Not-So Kind Regards
We're taking a short break! Exciting things coming March 2025. Stay tuned.
Not-So Kind Regards
You're Thinking About Your Strategy The Wrong Way (and It's Costing You)
Dive into strategic marketing with Maddy as she demystifies costly business myths. Discover the power of split testing and Birdcage Marketing's unique psychology-infused tactics. Learn to craft evolving hypotheses and connect with your audience intuitively.
Wind up your strategy fears and let them fly away as we tackle the paralysis of perfectionism in the marketing world. Maddy shares candid tales of her own misfires and how they ultimately fueled the triumph of Birdcage Marketing School. It's a lesson in the iterative nature of strategy and an invitation to join hands with us—whether through our professional guidance or the rich resources available at Birdcage Marketing School. Embrace the journey of strategy refinement, and don't forget to engage with us on social media for a dynamic, interactive learning adventure.
To work with us, book your discovery call at https://www.birdcagemarketing.com.au/start-here
To discover the school, visit https://birdcagemarketing.com.au/
A lot of people get split testing wrong. They think that split testing is when you just test two completely separate pieces of content or two completely separate landing pages and then you're like, well, that one did better. Ok, why, I don't know, because I changed every friggin' thing about the split test. You need to control the variable. We both know you're meant for more, which is why you need to work with a marketing agency that is unashamedly better. At Birdcage Marketing, we work with brands of all shapes and sizes all over the globe, across all different industries, to share our systematic approach to digital marketing. Whether we're writing your strategy, designing your brand and your website, mentoring you to do it all yourself, or managing your campaigns for you, our systematic approach to digital marketing is grounded in marketing psychology and powered by our passion to always be better. If that's good enough for you, then book your discovery call now. We do have limited availability across most of our services, so don't procrastinate, guys. Let's get this going.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Not so Kind regards podcast, where we're done with the digital fluff and pleasantries and are here to talk straight about business building, digital marketing and personal growth. I'm your host, maddie Birdcage, and in today's episode we are talking about my all-time favourite topic, strategy, but not just strategy how we may have explored it before in the podcast or how I speak about it online on TikTok. No, today we are talking about the fact that your understanding of strategy is completely skewed, and it's not your fault. It's because, firstly, I don't think anyone has ever explained strategy in the way that I'm going to be talking about it today. But the reality is the way that you understand strategy, the way that you're using strategy. It is costing you potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, because whenever I speak to anyone about strategy before they join Birdcage Marketing School or come on as a client, they have this completely warped understanding of what a strategy is actually meant to do and how you are supposed to use it. So let's unpack this today, get a notepad and pen out please not if you're driving, but after this episode, you will never look at strategy the same again and I'm going to make you absolutely full in love with it, I promise.
Speaker 1:What do you think strategy is? Is it a roadmap? Is it the answer to all your problems? Is it just a document? Do you actually have no idea what a strategy is? I'd say that's actually 99% of you, if not a hundred, because I've never heard anyone understand strategy the way that I see it, even my team members that come to the agency. They are always blown away and surprised as to how we actually do our strategies and what is included and the things that we actually think about. So I want you to take that understanding of what you think a strategy is and just throw it out the window, literally like scrunched up in a ball. Chuck it out the window because it's wrong. What a strategy is? It is a hypothesis. It's not a plan, a foolproof plan. It is an actually roadmap, even though that's what we include in our strategies, but we actually call that our action plan. What a strategy is? It is just a good friggin guess. It is a good guess so that you can understand where you need to begin your marketing journey and what you need to be testing against. That's what a strategy is, and of course, I'm talking about marketing strategy specifically, but I would argue it's every strategy, because until you actually put your marketing campaigns into the market, you don't know if you're right or if you're wrong.
Speaker 1:And people come to us and say well, how do you actually know all of this information about your target audiences. Do you use statistics or do you do research groups or qualitative or quantitative data all of those fun things we learned at uni? Yes, we include aspects of that, and actually we used to conduct first party quantitative and qualitative research when we first started doing brand strategies. What that just means is we used to do a questionnaire and then we'd throw it out to the internet friends and family, everyone that we could to get our responses back to then shape the strategies that we were creating for our clients. But guess what? We ditched those questionnaires because more often than not, we were 100% right every single time.
