No Fluff - Small Business Simplified

All right, welcome to another episode of No Fluff, Small Business aside. So what I want to talk about in today's episode is making the transition from day job, employee to self employed CEO, small business owner, right, and this is a transition that a lot of people struggle with for a few different reasons and they, the underlying thing on below all of that the thing under the thing of that is, you're in charge, there's no one else to blame.

All right, welcome to another episode of No Fluff, Small Business aside. So what I want to talk about in today's episode is making the transition from day job, employee to self employed CEO, small business owner, right, and this is a transition that a lot of people struggle with for a few different reasons and they, the underlying thing on below all of that the thing under the thing of that is, you're in charge, there's no one else to blame.

Welcome we are back for another episode of No Fluff Small Business Simplified. And in this episode, we're going to be talking all about niching and your ideal customer. Niching is a super trendy term that you probably have heard before, if you've been in the online business space, if you've been spending time researching your how to build or start a business, you've probably heard of niching. Basically, what it means is getting really specific about who your ideal customer is, who you want to sell to your products or services, and tailoring your marketing content, your sales efforts, your lead generation to reach out specifically to those people. And there's definitely some big benefits that you will see from niching.

We are back with another episode of No Fluff - Small Business, Simplified, and today I want to talk through your funnels and how your funnels and your digital ads should really hook up to each other. A lot of people are wondering, should I run ads right now? What would that ad strategy look like? And so many people are wasting money because they're starting to run ads before they're really thinking through and getting clear on how they are setting up their funnel overall. Ads are just a piece of the puzzle when it comes to your funnel, and you're really going to not see the ROI that you're wanting and hoping to see from doing paid ads, if you are not thinking through the entire journey of your customers, that purchasing journey which we've talked about in some other episodes. So, when you are looking at starting to run ads, you're probably going to first ask yourself, well where do I run these ads? Should I run them on Facebook and Instagram? Should I run them on Google? Should I run them on YouTube or Tik Tok? The first thing question you want to ask yourself is, what am I selling these people and are they looking for this thing specifically? Do they know they want this thing, or is this something that I know will be valuable for them, but they might not actively be searching for it?

Okay, let's talk about what to do when business is slow. And for a lot of businesses, a lot of business owners, a lot of industries, you might have peaks and valleys right you might have busy seasons and slow seasons. And so I wanted to share some things that you can do during those slower seasons that are really going to set you up for success.

Let's talk about some social media tips and best practices and I wanted to hit on this because I know social media is so important for a lot of small businesses, but for a lot of them and a lot of business owners, you kind of don't know where to start, because there's so many different social media platforms you can be on, and then even within those social media platforms. There's so many things, you are supposed to be doing, and it's really hard to keep up, right.

So today, I want to talk about some of the top mindset refrains that I find are the most powerful and the most impactful for a lot of small business owners, and we're gonna go over five or six today. But these are really really impactful mindset reframes if you are you struggling with your mindset or maybe you don't even know but you're struggling with these things.

As a business owner, so the first thing is really around frequency. And what I mean by that is we we know every time we're talking about one of our products or services right? If you're still creating all of your own content and you haven't outsource any of your content creation yet, you are very aware of how often you've talked about a product or service or launch or webinar or anything like that. It's really easy to get into a place of well, I don't want to annoy my audience, I don't want to annoy people. So I don't want to talk about this thing, too much, but the reality of social media is that we all follow and consume a lot of content every day. And a lot of content on social media. So a little bit of a kind of reframing mindset check here is, you feel like you've talked about this thing 1000 times and you're really worried people are just tired of hearing about it, right? But they probably have not heard of that thing at all.

They have no idea what you're talking about, or they're actually just seeing or hearing or reading about your post about that product or service for the first time, and often that people typically need to read or hear or learn about something, multiple times before they actually remember it. So, even if they have seen it before, the likelihood that they've already seen it enough times to really remember that that's what you offer that that's what you're promoting is low.

