Starting a business is easy. Now what?

Mastering Your Business Ecosystem: Key Steps to Success

In this episode of the 'Practice Your Perfect' podcast, host Ashlee Tate guides new and seasoned entrepreneurs through the essential steps to mastering their business ecosystem. The discussion covers clarifying your target audience, choosing the right platforms, developing a strong content strategy, leveraging SEO and keywords, building relationships and networking, and tracking key metrics. Ashlee emphasizes the importance of creating content that resonates with your audience and provides a foundation for a successful marketing strategy, whether you're running a for-profit or nonprofit organization.

00:00 Introduction: Overcoming the Fear of Starting a Business

00:44 Welcome to the Practice Your Perfect Podcast

00:55 Understanding Your Business Ecosystem

02:43 Identifying Your Target Audience

07:28 Choosing the Right Platforms

10:42 Developing a Strong Content Strategy

13:10 Leveraging SEO and Keywords

15:55 Building Relationships and Networking

17:23 Measuring Success Through Metrics

18:51 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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Transcript

 Starting a business might seem daunting and that is totally normal if you feel that way. And it's actually one of the easier parts of entrepreneurship, to be honest, like that's a series of steps. Go, get your name and start your business. And those things are not difficult. And I'm always very proud of people when they are starting a business because it takes so much guts to get from idea to actually making it happen.

But  then once you have the idea and you've started to make it happen, then it turns into a little bit more of an animal that we have to learn how to tame. And so that's why I want to talk to you today about mastering your business ecosystem and where and how to market it effectively. 

Welcome back to the practice your perfect podcast. And I am so excited to talk to you about today because today's one of the things that it's I love this. I love this guys. We are talking about your ecosystem as far as your business goes and really The different pieces of your ecosystem and how to manage it.

What do you need to focus on? What do you need to know when you are creating a business? Because, the first part of a business is yes, you have to go get some of these, some of the paperwork done and do all of those things, but that's part of the, that's like the easier part. If you can believe that, taking it from an idea to actually. Putting it on a piece of paper to say, I am a business owner. That part's exciting. That part is like new and fun. And again, one of the easier parts of starting a business, but when you actually are going to start creating, like content around things and marketing it and doing all of those other things, there are so many opportunities.

things to do that it can feel a little overwhelming. Like you don't know what to prioritize. What's the most important, like you hear all of these different things. Should you be on Instagram? Should you be on Twitter? Should you be on LinkedIn? So today I want to calm some of those fears for you. And I want to really talk about what you need to be focused on for your big business ecosystem when you're just getting started, or even if you've been building for a while, but now maybe you feel a little overwhelmed and you really want to start to Focus and I'm like, where does my effort really need to go?

Like, where am I going to get the most bang for my buck today? That's what we're going to talk about on the third episode of the practice, your perfect podcast. My name is Ashley Tate and thank you fierce visionaries for being here with me. And everything we do requires practice, whether it's, self development and we're becoming better people.

We want to be more productive. We want to make a profit. We want to make an impact. All of those things. are things that require us to really practice and that's what practice your perfect means. So thank you so much for joining me on this podcast today. So let's jump into number one. The first thing you need to do is really get clarity on who your customers are.

And I know you guys have heard this many times, and I will tell you right now that it is a difficult thing to do. It's hard because you feel like you're leaving some people and you really want to make sure you're talking to everybody. You don't want to leave out anybody, but let me tell you that. 

One of the things that I do is I talk to a lot of social entrepreneurs and I'm very big on purpose in your business and purpose driven entrepreneurs are like my sweet spot. It's like what I love to talk to you guys about. And it's really the type of entrepreneurs that I enjoy working with the most.

I don't care if it's for profit or nonprofit, but I can help both of those, right? So you have to even find a term that works for what you can offer or who you're looking for. Now, one thing I do want to add is like in this scenario and in this piece of your ecosystem, if you are a nonprofit, you have to understand that you do have to.

Two audiences. So there's one audience that you have that are your donors. And if your forward facing content is focused on finding more donors, then those would be the people that you are trying to get clarity on. And a lot of times for nonprofit founders, You guys have a hard time de deciphering between those two, right?

Sometimes you're talking about your purpose, but you're talking about your purpose as a way that you would talk to your actual clientele. And so we want to make sure that when we're talking about your ecosystem, and this is for all businesses for profit and nonprofit, you want to make sure that you're talking to the actual person that you're trying to attract.

