestyle, you’ll find like joyful self expressive movement. And instead of eating terribly, you will eat intuitively and feel much better for it. So you’re you’re the three pillars you promise. We reverse engineer those from the blocks so that everything’s like completely in alignment. There’s not a little here where, well, that sounds great, but I’m not sure how it addresses my problems.

The other thing we did with the message map was write loads of late. I think we did color coding and we wrote about the feelings that people have, about the challenges, challenges that they have and about the things that they want to achieve. We wrote about the outcomes. We wrote about the actions that people will take, the things they will do differently, like choosing different foods when you’re shopping or choosing different ways to spend your time or choosing different responses to triggers or stimuli. We talked about feelings, outcomes, actions, and meaning.

Meaning. The meaning is such a the meaning is huge. Wherever you can just think about how you can add in so that you can so that people are even thinking beyond. Like what what’s the benefit of the benefit? What’s the what does the transformation allow to happen next? And that’s where the kind of vision and imagination really beautiful thing comes in. And that’s why you don’t want to be talking to people who don’t actually even believe that the first the first level of transformation is possible.

So at the end of the Mercury messaging class, the assignment was to basically write up your whole offer. Write it up as if you were going to explain it from beginning to end. This is the promise. This is the big problem people have. Here’s how I solve it for them. Here’s how they feel before. Here’s how they feel after. Just like write out everything. So it’s like a piece of writing that you can read, edit, that you can read aloud, that you can read it to a study buddy.

Now, I don’t want you to spend weeks and months on this. This is the work of like two days to write it out, read aloud, find something to read it to and just get it to a point where it all makes sense and kind of lands with you. And there is one piece of content. OK. That is your masterpiece of content for this offer. It can be updated. It can be refined. It can be it can evolve as your offer evolves, which it will. But if you go back and complete that Mercury messaging class and do the assignment at the end, which is to just like know your offer inside out by writing it out everything through what’s your process.

What is it? What is it? Because as well, there’s three things that you teach to remove each block. So that’s like nine methodologies, nine steps that you teach to achieve this whole thing. There’s a lot there. There’s a lot there. That is a lot of content in itself. So there is your one big masterpiece of content for talking about this offer. So let’s imagine that you have that document open in front of you. Maybe you did do the homework and maybe you do have it open in front of you. And it’s probably I’m going to say, oh, what about, you know, it’s probably a couple of pages long, at least if you’re talking about the big problem and how people feeling and what are the what are the blocks and how do you alchemize them and what steps do you take people through. There’s a good chunk there.

So then what you can do to start generating more and more content from it is zoom in. Zoom in. So, for example, let’s just do this now. I’m sure that you can all name one of your one of the pillars of success that you teach. So one of the one of the blocks and what you turn it into. So the block is creative. The block is writer’s block. The challenge is writer’s block. And you turn it into creative flow or the challenge is people pleasing and you turn it into fearless self expression. So just identify one of those kind of turnarounds that you facilitate or teach as part of your offer. So just like pick one. Because if you have three, three of those, then that’s going to be three more posts, right? So you can pick one now and then you can do the other two later on this evening or each, you know, when you come to write the content. So it’s pretty easy to just go into a little bit more detail about one block and one pillar. So you would copy that section from your document, paste it into a new document or a new social media window, expand on it a little bit more.

Right. Maybe so then now you’ve got maybe two or three paragraphs on that one piece. Read it through. Make sure that you’re including outcomes and meanings. And so feelings and actions are really important to include. But if you’re like doing social media posts and you haven’t got so much space, then naming the outcomes of your work. What happens? What do people actually get from it is so much more important than like the calls they’re going to go on or the meditations that they’re going to do.

And when we talk about meanings, like what that means for people, what that enables to happen, what that transformation, like the ripple effects of it, that tends to create feelings in the reader anyway without you having to name them. Speaking of naming emotions, I told you that the secret to writing really powerful copy is just so devastatingly simple, but it boils down to this, that the reader is highly suggestible. I believe that reading specifically, well, actually language is kind of when people are receiving information, they are they’re suggestible.

So in order to make it so embarrassing, in order to make somebody feel something in your copy, all you have to do is name that emotion. Name the emotion. If you say this is exciting, people start to feel excited about it. If you say you will be happy to know, people feel happy to know. Okay. It’s that simple. If you want people to fill in a form and return it to you, say just fill in the form, click the link and return it to me. It’s like just naming what you want to happen so, so, so clearly. Use a thesaurus because copywriters all over the world use this a lot.

So if you can find a slightly less frequently used version of the emotion that you’re trying to name, so saying like blissful or ecstatic or delighted or joy overjoyed or something instead of happy. Then it just helps people to it helps it stand out. But the other interesting thing is that like with there’s so many like nuances, nuance to emotion that people will people will feel that nuanced emotions. So like, choose it. Why would you want somebody to feel happy if they could feel delighted or blissful or overjoyed, you know, choose a better word for how you want people to feel. The source for emotions.

Yes. So if we were so if we we have a one piece of master content, there’s one piece of content. And we also then can create some content around like the three blocks and the three pillars. So now we’ve got four pieces of content. And then for each of those like two to three paragraphs that you have written about a block or a pillar, you can you can zoom in closer again. It’s almost like a fractal. So for every one of the steps of your methodology, you like that is another social media post. So now you’ve probably got.

I don’t know if we were talking about like three different blocks and three different pillars of success and your main thing. Then we’ve got seven pieces of content. And if you walk through people, people through the steps of your methodology, now you have like a twenty one something pieces of content. So you can see where this is going, right? Because the more you zoom in and give and like expand on like just certain sections, you don’t want to put this all together into one big post, which is twenty five pages long.

But by getting really familiar with it and talking about specific aspects of your offer, this is how you gain a position of authority because you are always essentially talking about the same thing, but with increasing levels of nuance, with increasing. What do I want to say? Like the mastery of like how you connect the pieces between what your client is going through and your methodology. You can’t you don’t start off as an authority. You gain authority and acquire authority by becoming more authoritative in the way you talk about your subject.

And you gain that by learning about it and you learn about it by studying it and writing about it and turning in your assignments. So your genius, a lot of it will be in how you how you connect these pieces and where are the unique intersections between what you know, what you teach, the expertise you’ve acquired and who you are, your past experience, like what makes you a different energy worker or psychic medium or life coach or polyamory coach or book coach. What makes you different from all of the others.

And it’s always something to do with your past experience, whether you were, you know, whether you have like physical differences or your neurological differences or mental health differences or you had a particularly unique experience of growing up or, you know, like whatever makes you different is a potential source of like more influence. Like more interest and more depth when you when you start going deeply into your methodology and your success pillars.

So I want to give you, I want to, I want to leave some time for questions about this. The question that always comes up when people are talking a lot about their methodology is, well, if I tell everybody all about my program and everything I do, why would they then work with me? Why would they not just heal them heal themselves by using my free by consumer my free content? And my standard answer to that, which I’m going to, it still stands, but I’m going to expand on it as well.

So my standard answer to that is if somebody consumes all your content for free and achieves the transformation for themselves, that is some of the best marketing you can get that you can say like this bitch cured herself from my free content. Can you even imagine how powerful it is to work with me? Okay, so if somebody wants to do that, awesome. They will be your biggest fan and they will want to get them to write a testimonial, get them to say I transformed my business from her free content.

And the other reason is, is that what people really want to pay for, I believe, is much less information like we, we live in an absolute information glut, right? There’s no shortage of information. Everything I teach about marketing can be found on the Internet. Everything you teach, I’m sure, can be found in various places on the Internet. It’s not so much about information. It’s how it, how it’s put together by you is one thing. But the main thing is like how to implement it, how to actually do it, how to embody it, how to not just understand it on an intellectual level, but get the results from it.

And that’s what happens when people who work for you. So there is an argument, I’m turning it over in my head right now, there is an argument for just making all of your content, all of your content free, essentially, and just have people pay to implement with you. Because people have different circumstances, people need handholding and accountability, people have questions. So even if you were to decide to give away all your expertise and knowledge for free, it’s not a recommendation, I’m just saying it’s not something you need to be terrified of.

If you were to give that all away for free, you could still make a lot of money by helping people to implement it and act on it and embody it and be it and do it. And that would be that would be your job. And it would actually be really cool because you wouldn’t have to teach anybody anything because they would have already learned it from your free content. So you could just like jump in and get straight on with the doing with them.

So I just offer that as an alternative thing that might be as true as I can’t give away all my expertise because then people won’t work with me. Yes. I know one guy who has a 60 minute YouTube video that companies pay him to repeat to their people. Okay. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So you can have a template. This guy probably maybe he could do have like a script for the same video, the essential like a template, how to do it, how to do this.

And maybe there are companies who do do that, but there are also companies who are like, actually, we don’t want to go through the hassle of doing that. Can you just do it for us? So that is like definitely a possibility for service industries, videographers, copywriters. You know, there’s always, yeah, for those people who want it done for them. And for the people who want it done with them as well, just to be there and doing it with them. That’s the value. The value isn’t necessarily your expertise. It’s being in your energy that’s valuable.

Okay. So, um, would you would it be useful? I feel like I’d just rather like I haven’t have barely drawn back breath for 40 minutes now. So I think what I’m going to do is just take a five to seven minute break, which I would like you to use to just write down ideas, subject matter ideas based on your message map, based on your message map. I’m going to give you five minutes so that you can just write out just like be absurd. Write as long a list of you as you can of possible things that you could talk about based on your message map and like go off on tangents as well.

Like if you can think of any way to inject the ridiculous, the absurd, theological, the upside down, the makes no sense, then like anything that you can add that it adds an element of surprise is awesome. So what I’m saying is don’t constrain yourself to just the stuff that you’ve already written down in the, in the, in the messaging workshop. Let your, let your creativity flow and just make just make this ideas generation session about quantity rather than quality just like get down as many ideas as you can as a list like right fast automatic writing right down as many as you can. Don’t judge them whether they’re any good or any bad. Let’s just let it flow for five minutes. Yeah, I’m going to meet myself. I’m going to get a glass of water. I’m going to come back.

Okay, pens down. I’m only kidding. You can keep writing. I hope you’ve got a lovely long list of ideas. People are still eagerly writing away, and don’t stop by all means if you’re in flow, keep going. But we’re not finished yet because I want to talk to you about the different kinds of content so that you can get some variety and rhythm and flow in your content marketing. The different kinds of content each serve a different purpose in kind of getting people warmed up to your brand. Some people are already hot to your brand, but it’s just more like a different purpose in appealing to what people learn in different ways, right? Some people really respond to video, some people like to read a long form thing, some people just like the bright, punchy headline and like to interact. We want to hit as many points as possible.