Speaker 1:There was probably only in one instance that I really relied upon that questionnaire and that was with a client who was offering Tai Chi, and I actually use that questionnaire to prove my point that people aren't actually thinking about Tai Chi as much as they are thinking about yoga and Pilates and all of those in meditation. Tai Chi is definitely at the bottom of the list, and so all that did it didn't change how I saw things. It just helped me back it up to my client and, if anything, that is probably how we use statistics in our strategies the most. It is simply to give our clients a feeling that, oh, this is why they've come to this conclusion, when the reality is that we usually come to those conclusions intuitively and we are generally correct. That's not saying we are correct all the time, but I'd say probably nine times out of 10, our strategies are bang on, but that's all well and good if you are planning on paying us to do your strategy for you which we would love to do, and we have openings coming in March, so you have to start booking in now but if you plan on writing your own strategy, so, whether you are using Birdcage Marketing School or if you are just blindly fumbling through and writing your own strategy, these are all the things that you need to think about. And if you have had someone write your strategy for you, you need to be auditing that with what I'm going to share with you as well, because I actually have never seen a strategy written to the level that is required from us, no matter how much they've spent previously on these strategies.
Speaker 1:In your strategy, you need to be firstly, focusing on your audience profiling right, I've talked about this before, and the reason is because everything flows from the audience. Your brand is then shaped around you, but how your audience wants a brand to be shaped. And then your messages are shaped based on the audience, customer journey or the marketing funnel. So that is how we essentially write our strategies. And then, after that, comes the action plan, where we then say what you have to do and people think that's a strategy, that is a to-do list or an action plan. That is not a strategy but it is still very useful.
Speaker 1:What a strategy should be doing? You should be putting your best guess forward so that when you then go and put implement these campaigns, when I say to you, okay, this is your marketing funnel and we know that we need to be attention grabbing at the top of funnel, so controversial, relatable and or aspirational, then that is shaped by what your audience's pain points are, what their identity goals are, all of those factors that we've already written about. I am then strategizing or guessing that, by putting out XYZ piece of content that is going to resonate with them. Now, of course, there are a hundred different ways that you could shape that content. I might be telling you okay, controversial is probably what I recommend that you focus on, when, in reality, your audience actually responds better to being relatable or responds better to being aspirational.
Speaker 1:Until you use the good guess and until you start putting materials out into the world with which to get feedback, you will never know what the answer is. Because the argument for oh, but you can just use statistics and that will tell you what you need to do. Okay, but can I just ask, if you are a handmade children's clocks brand that's working out of California, how many statistical researchers have researched your exact target audience around your exact product and know exactly what those people are saying, thinking, feeling Like? Point me to that report. I would love to see it, because if that kind of micro research exists, that would make my life a lot easier. But guess what? It doesn't, because you are probably a small business that doesn't have the capacity, or even a medium size, or maybe even a larger business that doesn't have the capacity to fund such studies where you get this kind of information.
Speaker 1:So what do we do instead? We have to guess, we have to put two and two together, we have to use our own life experiences in order to then shape a strategy that gives us our best guess and puts our best foot forward, so that we can then test against it. So you might be wondering okay, maddie, if you are telling me that a strategy is just a good guess, why the hell am I paying you $10,000 for it? It's because, my friend, the more experienced the strategy writer is, so the more experienced the marketer is in this instance. The more times they have written a strategy, they have tested that strategy, they have worked with that particular audience, the more life experience they have with that audience as well. So, is the person writing the strategy, are they their own audience? The better the guess is going to be.
Speaker 1:Because if we look at a scale of guesses from zero being just completely the wrongest of the wrong to 100 being bang on correct we probably sit somewhere up into the 85 to 100% correctness range. And that is because we have written so many of these strategies and that is because we only take on clients that we feel confident that we can write a good strategy for and get as close to the mark as possible. For we used to only specialize in lifestyle brands until we then figured out how we can take our framework and push it out to a wider audience. But I would say now our sweet spot where we are definitely really, really good is in female-focused brands, female-focused audiences, and it's because we are a team of all females at this point in time and we have been since forever not on purpose, it's just with the types of brands we work for and the types of work we do. They've females have just been the best ones for the job. But it means we truly understand who our audiences are If we think, okay, well, you've just told me then that your specialty is female-focused brands, and yet you're out here on TikTok saying that your framework can be applied to any brand across any industry.
