S1E4 - The 6 Steps to Launching a Marketing Pipeline that ACTUALLY WORKS

How do you build and implement a marketing strategy? In this episode, Stacey will walk you through a six step process to building a digital marketing strategy. She developed a methodology called “The Game Changer” which consists of six key steps to develop a pipeline.

The 6C Methodology follows a structure that will allow you as a business owner to grow your client base. It is through understanding how to connect to your ideal customers, create a marketing material to engage them and lead them to the right platform to nourish your relationship with them.

This a method used by Stacey everyday within her agency and has proven real results. So grab your pen and paper, listen and take notes on this episode!

The 6C Methodology
• Connect
Key Points to Connecting to your Audience
• Value Proposition
• Branding
• Customer Avatar
• Create
Creating a Stock of Content to Appeal to your Audience
• Create Visual,Audio, Written & Action types of content
• Register your IP, Trademarks & Social Media handles
• Use #TheContentWaterfall to Repurpose Content
• Captivate
How to Captivate the Attention of your Customer
• What is the Familiarity Principle
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising
• PR Opportunities
• Capture
Capture the Contact Info of your Ideal Prospects
• Landing Page
• Pop-up Form
• Converse
Listening & Converse with your Prospects before You Attempt to Sell to Them
• Develop Relationships + Give Value
• Use Social Media to Converse with your prospects
• Create an email marketing campaign
• Convert
Impulse Factors to make your Sales Pitch Successful
• Fear of Loss
• Urgency
• Greed
• Indifference
• + Which Marketing Collateral you should use
Key Takeaways:
1. Give, give, give, before you try to ask for something in exchange.
2. Narrow your niche and focus on a smaller group of prospects
3. Organic reach is depreciating quite rapidly. Put marketing budget into advertising in order to get in front of your customers

Resources

How to make exciting email headlines/subject lines

Kristin Marquet on Gaining Publicity, Pitching the Media & Becoming a Trusted Authority

HARO

The Vault Contact Information

The Vault Website

The Vault Instagram

The Vault Twitter

The Vault Pinterest

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:32

In this episode, I am walking you through a six step process to building a digital marketing strategy. There are lots of businesses that have asked me how to build a marketing strategy and how to implement it with everything that's involved. I've actually worked with a methodology that I've developed called the game changer method and essentially, it follows the six key steps to building out a pipeline. I call them the six C's and they are: connect, create, captivate, capture, converse, and convert. So many business owners often overlook the importance of creating the entire marketing pipeline and just try to do a little bit of it. They just try to do social media or they just try to do some kind of advertising and don't think about the entire pipeline to actually warm up their prospects to get consumers excited about their brand.

Speaker 2: 1:21

So this six C methodology follows a structure which actually allows businesses with the ambition to grow their client base to plan, implement, and access a really steady flow of new prospects into their business. It's through understanding how to connect with their ideal customer that creates the type of marketing material that will engage that customer and captivate their attention on the right platforms. The businesses that do use this methodology do see a significant increase in the number of prospects that they capture. Once engaged, those prospects can be nurtured through conversations, via email, via social media, and a range of other marketing strategies. This allows important trust factors to be built before they try to convert them into a paying customer. So I'm going to walk you through these six steps that I use in my agency almost every single day and I hope that you find it helpful. The game changer methods...

: 2:14

So, gaining the attention of your perfect customers with a recognisable brand, a stack of engaging content, and just watch the powerful flow of inbound leads stream into your business. The game changer process essentially follows six steps. It's six C's, connect, create, captivate, capture, converse and convert. So I'm going to run through a few points on each of these six C's that you can get started with. Building out your marketing strategies. Let's start with first C in the game changer process... Connect is all about how you as a business will connect with your customers and how they will identify your business. The first step of this is figuring out your value proposition or your USP. What differentiates your brand from your competitors? It could be something like you offering the lowest cost or you're the highest quality or you're the first ever to find this specific solution to a problem.