I think I said right at the beginning about appealing to the thinking people and to the feeling people, appealing to those who like to move fast, appealing to those who like to move slowly, just so that we’re taking as much money as possible, right, of course. So, the first type of content, you’ve probably heard all of these terms before. I’m just going to go over them quite quickly and give you some examples, but what I would like you to do is take one of your coloured pens or crayons or highlighters and decide upon a colour for engagement. As I’m describing some examples of this type of content, I’d like you to look over your list and mark in some way those that you think would make cool engagement posts. You might need to make some additional notes. But let me talk about it, and you have a look and mark off which ones kind of lend themselves to engagement content like this.

Engagement posts, engagement content, a big part of them is to tickle the goblins that live inside the social media algorithms. We’ve all experienced where we post a selfie, felt cute, might delete later, or our kitten, or our kids, and it gets absolutely swamped with likes and comments. Then we post our offer, and it’s crickets. That means that the engagement post, the selfie or the kids or the kitten, has done its job. The purpose of engagement content is to generate activity on your profile, to get people engaging on your profile, so that the next time you post, when you post your authority content or you make your offer, more people see it. This came up earlier this week as well. If you’re always and only posting offers, it’s famous and well known that nobody comments, nobody really engages on offer posts. If that’s all you’re posting, it becomes like a self-fulfilling downward spiral where the social media algorithm goblins are going, “nobody likes this stuff, let’s bury it, nobody’s picking this up.” So you want to include stuff on your profile that’s really easy for people to engage with, like, “tell me a book that changed your life.” If you can get it to relate to your offer and content, even better. You’ll be able to come up with content with questions that only your ideal client would really be interested in answering.

For example, I’m about to go into a period of launching my higher ticket group demand at the moment. Let me see if I can think of a question that only my ideal clients for demand would have an answer for. If I said, “have you run a group program and want to know how to scale up for consistent income?” or “have you run a group program and then felt you need to find another offer?” or “how did your last launch go?” My ideal clients for demand are people who have already launched and delivered. So if I ask questions about group programs, whether they have one, have done one, want to scale it, how did it go, by definition, only my ideal clients are going to answer that post, right? Open-ended questions, but yes, a book that changed your life is a great one, gets loads of interaction. What’s your favourite crystal? You’ll get loads of interaction. You don’t want to only do engagement posts, but if you spend quite a lot of time on engagement posts, you’ll get a lot of people looking at your profile, a lot of eyes on your profile, and the algorithm goblins will be going, “this is good stuff, let’s keep serving this out.”

What are some other ideas? We did ask for recommendations, we did create a poll. Now, you can’t do a poll where you tick a box on a public profile; you can only do that in a group. But you could say, “do you prefer this or that?” You could ask people to name their favourite tools or methods related or adjacent to your work. A scale of one to ten, or a scale of like vomit emoji to ecstatic emoji, from a scale of that to that, how do you feel about x? Just questions that are so easy for people to answer, like “what’s your favourite emoji?” Questions that are so easy for people to answer. Share an unpopular opinion. What’s something you learned embarrassingly late in life? As you’re looking through your list of things now, just pick out where you can see that you might be able to find some questions to ask your audience. Also, share selfies. I think that the goblins really do love to see your face.

Okay, so the next type of content I want to talk about is connection content. Now, you might have a fairly good idea of who you are, but we hope that, and we trust that, there are new people joining your audience every week. How much do they know about you? This is where you can build out your business persona to give people a sense of the kind of person they will be working with. This could be in how you share what behind the scenes looks like for you, for example, how you and your assistant prepare for your work. It could be sharing your backstory, how you came to do this work. It could be talking about something that you feel is really cool and unique about what you do. It could be your personal reflections on what you do, like why you do it, your big why, your vision, and your mission, so that people get a better understanding of you and your business.

I hope you’ve selected a colour for connection and are making notes on your list or colouring in on your list where you might be able to identify this kind of connection content. Behind the scenes of your client calls if that’s part of your program, or behind the scenes of developing a ritual if that’s part of your methodology, or writing your notes, or just giving people a glimpse into what it’s like to be you. This is where the living your work and embodying your work comes in. You’ll notice as well that lots of the ideas on your list have more than one colour next to them. Lots of ideas fall into multiple different categories and could create multiple different posts. This is how you end up with hundreds of ideas, just based on that one master piece of content, which was you getting really familiar with your messaging about your offer.

So, what if we talk about sharing behind the scenes, sharing the story of how you do what you do, sharing about the education that you had in what you do, sharing snippets of your interests that aren’t necessarily immediately and obviously related to the work that you do, but you know that they are because they meet at the intersection that is you? Talking about your influences or your teachers, who has influenced your work and how they inform your work.

So the next colour to grab is, I would go for red or orange for authority. You will respect my authority is incredibly important to demonstrate just like you don’t have to do it in a serious way but you have to know what you’re talking about you have to demonstrate you don’t have to know what you’re talking about. Because if you’re in last week’s call you’ll remember that people have legitimate fears about spending money with people that they don’t know, don’t want to be. It’s not even that they don’t of course they don’t want to be scammed and they don’t even necessarily think they will be that they just don’t want to be disappointed.

This is about demonstrating, so mark with your red or your orange with your strong bold hand to signify your authority, how are you going to be demonstrating how you’re going to demonstrate your understanding of the obstacles that your clients face, and you, you do that, you demonstrate your understanding by talking about them with, with nuance, and with depth. So when you’re creating content in this way. If one of the obstacles in your clients way for example is people pleasing because that’s come up a few times over the last week, then you will be able to write at length and in depth about where that urge comes from, and the fight for your phone response and childhood trauma and complex PTSD and you know you like go wild you can go deep into it, because it gives your audience the understanding as long as they know that people pleasing is what, what is going on for them. They will recognize them themselves, they will recognize themselves in your words. That’s part of the sales process that we share it all interlinked so beautifully like a jeweled web.

What else can you do? You’re demonstrating your understanding. Another thing, another way to express your authority to show your authority to show your understanding and expertise is to share an overview, like share your framework, or your methodology. Why, like the three things that you offer your three success pillars. How you selected them, and like, yeah, why you selected them an overview of how you work. What we’re thinking about is what when we talked earlier about what does your, what does your ideal client need to hear I don’t want you to think in terms of what does your ideal need client need to hear in order to buy. Just genuinely what does she need to hear today to feel better. What does she need to hear today to like feel like she’s taken a little step towards the solution that she’s looking for. What does she need to hear today to realize that you’re the person who understands what she’s going through, not because she’s going to buy immediately. So her attention is got.

For some reason I just had the memory of talking about planetary magic and alter offerings, being like signaling to the gods in, in a sparkling cocktail party. You want to get Hermes attention. And, you know, like, he has every nymph in, in the heavens like falling, falling his feet and you want to get his attention so you like burn his incense, and you get his olive oil and you sing and you recite his him. So, it’s not about like immediately wanting to get something from this person in your audience but what do they need to hear in order to, in order to hear you, what do they know what will what capture their attention. What shifting perspective does she need today. Like, imagine if you were like, imagine if you were just like kind of coaching and encouraging and cheerleading a friend who was seeking a solution. And yeah, it might mean that you’re sending them like the other day I was ranting against some posting irrelevant names, but if they’re relevant names, you might be sending her relevant names, encouragement, and you know positive messages and a little bit of advice and a perspective shift. Like, I want you to be a cheerleader and a beacon for your ideal client.

What else for authority, go on a rant, take a strong position for or against something that you see in your industry. Explode a myth. Lots of people say that, but I say no. And yes, invite debate polarizing statements, take a stand, show your colors. That works great for engagement as well and you know even if you get detractors and naysayers, that is all good for the algorithm goblins. So we’ve talked about what have we talked about engagement, we’ve talked about connection, we’ve talked about authority.

I’m going to throw in with authority, social proof, credibility. Again, most people don’t engage on this kind of content but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. This is sharing a screenshot of somebody saying wow that was an amazing session, sharing a screenshot of somebody talking about the results that they’ve had with you. I got the job. I finally perfected my, you know, I finally hit. I don’t know. I don’t know what you do. Screenshots and results. Also, you publicly celebrating the results of your client. You don’t have to name them. But if you can, that’s really awesome. But you probably publicly talk about the results that your clients get and their backstory you can anonymize it if you know if it’s private just like anonymize the details. Share testimonials, screenshots or pretty designs it doesn’t matter.

This is, I’m doing this kind of as a sidebar because it’s not stuff that’s on your messaging thing, but it’s just like so valuable to pepper in there to include in next week I think we all do this thing. I certainly do it, we collect testimonials and then never, never publish them, speaking of which, I must remind me to talk to you about video testimonials. And like writing up like a case study, actually walking through the whole story of like what was going on before they worked with me, what did we work on together and how was life different afterwards and sharing your achievement and then the last piece is the office.

So refer to the death by email sequence that’s in paid. But as well as all of this the engagement, the connection and authority, you need to be posting your offers straightforward offer posts where you share the transformation you share the benefits you share the features. I’ve said this before in this session, you’ll hear me say it often. These kind of posts tend to get the least engagement of any type of content but post them anyway. And that’s why we do the engagement posts as well and that’s why we don’t want every single post to be an offer post. That will tend to drive engagement down. And the reason why we care about engagement is what so that more people see your offer posts.

So your offer post could be seeding the idea or I have a limited number of places, it can literally be the copy from your sales page or your sign up page if you have one. You know what to do about posting the offer. Generally just be like as direct as you can. People won’t engage. It doesn’t matter. They will still see it. Stick a call to action on it and you’re good to go. The bottom line is my friends that if you’re not promoting, you’re not going to sell. The thought to keep having the thought to indoctrinate yourself into is that when I sell, I make sales because it’s true. If you don’t sell, you won’t make sales.

And all of this content, if it’s relating somehow to this offer and you’re getting the sprinkling of these different types of content in there, this is all going to be like increasing the amount of energy and attention. And just like I get the image of neurons just kind of fizzing like fireflies. Just tiny sparks of attention as people begin to notice your offer and then pay more attention, more attention. It’s kind of incremental, but it’s also cumulative and is exponential. You don’t have to post 100% more frequently to get 100% more clients. You probably only have to post 10% more frequently or make your content 10% more engaging or creative or fun or unexpected or something. Small gains is what I’m saying have huge effects. So stick with it.

I’m gonna talk for a little while, probably about 20 minutes, on the small adjustments that we can make to our language to be sure that we’re talking to people who are ready to buy now. And let’s think about what we’re doing as learning to play the game of marketing because it’s the best way to approach it in a playful and experimental manner.

What I’m gonna offer you are some hacks, some slightly different ways of looking at the work that you’re already doing to instigate a small and subtle shift in language that has the potential to completely change how your marketing converts. It certainly made a huge difference to my business when I kind of realized what I had slipped back into habitually doing.

