Slash Your Marketing Budget to Make More $$$

Angela Frank: 00:00:00

Welcome to The Growth Pod.

Today we're checking in one on one to learn how you can use the power of a marketing ecosystem to spend less on your marketing, but make more money selling your products and services. I'm your host, Angela Frank. I'm a fractional CMO and founder with a track record of generating multimillion dollar revenue for my clients.

In: 2022

So if you're like me and love learning about how to grow your business more efficiently, you've come to the right place. So let's back up a little. What exactly is a marketing ecosystem and how can it help you spend less on your marketing while making more money?

It seems counterintuitive, right?

Well, a marketing ecosystem is a method of connecting your marketing channels into one cohesive system where the sum of of all of your marketing efforts is greater than its parts. And when you connect your marketing channels in this way, it creates a system that costs less and generates more revenue.

I love sharing the power of marketing ecosystems with business owners because if you're someone who has been in growth mode for a while, it's likely that your systems were built on the fly and likely they need some cleaning up. So with that in mind, let's start at the beginning, which is laying the foundation for your marketing ecosystem.

At the start of any successful marketing strategy, there are three key components. Your brand purpose, your tone of voice, and the person you are best able to help.

Your brand goal helps to tie all of your marketing together and I use this formula. Helping customer outcome. For me, my brand purpose is to help brands build profitable marketing strategies.

Your brand purpose is valuable because it quickly communicates the types of people you help and the outcomes they experience. After using your product or service, the next step is to create your tone of voice. And I also like to keep this super simple.

Just choose five adjectives that best describe your brand. I'll give you two examples. For my personal brand, my adjectives are authentic, approachable, relatable, expert guide.

But for my consulting business, my adjectives are expert, advisor, skilled, approachable, partner. You can see from these two examples how while the adjectives are similar, they create a different vibe for each brand.

The adjectives for my personal brand seem more approachable, maybe like a colleague, but for my consulting business, they seem a little bit more buttoned up. So simply choose five adjectives that you'd like to be associated with your business. Now here's where the magic happens.

By combining your brand purpose and your adjectives, you create a natural jumping off point for your marketing messaging. And not only this, but you also create cohesion between everything you're doing online and off. This is super important.

It creates psychological safety around your brand in which every time someone encounters you, their image of your brand is continually reinforced.

There are no surprises or incongruencies in what you're doing, and you're fostering increased trust that will ultimately lead to more people becoming a customer. After you have your brand purpose and your tone of voice, you need to identify who the one person is that your offer helps the most.

So to do this, look at your best customers. What do they have in common? Did they give you feedback after using your product or service?

By looking at all of your best customers, you're able to create an image of your super customer and then use this image to go out and find more customers just like them. After you have all three of these components, you can tie it all together using a statement. I use this one.

I help ideal customer achieve outcome so that benefit and therefore ideal state. Here's what that looks like in my business.

I help founders create profitable marketing strategies so they can hit their growth targets and focus on creating greater impact in their business. I want to note that this is loosely adopted from Alex Hormozi's book $100 million offers, which I highly recommend.

But you can use this formula to create something for your brand. And the important thing here is that these statements and the adjectives are not customer facing.

They're not meant for you to include in your marketing materials. They are meant to be guidelines. So all of your marketing has cohesion.

You want to make sure that your marketing all sounds the same, speaks to the same type of person, and shows that you solve a problem. After you have this, your foundation is complete, but your marketing ecosystem is just getting started.

So now we work on framing up your strategy and there are three key points to this step. Creating custom journeys, addressing objections and asking for the sale. So let's start with creating custom journeys.

Before someone purchases your offer, what information do they need to make their decision and where do they prefer to get this information? It might be a few different places, right? Some people may be new and they will need more information than an existing customer.

Some people like to read, others may prefer to watch videos, while others yet will need to hear you recommended from a trusted friend or advisor.

There are so many different ways that your offer can pop up on somebody's radar and everyone will be at a different part of their buying journey when that happens. So what can we do to make sure that we're meeting everyone where they are? Well, the answer is to create what I'm dubbing a build your own journey.

You need to have information available everywhere, speaking to all of the different stages of someone's buying journey and covering all of the questions, concerns, and considerations that they will have each step of the way.

You need to make this all available in written form, video form, social content, blogs, white papers, et cetera, and give people the ability to learn about your offer in the way that they prefer to learn about it and give them all of the information that they need. But once a prospect has all of this information, they're still likely to have some objections.

So the next thing you need to do is address those objections. There are many different types of objections, and if you've ever been on a sales call, you know that your prospects have many.

But there's really only a few simple categories of objections. I don't have the time, I don't have the money, or I don't have the confidence that this will work for me.

And these three simple objections can manifest in many different ways in your buyer's mind.

So it's your job to sit down, understand all of the reasons someone will push back on the information that you provided and then address them in that content. Suddenly I don't have time becomes I know what you're thinking. This seems like a big commitment. I'll have to find a babysitter and clear my schedule.

And you're worried that you won't have the time. But let me stop you right there and share Cheryl's story.

Cheryl is a mom of five with a demanding career, and her husband is often deployed, leaving her in charge of the household. And she was actually able to implement her new nutrition rout in less than five minutes per day.

Now, instead of pushing back and saying that they don't have the time, they're like, wow, sign me up. If Cheryl can do it, so can I. So you need to go out and find these perfect examples to address your customers objections.

And you need to address them all and in every way that they would manifest in your buyer's mind. And it's okay if you don't have a story like the one that I just made up about Cheryl.

What's important is that you show scenarios where the objection wasn't a big deal after all. And Ideally, you're able to share multiple scenarios so your prospects can address the exact version of their objection that they had in their mind.

What's next? Well, you've got to tell them the next step that they need to take. This is called a call to action.

It could be that they need to book a call, make a purchase, add to cart, reserve their spot. These are all calls to action. But here's where you're going to take it to the next step. You're not going to use a call to action.

You're going to use a call to outcome. And the difference is how that next step up is framed up in your prospect's mind. So let's say that your call to action is to book a call.

Yes, it's very understandable what you're asking them to do, but if you change Book a call to improve my health. Now, instead of thinking of another task that they need to complete, I'm going to go and I'm going to find my time and I'm going to book my call.

They're not visualizing that. They're visualizing the outcome of the next step that they need to take.

Now, you do have to be careful when using a call to outcome because you don't want your prospect to feel like you're trying to be sneaky or that you're attempting to obfuscate what you're asking them to do.

But if you're clear on the next step and use the call to outcome on your submit button, for example, you create a path that is desirable and makes obvious sense. Of course I want to improve my health, so I'm going to book a call. So let's recap.

To market less and sell more, you need to create your brand purpose, identify your tone of voice, find the one person you are best able to help. And after you've created that foundation, you need to create custom journeys, address your buyer's objections, and ask for the sale.

After you've done all of this work, you're ready to start adding your marketing channels into your ecosystem. And we'll discuss the nitty gritty of how that works in another episode. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Growth Pod.

I look forward to seeing you in the next one.