My guest on today's episode is Daisy McCarty, a brand message expert. I labeled this interview as "wall-to-wall value." If you're a business owner who's determined your target market isn't what you initially thought or you're trying to figure out what commonalities your best customers actually share, this episode is for you!
Key topics we cover:
✔️ Why is brand messaging so crucial
✔️ What is a buyer persona
✔️ How do you handle it if you can't suss out exactly what it is that all your best customers have in common
✔️ Personal brand = about you; business brand = about your customers
✔️ Root cause of why you're attracting all the wrong people or you're getting push-back on price
And yes, the outro music is really Daisy playing "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" on the banjo!
You can find Daisy online at: https://brandmessageclarity.com
And on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daisymccarty/
If you reach out to Daisy, she will send you a FREE copy of her Buyer Persona Worksheet, which I highly recommend you utilize.
My guest on today's episode is Daisy McCarty, a brand message expert. I labeled this interview as "wall-to-wall value." If you're a business owner who's determined your target market isn't what you initially thought or you're trying to figure out what commonalities your best customers actually share, this episode is for you!
Key topics we cover:
✔️ Why is brand messaging so crucial
✔️ What is a buyer persona
✔️ How do you handle it if you can't suss out exactly what it is that all your best customers have in common
✔️ Personal brand = about you; business brand = about your customers
✔️ Root cause of why you're attracting all the wrong people or you're getting push-back on price
And yes, the outro music is really Daisy playing "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" on the banjo!
You can find Daisy online at: https://brandmessageclarity.com
And on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daisymccarty/
If you reach out to Daisy, she will send you a FREE copy of her Buyer Persona Worksheet, which I highly recommend you utilize.
Hello, hello and welcome to today's episode of the Causey Consulting Podcast. I'm your host Sara Causey. I'm also the owner of Causey Consulting and you can find us online anytime at Causey ConsultingLLC.com. I am super pumped about today's episode. My guest is Daisy McCarty. Daisy is a brand message expert who works with b2b companies to nail down exactly how to engage and persuade customers. She has been crafting b2b content for over a decade, including thought leadership and marketing copy that's helped her clients make millions. She loves seeing business founders gain clarity on their branding and accelerate revenue growth. When she isn't writing, she plays the banjo to relax and recharge her creative batteries. And I can tell you there is a 100% chance that I'm going to be probing on that banjo question before we wrap this up. But first things first, Daisy, welcome, welcome. I'm so glad you're on today.
Unknown Speaker :Thank you very much, Sara. I've really enjoyed watching you on LinkedIn and reading your content. So this was a conversation I was definitely looking forward to.
Unknown Speaker :Awesome. Well, I want to ask first and foremost, how did you get interested in becoming a brand message expert?
Unknown Speaker :Sure. So about 12 years ago, I started my company and I focused on content and copywriting. So I was the hired pen that businesses and marketing agencies would bring in to write their content. So I got to work with a ton of different business owners directly and as a subcontractor, with many, many different marketing and web agencies. And I came to realize that there was a very big difference in outcomes. Between those companies that just said, Hey, we want to write some stuff. Here's who we want to target, go for it. And the ones that really went through an in depth brand message development process, so we dug deep into who they were as a company, and the value that they're bringing to the table, what made the difference, and really focused in on their buyer personas and a lot of detail digging into what makes their customers tick. And it was just a night and day difference between the projects that fizzled out, or they never got any traction, or they were met with apathy or confusion in the marketplace versus the ones that really were able to gain traction, and develop the brand awareness and the the revenue results that they wanted. And so, over the years, I started requiring my clients to go through more and more of that brand message development process. Until you know, these days if a client says, Oh, we don't really just want to go through a brand message development process. We just want you to write some copy for us. I I send them to someone else that I say, Okay, if you just want a copywriter, you could, I could recommend somebody for you. But if you want to fix your marketing messaging first, and your sales messaging, let's go through this process, so you can actually get the results that you want. Once you start, once you open the floodgates on your marketing budget, let's make sure that it's all in place first. So that's that's kind of it was a transformation that happened over the years. And I would say, the past four or five years, I've just been doing the brand message development. I'll do follow on work for my clients, I'll do their thought leadership content, I'll do their marketing and sales copy, but we have to get the foundation in place first.