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard me and other marketers as well talking about speaking to people who are ready to buy, speaking to your ideal client. But that can be, I know that that can be really confusing, a really difficult concept to grasp. Well, how do I speak to those people? I’m doing my best, but apparently they’re not hearing me. How do I speak to those, in a targeted way, to those people? That can seem like a really difficult concept to grasp if you are not already immersed in the marketing world, if you’re not a copywriter.

But I want you to just trust me for now because it’s gonna become clearer as I speak. But this is not about skill as a copywriter. You absolutely do not need to be a copywriter to do this. But this is, we’ve all done lots of ideal client avatar exercises. This is the most useful one you’ll ever do because it’s about identifying your ideal client as being not just somebody who matches the personality and the belief systems of the people who you love to work with. But also for most of us, our ideal client is also somebody who is motivated, who’s excited to work with us, who has money to invest in it and is ready to spend.

So these attributes, excited, motivated, committed, ready to invest, are the other traits that we’re gonna be primarily focused on in this lesson today. So it’s a slight shift, it’s subtle, but it is so, so profound like all of the best subtle shifts are. And we’re doing the background work that makes that shift come really quite easily, quite naturally.

Again, this is not about being a brilliant copywriter. I have a client right now who’s selling out her programs and will be the first to admit that she is by no means, by no means a copywriter. But she really has mastered this idea of speaking to people who are ready to buy now, okay?

How do we speak to people who are motivated to buy now? We need to understand what their decision-making process is. We need to understand what they are thinking, feeling, looking, doing, looking for, doing right now. If we don’t understand those things, we can’t begin to tailor our approach to somebody who’s ready to buy.

And the way we tend to default, what I found with working with lots and lots of people on this, what I found is that we tend to default to speaking to people who are nearly ready rather than really ready. If we focus on the people who are really ready, it will help move along with people who are nearly ready as well. And then there’s a whole other section of our audience who are not nearly ready, but they will be. And I think it probably goes without saying why exactly we want to focus on the people who are really ready to buy, because that means more sales, more conversions, more easily. And cash flow is the number one thing that we want in our business.

The first thing to understand is the hotness, the hotness of our leads. Now, you’ve heard in marketing us talking about cold leads, warm leads, hot leads. What do we mean by that? It’s like the, I don’t know if you used to play this game, we used to play this game as children where somebody would hide something in a room. And I’m laughing because it’s so million miles away from the experience that my children are having now growing up. Hide an object in a room and as somebody was searching for it, as you would get closer, you would say warmer, warmer, warmer. And then as they moved away from it, you’d go colder, colder, colder. So think of your leads on that kind of a continuum from cold, which means they are a stranger to your work, know very little about you through gradually, you know, they might be cold, cool, warm, very warm, hot, hot, hot. And the very hottest leads are the people who are just like on the brink of signing up. They’re on the brink of saying yes.

So, excuse me, within your audience, within your audience, my audience, any audience, there are some people who are entirely not interested in working with us at all. Some who are curious, some who are very motivated to buy now and everything in between. Every person in your audience has a different level of intent, a different level of interest and a different proximity to that buying decision, how close they are to making that decision. And of course, individuals move between those levels of intent. They move between that hotness, I’m about to buy, coolness, oh, I’m changing my mind, I’m drawing back. It’s a fluid situation is what I’m saying.

So imagine a significant purchase of your own. Maybe, you know, you’re thinking about buying a new car or something. So you will move between levels of intent. So while your current ride is, you know, running well, it might be you’re like idly thinking, oh, I would really love to own a red convertible or whatever it is. And then but you’re really just window shopping and browsing the market. But then when there are, you know, some catastrophic mechanical fault happens in your car, then your intention to purchase, your hotness as a lead for your local car dealership goes way up because you are suddenly very motivated to buy. So our audience – people within our audience – are shifting between these categories all the time.

So let’s talk about the categories. So I look this up and obviously within any audience – some people put the number at 30 percent, that sounds reasonable to me – 30 percent of people are never going to work with you. They’re in your audience for other reasons than because they want to work with you. Could be family and friends who wish you well. Could be competitors. Could be people who are interested in your work but are working with somebody else and they’re very committed to them and not planning on switching. So about 30 percent of people in your audience not going to work with you at all. And we assume that most of them aren’t going to be in your audience forever. Ultimately, they will get bored and move on or switch to, you know, they will become a higher intent. And then of those that remain, so about of the 70 percent of people in your audience who remain of those, it breaks down roughly like this.

So 40 percent of people happy to know you’re there, interested in theory in your work, but they are not currently purchasing. They are window shopping at best. They’re keeping an eye on what you’re doing. They may want to purchase at some time in the future, but it’s not currently on their radar. (Sorry, I’m just smudging my lipstick.) And so that’s 40 percent. And so, yes, 40 percent of the 70 percent who are potential customers.

Another 40 percent of those people are browsing. They’re interested. They know that they that they’re looking for a solution to something or other, but they’re not super, super motivated at this time. They are looking around. They’re weighing up their options. They’re trying other things. They’re probably trying to fix whatever’s going on themselves, you know, by free workshops, consuming content. They’re trying to figure it out themselves.

Then about 15 percent are strongly considering making a purchasing decision. They’re kind of like, they know that they want this fixed and they are in the process of decision making.

And 5 percent of people actually have their wallet in their hand and are ready to pay. So I know that’s four categories there. But broadly speaking, we could also break those categories down into low, medium, high levels of intent, purchasing intent or cool, warm, hot leads, for example.

So, yes, this level of intent, their temperature to the temperature of the leads, the level of the intent, whether they’re low intent, medium intent or high intent, that’s referring to the combination of their need for a solution to their problem, and their desire to actually get that solution quickly. So you can see that there’s a that there will be a direct correlation with how likely and, you know, somebody who has a strong need and a strong desire, that’s going to correlate to them making a quick purchasing decision.

Knowing this means we can tailor our marketing messaging systems, processes, offers, everything to the people in our audience who we know are there, who we know intend to buy. And if we can speak to those people effectively, that is going to obviously directly impact how quickly you are able to sell to those people.

Sometimes it can be really useful to just compare what cool and what hot looks like.

So somebody who is, for example, OK, let’s take a really obvious one, a cool lead. So somebody who’s in your audience but not really like reading any sales copy, not responding to any offers. They may not be aware that they even have a problem. If they are, they may not be aware that there is a solution to a problem. And even if they are aware and they’re in this like cool leads category, solving it is is not a high priority for them. The problem that they’re experiencing might be an annoyance. It might be bugging them a little bit. It might be niggling them that they need to take some action on it, but it’s not it’s not a top priority.

So obviously to turn those people into customers. And this is where a lot of marketing kind of by default ends up being pitched at these people. But obviously these people are going to require the most resources to get them over the line. They are going to have the longest sales cycle because even if you were able to capture and hold that person’s attention, you’ve created a lot of work for yourself in first of all educating them that they have a problem and that there is a solution to the problem. And there would probably need to be some pushing on some pain points to let people to kind of agitate the need to solve the problem. We don’t like doing that. A lot of inexperienced marketers do teach people content strategies, messaging strategies that are unintentionally aimed at this buyer.

So that looks like explaining to people what they are experiencing, explaining to people that their problem can be solved, explaining to people why they should want to solve their problem. But as I say, the sad truth is if you’re speaking to people who don’t want, who aren’t feeling that sense of urgency to solve their own problem, it is going to take a long time to get them over the line and equally important, it actually repels, like all of this is happening in kind of split-second unconscious decision, but it actually repels the people who are ready to buy because they already understand everything you’re saying to these low intent, cool, cool leads. They already understand that there is a problem. They already understand that there is a solution. They have already gained that wisdom and are ready to buy.

So it’s not like – it’s not that they’re looking at your marketing content and going, “ew, ew, ew, no, that’s not it.” That’s not what’s happening at all. As I say, it’s split-second decisions on an unconscious level. But when they see that copy that’s explaining to people that your solution can be solved and here’s why you should want to, here’s why you should pursue that. It’s just, it’s not resonating with them because they have already gained that level of wisdom. They’ve already walked that part of the journey and are now on the brink of launching themselves into the next chapter, which happens as soon as they make the purchasing decision. So while you’re busily convincing people that they can solve their problem and here’s how they could do it, those people who are ready to buy have moved on because you’re not speaking to them.

So think of a low intent, a cool lead, low intent buyer or cool lead like as a window shopper. They’re enjoying the scenery, enjoying the environment, enjoying browsing, but we’re not going to spend a lot of time, money, energy, resources trying to gain their attention and keep hold of it. It’s an uphill battle and we don’t have time for that. Whereas compared to somebody like – think of yourself when you have decided to find a solution to whatever challenge you’re dealing with on a mission, actively seeking a solution, researching, researching maybe between a few different service providers, looking for the perfect fit, ready to spend. Not overly – of course budget is going to come into it – but not overly concerned with budget because they’re actually looking at the transformation on offer and are determined to find the offer or service that’s going to be the perfect fit.

So what we can see is that the problems that people have are different according to the levels of intent. And this obviously affects the way people make decisions, which means that the way we speak to the audience as a whole is going to have to change because we want to, as I said, right from the top, we want to optimize our message and our language for the people who are ready to buy. This is our goal from here on out to only be speaking to hot, hot, hot leads to people who are ready to buy.

And we do that by understanding the journey that they have been on up until this point. And your messaging will let them know that you understand them in a way that nobody else does. So just let me know. Say yes. Give me a thumbs up. Let me know that you can see that it makes sense that we’re reverse engineering our message to develop a strategy for the people who are most ready to buy, rather than focusing on anybody who needs to be convinced, explained, anything else like that. I mean, of course, we need – that there’s bound to be a little bit of an explanation, explanation about how your solution works and why it’s so unique and why it offers a permanent solution and why it’s all the reasons that make it so brilliant. But we’re not in the business of trying to convince people that there is a solution and that they should want to solve their problem.

OK, so we are still going to have a customer journey. We are still going to have a nurture strategy that supports those that the nearly ready, the people who are nearly ready, but they’re not all the way ready because some people just take a little bit longer to make a decision. And we can absolutely create a strategy that gives those people the love and the nurture and the deepening relationship and helps them get familiar with our work. And ultimately, we hope convert them over time so we can have these two pathways, a pathway for people who are ready now and a pathway for people who are nearly, nearly ready. But those window shoppers, they’re going to window shop anyway and they can lead themselves through that process of going from window shopping to actual shopping.

