Hello, everyone, we are back for day two of the social slowdown challenge. I'm Meg Casebolt, your host. Yesterday we went through and we debriefed and really evaluated what worked in 2022. For our marketing strategies, what worked last year. Maybe if you're listening to this, and you know, a couple months, you want to think about the last month, maybe you don't want to have to look back at a whole year, that's fine. But we looked at our marketing and how well it worked and evaluated how it worked based on the amount of time that we were spending on things and how effective it was, and how expensive it was and and how we felt when we were doing it. Now we're going to take that backward looking debrief, and we're going to apply it to our vision moving forward. So if you're working through this live with us thinking about what happens in 2023, if you're listening to this later, that's cool. Maybe it's just next quarter, right? But the question is, the prompt is, how do you want your marketing to look and feel moving forward? Which of those marketing strategies that we evaluated when you looked at that enjoyment score? Which of them did you enjoy the most. And then when you're looking at all of those factors, you know, your time, your money, your energy, your joy, which of those marketing strategies felt easiest? Because it doesn't always have to be hard, right? Sometimes we want to lean into the ease instead of into those should. All of us are different humans with different strengths. And if you love dancing on Tik Tok, and it feels awesome to you, and you feel like you're connecting with your community. They're great. I know a lot of people who are doing you know, they're kicking ass on Tik Tok, or Instagram. Like, if social media feels good to you. Maybe the goal is to really think about what about it felt good? What about it felt easy. And then the goal for the next couple of days is to figure out some some boundaries, or some ways that you can do it more effectively. So it feels even better. If you're coming into this from the perspective of I don't really know if I want to be on social media anymore. doesn't really feel good. Spending a lot of time not sure how well it's working. This is a time to say, what else do I want to be doing? Right? What What can start to replace some of my time some of my energy. And there may be different tiers of things that you want your marketing to look like. So in today's episode, I'm going to start to not just say what felt good, because sometimes what feels good is not always the best fit for what we need to do. But I want you to think about sort of three levels of marketing. Some people would call this a sales funnel, some people would call this a pipeline, I'm just going to talk about are just three levels. Okay? And we're going to use a very simple acronym here. Is that right? Yeah, acronym ABC, right? There are three things three sort of outcomes that we need our marketing to do for us awareness, building relationships, and conversion. And what I want you to do is we're talking this through is to choose one top strategy for each of these, what is going to be your awareness marketing channel? What is going to be your building relationships marketing channel? And how are you going to convert those leads into sales? So in terms of awareness, that's discovery, that's how are people finding out about you? I think a lot of people think that social media is an awareness channel. If you guys want to go back and listen to a conversation I had with Andrea Jones. We can put that in the show notes. It was my first conversation with her. I think it was like episode three of the podcast, we had a really deep conversation about the fact that social media is really not there for people to find out who you are. It's really more about that relationship building component in terms of awareness channels. This maybe, you know, obviously, I'm going to talk about SEO here because that's what I teach. That's what I believe in. Search engine optimization is a great awareness channel a great way for people to discover you when they need you. I have found that for our business, in addition to content marketing and search engine optimization, our top other top three, the other two things in our top three, our personal referrals, and podcast guesting and because we have that information about what's working, those are the places that we're spending our time in 2023 is SEO content, really search based content, podcasts guessing and building relationships with people who can send people our way. And that's why we feel safe. Being able to remove ourselves from social media or give ourselves a step back from it is because we have other are channels that we can use for for that awareness for that discovery? The next level of marketing after people discover who you are after you have that recognition? How are you going to get them to trust you? How are you going to build that relationship? How are you going to get them to consider actually working with you. This is actually where social media is kind of awesome, because people are already hanging out at sort of that watercooler and then you can show up in their feed, and you can give them a loose or informal way of looking at what it is to work with you letting them trust you. But there are other ways to do this, too. This could be coffee chats, this could be having your own content marketing platform, whether that's your blog, your YouTube, your podcast, you know, I think the fact that y'all are listening to this, this is building relationships, somebody probably told you about the podcast, or maybe you saw it in the podcast app. And that was your discovery. But now that you're listening to this conversation, we are building a relationship with each other. So what is the way that you want to build relationships, for love at first search, its content marketing, mostly through the podcast, we also do have a YouTube channel, but when I looked at how much time and energy and money was going into it, versus the outcomes, we actually chose to pause our YouTube channel this year, we may bring it back in a month or two, but I my energetic needs were higher than the what we could do with the YouTube channel. So you know, that's part of our decision making process happening too, is sometimes even if things are working, you go, that's a lot of work, right? I don't want to do my hair and makeup every time I need to create content proof of work to do my hair, right? Sometimes those factors are considerations for us as we're making these decisions. Okay, that was a bit of a digression. And then the last stage of your marketing funnel is conversions. How are you actually going to sell people things? Sure, you can be found Sure you can, you know, build relationships with people, but how are you going to get them to give you money? For love it for a search, our conversion mechanisms are email marketing, webinars, and hey, surprise, this challenge, right? Part of this is building relationships. Part of this is going to talk to you about maybe if you want to start doing some SEO and content marketing, you can work with us on that, right? Sometimes things can fit across multiple levels. Maybe you heard about this challenge from somebody, no, you're building a relationship with us. And then at the end of this, you'll decide to join our program, maybe Whoa, that's okay. All right, I'm never gonna force anybody to do something like that. I'm not gonna do you know, high pressure sales is not my thing. But everyone, you need to have at least a certain number of people moving through those three stages, awareness, building relationships, and conversions in order for this to be a business and not a hobby. So take that list I gave you yesterday, take a look at that scorecard that you already filled out. If you're in our live challenge, and you're working with the the spreadsheet that we gave, you go to the second tab, and you can just redo the whole thing, looking forward into 2023 versus looking backwards into 2022. And start to think about what is the top strategy that you want to spend in awareness in building relationships. And in conversions. If you're using our spreadsheet, we actually have a little column where they have dropped down. So that way you can think about which of these marketing strategies do you want to use in 2023 for each of these levels, awareness, building relationships and conversions. Next steps, if you are looking at your spreadsheet, looking at your scorecard, thinking about what you want to do, and you're looking at it and saying, oh, you know, in 2023, I really want content marketing, and search engine optimization to be my strategy. And that would be getting traffic from Google, to your website, to your blog, to your podcast to your YouTube channel. If that's the case, then I do want to let you know that we are going to be starting our attraction activate program on February 6, we are going to be running it live twice this year. We're going to run it once from February to May. And then we're going to run it again from September to December. And when I say live, I mean I will be teaching all of those trainings, where you can come and listen live, ask your questions. And then we'll run those every other week. And we'll have live q&a s and you can get feedback on your homework like we really want this to be hands on. So if you want to find out more about that program, you can head over to attraction activate that com if you want to learn more about what that live training component will look like and what we wouldn't be doing together over that four month period to get started on your search traffic to improve your search traffic. You can go over to love it for search.com/webinar to sign up for that
you don't have to be in the challenge to come join the webinar. I'm just going to be walking through the attraction activate program and maybe you don't want to join attract and activate but you want to take some of these ideas years and try to implement them on your own, you're still more than welcome to come to the webinar, ask any questions, find out if it's a good fit for you. So last thing I want to leave you with is a quote from company one by Paul Jarvis. So as you're thinking about how you want to market in 2023. In addition to how you're feeling about it, I also want you to think about how your customer feels about how they want to be marketed to. So that's what inspired this, this selection. So in company one, Paul Jarvis says this, these days, consumers buy and make choices, often based on alignment with their own values. By not focusing on infinite growth, or assuming that more is better, you can focus on making your products better aligned with the values of a smaller, more specific group of people than market directly to their needs and viewpoints. So that was just my way of saying if you want to be on social media, go for it. If you don't, then go find where your people are hanging out, and you can market to them directly. If you want to join our conversations everyday, this week at noon, Eastern, you can head over to social celadon.com/challenge. We're going to be having prompts, we're going to be having all of these scorecards available to download them there. And again, if you want to if part of your plan for 2023 is to do more search engine optimization to get that leads get more traffic to your website from Google, head over to love it for search.com. You can find out about our webinar that's happening next week, or you can find out more about our tracks and activate program which starts on February 6. I will be back tomorrow for day three of the challenge to talk about how to make some of these marketing choices and how to make sure that the time and energy that you're spending on your marketing will have a good return on investment. So tune in with me then and hope you're having a great day.