Speaker 2: 3:19

Your value proposition should be thought of as what do you have that your competitors don't? Developing your proposition requires answering a few different probing questions. So things like what makes you unique? What experience do you have that your competitors don't? What are five or so characteristics that describe your ideal customer? What are the top three benefits that you offer your customers? And what makes you better than any of your competitors? I would also think about how customers find you and you can also narrow your niche and focus on a smaller group of prospects too. So really identifying what is your value proposition as a business and what makes you different is the first part of connecting with them.

: 4:04

The second part I think is branding, so branding is one of my favourite aspects of building a really strong business profile or even a personal profile too and it's where your business comes to life. It's something that is visual and it's tangible. It really includes every aspect of the brand, so that's what you see is what you hear is what you feel. Your branding should cover quite a few different areas. When it comes to creating a brand for your business, you want to try to establish some brand rules. This should be a top priority because it can help you to create a more unified look for your brand. Something that's way more consistent and also identifiable and it also something that's going to translate really well online and offline. So sometimes they're called brand guidelines and it's just putting together things like the type of colour Palette that you use in your brand, the image style, your typography the fonts that you're using, how your logo should be used. It can also include things like your mission statement, your vision and your purpose.

Speaker 2: 5:04

Additionally, how does your brand sound? So what is the tone of voice, the character, the tone and the purpose, the language that should be used within your brand. Just getting some of that down on paper is a really, really great place to start. If you're already an established business, then I would say investing actually in the brand guidelines is a really good call. But if you are just getting started, just thinking about some of those basics as to what your brand looks like, sounds like, feels like it's really important and will help position you.

: 5:31

The third part of the connect process, just to keep this simple, is the customer Avatar. And I know we've talked about this in previous episodes, but it's who you're marketing your products or services to. It's thinking about who your ideal customer is, where do they spend time online, and what are the really core challenges? The biggest mistake that I see businesses make is that they're trying to be all things to all people. They can claim that anybody is interested in their business and that their prospects could be absolutely anybody but it's just not true. The more niche that you can be as a business; the more likely you are to actually attract clients to attract customers to you. Being niche helps to establishes that connection with your consumers. So those are a couple of key points with regards to connecting with your audience, which is the first C of this process. Moving on to create, which is the second step. There are a couple of different things that you want to try to do in the create. Step one is getting the fundamentals in place for your business.

Speaker 2: 6:40

So that means a website. Make sure that you've got a website up, that you've registered your domain names and that you've got a professional email address. You don't have to spend loads of money on websites. If you are fairly tech savvy, you can go ahead and build something yourself. You can hire an outsourced person to create a website for you. You know our agency, we create really simple, beautiful looking wordpress websites for less than 500 pounds. You don't have to spend a lot of money. There are other places out there that even do it cheaper than that, but just having something in place is really, really important. We also suggest getting all of your social media handles registered, so that means going onto facebook, instagram, pinterest, twitter, all the different social media platforms and just registering your company, your brand name, your personal name, really, really important. Even if you don't plan to use them, it's just important for you to grab them so that nobody else does and can't either misrepresent you in some way or just means that if clients are coming across your business online, they do search for you on instagram.

: 7:42

Even if you're not using instagram, then they at least can be directed to your website so you can see that I do this myself too. So with the Vault, obviously we have our own instagram which is at the volt says, but my digital agency brand elective, we've got the instagram account registered. We don't actually use it a huge amount so. But I do just have an image up that just says how to contact us. It just says, you know, we don't use instagram, but here's our website, here's our other social media platforms that were really active on. So it just means that if someone does do that, search for me that they find us and they know exactly where they can go to connect with us. So really, really important to get those in place. And then the other thing with create as well, part of the fundamentals is getting your IP registered. So what I mean by that is trademark. So go ahead and get a trademark registered for any of the important brands or product names. That's a really important fundamental right at the beginning of your process to make sure that you own that IP. Also within the step which is create one thing that you should be focusing on is creating different types of content. So I think there's four different ways that people like to consume content. I think there's the written form, the audio form or visual form, and an also actionable form.

