Building Awareness for Your Business

In this episode Dr. Angela takes you through the steps to test ways to build awareness for your business. You will learn about the various types of awareness and how to capitalize on your local and online community.

 

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In this episode you will learn:

• 1:59 How do you build awareness?
• 2:30 Live events
• 5:02 Speaking
• 5:45 Networking
• 8:27 Social Media
• 10:20 Referrals
• 13:06 Media Coverage
• 13:35 SEO
• 16:27 Gig Boards
• 16:48 Collaboration
• 22:20 How much time to do you spend on awareness?
• 23:43 Which kind of awareness will be the best for you?
• 25:16 What’s your purpose?

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Full Episode Transcript:

What we’ll do this week is we will pick 1 to 3 ways that people can hear about you. They may be people, you know that we’re reigniting, or other people’s audiences that you’re getting in front of for the first time.

And as you’ll remember from the author’s way, we want to pick no more than three awareness methods. 123, and one is really the goal. But what I want to start to do with you guys, is for you to start with, almost like the book basket.

Start with your list of all the possible awareness activities that you could do. Remember, awareness is just how people hear about you. So what you’re going to do is going to fall into a few buckets. And whichever one you pick, the one that’s going to be most effective is what you’re already good at. So if you love speaking You should speak. If you love writing, you should write, if you like being interviewed, you should be interviewed, there’s not a right or wrong way I’m going to share with you and I’m going to bring this up on the screen right now, a list that I put together with some help from a bunch of coaches. Now, I should say, with this list, that this is primarily a phase one. So this is unpaid direct outreach, mostly phase one activities. I will talk a little later in the class about advertising. But really, if you’re ready to spend money on advertising, you’re probably in phase two. You may still want to do this as an exercise, especially if you’re pivoting or changing niches or something like that.

Okay, this list, and you’ve got this in the supplemental materials in your Student Center. This List falls into a few buckets, I think 10 different buckets of things that you could do. Now, you already have many lists like this. And we already did it at the live event. So if you already know your awareness methods, you don’t have to go through this brainstorming. But I really just want you to pick once and for all, what you’re going to focus on for the next 90 days not to get it right again, but to figure out what comes up when you do it. So I’m going to share with you these buckets. And you also have a bit if you still have your binder from the author’s way, you’ll have a big list of combined awareness, you’ll have phase one and phase two awareness.

This is all phase one stuff and it’s broken up in a slightly different way. And these are actual quotes from coaches about how they get their clients. So this is real, it’s all the same stuff on the list that I sent, but the list that I sent were in different words. So I’m just trying to give you the same content in different ways so it sinks in your head.

So the first thing is live events.

This was my first awareness activity. I attended an event it was called Martha Beck’s dream Writers Workshop. And I knew everybody at this event, there were 24 people, including me, and then three organizers. But I knew they all wanted to write books that 24 attendees all wanted to write books, because that’s what the event was. So that was pretty much my ideal reader.

So what events is your ideal reader attending? I’ve also gotten clients from walking around at trade shows, you could also have a booth but you have to pay for that. But you can walk around, especially if you’re selling to the vendors of a trade show, let’s say, and I actually think somebody on this call today does this. Let’s say you are working with healing professionals and helping lightworkers to define their branding. There is probably a trade show happening. I know I went to them with my mom growing up all the time. There’s probably like an expo like a new age Expo where you can walk around and get a reading or buy a crystal, you could go to that event, walk around to the tables, and meet the people who are exhibiting because the people who are exhibiting are all your ideal reader. So is your ideal reader at trade shows.

You can attend a conference or host a conference. So one of our this would work, especially if you had a list or maybe you were in the corporate world and you were selling now to professionals. Let’s say you’re selling to professionals about changing their job. You can host your own conference in a hotel room, inviting your past, like coworkers, people that you knew from your corporate days, you can attend a conference. You can this person leading a large Meetup group they were leading one you could also attend meetup groups.

So what are the live events that you could either attend or Host to meet people speaking these are again very specific ones that people posted speaking at every woman’s group in the area for free speaking to parenting groups speaking to business groups, in person communities I already engage in and serve that might be the PTA for you, in person presentations at the Chamber of Commerce.