Today let's talk about SEO for your business. SEO stands for search engine optimization and this is something that can be really scary for a lot of business owners, because it feels like this, just like what the hell is it, how do I do it, it's super complicated or it's like very like hard to know what is right to do what is wrong to do what should I be doing. So I wanted to do a little introduction into SEO for small businesses at Sandy Nicola digital the marketing agency we work with a lot of small and medium sized businesses on their SEO, and basically you know let's just start with what is SEO so SEO search engine optimization is anything that's coming up like if you Google something, all of those results that are coming up, that's search engine results, right, and then the O is optimization which is optimizing your site to help ensure that it is coming up in those search results. So I'm not talking about the results that come up in the first few slots after you Google stuff, you'll see next to those that says ad and those are Google ads right those are display ads, those are you know people are paying to come up in that first, second, you know, or third result. Anything below that, or if no one is running ads for that, you know, then no ads will come up, but anything else that's coming up, those are organically coming up in your search engine results, so that means basically Google looks at the entire internet right any

page any website that has been submitted to

their, to their to Google, and they do what's called crawling a website and they look at your whole website, and they decide based on what this user is searching for, they want to give in the search results, the all the sites all the content that is most likely to closely aligned with what that user is searching for, right, because Google wants their users to have a good experience a good user experience so they want to make sure if I'm googling best vegan recipes for the instapot Google wants to make sure I'm seeing content that's coming up that's related to vegan restaurant recipes for instapot right, they want to make sure I'm not getting results for meat based and subpar recipes right because that's not relevant to me and so I don't want as a user, I don't want to have to parse through irrelevant information. So Google will crawl through your website, and using all the information on your website and you know different things that we're going to talk about in a minute, they will decide okay what is this website about what's the content of this website about, and then that is how you come up in those search engine results.

Today, I want to talk about systems and processes automations and outsourcing in your business. And I think this is so important and something that a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners struggle with, as they really start to scale and grow their business, right? Especially if you're a service based business owner, you now have enough clients where you're bringing in that revenue, but you are spending all your time servicing those clients. So how do you continue to grow without duplicating yourself, right, like, I can't kill myself. So that means I need to be able to get more done in less time. So what gives, and a lot of business owners jumped to outsourcing right there, and they'll just go straight for the VA. But there's a lot of lower hanging fruit that you can make yourself have more time available through systems and processes and automation, that will actually be cheaper than outsourcing. So that you can rely on the outsourcing for the higher level work for work that really requires that person, right an actual person to be handling it. So when I talk about systems and processes, this is really making sure that you have standard operating procedures documented for your business, right. So every time you do something, you should have a document that outlines every step of doing that thing, right, and you can have a document that outlines step by step, or you can record a video and then transcribe that video.

I know that so many business owners are not doing market research, then they're creating products and services that tank that do not sell, and they wonder why you have to do market research.

I don't care that you think your product or service is a great idea. I don't care that you think it's going to be so helpful and people are going to love it. I don't care. You have to be doing market research because literally just taking a little bit of time to do market research, when you're building a new business, when you're creating a new product, service or package is going to pay dividends in the future.

Doing market research is going to enable you to answer questions like:

What should I charge?

What should the price point for this be?

Do people want this thing?

How should I talk about this thing that's going to help it to sell?

How do I talk about the value of this thing?

Who wants this thing?

Where can I connect with the people that would buy this thing?

Those are just a couple of questions that you can answer with market research, but they're huge, they're the only questions that matter. But so many people don't actually do market research - you might think you're doing market research but you're really not.

HOW TO START YOUR MARKET RESEARCH

So there's a couple of components to market research that are going to be the most impactful for you. The first and easiest thing is going to be doing a competitive analysis.

This means looking up people who are offering similar products and services. Check out their website, how are they talking about the thing that they're selling, who does it seem like they're targeting, what are their price points. I aim to look at 3-5 of these (preferably five) because this is really easy thing to do.

Make sure when you're doing this competitive analysis, you're looking at people who are delivering a product or service at a similar level as you. What I mean by that is if you are a social media manager and you've really just started out - don't do a competitive analysis based on an agency that's been around for 10 years and who's extremely experienced at it, because that's not your direct competitor. Yes, they're offering something that's similar, but they're not your direct competitor because I guarantee that person, or that business, is commanding a higher price point than you're going to be able to command.

That's not a bad thing. it's just the truth.

So when you're doing a competitive analysis, you can look at those people because that's something to reach for and something to work towards. But your direct competitors are going to be people who are delivering a similar product or service at a similar level as you and who are offering that product or service to a similar target audience. So these are all things to keep in mind.