OK. Because when you’re talking to people who are ready to buy, their decision making process is like, how can we compare that? Let’s compare that the decision making process between somebody who is really ready versus nearly ready. The person who is really ready is open. They want to hear about your offer. They want to hear about it. They have already decided to purchase a solution and so they decide much, much faster. They’re wide open to hear about your offer and they will make a decision about it very quickly. And because you’re talking to people who will make a decision quickly, you can see the effects of your marketing and your position, your positioning much more quickly and much more effectively too.

So these people, your hot, hot leads, they are excited to get started. They’re keen to solve as quickly and effectively as they can. They’re fast to convert. And again, hence the focus of our intention. And remembering, just repeating myself again because it’s so, so important. When somebody comes across your work and they are actively seeking a solution to the problem you can solve, they will be turned off by content that is talking to people who don’t know that there is a solution or need to be persuaded to do something about it. OK. That’s not interesting or new to them. They have been on that journey. It’s not going to get their attention. They will move on.

So in this lesson, in this workbook, we’re just going to go through a process to, I’m going to describe the process that we go through to uncover the language that your hot leads speak and understand when they are at the point of deciding and making a change. They’ve been through this whole journey to get here. And now you are here to just help them over the line to make that decision, to get to the outcome, the transformation, the solution that they want. So we’re slightly pivoting, like even within ourselves, to be supporting people who are ready, who are actively seeking solutions, who are ready to say yes.

And what that looks like is basically three key things that these people need. People who are on the brink of a decision, these are the three key things they need. They need to shift their beliefs about what’s possible. They need clarity on what is really behind the challenge that they’re facing. And they want a unique, innovative – I was going to say interesting – but a unique and innovative solution that makes sense to them. That they can look like, even if they don’t understand all the components of it, they can understand how this unique and innovative solution will get them from where they are right now to where they want to be.

And this is what it means to have premium clients. It’s a horrible phrase and in many cases quite meaningless, but it’s not about your fee and it’s not about their income level. It’s about the level of their desire and their intention to take action. It’s really important for your sales, obviously, but it actually also impacts the top of your marketing funnel. It impacts the types of leads coming in because when you’re speaking the language of people ready to buy, you attract more people who are ready to buy. And it actually even makes the delivery of your work better because the journey that your clients have been on up to this point means that they’re joining your program with commitment to the work. You haven’t had to do any convincing or persuading of them in any way. We’ve all worked with those clients who we kind of had to convince or persuade and it almost never works out well. The clients who get the most from our work most of the time are people who are really motivated and excited and eager and who are really decisive that your solution is the right one.

OK, so a bit more about understanding the difference between high and mid intent or warm and cool. In the workbook, I’m going to ask you to start thinking about things like, I’m going to give you an illustration for this one, but what is somebody who is actively seeking a solution doing right now? What are they doing already and what have they already done to try and solve their problems? So let me try and explain the difference using my audience. So it would be using my audience and my business.

So it would be very reasonable for me to say that my ideal clients are doing their best with a lot of kind of piecemeal marketing advice. They are DIY-ing a marketing strategy. They are attending lots of free and low cost workshops. They’re consuming lots of free and low cost content, maybe self-serve courses as well, and they are piecing it all together. That sounds like a reasonable ideal client avatar for me, right? In fact, I classify those people as being nearly ready. If they are still in that headspace of being of like, “I have time to figure this out. I’ve just purchased this course and I’m going to this workshop and I’m going to test out this new platform.” If they are still in that space of being, “I can figure this out alone,” they are not an ideal client for me. My ideal clients have decided that they’re not going to do that anymore. And one of two scenarios, either they’ve been doing that for a long time and they are now sick and tired of it, or the thing that they want to achieve is so important to them that they don’t want to go through the whole trying-to-piece-it-together-myself kind of thing.

Another great example is somebody trying to get in shape. He decided to try and get in shape. The difference being between somebody who says, “You know what? I’m just going to download the Couch to 5K app and I’ll just work on it over the summer and then reassess where I am in October.” OK? That’s somebody’s ideal client, but it’s not a personal trainer’s ideal client. The personal trainer’s ideal client is somebody who has tried Couch to 5K, who has tried gym membership and they just find that they don’t stick to it or that their form is bad and they keep getting injured, or they’ve been for a checkup with the doctor who says, “Listen, you really need to get in shape right now.” So in that scenario, the ideal client is somebody who’s tried the easy way, who’s tried the DIY method, the “I’ll just sort it out myself” way, and they are now, either because it’s taken too long and they haven’t got what they needed, or it’s so important to them that they need to get it right from the beginning. And so they are actively in the market looking for who’s going to be the right personal trainer to show up at their door on a Monday morning and say, “Get your running shoes on. Let’s go.” OK? So these are the questions that we’re asking in our In the Copy Workbook. What are these people already tried? And having already tried what they’ve already tried, what are they now looking for? What cues are they listening out for? What questions are they asking about the people whose work they are looking at it? And the more we understand this, the more we can use it in our marketing.

So think about this. If I were to introduce you to somebody right now who had the exact problem that you can offer a solution to, and they have the money and they have the commitment and the motivation, and they are actively in the market for a solution, but they don’t know your work, where would you be able to send them to get them to a yes as quickly as possible in the fewest number of steps? So the fewest number of steps to describe and explain your solution and give somebody the opportunity to buy something as easily and with the least amount of you need to get 14 emails or you’re going to need to wade through my YouTube chat, you know, through 15 videos on the YouTube. What’s the easiest way? If somebody came to you today and said, “I really am looking for a solution to this. How can we work together?” Where could you signpost them to which would give them the most concise and elegant possible explanation of your solution and next step?

So as an example, a video training that describes your methodology with a link to book a sales call, right? That would be an obvious way to do it. Or an e-book that describes your methodology with a link to book a call or a document. Doesn’t even have to be as long as an e-book, but what would be the simplest way to explain your work to somebody and lead them to a yes? And if you don’t already have that, think about how we can set that up in your business. Obviously, this requires having a methodology and that’s part of the work that we’re doing here. But the principle to have in mind is getting people from entering your world, getting those ready-to-buy people, from entering your world to a “Yes, let’s work together, here’s my money” as quickly and kind of smoothly as possible.

And then the next question, of course, is what are we going to do with the people who are nearly ready? The people who are very, very interested but need a little bit more nurturing. And that could really be the same training, the same resource, the same video or e-book or document. But this time, you could have two links on there. So a link to book a call for the people who are ready now or a link to, for example, join your Facebook group for people who need a little bit more warming up.

Between this lesson and the workbook, I want you to understand what it means to focus on telling your message to those hot, hot leads who have already decided to solve their problem, who don’t need an education or convincing that they want to solve it or why they should want to solve it. This is what most people who are struggling with marketing need. It can be difficult to understand what we’re doing that keeps attracting people who are not ready to say “Yes”. So this lesson and this workbook is going to help you develop that language for your content such that it starts to attract the right kind of leads, the people who are ready to buy.

And once you’ve worked through this, obviously it means you can look through all of your current messaging. I mean, obviously, social media content is quite ephemeral and fleeting. But if you write blogs, it could be the messaging on your website, the messaging on your sales pages. It means you’re going to be able to update all of your current messaging to replace some of the language.

Okay, I’m going to quickly recap and conclude.

Essentially, what we’ve talked about is a way of evolving and refining your message with the intention to attract and engage leads who aren’t just interested, but who are ready to make a purchasing decision right now. And we’re doing that because it makes the sales cycle more efficient and shows the most possible profit per hour of your marketing time. It’s a lot. Mercury is supportive. Do the workbook. If you feel like you don’t know your audience, then go back to market research. And let’s talk about this in the group. I’m particularly interested in seeing your side by side comparisons of nearly ready versus really ready.

When you launch your new offer, the first time you enrol, we know what that’s going look like, right? It’s likely to be a soft launch, it’s likely to be; reaching out to tell your warmest contacts about the new thing, maybe you will do a live event, I’m sure there will be a flurry of social media activity where you talk about it, maybe a flurry of emails where you contact your list about it, and you make those exciting and all-important first sales.

But then the serious business is filling this program month on month. You don’t have to enrol every single month if you don’t want to, but most people do want sales every month, right? So that’s why I focus on monthly enrolments. That kind of cash flow – consistent monthly cash flow – does not happen by accident. It absolutely does not happen by accident, and that’s why I want you to design a promotion and sales cycle.

They’re going to look very similar because they’re all going to contain the same elements over a similar time period, but the specifics of the subject matter, and how long you require to do something, and what kind of event you decide to run, are going to be unique to your business and what works for you, what works for your energy, what you like to do, what you want to do, and what your current level of resource is like. You get to set the pace.

I’ve used the example of a six weekly sales cycle. That’s what I aim for in my business. It works for me. Some people teach to do it every month. To me that feels a little bit, a little bit frantic and you may even decide that you want to stretch it out to an eight week sales cycle.

The important thing is, is that you get back on the cycle every time you fall off. It’s by going through it over and over and over again that you develop a standard process, a procedure that you can repeat whenever you want to sign new clients. Some of you have already launched enough times or run enough live events that you have assets created now. You have landing pages that you can copy and repurpose. You have emails that you can copy and update and adapt. So every time you do it, the process gets a little slicker, right? It gets a little bit more rehearsed. It gets a little bit elevated every single time you do it. The standard process, a procedure that you can repeat whenever you want to sign new clients.

Another key, key critical part in this process is the automations. They’re not going to do all of the work for you. That’s not their purpose. Especially at the beginning, like when you’ve just set them up, are not going to bring you the number of clients you want. Not when you have a tiny ad spend and not when they are still like pre-optimization, right? They’re not going to convert at high numbers for you. Ultimately, that’s the goal – but at this stage, it’s an added bonus if they convert into sales. Yes, we would love to sign a few clients from those automations but the more important job that they’re doing is growing your audience, and also warming up the people as they join.

So that each time you run this six-week cycle – if your automations are set up – you will have more people in your audience than you did at the beginning of the previous six-week cycle, and they will be pre-warmed. They will already have some understanding of your brand, your methodology, your offer. All of that has been handled by the automation.

This is how your cycle helps you break the feast and famine roller coaster which is a big part of why we’re doing this, right? That’s one of the big benefits of having a profitable, always open group offer is to break the terrifying and exhilarating highs and lows of sales and revenue which really scupper a lot of very small businesses. The thing that really stitches up a small business’s lack of cash flow.

The biggest success indicator in this whole system is lead flow. If you can nail lead flow, which is good fit clients joining your audience, you massively stack the odds in your favour. It’s one of the hardest things to master and it is one of the most important. This makes and breaks businesses, whether you know how to consistently generate leads. How to get people to raise their hands and say, yes I’m interested in this work.

So why do we need a six week weekly cycle? Why can’t we just rely on the automations to do it? Evergreen versus cohort group programs each have their pros and cons, and on the downside for Evergreen is that it’s really tempting to think that you have to be promoting the same thing constantly all the time and that is really difficult to do. It’s really hard work to be in constant lead generation mode. It’s really hard work to be in constant sales mode. Launches are very very draining, yes, but at least they are time constrained!