Every single one of these that you see up here are ways that coaches clients, people like you experts, like you got clients through these methods, so they’re real, you can just pick them. If you’re going to pick you want to pick at this high level, like live events are speaking not just like going to the gas station, we’re not going to just go to the gas station for 90 days. All right, here’s the next one. Networking. So and this was an actual quote from a coach don’t go in trying to sell people build relationships. B and I are other paid networking groups in DC we have something called her corner. I’ve heard of them her nor there are lots of networks. Working Groups are usually paid, but they’re like 60 bucks or 10 bucks a meeting or $150 a year. Spending money like that is different than spending scalable money on advertising like thousands of dollars. So I have no problem with something like that.

There’s also down here at letter K is co working spaces. I have a lot of clients who are getting their business from co working spaces. You’re Of course going to pay for the CO working space, which hopefully you use, but when you pay for a co working space, a lot of times they let you make presentations to the other people at that co working space. So are your people they’re volunteering. Maybe I have a client who serves nonprofit executive directors, you could volunteer for a nonprofit and if their staff is your ideal reader, you will get to know their staff and you can share what you do.

Churches a huge one for a lot of people and then some of these the gas station, the group Restore the parking up coffee shops on vacation auto mechanic shop Uber drivers, Lyft drivers ski slopes Yoga shala is I don’t even know that word. This passenger retreats surfing. So I have never gotten a client surfing, I could assure you because I’ve never been surfing but I can tell you my experience with networking is how I built my ghost writing and editing business.

I always got clients when I went on vacation, usually on public transportation. So I got a job writing for W magazine and doing a book for W magazine on the two. I got a job doing a book for Clark shoes. When I was in Glastonbury at the Glastonbury Music Festival, and they happen to be nearby and it was just a guy at a music festival. I did a walk around the base of Lulu so I did an Aboriginal walk around the base of coolaroo and the guy who is in my walking group there were like six of us in the walking group. One guy was from Philadelphia I did a book with him on the mafia.

He was actually in a witness protection program. totally crazy. So if you actually talk to humans and share what you do, consistently, I don’t mean like once or twice in 90 days, but I mean actually set a goal and say five times today I’m going to tell people exactly what I do. You will get clients. If you are hoping they’re going to ask you it is less likely.

Okay, social media. I have a few here there could probably be 100 LinkedIn groups. So one of our quill members has gotten all of her clients by participating in LinkedIn groups. Instagram, commenting, I have another former plume member some of you know Steph gold. Go look at Steph Gold’s Instagram page. She has a four or $500,000 business now built purely on Instagram. I have no idea what that shit is. That is I cross some sort of age limit. I don’t understand. I cannot even post the thing. Don’t look at me. Instagram page is a disaster and mostly Jesse has posted the pictures because I freeze. My like lizard brain thinks Instagram will kill me apparently because I cannot I can’t fucking get it. I can’t get it.

Anyway, networking Facebook groups so I got a lot of my first clients from two Facebook groups, the market back Facebook group and another one that doesn’t exist anymore but it was called magical Business Academy. I know a lot of people who have gotten so my friend Jenny, she and my friend Kendrick show both built their businesses just by networking in the B school Facebook group. I don’t know if that works as well, but it definitely worked really well at the beginning. Now what I see people doing is daily Facebook Lives But the trick there is make sure you are either regularly adding Facebook friends because when you add a new Facebook friend, you’re going to come up in their algorithm.

So go out there and recruit people to be friends with go into Facebook groups, find people to friend that you’re having conversations with and then do You’re live. So you have to be regularly adding people or do interviews. And as part of your interview, ask the person you’re interviewing to share it to their page, so that new people are seeing these Facebook Lives. And for 90 days, I would think about this as daily are pretty damn close. referrals. Great example here. Tammy Sacco has built a six figure business just on referrals. Those referrals come in her case from mostly from doctors that are local. So local practitioners, therapists, naturopaths, doctors, local business owners, yoga teachers, friends, family, past clients, former co workers, who can get you referrals I don’t have on here lawyers, I should definitely have that. Who can get you referrals?

All of these are real things. Somebody is making money by getting by getting referrals from these people. I just cut and paste bid from another thread of coaches from another site of where they’ve gotten clients and where they’ve gotten referrals. You can do this to books. If you’re going to do books and in class four, we’re going to talk about using your free book as a lead magnet.