Once you do your competitive analysis, now it's time to talk to real people. And I know this is the step that a lot of people skip because you don't want to talk to a real person or you don't know how to get on the phone with a real person. But getting on some phone calls, is going to pay dividends in the future. It's going to be so so impactful for your business, because you get so much value from those conversations!

When I'm doing market research, what I like to do is I like to try and get on calls with two different types of people:

My target customer.

My competitors.

Okay, so let's talk about the second one really quick - competitors or peers in your space. So, if you can get on a call with someone who is offering a similar product or service as you at a similar price point to what you're thinking about, maybe you can get on a call with a couple of those people. You can also get on calls with people who are or businesses who are offering a similar product and service to you, but it might be at a higher level, a higher service level offering. So it might be someone who started their business and has been offering that thing for 10 years already, but you can still get on a call with them because everybody started somewhere, and they can give you a lot of help and information around that.. They might even give you some advice around that. But we really want to communicate to those people that we really value their time and we really value their feedback. And that's the key here is really showing that value in that appreciation. So how do we do that?

Again, some of you some people out there are not going to be willing to do this for you, they're not going to be willing to help you. And that's okay. We want to look for the people who are willing to help, who are willing to give us that value. And we want to offer something for them that really shows them I value your time.

First of all, you're going to make these calls 15-20 minutes max! Any longer than that is just not acceptable. It's not valuing their time, they're doing this for you. They don't need to do this for you. It's a favor. Second, what I typically do is I offer to buy them a coffee so I'll either send them like a $10 Digital Starbucks gift card or maybe a $10 amazon gift card. This just is an extra indication of like, “Wow, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.”.

Next, your target customer calls.

Okay, so you want to identify who's a target customer. Ask them to get on those calls, you can either give them that digital gift card for a coffee or you can even offer them something for free. So if you're a social media manager, you might offer them a free social media audit in exchange for this call, or a few templates that they can use - something that they would find valuable, something that they would get value out of getting for free, and this is not just something you're giving out anyone for free you can offer them your lead magnet that anybody can go to your website and get for free, there's something that needs to be a value there. If you don't have that thing if you're not sure what that thing could be, offer that gift card - easy, not a big deal. There's going to be some people that are like “No I can't do it.” That's okay, you will find people who will be willing to do it.

This part is key - you will not pitch them at the end of these calls.

Because they are getting on these calls purely as “this is market research I want to ask you some questions.”

If you then pitch them at the end of this call, you are totally breaking their trust. They did not come onto this call to be sold to. You will sometimes end the market research call and someone will want to work with you or will ask how they can work with you. I really recommend saying like, yes, 100%, we can do that. Let's schedule a discovery call specifically where we can talk about that.

When you get on these calls, make sure you prepare questions ahead of time as well. Again this is indicating to them that you really value your their time. So, you are preparing questions around what are their problems, what are the problems they're looking for solutions on, how would your product or service benefit them. Use this time to really dig into what are their needs, what's the problem, how can you solve that problem via your product or service, how can you help them, how can you make their life easier? Ask them about pricing and you could say so for this type of package, what would you be willing to pay for this type of package? Ask if you can either record the call or take very very diligent notes as well, because you really want to pay attention to the words that they're using and how they're describing these things, because you can then go and use that in your content and you can get really great content ideas, because it's coming straight from the horse's mouth.

If you go through this market research process and you do all these things, you are going to have so much information that you are able to use to make so many decisions. And, information backed decisions, you're not just pulling your pricing out of the air, you're not just pulling your packages out of the air, you've actually talked to people, you've actually figured out what they needed, and you're able to provide that no more, no less. And you're able to use their words and solve their problems as they've identified them. So this has huge impacts for your business but it's something that a lot of people don’t do. They're not having this wealth of information because they're not doing that market research.

If you are struggling to figure out how to do these things and you really just want someone to be able to hold your hand and walk you through how to do these things or you've done some market research but you're really struggling to understand what all that information is telling you, you probably want to book a digital strategy intensive! This is a 90 minute call where we deep dive into answering all of your questions and you get a really specific actionable plan after that call so that you can move forward and know exactly what you need to do to proceed.