Speaker 2: 8:58

I can give you some examples within my business. So for example a written form with the Vault is that we do a blog which is on our website, thevault.global. We also have a magazine that we produce quarterly, which has lots of articles, so that's something that people can read. So those are the kind of couple of different forms of written content. For audio, we obviously we have this podcast so people can listen and learn about the different things that we talk about. In terms of visual, we've got some video content including being on Instagram tv. We also run some videos across our twitter channel that links to our Youtube, as well as lots of social media graphics that encourages people to engage with us. We even have some actionable items. In our show notes we include links to quizzes, people can take school cards and even download some strategy books. Our membership community, that's due to launch soon, has a lot of strategy work books that people can download and actually fill in. People like to learn in different ways. So it's about providing as many forms of content as possible.

: 10:13

We also, as part of the create process, once I have a method in place to help to repurpose content at our agency, we call it the content waterfall. If you do a search for#ContentWaterfall, you'll see that we have an infographic which explains that process. I actually cover this in one of my other podcasts in more detail. But, essentially what it means is when you produce a core piece of content that you haven't repurposed in different ways.

Speaker 2: 10:43

So to give you an example, obviously this podcast for me as a core piece of content, so I record the podcast. I've got lots of different guests that I interview, what I didn't do as I have those interviews transcribed so that they become a written format as well off the back of that written formats that's released it as a blog. Then what we'll do is we'll take that blog and we will repurpose it into social media graphics, so we create a lot of visual graphics that we can share out across all of our platforms. We also break the blog down into 20 or so different tweets we push out across twitter. We all also take the images that were created with already shared them on social media, but we'll also index them into Google search so that people can find them that way. We share them across pinterest and different pinterest boards. There's many different ways that we're trying to repurpose content in that phone. If, for example, we might have an interview per person that we interviewed that goes through a process, they may be talking through a methodology and just like I'm doing now with these six c's to creating a marketing pipeline, the game changer method, we may then create an infographic off the back of that, so anything that can be repurposed using the content waterfall process is really, really important because as a business, you do need to be creating content regularly. You need to be pushing content out there to engage your customers into coming to generate leads into your business, and we were all that time. You know, it was not that easy to be creating content every single day. So if you can focus on creating really good pieces of core content and then finding a way to repurpose that, that can be really, really effective. So look out for that future episode on this podcast. The third C in this process is captivate and captivate is really just all about how you captivate the ascension of your audience as it says on the tin and captivate somebody that's really interesting about this is the familiarity principle. That's something that I talk a lot about in my business. It's about creating the know, like, and trust factors. So the familiarity principle is actually, it's really sort of exciting role. It plays in marketing. It kind of exploited the psychological underpinnings of how humans actually make decisions. And essentially what it means is the more that you're exposed to something, the more familiar you become with it, the more likely you are to know it to like it and then therefore trusted. It's quite a weird concept when you think about it. Um, there's a few examples about this that sort of happen. You know, for example, if you're listening to the radio and you hear a song and the first time you hear it, you're like, oh, I'm not really into that. It's not really my thing. I didn't really like what this artist has done. And then it becomes one of their songs that's played relentlessly on the radio, you see, you hear it five times, 10 times, 15 times, and then all of a sudden you find yourself kind of humming along to it and it sort of grows on you and you start to like it. Do you know what I'm talking about when I think about things like that, it's actually called the familiarity principle. So the more that you hear it, some more that you start to like it and the more that you trust it and therefore more likely to engage with, you know, if, if we turn that into a business sense more, you see something where you trust it. Um, so that's something that we want to embed inside our marketing pipelines. Part of the captivate process as well. We want to be thinking about how to get in front of your ideal prospects. Really good way to do that as obviously advertising. So that might be Google ads, it might be facebook ads, it might be other different social networks. Organic reach we know is dying a slow death or not so much a slow death, but it's depreciating quite rapidly, so you do usually have to put some form of marketing budget into advertising in order to get out in front of your customers. So thinking about implementing those sorts of ads, it's really important as part of your digital marketing process. The other thing that you can do to captivate the attention of your customers is things like pr opportunities. So obviously