Speaker 1:It can be. The framework can be. It's the strategy writer that needs to be specialized. Let me explain this again the framework that we use with which to write our strategy, so literally, the questions that need to be answered. Essentially, that can be applied to any industry, any category, any business size, any stage of business, any audience, as long as the strategy writer has experience with that audience. If you are an internal marketer and you've worked in that business for 10 years and you use our framework, you're going to be able to write a really great strategy. If you are using our framework and you are your target audience as a business owner, you're going to be able to write a really good strategy.
Speaker 1:It's why, when I say that we have a very strict criteria on who we take on as done for you clients, I mean it. And if I get approached by a brand that is like I don't know what's, something I just have no idea about, like the manufacturing of pens, but I have no idea what a pen manufacturer is, necessarily what is going through their brains, and so I'm not going to take that job on. But if you tell me, oh, what about a male focus brand, a fishing brand, for example, I'll say, damn straight, give me that strategy, because I can write the heck out of that, because I live with a I wouldn't call them a professional fisherman by any means, but he has a lot of friends who are, who make a living through fishing on YouTube. Let's just say that. And so if I'm in this situation which I have been many times I will pick up the phone and I will call, and this is what we call qualitative data, where I conduct essentially an interview with the target audience and then I shape my strategy from that. But the point that I'm making is that you need to have an understanding of your target audience in order to write the strategy, but as long as you use the framework that we give you or that we use, you will get very, very close to your strategy being bang on, exactly correct. So we've explored how our framework works and how it helps to create better strategy writers, as long as the writer of the strategy understands the audience. However, we also need to remind ourselves that strategy is actually it's just a baseline for which you can then test your theories against.
Speaker 1:You can't split test if you don't control the variables. Oh my God, all my year 10, science is like coming to me now. Miss Price used to kick me out of class all the time. But, miss Price, I've taken a few things away from you the importance of the hypothesis and also the importance of controlling the variable when you are testing. And a lot of people get split testing wrong. They think that split testing is when you just test two completely separate pieces of content or two completely separate landing pages and then you're like, well, that one did better. Okay, why? I don't know, because I changed every friggin thing about the split test. You need to control the variable. You can't tell me that, oh well, this landing page is better because I think the headline, when you also change the colors, the photography and the amount of copy on the page.
Speaker 1:Split testing is about split testing very small, incremental pieces so that you can actually figure out exactly what the answer is. It may just be that it was the call to action that you used at the very bottom of the page. That's the only thing that changed, and you know that this other landing page over here got 50% more conversions. You're going to know that that type of call to action is the absolute winner, but you need a strategy in order to get to that place in the first place, because you need to guess what call to action Should I be putting here, based on what I know about my audience. So, is it that your audience prefers the more affirmative action where it's yes, give me my dream business, or do they prefer to stay in roll? Now, type of call to action. You need to first of all hypothesize, you need to strategize, you need to guess this based on the target audience personas that you have written, and then you need to go out and actually do it and then you need to split test against that to decide OK, was I right or was I wrong? That's how it works.
Speaker 1:The reason why so many people and why I had some big, bold statements at the top of this episode, where I said that everything you know about strategy is wrong, the way that you think, about the way that you're using it is because people think that a strategy is actually gospel. They think that it is another word, for they think that we literally chisel the strategy into stone and it can never be changed, when something that we really tried and make clear with our clients is that a strategy is just a starting point and it should evolve, and if it doesn't evolve, that means that you are actually dying. As you know, I believe in the evolve or die is how businesses should operate. So if your strategy isn't evolving, then you're doing something wrong. A strategy set in stone is a strategy that is doomed for failure. So, based on what I've just shared the fact that your strategy isn't an all or nothing, your strategy is not set in stone, and that your strategy is actually just a very good guess and a starting point for you to then do your live market testing and get feedback around I really hope that lifts the pressure off the strategy writing that you are doing. I know the first learning pathway in birdcage marketing school is called strategy success, and it's where we give you all the training, all the questions, all the templates that you need to use in order to write a winning brand strategy, which then will shape the rest of all of your marketing.
Speaker 1:But so many of you are getting stuck on it, so many of you are feeling overwhelmed and daunted by it, and I can see and my team members and I can see that that is because you are afraid of getting it wrong. Guys, don't be afraid of getting it wrong because most likely, especially if you're a small business, you are actually the target audience. So you know yourself deeply and I hope that this actually leads to you knowing yourself more deeply. And it is not set in stone. It is a good guess, it is a starting point, it is a hypothesis for you to test against in the real marketplace. Now, the problem that I have if you are not writing your strategy in the first place because you are afraid of getting it wrong, that's a problem. But if you are then not testing against that strategy because you are afraid of your content flopping, that is the second problem that you have.