Okay? So there are going to be lots of different types of people in your business. Okay. But we want to talk to the people that we are trying to attract into our actual business. Okay, so think about that and  really try to think about what are the needs, the behaviors, like what are they, what like really is, what are they struggling with that you are coming in to help?

So I don't know if you saw, but at the top of this video, I really talked about how You know, starting the business is fun. It's easy. And then we get into the nitty gritty of really creating our marketing. And that's where a lot of my clients tend to have the biggest issue. It's not the start of the business.

It's not launching the business. It is actually. Making sure that you're making the right content for the business, putting yourself out there to make the content right. And to actually show up. Those things are tough. Those things are hard. And there are a lot of things that you have to move through as far as fear and doubt and comparison.

There are a lot of things that we have to, push past, not even not even really, self development wise, but just holistically as an entrepreneur and getting into that kind of entrepreneurial mindset, we have to push past a lot of those things. So when you're thinking about your audience and determining who your market is, I want you to focus on the thing that you love.

know the most, right? So you could be talking about how to you could, you could really focus on like something like how to build cars. Like maybe that's your thing. If that's your thing, it might not be like, maybe you sell car parts and that might be your actual business, but your thing is that you understand cars and how to build them and how to put them together.

And then you're going to find people who are like, Yes, I love building cars and I want to learn more about that. And then they might find out that you actually are over here selling car parts. It doesn't have to be a direct line to what you do. It just needs to be a way to attract the people that are into the same things that you're into and that are maybe holding the same values that you do and really learning how to understand them deeply.

One of the things I think we miss on on actually deciphering who we're talking to and figuring out who our target audience is that we don't ever really stop.  And I have found that's been one of the most helpful pieces and really being able to speak to my audience is really stopping to listen and ask them questions.

Get their feedback, read the comments, read the questions, write them down somewhere, really understand what are they struggling with? How can I help them? Like, how can I meet them where they are? Not where you want them to be. But like where they are, like, where were you five years ago, seven years ago, two years ago, six months ago, what were you struggling with and then start to make content around those things.

And that will really help help you figure out the right way to actually, Talk to your customer. Okay, so I know that sounds really rudimentary, but it is one of the most powerful things that you can do to build an audience is to speak to them where you were and to listen to them and get their feedback.

Let them help you shape your business and the business that's going to help you. Them the most, right? So yeah that's number one. It's really just determining your market and going off of that. So I spent a lot of time there, but the next thing is to choose the right platforms.

So a lot of us, we just get on platforms because we see everybody else doing so well on those platforms. We see everybody else thriving and just killing it over there. But you have to think about the information that you are producing and All of that, you have to remember what do they say? The medium is the message, right?

And and the message is the medium. You really have to understand what,  how the message is going to be received on each day. different medium and how you want to express that message based on that medium. So a lot of times you will see people just taking their Facebook posts, putting on their Instagram posts, putting on their Tik Tok, putting on their YouTube, putting on their blog, their website.

You have to understand how, excuse me, you have to understand how the medium actually works so that you'll understand how to create the right content for your audience. for the people on that specific medium. Sorry. I know that's like a lot of different things, but for the platforms that you choose, we want you to choose something that one is Comfortable for you, as a creator, like what do you like to do and how you want to show up.

So if you don't want to show your face, maybe YouTube isn't the place for you. But if you love to talk and you like talking for a long time, like me, maybe a podcast is better for you where people can listen to your ideas, listen to your advice. But they don't necessarily have to be stuck to a video for all that time, right?

I've had someone on my videos, shorten it and make it super succinct and say, here's what she said, you'll thank me later. And, it's true. I'm a pretty Brevity is not my strength. Okay. But you have to know that about yourself and be aware that if your customers like that, great.

If they don't like that, then maybe you need to shift and make some changes. And and understanding the platforms are the best way to do that. I've never been a great person on Twitter because Twitter is,  it thrives on brevity, right? And so you need to understand that if you're going to write on Twitter, then you need to be able to make your ideas short, punchy, and succinct.

Like they need to be able to be clear and say what you mean to say and then get off. All right. So  that's number two.  Also one of the other things, I'm sorry, I'm looking down at my nose, but one of the other things is, you want to make sure that. You're in the right place for the type of audience that you're looking for.