we featured on our previous podcast with Chris and Marquez. She talked a lot about getting media attention and how to use pr to go back and listen to the episode if you haven't heard it yet, but also following things on twitter. There's a couple of hashtags. One is Hashtag journalists requests. The other is Hashtag pr requests and so what that will is any kind of journalists from your local media publications that are seeking a source or want to comment on a specific story will often put a request out there and then they'll use those hashtags. So if you monitor those on twitter, you can put yourself forward to comment on those sorts of stories and that can help to leverage your own pr opportunities. There are a couple of other sources that you can go to to which afraid one is called Harry h a r o help a reporter out. And if you just go ahead and register, you can set up all the different subjects that you are interested in hearing about that you know are relevant to your particular business or brand. And then what happens is every single day you receive an email which says, here are the stories that journalists are looking for a comment about and you can put forward to journalists pitch to kind of leverage and get yourself some pr opportunities. Definitely recommend that to create a way for you to captivate the attention of the audience that you seek. The full step is capture thinking about how you're going to capture the details of the people that you are attracting to your business. So once they've seen all this great content that you've produced, they've, they've come across their facebook ad or a Google ad, or they've seen a PR media piece about you, you then have to find a way to capture their details right? So keep it simple as my best advice on this, um, have a really good landing page in place, um, which asks for really simple information. Think about how you feel when you go online to download something or subscribed to something. You don't want to be filling in a really long form. You get bored with it and you don't want to give away that much personal information. So if you can get away with just asking a name and email address, it's really simple place to begin when you're capturing data that you can then use later on for repurposing, make sure that you've got that set up on a specific landing page or use a pop up form on your website which just pops up and asks for people's information in exchange for something. Make sure that you're actually giving them something. It's very difficult to get people to subscribe to an email list or a newsletter without giving them something in exchange, so whether that is a download, some form of lead magnet or checklist, a chapter of a book, it could be subscribing to a webinar. I make sure that you are offering something in exchange for those contact details. That's going to help your Roi be so much more effective. The fifth is converse. I love talking about this step because what I find talking to a lot of different businesses is that as soon as they capture somebody's details in the previous step, they want to sell to them immediately and I just think that is a really cool way to put people off your business. You really do need to focus on this fifth step which is converse, so actually developing a relationship with this prospect builds trust with them, offer them a lot of value. You've heard a lot of people on this podcast already and they talk all about just give value, give value, give, give, give, give. Before you try to ask for something in exchange, the tighter and the stronger your relationship is with someone, the more likely they are to make a purchase from you. So use the converse statuettes. She developed that relationship. How can you do that was a few different ways. First is through social media, so things like just responding to comments. You know, if someone sends you a direct message or an email or whatever, making sure you actually do respond to that. Use that opportunity to start conversations. If somebody is retreating, something of yours on twitter and make sure that you engage with that person and comment back on something that they've tweeted. If someone is writing a comment on an instagram post, make sure that you're responding to that and maybe asking your questions about the conversations, you know, ask questions going back and forth. Actually converse with them. Email marketing is another way. So obviously you've captured the information on your, on your landing page or on your pop art form. Create an email marketing campaign. One thing I would suggest with this is don't go straight into the sale. Making sure that you're still giving value, so your first, at least I would say nine emails need to be giving value. Really good stuff, not just a boring email for the sake of hitting your nine emails that you have to send out before you ask for something in exchange, good content, whether it's again, offering them something for free, whether it's educating them on a specific challenge that you know, that they have really, really good content via email can be super, super effective. You can use a lot of different platforms. I use infusion soft in my business, um, but if you're in the early stages of doing an email marketing campaign, you can use something like mailchimp. There's quite a few different platforms out there that are really, really cost effective that can help you to manage an email campaign. I've actually written a blog about this or about how to create really great subject lines that are linked to in the show notes that's on my agency website. So I'll think to that because they can give you some ideas in terms of what you should be talking about with regards to subject lines. And then we can move on to the sixth step, which is convert, which is this is when we actually can try to make a sale. Converting