Speaker 1:So, by being afraid of making a mistake with your strategy. You are actually completely avoiding the whole purpose of the strategy, which is to make a really good guess and then to test against that guess. That is the whole process of marketing that I think so many of you do not understand, and you think that this strategy has to be perfect, the content has to be perfect, everything has to be perfect, and if it is not, you are not going to do it at all. That is how you fail at marketing and I think that has actually been my superpower in my entire business career. It is the fact that I am perfectionistic in a few ways and, if anything, I think that has increased in the past 12 months especially, but especially in the past it was just like just do it, just put it out there and do it and just see what happens.
Speaker 1:Before Birdcage Marketing School, we did have a number of courses that I created that I either never launched or I launched to no one and got no sales. But if I hadn't have made those mistakes along the way, there's no way we could have had the successful school and course and programs that we do now, that are literally starting to become more lucrative than our actual agency, than our actual main business, and that is why the way that you think about strategy is not conducive to you being successful. That is why that you thinking that strategy is this perfect set and stone thing that you can never, that when you execute, you can never get wrong. That is why it is costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars because that is how much we have made through our Birdcage Marketing School alone but that is the opportunity cost that it's costing you by not doing a strategy in the first place but then not executing on your strategy. So what have we taken out of this?
Speaker 1:I hope every time I said strategy, you guys had a drink because you'd be feeling pretty happy right now. I did say that word a lot, but I really, really, really hope that you understood from what I said in this episode that you need to write your strategy. You have to do it. There is no way around it. Do not skip ahead to tactics. Do not skip ahead to just learning how to use the meta platform. You need to do your strategy first. I don't care if you are afraid of strategy, if you don't think you can write a strategy, all of those things. We give you absolutely no excuse not to get a strategy done with all the tools and support that we offer you now.
Speaker 1:If you really just have no idea how to write a strategy, fork out the cash and get us to do it for you. Because, yes, it might cost you five, ten thousand dollars, sometimes up to twenty five thousand dollars, but once we have that strategy in place, you will make that money back tenfold, a hundredfold Depends how good you are in execution. But if you put into place the things that we tell you to do, based on this strategy, I promise you there's no way you cannot make money. That's number one. Number two if you are like there's just no way I can pay that kind of money right now, well, first let's go back and watch that TikTok about how marketing is an investment, not a cost. But that's why Birdcage Marketing School exists, because for a very low cost comparatively to what you can be earning after doing this, you will learn how to write your own strategy, which I think is the skill for life personally. But number two, you're actually going to be able to take action on it. And if you're like, oh well, I'm not sure if my strategy is a hundred percent right. That's why we have a highly, heavily, heavily discounted one-on-one coaching sessions available through Birdcage Marketing School if you're a full library member.
Speaker 1:Now, in between both of those options, we do have our mentoring program, which is the one-on-one sessions that you have every two weeks with your senior strategist that is assigned to you, which guess what? Is assigned to you based on how good they are at understanding your target audience and how suited they are to your brand. We're not going to put a 20-year-old who's never had children before. We're not going to put you as make them your mentor if you are a baby brand, for example. That's not how it works. We always make sure that the person that you are working with is suited to your business and understands your business on a personal level as well in the fact that they could technically be the target audience at some stage or another.
Speaker 1:So, moral of the story you need a strategy. Second moral of the story you need to execute on that strategy and do not be afraid of failure. Guys. Come on, let's get over this. We are done with failure in 2024. It does not exist. There is just trying and trying again. The third moral of this story is that there are avenues and plenty of opportunities for you to get help. If you are blocking yourself in getting your strategy written, in executing your strategy, you really really, really have no excuse to not do this.
Speaker 1:Guys, thanks for listening to this episode of the Not so Kind regards podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. If you did, we would really appreciate if you left a review, on whatever streaming platform you were using. It helps us to grow as a brand new podcast and to help many more business owners and content creators reach their goals, just like we hope this brought you one step closer to your Bambak. Connect with us on TikTok, at Maddie Birdcage and at Birdcage Marketing, and the same handles on Instagram again, and if you really want to learn how to work with us, make sure you head to our website and book a call. We would love to speak with you.