If you need to promote constantly to fill your group, that does not sound like a good time in business to me. Selling all the time just doesn’t feel great. We need variety and we need to change the pace, otherwise we lose steam, we get this feeling of hitting your head against a brick wall, screaming into the void, and ultimately your audience gets bored of the same message and start to ignore it. But! We do still need leads every month. We do still need sales every month, so what a conundrum we are in.

Because we need those sales every month, ‘not promoting at all’ is not an option either. We need to find a middle ground. That’s what this six-week cycle is designed to do: take the best bits, the most important bits of the launch process, and combine it with the most efficient, effective pieces of evergreen marketing as well.

When we get this right it means we have inbound leads – people reaching out – from automations and your content strategy, and you have a repeatable, reliable, system for deepening your relationship with your audience, which will be growing and changing every time you repeat the six-week cycle.

The first part of the cycle, which we’re not getting deep into today, is the automations. And what do I mean by that? I mean, “what happens when somebody joins your list.” That could be from the Thank You page, the email welcome sequence, nurture emails. It’s the invitation to join your Facebook group and what happens there. And this will be largely hands-free once it is set up. It’s a crucial part of the process, but it’s not something that you need to attend to every six-week cycle, once it’s set up.

The automated piece is really, really important. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you in terms of selling to people who are ready to buy. So if you have a validated offer, if you have an offer that people have bought, but you haven’t got the automations set up yet, let’s talk about that. It’s definitely something to look at. It will serve you really, really well over the long term.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a hefty, chunky piece of work. It’s kind of daunting to undertake. It’s not something that you can just knock out in a day or even a week. But if you have that piece working really well, and it’s all converting, and you’re running ads at the top, you can actually skip the six-weekly sales ritual because you have so many calls booked, client signed just from the automated marketing.

Even once you do have all those automations in place, you probably are still going to keep doing all of the other pieces of this ritual, at least for a while. Then you have a process that you can run anytime you want to see what you can do to boost your sales figures for any particular given month.

The next piece of the six-weekly cycle is, things that you do daily and weekly, which I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on. But this is the part that most people are kind of on top of. So it’s like the social media content semi-consistently, you know a few times a week. It’s your nurture strategy. It’s your hand raiser posts. It’s the DM conversations that you’re having, the sales conversations that you’re having, the market research conversations that you’re having, its deepening connections and relationships. It’s networking.

And then the third piece of the ecosystem, is really what we’re here to talk about today which is the monthly or six-weekly cycle. Now let me see if I can give you a link. If I’ll drop the link in the group. It’s just a blank calendar, which you can update the date in the first cell of the first row. It’s the spreadsheet, all of the rest will automatically adjust. So what you will be left with is a blank year to view calendar with one square for every week of the year.

Okay, so the first thing to do will be to go through add to the calendar in any commitments you know you have. Like if you’re traveling, or you decided that you don’t work in August when the kids are off school, Christmas and Thanksgiving, just block off those weeks where you’re not available for work. And then go through your calendar and in every six-week block, we’re going to have a sales period and a live event.

The biggest mistake that I see people fall into – I have fallen into it many, many times – is setting up all of the rest of these pieces, setting up the automations, setting up the daily and weekly content strategy, but forgetting to actually promote. Because we have pushed back against the idea of promoting all the all the time what we end up doing is promoting it maybe one day a week, or two or three days a week but mixed in with a whole lot of memes and other kind of unfocused content, so in effect we’re just not promoting it at all, and then wondering why we don’t have sales.

So out of your six week block, two weeks are going to be dedicated to actually selling an offer. Not engagement, not lead generation, not connection, actually selling. For me that usually looks like a week of selling in the DMs, and then a week where I’m all over my socials. Sometimes they take a bit longer; this is your calendar, you can change the dates, you can change the amount of time you give to the different elements, but I want you to be sure that you are actually promoting your thing. That you are asking for the sale. That you are selling your shit for at least 10 to 14 days out of every six weeks.

There are lots of resources in the teaching library about what that looks like. For most of you, it will be a similar strategy to mine, which is a big focus on lead generation and getting people into DM conversations, sharing a Google document with people who raise their hands. But if you are unsure about any of what needs to be a part of your two-week promotion cycle every six weeks, we can talk about that on our calls, and there are lots and lots of trainings that I can direct you to.

Now you’ve got a six-week cycle, you’ve taken out two weeks which are going to be your promotion, enrolment, signing clients, asking for the sale period; and the other thing I want to appear in that six-week block is some kind of live event. Could be an hour-long class, a half-day workshop, a three-day challenge, a five-day challenge, a Facebook group, a Zoom call, small group Voxer coaching—there are so many options. It’s one of the best bits of launching, being in relationship with your audience, and sharing energy before sales and conversions. And the automations that you’ve got set up are just providing the foundation for this. They have pre-warmed your audience.

If you’re doing live events without having lead flow and automation – you don’t need that kind of pressure on every live event to convert. That’s why we have the automations in place: to support, and underpin, and add fire to everything else that we do.

What is the subject for the live events? You’re not going to lose in business by running the same event over and over again. You’ll just get better at it. And you’ll be amazed at how many people in your audience actually do want to attend the same workshop twice.

Equally, if you get inspired to teach something else, you can switch it up! You still have the benefit of all the marketing assets that you created for previous events, and you’ve saved yourself a great deal of time in being able to update and repurpose. Obviously, the quickest and easiest thing to do is to do the exact same thing again, but it’s still easier to update than to be building it from scratch.

The first time you do these things, whether it’s building a registration page, or an email automation, or running a live event, or promoting an offer, the first time you do it is always the most difficult and every subsequent time it gets a little easier, a little bit quicker, and and it gets better. Because you’re reviewing, updating, and refining it, in line with your deepened understanding of your business, yourself, the soul of your business, your audience, the market research that you’ve done, what’s happening in your industry – it just gets better by doing over and over again.

We’re very familiar with the concept of allowing ourselves to be a beginner. We also need to allow ourselves to become an expert.

Now, out of six weeks, you have two blocked out as promotion. One week is labeled as the week in which your live event is going to take place. And obviously, you’re also going to need to promote that live event, so the week before the live event is going to be promotion, you will sell it just like you would sell a paid offer. You will sell it in your DMs, and you will sell it on your social media.

So now, out of six weeks, four are taken up. There’s two weeks promoting and delivering a free offer, your live event, and two weeks promoting and signing clients to your core, profitable, evergreen offer; and there’s two weeks left over. Obviously, there’s some preparation to do ahead of both of the promotional weeks, and sometimes there’s going to be some overlap, so you will be preparing content for one thing while you’re promoting another, and that I find is why having this visual cue is really useful.

Also, in those two “clear” weeks, we know they’re going to get filled right, like client delivery is happening alongside our marketing activity – obviously we’re not doing one or the other – so having those two clear weeks means you can catch up if you’ve got behind, there is some wiggle room with dates, sometimes we just need to rest and lean out a little bit from being in the energy of promotion and marketing.

So just imagine, tell me, what do you think would happen to your business if over the next 12 months you ran eight live events and did eight enrolment periods? Even if you shoot for that and end up doing six, or even five… however many you do, you’re going end up having a really big year in your business, in terms of developing marketing assets, in terms of learning, growing your audience, interacting with your audience, the number of leads you have in your business, and ultimately of course in the number of sales you make.

It sounds like a lot, I know. The first six weeks are the hardest. After that, you have the bones created, so you’re just adding to, refining, optimizing, getting better at it.

So, I just want to quickly tell you the three places that people get stuck—it might be four, I’m not sure. I think I’ve touched on most of these.

One place where people get stuck is they’re just doing the weekly actions, just posting content and wondering why they’re not getting clients. They might even be posting promotional content and still not getting clients. They’re ignoring audience growth and the whole automated nurture piece. So, they are missing the opportunity to sell to people and engage them when they are most interested, which is right after joining your audience.

Not investing – energy, time, or money – in top of funnel. To get to a six-figure business is rarely going to come purely from organic marketing. And if it is, there’s going to be a consistent strategy for collaboration, for getting in front of other people’s audiences. It doesn’t necessarily mean Facebook ads, but it is likely to mean some kind of investment.

For example, I know that there are now pay-to-advertise Facebook groups. It might be contracting somebody to seek podcast appearances for you, strategically with an eye to audience growth. It could be paying somebody to do your PR for you. There are options, but they all require investment. And honestly, slow organic growth is a great deal of hard work for not a lot of gain.

We talked about the pitfall of not actually doing the promotion. Like, you’d think it would go without saying, but we can get so close to our business, and so focused on doing an individual piece, like setting up one piece of the automation, that we can just let weeks go by without actually doing any concerted promotion, which is obviously going to show up in your bottom line.

And then, I just think it’s a real missed opportunity when I see people who are not doing live events. That is the part of launching, of live launching, that is really fun and that really works. It creates buzz, live energy. And whether we’re talking about a live event or talking about a promotional period, there’s a real benefit to giving it a constrained time period and a narrow focus for a short period of time, so rather than seeding the idea of a live event, or rather than having a kind of diluted promotional period for your paid offer, to have short periods of intense focus.

Everything that we’re doing here is about optimized marketing, so really just paying attention to the pieces that actually move the needle in your business, which are not beautiful sales pages, gorgeous graphics, lovely websites, fancy funnels – when you’re a sole entrepreneur without the benefit of a team or a large marketing budget, we have to just focus on the pieces that are most strategic, the pieces that deliver the greatest profit per hour of your time, essentially – that’s what we’re talking about.

There’s a lot of baggage that comes with the topic of DM conversations, right? It’s one of those polarizing subjects that people love to post about on our social media feeds. So, if we’re thinking about using a DM strategy, we have a bias towards noticing people talking about that type of content themselves. And that’s when we run into comments like, “Oh, I can’t bear it when people jump in my DMs and pitch me.” “It’s so spammy, and I can’t believe that even works.”

We hear a lot of judgment about DMs, which essentially boils down to us worrying about what other people think of a specific strategy.

If we’re feeling hung up on, “Can I do it? Is it awkward?” a big part of that is usually our concern about how it will be received by other people. So if that’s you, here’s why we’re not buying into that belief that DM conversations are gross, sleazy, spammy, salesy, manipulative, disrespectful, invasive, or any of the other adjectives you may hear being leveled against the whole strategy of DM outreach:

The first point is that those who are complaining about complete strangers or brand new connections leaping into the DMs to immediately pitch them are talking about cold DMing, cold pitching. Yes, you’ve experienced it; a brand new connection or somebody you’re not even connected to yet will like a bunch of your posts, send a friend request, and immediately, at least with me, it’s always appointment setters. They say, “So we can get you 30 sales calls every week.” And I’m like, “God, no, please. That’s the last thing I want. I would hate to have 30 sales calls a week.” No, that’s not the kind of DMing we are talking about. And I can guarantee that if you are concerned, if you’re the kind of person who wants to be ethical, respectful, polite, there’s no chance that you’re going to veer into the manipulative, sleazy, spammy, salesy kind of territory?