is essentially the sales pitch, right? So it's only at this point in the process that I would recommend trying to convert the sale. Anything earlier, you'll find your return on investment is not great. Think about it from your customer's perspective. If they are not aware of your brand, if they don't know who you are, they don't know what your product is. It is really challenging to get them to make an impulsive decision, so they do need to go through this entire pipeline before they're ready to commit and handover there really hard earned money. So make sure that you've gone through that entire process. You've really understood how to connect with them. You've created really valuable content for them to download and engage with. You've captivated their attention through advertising and PR. You've captured their details. Do you know who they are? You've conversed and you've really built on that relationship and now you go into convert. So which is where you can pitch the sale. Obviously with any kind of sales, there's impulse factors that should be used to help bring that person over the line and get them to sign up and download or purchase from you. There's quite a few of them, but my favorite ones are things like the fear of loss. So fear of loss with regards to sales is when you talk about something that's almost sold out, so you're showing people that you know, a lot of people have already purchased this, we've only got limited supply. It creates this fear of loss and that's a great impulse factor to get them to actually purchase from you. Another one that I really like is the impulse factor tool, which is called keeping up with the Jones' is so everybody knows that, right? That nobody wants to be the first person to buy something. They want to see that their friends are doing it as someone that they know is doing it with somebody that is like them, is also purchasing, and then that's an impulse for them to actually purchase. So this is when your testimonials will drive sales and they're really, really important for people to see. The other business owners, just like them have also, or whoever your audience is, whoever your customer is, just people just like them have actually already purchased from you, and here's the results. Those testimonials are super important. Another impulse back to that's important to work into your sales pitch is urgency, so it was kind of similar to fair of loss. It's about creating a now will never concept so that there's a deadline that they have to make the purchase by this time or there will be no other opportunity to do it, so it's creating urgency to get them to make a decision and make a purchase from you. Greed. Greed is another impulse factor that's worth working into your sales pitch. So this is customers. They want more for less, right? You see these things where price starts out at unit was originally 97 pounds. Now at 67 pounds. Now it's 37 pounds now at 17 pounds. So perhaps the first time they heard that it was available for 97 pounds, I thought, oh, that's a little bit expensive for what I'm getting. Then you're lowering the price of 67 pounds and giving them something extra and then the first special efforts coming down to 37 pounds and then before you know it, when they had that original price of 97 pounds, they're like, oh, I probably would only pay half of that amount, only pay 50 quid for it, so if you're coming down to them 37 pounds and maybe even down to 17 pounds, that seems like a really good decision and you're really playing on that greed factor where they actually to make that purchase decision. So that's important to work into your sales funnel. The other impulse factor, which was actually my favorite when I was in sales, is indifference and you have to have a fantastic promotion, which is well worth the money so you don't have to beg for a sale. I think indifference is really important. You know, we don't. Nobody wants to buy from somebody who's desperate. I think they want to make sure that you're confident and I think that's what indifference is all about. It's just having this confidence, not arrogance, confidence that your product is great, that you've got awesome customers, that you don't actually need the sale, that you truly think that it is going to be beneficial for that particular customer, so have a level of indifference and that can really help to improve your conversion rates to make sure that you're getting the best return on your entire marketing pipeline. The other part that is part of the convert, part of this process is having really good marketing collateral, so brochures that explain things really well. There's nothing better than meeting for a sales pitch. Being able to give a great business card alongside some really good marketing material, something tangible that people can hold in their hands and they can see exactly what it is that they're purchasing. That kind of thing can be really, really powerful for helping that conversion stage. So I hope you've learned some things that have running through this very brief explanation of a marketing pipeline which we call the game changer package. Working through these six steps can really help you to implement stronger sales, open up the amount of leads that you're generating into your business, and just really help you outperform your competition. So don't try to skip over any of the steps. Make sure that you do implement absolutely all of them. You want to make sure you're connecting, creating captivating, capturing, conversing, and then converting your customers.

Speaker 3: 25:06

You've just been listening to the podcast is stacy care. If you've enjoyed the show, she'd really appreciate you leaving a review on itunes and don't forget to head over to www dot[inaudible] dot org for more free content that will help you build an effective marketing strategy.