So  LinkedIn, I'm going to tell you a story about LinkedIn just really quick. I haven't been on LinkedIn in a very long time. And then I went and I redid my profile, whole profile.  I did everything that I needed to do and I started writing on LinkedIn and it was short, like nothing. I haven't written on there a whole lot after that, but I wanted to test it out. I wrote on there and one of my first posts did really well.  Unexpectedly. Okay, and I realize that a lot of the people that I want to help are there. But if you're talking into a place that, like Instagram is a little bit more fun, a little bit more loose and relaxed. And so when you're trying to reach people there, you may need to create a different type of content than the more cerebral, serious Stuff that you might put on LinkedIn.

So that's just a good way to look at things because  the content that I would put on LinkedIn is not what I would put on Instagram. It won't work. So always make sure you're just looking at that. And that's, you've probably heard that before. So that's number three. Number two, sorry,  number three.

Now, number three,  this one is pretty big. You want to develop a strong content strategy. Now I will tell you, and in my next podcast, I'm going to talk about I'll talk to you all about like how I messed up on this part, but content strategy is huge. I don't care if you use a content calendar, like a, just a basic calendar to start writing out your content, but really give yourself, a little bit of a a boost, by writing out your content beforehand, really understanding what you want to say, what the point of your video is, what you're why you're saying what you're saying.

I don't care if it's a real, I don't give us a tweet. Like where does it fit into your content strategy? Not just blindly showing up. Now I will tell you that I will take blindly showing up and you just are showing up more than I would.  More than I would say, don't do anything and do your content strategy.

I want you to do it alongside. If right now you just need to show up and just do, that's what I want you to do. But if you want to really accelerate your productivity and And your success online, then yes, a content strategy is fantastic. Content batching, content scheduling, all of those things are necessary and they are what are going to really make the difference between whether you're going to succeed online or whether you're not.

Now, if you're just out there testing and you're just getting started, I always recommend just throw things at the wall, right? Like when you throw the noodles at the wall and you're just trying to figure out if something's going to stick and what people like, that's great. Just do that.

Especially when you're just starting out. People don't know about you yet. They don't know, they don't, they're not necessarily watching your channel yet. I still experiment on my channel. There's not a ton of people watching the channel yet. Same for this podcast. Like until it's huge and people are coming here to expect a specific thing,  I'm just going to throw things at the wall and see what sticks, see what people like, what they want to know more about what resonates with you.

I love that, right? It's feedback. It's all feedback. And if you can really think about content from that perspective, it's putting out your ideas, getting the feedback, iterating on those ideas, and then coming back and creating even more. That's really what it comes down to.  Putting content strategies and schedules and all of those things are really just training wheels to get you out there and guardrails, not training wheels, they're  guardrails that are going to keep you focused, right?

So that we don't say squirrel and we don't say, I have another idea and I want to do this and I want to do that. No, you are sitting down to record X, you've already given thought to it, you've already created a script, you already know what you're doing and then you just go. And that's what we're trying to do when we create a content schedule and batching and all of those things. 

Okay. 

Next up is leveraging SEO. Okay. And keywords. Now, this is once you get a little bit deeper, but when you're creating your content ecosystem, one of the things you want is for people to actually be able to find, Your content, right? We want them to be able to find our content. So in order for them to do that, you have to understand what you have to understand what podcasts, titles you need, what SEO you need, the keywords that they're going to be searching.

So a good way to do that is you can just go into Google and you can say the title of your podcast or YouTube or whatever you're trying to look up. And see what keywords people are using. You can look on the number one page, and you can see like people are using these keywords or those keywords.

And then you want to put those keywords into your actual content. Now you don't want to do keyword stuffing, which you've probably heard of this before too, and SEO I did not say this, but search engine optimization, basically all you're trying to do is so that people, when they do search for whatever it is that you're creating, they can find it.

So I'll use a lot of terms like small business, nonprofits, purpose driven entrepreneurs entrepreneurship, and this one specifically, I will talk about creating content, creating a content ecosystem, marketing your business. Those are SEO words that people are actually going to be searching for. And so this is going a little bit, I don't want to go too deep into the woods or into the weeds on this because it is something that does require a little bit more training, but it's just something to be aware of. Like you wouldn't just put up a title just to put it up there. You put up a title that is going to help people find your content.

And that's the purpose of SEO and keywords. So  when you have time and you're ready to. Build off of, creating on the right platforms for yourself and really starting to understand how that platform works. These are things that you will add into the next tier of really scaling your business and growing it over time.