Unknown Speaker :Well, that's a great point. If someone needs a do over, let's say maybe they thought that they had the foundational pieces correct. But then they're discovering the clients that they're bringing in or the prospects that they're attracting are just not quite right. And I'll offer myself up as an example here. I'm always more than willing to tattle on myself. You know, I found that happening in the early days of my coaching and consulting business, I was attracting people who were burned out, people who were pre-revenue, people who really didn't have money to spend. And I thought, okay, I'm looking for people who have $20,000, not people who have 20 bucks. And I realized that the ship had definitely gone off course in a big way. So in those situations where someone thought that they had the foundations right, but now they know that they need a do-over, what do you as a brand message expert recommend that they do?
Unknown Speaker :Sure. So marketing will always be an iterative process. And there is always going to be trial and error involved. But one of the things that I recommend when people are being met with that either push back on price or they're having an issue with their tracking all the kinds of customers they don't want to do business with. It's time to take a closer look at your buyer personas, especially who would be the early adopters or the ideal adopters. Have the solution that you're bringing to market. So these are people that need have a problem that's painful enough and urgent enough, that needs to be fixed. Now, they have, obviously the budget in order to afford what you're selling. So it's not somebody who's in a complete mode of desperation, where you're the very last ditch effort that they're making, but somebody who has enough maturity along their, their business or along their career, to be able to have a little runway to make change, and they need to be willing to try something new. So most of the business owners I talk to are running into this kind of problem. They've had some of their ideal clients over the years, they've so they've had enough experience or they had enough conversations with enough of their prospects, then we can start pulling out some of those commonalities, and making sure that there's real alignment between the greatest value that they offer in their solution and the the greatest and most urgent pains that their ideal customers are experiencing, so that you can have those conversations in full. Normally with your target market, just by having conversations and networking, you have more structured prospect interviews, you can reach out in ways that are not sales related, you can reach out in ways that are very much more marketing related. There are all types of different research that you can do. But really, what it really comes down to is looking at the customers that you've been able to help the most who've been the easiest to work with, who, you know, been very well satisfied with the value they've received in return for the price that they paid, and really teasing out what makes them the same. And it's not necessarily what you might think they might be demographically quite varied. They might be across a pretty wide age range. They might be in different industries, they might be in different roles, but what you'll find is there may be other factors, from their values or their personality to the specific way that they see their problem that makes them different from the customers that just are not a good fit for you.
Unknown Speaker :Excellent advice. If someone is listening to this episode, and they're hearing you use the term buyer persona, and they're not quite sure what that means, how would you define it?
Unknown Speaker :Sure. So this is a useful little piece of marketing jargon to know and there are a lot of different ways to actually describe it. Some people might be more familiar with the term avatar, and some people might know it as a customer profile. a buyer persona is really just a composite of the common characteristics of your ideal prospects or customers. So it's not one real life example. But it's an amalgamation of a bunch of real life examples where you can say, Yeah, 80% of the time, my ideal customers are kind of like this, or they think like this or they're influenced by this group of people. So you're building out a pattern or a template where you can say most of my customers match up with this type of person, so that when you're creating marketing, copy or content, you He kind of put yourself in that purse in that personas shoes, and imagine that they're a real person so that when you're writing marketing or sales content for them, it's as if you're speaking directly to that person, or that really resonates on the other end, when someone who is your ideal persona reads it. They go, Oh, they could be writing about me. How did they get inside my head? How do they know so much about me? And it's because you're making those educated presumptions based on the commonalities that you've noticed and the patterns you've noticed, and how your customers tend to think, feel and act.
Unknown Speaker :Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see it? I know there's seven deadly sins. But if you had to think of maybe the top two or three deadly sins that you see from a brand messaging or buyer persona perspective, what are they?
Unknown Speaker :Sure. So the biggest challenge that I see business owners facing is that they have correctly identified a problem that their customers are facing and they've created a fantastic solution. For that problem, so they've got a solution their customers need, but they haven't nailed down what will make their customers want it. Because that there's a gap between what people need and what they want. That's where you have people falling out of your sales pipeline. That's where you have people saying, Oh, that's fantastic. I love it, but they're not shelling out money for it. There's something that's, you know, it's just not enough of what they want. So making sure that your solution fits their problem is absolutely essential. And making sure that when you're talking about your solution, you're framing it in the same way that your personas frame their problem, because if you're talking about a solution, and they haven't correctly identified what their problem is, or they think it's caused by something else, they can't connect that to the solution that you're providing. You have to be speaking their language or you have to be willing to take those extra steps to educate them about what their problem is. So they can then say, Aha, so this is why what you do solves the problem that I have, and gives me what I want. So I would say that's the number one challenge that I see especially with people who have technical or more complex solutions, it's easy to fall in love with what you're doing and the way you do it and what makes it so cool. But if you are not tapping into on an emotional level, what your customers want and the job to be done from their perspective, your marketing is going to fall on deaf ears.