So we’ll get into this more, but book sales, so that would mean really promoting and you could actually go onto Amazon and do ad campaigns, promoting your reader magnet that’s inside your book, and pushing really hard for book sales, drop your price to 99 cents, do an ad campaign on Amazon. You’re going to spend a little bit of money but probably not that much. Make sure in your book, your reader magnet is front and center. Another way is to send your books in this case sending my book to CEOs trying to grow their business. One of my authors Mark Silverman has a book called only 10s. It focuses on executives with ADHD Total coincidence Mark happens to be in the DC area. So we had a coffee the other day, I actually had tea and he had coffee.

We had coffee the other day. And he had gotten a copy of Washington business journals, top 100 companies in the DC area. And then he had made up packets. And if you go to his Facebook page, you can see them and go to the photos and you’ll see it. He made up yellow envelopes with two copies of his book and a letter that he was sending to all of the top 100 places to work in DC. And what he told me Is everybody we both have we happen to live near each other. He lives in Vienna and I live in McLean are like one town away. So he said, everybody who’s in rest in Tyson’s McLean Vienna, kind of a five mile radius around his house, he’s going to deliver those in person. You could also FedEx them, but it’s not like you’re going to send one CEO your book or whoever your ideal reader is and turn that into a lead. His plan was 130 days.

If you’re doing 90 days, it’s probably more like 300.

Media coverage. Could you get a media article every single day I listed HARO here, which is helped a reporter out, but there are other sites like this. There are other sites like this, can you contact your local paper, local press, somebody who I see is on this call has found like an ethnic press where her people are and she’s got 15 of them, could you actually be in one of their publications every single day? That’s what you want to know.

The next one is SEO, Search Engine Optimization. And the deal with search engine optimization is it is the dream. It is my dream. It’s the I will have no problems when this works for me. The problem is it’s actually really really hard.

So I wanted to share this example with you because it’s so beautiful. This woman says virtually and we can figure out who it is because we can just go to our site virtually Everyone I’ve ever coached has found me through Google. They just do a search for parenting coach. And I think because of my URL, the parenting coach, they find me. She said, I got that domain. I asked her when she got it 2002 which is like, almost 20 years ago, long time.

She’s there’s been many times I’ve been number one, which astounds me because it just seems to happen. She bought the right URL at the right time and put content on it. It generally to season a URL takes three or four years now I’ll give you a hint here. My friend Sam was able to double his business by buying a URL. He bought the URL consulting.com it was $100,000 and he’s got a blog post somewhere. That’s like why spending $100,000 on consulting comm was the best money I’ve ever spent in my business.

Right let’s say you’re a parenting coach, and this woman is going out of business. Buy her fucking URL, it gets a ton of traffic. I actually when I saw her post this thought about trying to buy her company for one of our partner authors, one of our authors that are in our author accelerator program, because I was like, she would probably let me buy her company for $100,000, maybe $300,000. That domain is worth gold if you knew what to do with it. So if you do not have a perfect URL or a seasoned website, you are going to need to become an SEO expert that is possible, but you’re going to have to buy some domains and do a lot of SEO training.

There’s tons of free SEO training out there. Her success was based on her domain being in 2002. And now that’s gone. That real estate is gone. There was a land grab between 1998 and 2002 or so there was a land grab for the good domains. She won the land grab, she just didn’t even know She was in a race. Good for her. It’s a mitzvah and let’s hope she’s an awesome parenting coach. But how can you do SEO do not pick it if you don’t have a strategy because that is a tough one. By the way, if you’re like her, and you already have a ton of traffic coming to your site, I haven’t been to her site, but I bet there’s like five things I can do that would triple her revenue in like 30 seconds. So if you have a great URL and you’re getting a ton of traffic, how are you going to leverage it?

Gig boards, I have a client who gets all of her business from thumbtack.

Crazy, no idea how she does it, but especially if you do something that is closer to consulting, Craigslist, Upwork, thumbtack, any of those gig boards, they are a really good place to start. So collaboration is an example here is can you offer a free event for as a way for another business to say Thank you to their loyal customers. So for instance, could you call all the spas within 20 miles of your house and offer to do a free workshop to any of their clients who have visited the spa that are on their list?

You could then do those Thank you days if you had one of those Thank you days a week that would lead to clients and people being aware of you, other people’s audience, the spa owners. Another example is customer appreciation. That’s the word was gone from my head. Can you run customer appreciation nights, let’s say for financial planners office or a doctor’s office or one of my clients, Ali Cuddy did was she went to boutiques. They generally closed at like 7pm and she would offer to do a wine and cheese night for their most loyal customers. And she would then at the customer appreciation, Knights do a reading from her book, give her book away. Share some secrets and end up getting some clients from that.

So are there collaborations like that? Maybe there’s a coach Oh, I just did an introduction about 10 minutes ago, my friend from high school, my friend from middle school, one of my first best friends, she had a beach house it she was the best friend. I got to spend summers at our beach house and old saber. She lives in Westchester, New York, and she has a yoga studio. And her name is Karen. She was Karen McLaughlin growing up, but she’s Karen young.

So she has Karen young yoga. I know that one of our co members is a nutritionist and lives relatively close. She lives in Greenwich or Fairfield in the south of Connecticut. Karen lives near the Connecticut border. And she doesn’t do nutrition even though she’s super into nutrition. She does yoga. Aaron doesn’t really do yoga doesn’t really teach yoga. She teaches nutrition although she’s great at yoga. I know that energetically they’re going to love each other Can Aaron do a nutrition workshop for Karen’s yoga studio and have Karen do a yoga workshop for Aaron’s nutrition client? Are their collaborations needy right here in the quill, where you’re not selling the same thing as someone, but you’re selling them to the same clients. When I look at Aaron’s business, and I look at Karen’s business, they have the exactly the same ideal reader. Exactly the same.

 Karen doesn’t even have a book and she has an ideal reader. Look at that. So are there collaborations that you can be doing in the quill, or with other colleagues, people you know from other trainings that you’ve done? Can you do trades? Can you do partnerships, where you’re presenting to their group you’re presenting to they’re presenting to your group you’re presenting to their group or you’re doing emails to each other’s groups, and it’s not competitive.

Most people have a nutritionist also exercise most people who exercise pay for it. Many people who go to a yoga studio regularly would have a nutrition It’s usually not the same person. So this is not competitive, it’s complimentary, and they can promote each other. So these are 10, free awareness categories. I want you to pick one of these to become the world’s expert on. And what I recommend is actually by starting your assignment for this week, with something like the book basket, where you just list everything, nothing’s off the table. You can do any of these things. You can go through the other list. This is not comprehensive. There are millions of options. Go through everything that you could possibly do and then see what category your favorite things are in and pick that one category that you are going to absolutely master.

 

So that’s step one,identify one awareness activity at a high level. level that you are going to focus on for 90 days becoming the world’s best expert.

Now, let’s say I didn’t even put article writing in there. That’s another way article ready? I’m gonna add that hold on making a note. So let’s say that you have pick, let’s say that you have picked writing articles. And somebody from NyQuil asks you to do a facebook live with them.

Should you do it? Absolutely.

It just doesn’t count towards your marketing hours for the week. It’s an extra thing. So if you have to decide what to say no to it would be that but I hope you have enough time in your schedule to do extra stuff. If somebody asks you to speak at the Women’s League and you know, that’s not really your focus, but it sure would be fun to speak at the Women’s League. I’m not saying no, I’m just saying your goal for the next 90 days isn’t to become the world’s expert at those you will find as you become laser focused on what to wear. activity, other opportunities are going to come in. And that’s great. We want those things. Ultimately, we want all of your marketing to be people asking you to do things.

So that’s awesome. We’re actually creating that with your energetic focus on one thing. Step number two, once your list is complete, you’ve got this big list of everything you can do. I want you to go back and look at how many hours you’re spending on marketing.

You will most certainly find that in the business model that we did at the author’s way. If you don’t have that number, and you’re totally clueless, I would pick 15 hours. Don’t spend time trying to reconstruct this. It’s going to be somewhere between 10 and 20 hours. 15 is a perfectly fine number. If you know you’re super busy or you have a full time job, pick 10. If you know you really want to go into hyperdrive pick 20 but you’re gonna have to spend two Somewhere between 10 and 20 hours a week on your awareness. Don’t be surprised if you’re not getting clients if you’re not doing that. There’s not a magical world unless you happen to win the URL lottery like our parenting coach lady did. So as you look through the list of things you can do, and you can sort of see the buckets that are showing up for you. Can you do that in the hours that you have set aside? So for instance, if we’re going to be looking at writing an article every week, and it takes you 20 hours to write an article, and you have to get it placed, that’s not a good choice for you. So can you widow down your list based on how much time you have? Step three. Once you have your list, you have your numbers you’ve done some analysis of that list is to decide on which activities are going to get you your most bang for your buck and buck you There is going to be time for the time you have what is most likely to get you the most lead.

So that is the question you want to like look at gas station was one of the networking things, right? So if one of your things is going to be talking to people at gas stations and grocery stores and yoga schools in the time you have, is that going to help you reach your goal? Is that going to be an efficient use of your time? If you’re in Vienna, and you’ve been in Vienna for 10 years, and you know exactly how to use it? Maybe the answer is yes. If you’ve already gotten a lot of clients from your yoga studio, maybe the answer is yes. And you can add a collaboration. But if you’ve never done that you’re not good at it.

You can assume that’s going to take at least three hours to get a lead. By networking. That way. You got to sign up for yoga class, go to the yoga class drive to the yoga class, go home. There’s 20 people there. How many people Can you talk to before and after four? Will one of them become a lead? Maybe, but we’ve just spent four hours to get one lead. So timing wise, that might not be the most efficient use. All right, once you’ve got your best guess, at what one awareness activity bucket you’re going to be focused on. I want you to put your items under the buckets, like I had yoga studio gas station. And I want you to think about what is your purpose statement. Remember, with your chapters, each chapter in your book had a purpose. So you want to write something like a purpose statement, and here’s how you’re going to write it. The purpose is going to be to get X number of leads.

So in the next 90 days, how many leads are you going to get from yoga class? I know what you want to tell me is I won’t know till after I do it, but you’re actually going to decide in advance, because that’s going to help you determine how you spend your time. So if you’re getting 10 leads from yoga class, you’re going to be going to a lot of yoga classes, you’re going to go to three yoga classes. in week one, you’re going to see how many leads you got, let’s say you get three leads, you know, you need to get 10 leads that will tell you exactly how many yoga classes you need to go to 10. And keep doing that.

So your job at the beginning, the first 30 days is to just figure out what your numbers actually are. It’s not like you wait till the end of 90 days, don’t go to any yoga classes and say, well, that yoga class thing sure didn’t work, right. You’ve got to actually do something and measure what’s working and then you can readjust it. So for each activity, your goal is how many leads what your purpose statement is, how many leads will you get from this source. If you say I’m doing referrals, I’m going to get, you’re going to know already how many leads you need, because we did this in class one. So you already know how many leads you need for the next 90 days. So you’re going to look at that goal. And let’s say that goal is 60 leads that you need.

You’re doing referrals. How many are you going to get from friends? You decide that an event? Six, how many you’re getting from yoga classes? Ted, how many are you getting from the gas station? We’ll give that one. And then you’re going to go out there and do it. You’re going to see what you’re doing. And you’re going to do it. If it says you’re going to get a lead from gas stations, you’re going to be talking to people, your brain will just naturally do this, right? I have 90 days to get one lead from a gas station. I’m going to talk to a person who’s pumping gas next to me. Right if that was the one that you decided. So under whatever bucket you pick if it’s customer appreciation night, great. Let’s break that down to financial advisors, doctors, boutiques, and I need 60 leads. So I’m going to get 20 from doctors offices 20 from financial planners and 20. From boutiques. Now we got to start calling boutiques to get those booked. We know exactly what our activity is. So your job for this week is a purpose think pick your bucket, pick what goes under that bucket.

And then you are going to set your specific goals from how many leads from each source. And you’re also going to set your specific number of hours. So you’re going to spend 15 hours and break that down. If it’s customer service nights and we have three buckets, you’re spending 15 hours a week. How are you spending the hours you want to decide all this in advance or what happens is 90 days just disappears into thin air.

Who knows where the fuck it goes. It is eaten by the black hole goblins of space and time.

So decide this week. What you’re spending time on.