So leverage SEO and your keywords. That's what we want to say. And this is something that comes after you understand your audience, after you understand what platform. Then you can start using the keywords. Okay. And then and  the last thing about all of that too is

the last thing about all of those things that I just said to you are also part of your content strategy. So really I would probably start with,  Whoa,  I would start with your content strategy first and then go from there, right? Cause you're going to add in those words when you start to think about your content strategy. 

One of the other things that you want to think about when you're thinking about SEO and keywords and all of that is you want to think about  How people are finding your website or what words are on your website because those things also matter Even when you are writing up your profiles and all of those things, what words are people using to find people like you?

It's important for you to figure that out because that all of those pieces any written pieces on the internet are all  Just basic SEO and keywords and that's what you need to know for your business So when you get there and you're ready for that You That's what we do, SSEO and keywords. 

Now number five is all about building relationships and networking and really finding your community. Like where do you need to be? Where is it that is going to help you thrive? And you can check out our community down in the the description box if you want or in the show notes.  Finding your other fierce visionaries, like other people who are purpose driven and they really want to, Live their best life and they want to, create the best business they can make the most impact  Those are the people that maybe you want to be around right like you want to find other people like you so it's important That if you find somebody online follow them check them out send them a hey, let them know that you are  doing something very similar or something that could potentially help their business or that you'd like to come alongside with, or maybe you want to interview them or they want to interview you like creating that type of Those types of, relationships online are huge and it just expands your network all the way around.

It doesn't always have to be transactional. It can just be something like, Hey, I really love your content and I just wanted to tell you, it could be something as simple as that. And it's just a way to connect. So don't discount building relationships on lines. It's what wow, online. It's one of the best things that you can do.

Okay. Don't discount.  So don't discount making relationships online because it's one of the best things that you can do. It the impact is far beyond income or anything that, is material focused. I don't even know what I'm talking about right now.  Take all that out. 

Now, the one thing that's really going to,  Propel your business forward and really show you how you are building and the success of what you're doing or the failures of what you're doing are going to be in your metrics. So measurement and tracking is huge. Figure out what you want to measure, why you want to measure it and what you're looking for, what your goals are for that.

So if you're simply looking for some vanity metrics like followers, are they increasing? Are they not increasing? Okay. You know how to find. Those metrics. But let's say you're looking for something a little bit deeper. Let's say you're trying to build a community or you're trying to see if your donations increased or if you're selling your courses or if people are joining your tribe or whatever it is, find a metric that means something to you.

Find a metric that is important to you and your business and that really aligns with the values and the mission of your business. And then track that because I will tell you that if you start tracking, sorry guys. If you start tracking  those types of metrics, you will find that there are so many variables that go into how much money you're going to make or how many people are going to follow you or if the algorithm is working, find a metric that doesn't have anything to do with the algorithm, but that could be a correlation to how many people are seeing your content or what content is actually working the best, because then you can go back and you can actually make more of that type of content, or you can connect with those customers coming from a specific platform.  Now that we've talked about all the different ways and focuses that you can have in your ecosystem and why you need to focus on specific things, those are my tips for today on how to master your ecosystem. Your business ecosystem is one of the most important pieces of your online marketing strategy and building a brand.

And you want to make sure that you're really keeping track of, All the time. Do you need to pivot on your audience? Is that really the audience you want? You have to determine that, right? I mean you can have a lot of people  and not have any sort of community amongst those people, right? So you want to make sure that you're going the direction that you actually intended and that you're getting some of the feedback that you actually want from the people that you want it from.

I say all that to say that's it for today in today's video. And thank you so much for watching the practice your perfect podcast. And thank you so much for listening today. For those of you that are listening, I would love to know what I could talk about that you guys want to hear. If you have any questions, please leave them down in the comment section below.

I always like to answer. It's like one of my favorite things to talk back to you guys. So please. Leave all your questions, comments. Again, thank you so much. And it's great to be back. I hope you guys like the new setup. It's a little different. And things will get better. I will actually focus on my intro.

Okay. I will focus on some of those things, but I just had to get down and dirty and do it today. So as you guys saw talking about content strategy today, I recorded all three of those videos. The first three podcast episodes in two hours.  And I am  pretty positive that one of those did not actually turn out. 

But anyway, so anyway, stay fierce on your goals and get out there and unleash your something amazing. And I will talk to you guys next week. Thanks. Bye guys.