This isn’t about cold DMing. This is about initiating conversation with people in your audience instead of waiting for other people to go first. It’s about being proactive in creating opportunities.

Now, ultimately, yes, attraction marketing is what we are all about learning. That’s why we’re in the business of refining our messaging and positioning. Inbound leads—getting people messaging us to talk about working together—is the grail we are seeking. And we know that at least in the early stages, at least now, while we’re figuring all that messaging out and putting the evergreen marketing systems in place and so on, at least for now, there is going to be a shortfall between the number of inbound leads you’re receiving and the impact and number of clients and money you want to make. And those are opportunities. It’s on us as business owners to find and create those opportunities.

Posting on social media alone is not enough; that’s not a marketing strategy. Posting on social media and emailing is not enough. Consistent content isn’t enough to make sales. Creating opportunities and connections and networking Creating connections, creating opportunities with other people, whether that’s as clients or collaborators or partnerships, sharing one another’s audiences, we’re creating opportunities through networking, through this social networking. So, there is a class which I will link to on three missions and a side quest, which talks more about this, just like the kind of the highest level archetypal almost functions of marketing. The first one being talk to more people, creating connections with more people.

The other hesitation that I see comes out all the time, and the main one that we’re going to focus on, because the first one is just like stop caring what other people think about you so much. But the one we’re going to shift today is what happens when people follow my social media and lead gen strategy, they’re creating leads through their social media content, and then they open these conversations, they get these new leads on their CRM, but almost immediately retreat, saying, “I don’t know what to say next. I don’t know how to make people feel comfortable. It feels so awful and so cringe. Should I say this? Should I say that? When do I pitch my offer? I feel so frozen about this.” So if this is you, let’s breathe together because I want to remind you that you absolutely do know how to have conversations that make people feel at ease, even in DMs. You do it, I dare say, all the time. You know how to ask things of people in a natural way, and the only reason that it’s eluding you right at this point is because it’s unfamiliar. It’s a new marketing task that you aren’t an expert at yet, so it’s unfamiliar. There’s that discomfort of being a beginner and because the stakes feel high. “I am not an expert at this and I need to make sales. This is it. I have a lead. I have a new person in my DMs and I need to convert them. I need to make this number of sales per month. It’s high stakes.” And that energy is a bit of a conversation killer.

I love the instinct. I love the instinct to move the conversation on and that’s what I’m talking about today and that’s how we’re using the DM strategy in general, is to move the conversation, the journey, on rather than waiting for it to happen by chance. We’re taking control of the customer journey. I am going to create some templates and worksheets linked to this video to lay out some of the messenger conversations, lay them out for you. I’m going to talk about a few different conversations that are really useful to have scripted so that you don’t need to put a great deal of thought or emotional energy into creating each one as it arises again and again. But like everything else in marketing, this is something that becomes easier and more fluent and fluid and natural and that you refine as you, you know, by doing it over time. We are doing this work with the intention that it becomes very normal and very natural for you to be having lots and lots of conversations with people who are interested in your work. It’s something that happens all the time every day. There are people messaging you and you are messaging people, and there’s just lots and lots of chatter behind the scenes about your work and about the ways people can work with you. And we’re going to create that buzz through action, intention, and attention because we know just like everything else, if this is what we give our focus to and we track our results with and we expect to work, if we give it our love and our time, the more it will grow and flourish. And we’re doing this because I guarantee, I guarantee that the more conversations any business is having with potential clients, the more sales they are making. Two identical businesses selling the same offer, if one is prioritizing conversations and connection, they’re the business that’s making more sales. It is all about connection, relationships, human networks. And this is really where small businesses like ours have the advantage, where the business owner still has the time and capacity because of the relatively small numbers involved to genuinely create those personal connections. The owner has time. The owner has the additional motivation that all of these conversations are whether they result in sales and money in the bank or not. They are all absolute gold of market research and learning about what your people are dealing with, what their challenges are, what their hopes and dreams are. It is all deepening relationships with people within your audience. And we’re going to do it in a way that also moves forward the people who are ready to buy now. They may only be 2% of your audience, but we definitely want to move those people on to make it possible for them to buy now. So when we’re talking about DM conversations, the first thing we need to do is stop thinking about pitching and sales for a moment. It is exciting to have new people on your CRM, new people joining your DM conversations. But I don’t want for your first instinct to be sell.

So there are, as I just mentioned, a very rare breed, 2% of people who may come into your DMs and say, “I’ve binge-watched all your stuff. I’m ready to work with you right now. Take my money.” And even when those people do come in, just think for a moment how you respond. The CEO, you, respond to somebody coming in and saying, “Take my money. I want us to work together.” It seems to me that most likely you would still have some initial questions for this person. If somebody comes into your DM saying, “I want to work together,” you are going to have some questions for them. How did you find me? Are we a fit? What are you hoping to get from working together? What are your priorities? Even somebody who’s ready to give you their money, you’re going to perform a kind of triage process with them so that you can make sure that your process exactly fits their needs or that you can, or that you’re going to be able to adjust your process if it’s a more bespoke thing. The point being, when you first meet somebody, you don’t know enough about their business yet to pitch them. So that’s the first mission, is to ask those clarifying questions, to triage, to diagnose what they’re going through and what kind of support they need. What are they looking for? How are they going to know when they found it? And what have they tried already? Now, the kind of questions you ask are going to depend very much on your niche and what your methodology is and how you help people to transform. But if you ask enough questions, there’s a sweet spot here. We want to avoid the feeling of an inquisition, but allowing for the natural flow of conversation unfolding over days, sometimes, weeks, sometimes. We want to keep it as short as possible, but you know, these things take time. If you ask enough questions, when it does become time to pitch, you will know exactly what this person needs and whether you are equipped and qualified to help them. So ask as many questions as you need to ask until you feel super confident that your methodology will help them. And then you feel really excited to tell them about whichever offer you’ve diagnosed is going to be the perfect fit for them. This is, it’s liberating, it’s exciting, it’s encouraging, it’s confidence-boosting to ask questions until it is so super clear that your offer is exactly what they need to the point that all you need to do is just lay out what it is that you’re going to cover with them and how it relates to everything that you’ve just been talking about. And you don’t need a script for this. There is no magic code for this. The only challenging part really is allowing it to unfold and not just kind of latching on to like, this is exciting, this is a lead, I’m going to hyper-fixate on this until they convert, okay? So this is, we have to give ourselves grace. If you are not already in the habit of DMing people in your audience every day, this, it feels very unfamiliar and this can be a real stunt on what feels like a natural conversation flow. But you do know how to make people feel appreciated. You do know what makes people feel good and seen. Slow down, breathe, take a moment to just like scan over the conversation you’ve previously had before you answered and look at the DM conversations you have had with business owners who have made you feel good. So I get messages from people who I have DM’d with saying, how is it that you can promote a live event or freebie and make me feel so delighted to be invited? And that’s not a secret or a copywriting secret or any particular like code or template. It’s just about slowing down a little bit, enough to look back at the conversation and also to be willing to move the conversation ahead, to be bold enough to lead somebody unapologetically toward the sale and also having a system for making sure that the conversations don’t die on me. This is the CRM that we’ve talked about in the program a number of times. I’ll give you a link to it. If you’re not tracking your leads in your CRM, that is where you’re leaving behind all the money. But using this system, you can have dozens, maybe even hundreds of conversations going on and don’t start freaking out about time management. This isn’t a problem that you need to worry about solving if your CRM is still 12 people. But suffice to say that by the time your CRM is unwieldy, your strategy will have evolved. So it’s not something that you even need to worry about. So you can be having lots and lots of conversations at the same time and yet still you are only pitching things that help people. You are only pitching things in a really transparent and non-manipulative way so that you can always feel good about the conversations that you’re having and the impact that you’re having through giving clarity and giving value even before people sign as clients. Now as I’m saying that, I have a word ringing in my head, boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. How do you stop giving, giving, giving and move people to sales? So I’m going to come back and talk about that. Make sure you’ve watched the class about setting up and keeping your CRM live. It is really, really important that you are tracking what happens there.

Why are we focusing on DMs? As I’ve just mentioned, you can have lots of them at the same time. I can probably update 20 or 30 DM conversations in an hour. I could have one or two sales calls in that same hour. The more people you are talking to, because you can talk to so many more people, the more insight, market insight you are getting into what your audience is telling you about what they are dealing with. Ultimately, you are networking more effectively, creating more opportunities. A list of people who you can personally invite to a live event, for example. It’s creating opportunities to circle back to the beginning, not waiting for other people to go first. When somebody joins your network, we’re giving them multiple opportunities to learn more about you and about your work. A really important piece of that is giving them the opportunity to connect with you personally. So the first and most simple message I want you to get used to sending out to everybody, everyone who accepts a friend request, everybody who sends, everybody who accepts a simple, “Hello, it’s great to be connected,” smiley face emoji. That’s it. If you get a response, fantastic. You are in conversation and you can put them on your CRM. It’s weird and cringe to message people like that emphatically. So what? So what if you get a couple of messages back from people saying, “Hmm, why do you want to connect? Why did you want to join my circle?” If the worst thing you do today is cause a split second of mild annoyance to somebody with a stick up their ass, you are doing incredibly well. Seriously, don’t give it a second thought. Other people’s opinions about you sending a friendly DM when you connect as friends are actually irrelevant. And we are not here to be about being cool. Okay. We have bigger concerns. We have bigger ambitions than avoiding upsetting anyone. And that includes being in charge of the journey that people take when they join our world. Okay. So when people find you and they’re excited and ready to buy, we’re not going to leave that to chance. So in the templates that I’m going to share with you, going with this video, I’m giving you a few different possible message conversations that I really strongly suggest you integrate into your daily marketing activities. If you’re ever, I spoke with a client today about what business tasks would you prioritize if you could only work five hours a day, or if you could only work four days a week, what tasks would you prioritize? And following up and maintaining and adding to these conversations has got to be up there. There’s just about nothing that’s more valuable of a use of your time than paying attention to these conversations. These are going to get you higher conversions than your email list, higher conversions than posting on your social media channel, higher conversions than a live event or webinar. This is literally your sales pipeline. And if your focus is to add to this number of ongoing conversations every week, there will always be money on the table and clients available for whatever you choose to promote. So the very first DM I would like you to get used to sending to everyone, new friend or connection to set the tone, let them know that by joining your world, you are going to be contacting them by DM. That’s how you roll. You roll that way because it’s easier to make sales that way than any other way. Okay. So for example, I had a client who made zero sales in the first three, four days of her launch with emails and sales page, big fat zero. We started a DM campaign and she closed 10K in the week before Christmas. And that was all through DM conversations. Yes, people were going to read her sales page, but they weren’t buying off her sales page. They were buying from the conversations last September. Another client sold seven spots on a 2K retreat, tiny audience, tiny email lists, and didn’t once post about it, not even one single time on social media. Just this was all done through warm DMs. So lead generation social media content, never actually promoting the retreat or the offer itself. And then following up through DM conversations, which are all mapped out for you. It doesn’t need to be complicated.

So conversation one, new connections. Conversation two, if you have a Facebook group, when people join your group, likewise, you can send them a message. You can offer them a freebie. Here’s an idea. So offer them a freebie, but instead of directing them to your email list, ask if you can message them with the freebie. Of course, you’re going to also message people who say no to the freebie. But what I’m pointing to you is to prioritize these conversations over emails. A lot of people get will run a lead generation process like this was. They’ll say, raise your hand if I can send you the PDF and the person raises their hand. And then instead of just sending them the PDF, we’ll then send them a link to a signup page. So that’s adding another step to the process for those people. Your conversions will go down. And it’s just cleaner and more like, I need to sneeze. But talking about the natural flow of conversation, if you say to somebody, hey, can I give you an invite to a party? To just give them the invite rather than to send them off to a page where they have to register and join an email list and get the thing. What I’m pointing to you towards is prioritizing the conversation. It is worth more to your business than an email address is. There will be ample opportunities down the line to get the email addresses from everybody who is in your CRM. But given the choice between keeping the interaction in your conversation or sending somebody away and ask them to do something else, every time you add a step to the process, you’re going to lose people. Your conversions are going to go down. So just keep it prioritize the conversations. Don’t worry about getting emails from everybody. That’s not the vibe. Serve in the DMs.

So let’s talk about another kind of DM conversation. I’m going to give you templates for these content-driven conversations, similar to the Lead Magnet funnel we were just talking about there. There’s a class on lead generation. I can send you the link. I’ll add the link when I edit this video. The last 20 minutes or so is all about social media lead generation specifically, which often includes a process for people to raise their hand for a freebie or details of a particular class or workshop or program. And obviously you’re going to be following up with those people. As I just said, we’re going to just send them the details directly. No requirement to sign up for anything. That cuts your work down too, because you don’t need to create the sign up page. You don’t need to create the email automation. You just drop them the PDF link right there in the DMs. So those conversations, people who raise their hand to ask for a particular lead magnet or raise their hand to ask for details about a specific offer, these are the people who we are thinking about moving towards a sales conversation. This has gone beyond “hi, it’s nice to meet you.” And we’ve gone through some clarifying questions.

We’re recognizing here a bit more of an opportunity to move into a sales conversation because they are already saying yes to your work in this capacity. So it’s actually very natural to follow up with them to move the conversation on. You will say, “hey, I’m messaging because you said you would like to see my freebie. Here it is.” And then we might offer them something else as well. “I also have a recorded class on that topic and you would be interested to see?” And then there will be a follow-up to invite people to talk more directly with you. “Would you like to know how I can support you with this work?” And it can stay in DMs. It doesn’t even need to move to Zoom for a sales conversation.

The next kind of conversation I want to talk about is a direct pitch. If you are validating an offer and you have a CRM, so you have conversations already underway with people, maybe you spoke to them in the last kind of week or month. If you have something new that you are validating, it is okay to ask people if you can pitch them your idea.

You may have a high ticket offer and two, three, five people in mind who you think it would be perfect for. It is okay to go into people’s DMs and say, for example, “Hi, we have had some conversations related to this thing in the past.” So I was thinking you might be interested in some details I’ve put together for a program that is going to allow you to XYZ. I would love if you would look it over, please may I send you the document?” You are allowed to do that. That is not cold pitching. That is thoughtful outreach. It’s very different from turning up uninvited, unannounced, a complete stranger in somebody’s messenger box who just sent you a friend request.

You don’t have to act awkward or hide the fact that you have an offer that you want to sell. You don’t have to pretend like you’re not in business. You don’t have to pretend that all your leads are inbound only. This is your job as a business owner to network and ask for the sale. Sometimes direct pitching is appropriate. Marketing and sales is not something that we need to shy away from and pretend that we don’t need to do. DM conversations are a key part of your outreach strategy. Every business needs an outreach strategy. Every growing business has an outreach strategy. I recommend DMing because it is so accessible. It is so efficient. It is so efficient in having so many people in one place that you can talk to kind of at scale.

A couple of things I need to add into here. One is: who this strategy is not good for. You can probably feel a part of you inside thinking this sounds like an awful lot of time and effort. And yes, it is. It takes a great deal of time and effort to turn leads into clients, which is part of the reason for the emphasis on having a highly profitable offer. If an hour of my time is worth, for example, $100 and if it takes, I don’t know what the number is, but let’s say for the sake of argument, if it takes me one full working day to convert on average one lead into a client, I don’t think it does. I think it’s far less than that, but let’s say it does, then each client would need to pay me at least double my daily rate in order for this to be profitable for me. So if I’m spending a day converting a lead into a client, if I’m spending a day to create every client and they’re only paying me $50, I’m going to go bust. They’re not paying me enough to keep going. So it needs to be a profitable offer. This is not a strategy that works for low ticket. You can sell low ticket if your plan is to upsell them to high ticket, but in that case, the math is different. You’re basing your profitability on an average customer value rather than on the low ticket item alone. So don’t use this if you don’t have a profitable offer, which makes you feel like you can afford to put time and energy into learning about your audience and pitching them a profitable offer. The other thing that I missed out and what was the alarm going off in my head? It was about boundaries.

Okay. So I’ve heard it described to me like this. If somebody raises their hand and would like to receive your PDF or your training or watch the replay of your masterclass or whatever it is, ask them some questions for context. This is going to be in the conversation template that I give you, but ask them some questions about what they’re going through and then save, serve them as if they were a client. Where that stops is if they start to behave as if they were a client. The key piece that I want you to remember is that you are leading the conversation and you are also training your audience on how to treat you on how to interact with you. So if that means shutting down a conversation, which is in danger of turning into free advice, and pitching a paid offer instead, that is exactly what you’ll do.

As with everything else here, there’s no code to make sure you never slip into that territory of over-serving, over-giving. It’s a very easy trap for us to fall into, especially if we were kind of brought up to please everybody and cause nobody any offense ever. So, and like so many boundaries, they kind of, we put them in place and enforce them when they’re tested. So it can be a kind of like painful, oh, I need a boundary here and all that boundary there, and oh, I need to tighten this up as time goes on. We’re not going to get it right at the very beginning. It’s not a reason to begin.

Hi, kittens. Thank you for joining me. We’re here today to talk about the unglamorous but extremely important topic of market research and why. Why is market research important?

Because having an understanding of how to extract learnings from the market, the market you’re operating in, is really a magic ingredient that’s going to help you to avoid making a lot of mistakes in your messaging, in your offers, in your promotions, and it is going to help you assess at every step of your business growth what is working, in other words, what is resonating with your audience.

Now, ultimately, of course, we do have the cold hard data of sales figures to guide our actions, but it’s not always easy to tell what is making the difference between messaging that converts and messaging that doesn’t. So having a research process will help to guide and shape everything that goes into turning a stranger into a client as quickly and as easily as possible. And that’s always the mission, right? To turn strangers into clients as efficiently as we can.

And so it stands to reason, it makes logical sense, that the more we know and understand about the people who make up our audience – the audience that we have right now, not the audience that we wish we had or the audience that we’re building, but the audience that we have right now – the more we know and understand about the people whose attention we have, the more informed our strategic and creative decisions can be, right? That makes sense.

So I’m going to give you a few examples of how you could start using market research today. And if you’re not already booking lots of client calls and sales calls, this is a really good use of your time. Use your time to go into market research, because what you learn is going to help your messaging, it’s going to help your understanding of your audience, and it’s going to help you, therefore, make a really good guess at what they’re going to respond to.

And before I tell you, give you these examples, I do have to caveat this with the truism. People don’t always take the actions that they say that they would take in a research setting. So we do always have to take the findings with a pinch of salt. However, it’s still the best and most useful method that we have for trying to predict what people are going to do, at least until we’ve built up a large kind of bank of data and evidence of our own to help us predict that.

Again, just to recap why we’re doing this. If you don’t know what your audience wants or what they respond to, you’re going to find it hard to sell to them. And if you’re going to invest a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy or resources into something. So for example, you’re creating a new offer or launching a new lead magnet funnel, or you are running ads, you can reduce the risk, all business activities carry risk, but you can reduce the risk so that you go in feeling as confident as you can that your assumptions, your conjectures are as close to correct as you can be. Of course, there are going to be nasty surprises. There are always nasty surprises, but nevertheless, we move. And although market research is not infallible, far from it, it is, as I say, it is still the best tool that we’ve got.

So let’s talk about some ways you can do some market research. So the first I’m going to mention is competitor analysis. This is researching the market that you are operating in. Before you do this, make sure you have your big girl underwear on your CEO hat. This can be triggering. It can be difficult to look at other businesses, other businesses, which are obviously showing their highlight reels, showing the best of themselves. It can be difficult to look at other people in your niche and analyze what they are doing. But we need to get into the habit of looking at social media, researching competitors, researching the market with the CEO mindset. So look at what other people in your niche are selling, what language they’re using. If they are selling a particular outcome, you can too. If they are over a long period of time, have a kind of core offer that they promote month after month, year after year, you can feel fairly confident that it is selling and you can sell that same outcome too. What outcome are they promising? What language are they using? If they are selling a specific outcome, there is a desire in the markets for that outcome. And so your challenge is to think, what would I do differently? How could I do it better? Again, the trick is not to get into comparison mode, not to start comparing your year two or three to their year 10, right? Act like a CEO, business head on, business actions, business decisions.

This is a great one for competitor analysis. Record a voice note on your phone. They really are listening to you. Record a voice note as if you were your own ideal client saying something like, oh, I don’t know, saying something like, “I am so done. I’m doing like an old fashioned phone, do it like this. I am so done with hot flashes. I can’t handle these night sweats anymore. Brain fog is ruining my life. I really want a solution. I’m not willing to go to the pharmaceutical route just yet. Somebody must be able to help me.” Record that voice note. And I predict that within a few hours, targeted ads will start showing up in your social media feeds. So that is a great way to identify what your competitors are doing so that you can see how your solution fits in where the gap is that you can fill in your market.

Okay. So competitor analysis is one. While we’re on the subject of looking at your social media feed, social media listening is another method for your market research. Look at your social media feed, but look at it as a creator instead of a consumer. It’s a different mindset, but as you scroll through your feed, one, you’re going to see ads popping up, obviously, and every ad is a response to a need in the market. That’s one way of identifying the transformations that people are looking for, right? But also look in the groups you’re in, see what your friends and other people in your network and your audience are posting about. People leave clues everywhere about what they’re struggling with if you are open to see.

But if you are active on social media, you do have access to a large group of people to ask, right? You have your own social media network. Your following. You have your email list. You have your own Facebook group. Your own Facebook group. You have other people’s groups that you are active in. So you can use that population for broad research. Running a poll, using those stickers in your stories. Do you prefer this name or that? Are you interested in this class or workshop or that one? So like testing names of lead magnets, which would you be more drawn to? Which live event would you like to come to? I’m planning a series of workshops. Which one should I do first, A, B, or C?

The other thing you can do with large groups is set up a questionnaire. You will probably have to incentivize people to fill it out. But if you have something that people want, like a program that you could offer, you could offer to people which isn’t going to eat into your profit margins because it’s already created and it costs you nothing to deliver it.

Or again, like a raffle option for a reading or a class or a one-off session. Incentivizing people to fill in a questionnaire. I’ll give you my market research questionnaire that I used some time ago. I haven’t used it recently, but I think it will be still useful for you. You could even copy it and use it for your own market research. The benefit of that is that you can go into a bit more detail. It’s a little bit more refined and finessed than just kind of the blunt object of asking this or that. You can ask questions where people need to kind of write a few sentences to give you their response. And that’s an absolute goal because people are giving you their language and you can literally copy their language from the questionnaire into a document called audience language and use it in your sales and promotional copy.

So that’s a little bit about using larger groups like the whole market, your whole social media feed, your whole social media network to get insights into the market. But for a lot of us who don’t have huge audiences, it can sometimes be easier to get that insight on more of a one-to-one basis.

So here’s the technique I call the win-win call. Very simple. Here’s what you do. Here’s how the process goes. Number one, you post on your social media feed about something connected to your work. Somebody who engages on your post, they like it or heart react it or leave a comment. You send them a message and say, thank you so much for supporting my work for responding to this post. I really appreciate the engagement. I’m just getting started. And I was wondering if there’s any chance you would be happy to take just a 20-minute call with me. I literally have nothing to sell you, but I would love to find out what your biggest desires are, what are your biggest priorities, because it’s going to help me out so much. I’d be happy to buy you a coffee and you can literally buy somebody a coffee gift card, a coffee shop gift card in exchange for their time. And you might have to ask a few people a few different times, but then we’d look the call, jump on the call, and for 20 minutes, you listen. Ask about their desires, ask about their challenges, ask about their priorities and what blocks them, and then listen. At the end of the call, ask them, do you have any questions for me? Some people, not everybody, but some people will ask about what you do and the ways that you work with people. And then you just agree to keep in touch. You add them to your CRM and you keep in touch. They may or may not ever go on to become a paying client, but what you have got is some really deep insight into what your audience’s desires, challenges, priorities, blocks are. And although their answers won’t apply to everyone in your audience, they will apply to other people as well. Nobody is that completely unique, that they are the only person struggling with that particular challenge or priority. Okay? So that’s the win-win call.

Another way of getting market research from one particular individual is doing it in DM conversations. Obviously, you know I love a DM conversation. One way to do this, imagine we have posted some lead generation content. I have just finished editing a video on XYZ. Please raise your hand if I can send it to you, right? You are going to get the most value from those leads if you ask some questions in the DMs. Go and watch the class on DM conversations. But even without that, even without having watched that, you know instinctively that it can feel overbearing. It can feel even aggressive to just go straight to pitching, okay? But asking some questions ahead of time is just a way of easing into the relationship and it gives you some absolute gold in terms of the information that you get from those questions.

So questions might be like, how does this issue impact your life on a daily basis? What have you already tried? What keeps you from trying ABC? Those questions in your DMs, nobody is going to object to them if it’s just part of an easy flowing conversation. But it’s easy to overlook those answers when what they are is actually really valuable market research insights that are going to inform your marketing and your offer creation and your promotion and your messaging and everything. Just because you didn’t deliberately set out to do market research in a conversation doesn’t mean that you can’t take the insights or the information from that conversation and add it into your bank, your library of insights of what you know about your audience, okay?

So yes, I’m messaging because you said you were interested in this video, would it be okay to ask you a couple of questions? How is this going for you? What have you tried? And then when people reply to you, you need to respond as if they were a paying client. All of that is in the DM conversation class, but the information that your engaged leads give you here is absolute gold. And even if you don’t actually like note it down anywhere, you are going to start to spot patterns and themes in emerging from what you hear.

Okay, another DM conversation. Message somebody you know well. This is not for a cold DM. This is for somebody who you have already connected with. You have already had conversations potentially about working together, certainly had conversations about your work. You’re already in conversation with them. So if you have somebody in mind, you could just message them now and say, “Hey, do you have a couple of minutes? I would love to ask you a couple of research questions.” Assuming they say yes, I’m going to give you my example. My first question, the context for this, I wanted to put together a high ticket one-to-one offer. So I identified somebody in my audience who I knew would be pretty close to my ideal client for such an offer, messaged her and asked her, “As above, do you have a couple of minutes?” So I can ask you a couple of research questions. Super easy, no pressure to get back to me immediately. And the first question was this, “What do you really want from your business right now? What do you wake up wanting?” Okay, so that’s question one. Obviously, you can take out business and what do you really want from your relationships right now? What do you really want from your energy levels and health right now? What do you wake up wanting? Okay, and in this case, the answer was, “I want a spacious calendar and a full bank account.”

What a brilliant answer. So, so insightful, so concise, exactly what I needed. So my second question, why do you think it’s difficult to create? We’re asking your audience for their assessment of why it’s difficult to create. What you’re looking for is their insight on the problem or the challenge or the issue, not your diagnosis, not your assessment of why they are struggling, but what they believe is going on. Marketing and messaging is very much an exercise in shape-shifting and being able to embody what your ideal client is going through, what they’re thinking about, what they’re looking for, what they’re listening out for, so that you can be that thing, okay? So that’s the second question. Why is that difficult to create? Ask clarifying questions.

And in my example, the person in my audience said she was confused about pricing, she was confused about all her different offers. There was just a whole lot of confusion going on and not knowing what activities to prioritize. Okay, so we’ve already got some absolute wonderful insights here. And then the final question I asked was, and this is the real good one, if you were to design the perfect solution, this is my question, if you were to design the perfect solution for you, what kind of support would you include to get you to where you want to be?

So I’m actually getting my ideal client, although she’s not a client, we’re going to talk about that in a moment, but this person in my audience, I’m actually asking her to design the kind of support that she would want to meet her, to meet her needs, to get her to desires. She said, I would want somebody to have a holistic view of my entire business structure and me in it. And then I would, and that would help me to get down to the nitty gritty of building the various components. So I would want strategy and copywriting and coaching for when it all goes wrong. She told me I’m not interested in peer support or community or group offers because I get too distracted by the other voices and what they’re doing. Amazing. I literally asked her to design the perfect solution for her problems as she sees them.

Do you see how this is like such a potent set of questions to ask? If you have somebody in your audience who there’s a measure of goodwill between you, she’s not already a client, but she does closely match the kind of person that you would really love to work with. Okay. Incredible little exchange. The whole thing took about five minutes. I put it in some notes. The next morning it was a new offer. I posted about it five figures and literally sold a spot the very next day to a different person. The language from audience member one so closely matched the challenges of audience member two, but she just jumped in straight away. Okay. So a couple of DM conversations that you could try today.

Another method of market research, validating the idea. Most of you will know I never want you to create a course or program or offer or record or write a single piece of teaching curriculum until you have sold a spot. Validating an idea is a way to test the market and actually give you proof of concept or not before you invest any time, energy and resources into creating something. And that can be as simple as this. Ask your audience. I have an idea for something. I have an idea for a program that would, and then the transformation that you offer without having to do this thing that they don’t want to do. Is that something that you would be interested in? It can be as simple as that. I have an idea for XYZ. Is that something that you might be interested in? If you get a few people saying yes, go for it. Full steam ahead, start selling. And if you get absolute crickets, then maybe you need to change something about the, uh, the way that you’re presenting the idea before progressing. Okay. Can you see how that makes sense to test your idea in the market before actually moving ahead with it?

Now it is worth saying that if you have a very small audience and you haven’t been particularly nurturing and engaging your audience, so none of your posts are getting much engagement, you may need to ask more than once. But validating the idea with your audience before going ahead to build is a great way of researching your audience, your market in relation to the idea of the thing that you want to sell.

Before we wrap up, I have spoken to more than one person, coming on board as a client who tells me that they have done a lot of market research, but on close to the investigation, the people they are asking questions to are people who have already worked with them and come out the other side of the program. They are people who have already experienced the transformation. Now, it is of course valuable and very worthwhile speaking to those people for feedback. However, they are going to describe a different set of problems and challenges when they are on the other side of the transformation that you helped to facilitate, then they would have at the point at which they signed up with you, signed up to become a client, right? In other words, hindsight is 20/20. Even if I think I remember very, very well what I was experiencing before I joined your program, the chances are very, very low that I will describe it in the same way because I’m a different person than I was four weeks ago, six weeks ago, 90 days ago, how, however long the program is. So when you are doing market research for the purposes of selling something new or for the purposes of your marketing, please make sure that you’re speaking to people who have not, who are not your clients yet, right? Definitely speak to your clients at the end of the program. Get that feedback. That’s consumer research. It’s very valuable. It’s very important, but it is not the same. You’re not going to get the same answers as you would from people who you have not worked with yet, okay?

So let me summarize. We talked about competitor analysis and just having a look at what other people in your industry are doing. We talked about social media listening and strolling your feed as a creator rather than as a consumer. We talked about some easy ways that you can get insights from larger groups. So straightforward polls, stickers, asking questions, questionnaires, and incentivizing people to complete them. We talked about win-win call on one-to-one. That’s a really straightforward market research call where you just ask people pertinent questions and listen. We talked about the DM conversation with, I would describe them as hot leads, where you literally ask them to design the solution to the problem that they’re having. And we talked about the importance of validating your ideas in the market before you sell them. There’s a whole other class on validation, so go and watch that if you haven’t already. Scout implementing these methods today. Even small-scale market research can lead to significant changes in your messaging and significant improvements in your strategies and results. You can spot the gaps in the market. And what could you discover today that could transform your results tomorrow? Have a look at the workbook, ask questions on the group, and I will see you next time.