Unknown Speaker :Wow, that I think that's a wonderful summary, Daisy, and I see it a lot like in the coaching space, for example, I will see coaches, using their social media, their marketing platforms to push out content that they like, or things to talk about problems that they're having in their own business, but it's not necessarily speaking to the actual client. It's not necessarily speaking to the people that they actually want to do business with. It's almost like them taking the time to have a whine and a moan online.
Unknown Speaker :And that's where it's important to remember that your brand is never about you. And this is a especially a challenge for people in the coaching consulting space who are solopreneurs... There's a blurring of the line between the personal brand and the professional brand or the personal brand and the business brand. Your personal brand is all about you. It should be that's what it's for. It's about how great you are what makes you different and unique. Your business brand has to be about your customer and if you confuse the two then you're going to end up doing exactly what you just mentioned where you're you know, he may be an Instagram influencer, but you're not actually serving your customers and putting them first.
Unknown Speaker :Love it. Love it. I'm just I'm sitting here giving you a round of applause, virtually. Love it. Love it. Now as promised at the beginning, I cannot leave you without asking about the banjo and I don't know if there's a term for it. Like you know, there's the term pianist or flutist... is it ban ban banjoist?
Unknown Speaker :I think we just call it being a picker and a grinner.
Unknown Speaker :Awesome! So why the banjo? How did you get started?
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, my parents bought us some bluegrass instruments. One year for Christmas. I was about 15 and I'm the one who happened to pick up the banjo and start playing around with it and I've been doing that ever since I think it's impossible to be unhappy when you're playing a banjo. So it's a great pick-me-up, a great boost.
Unknown Speaker :That's awesome. I love knitting for the same reason because I can just, you know, I can let my fingers do the work and my mind sort of turns off and it turns into this very beautiful, cathartic space of peace you know?
Unknown Speaker :Mmhmm. Absolutely. So you're gonna put like "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" as the backup? You know you want to.
Unknown Speaker :I know! Now the wheels are turning in my mind. Like, would that be copyright infringement? I don't know if I could get away with it. But if so, it'll probably show up.
Unknown Speaker :Oh, that was an old old one. I can send you a clip. I've got me actually playing that so you can use it without fear.
Unknown Speaker :Oh, gosh. That's awesome. Well, Daisy, we have had 12.5 minutes of sheer value. I mean, this has been, I've learned a from this conversation, I know other people listening to this podcast are gonna feel the same way. So I really want to thank you, I know that you're busy and you have a lot going on. So I want to thank you for taking the time to appear on this episode with me.
Unknown Speaker :Absolutely. And if anyone listening would like a copy of my buyer persona worksheet completely free, just check me out on LinkedIn, send me a message and I'll send it over.
Unknown Speaker :Awesome. And you also have a website to brandmessageclarity.com
Unknown Speaker :That's correct. There's a free training on there where we talk about creating buyer personas, developing your marketplace differentiators and cultivating brand champions, about 45 minutes, and there's a workbook that I'm happy to give to anybody who'd like that as well. So it kind of gives you the those first three things that tend to be most important for early stage business owners to nail down.
Unknown Speaker :Awesome! Connect with Daisy on LinkedIn. She always has great content. As we were saying as far as we know, she's the only Daisy McCarty with a completed profile. You can find her on LinkedIn and you connect with her there. Please visit the website brandmessageclarity.com as well. And Daisy, I thank you again for taking the time to be with me today.
Unknown Speaker :Thank you very much great conversation.
Unknown Speaker :I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Again, our guest was Daisy McCarty, a brand message expert. You can connect with her on LinkedIn. Or you can visit her website at brandmessageclarity.com. If you enjoyed this episode, or you know somebody who could benefit from the content, please share it. Please also, if you haven't already, subscribe and leave a review for us on iTunes. Bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai