Episode 12: Your Marketing Questions Answered

Hello and welcome back to Imperfect Marketing. This is your host, Kendra Corman, and I'm so happy that you've tuned in for this episode. Today's, episode's going to be a little bit different as I don't have someone that I'm interviewing and I'm going to be answering questions that you all have submitted, or even add in some questions that people ask me on a regular basis. Let's go ahead and get started. The first question is, how do you grow your email list from scratch? I would be a millionaire if I was paid every time I was asked this question, and I think the first thing to keep in mind is that growing your email list needs to be top of mind for you.

If it's top of mind for you and it's a priority, your email list will grow because you are going to be doing activities and asking people to join your email list on a regular basis, and it is going to grow. Let's get started on how you can do this in a couple of different ways. First, start with your friends and family. Start with prospects you've spoken with. This will usually get you about 20 to 50 people. The important piece here is to make sure that they know that you're adding them to your email list. While it's tempting just to add people, you really, really want your email list to be permission-based. I actually like it when people unsubscribe because then I'm not reaching out to people that aren't going to be engaging or buying my product or anything like that.

You want a small, tight email list to start that's going to garner engagement, and these friends, family, and prospects that you're starting out with are going to give you that feedback. Let's now think about the last email list that you signed up for. How did you sign up? Was it in person? Did you scan a QR code? Did someone ask you, "Can we have your email list to send you discounts and coupons at a store checkout?" Was it in print? Did you see a sign? Was there a QR code on the table at the local restaurant? Was it online? I do almost all of mine online personally, mostly to get some sort of freebie white paper or research that someone else has done. But think about the last few email lists that you signed up for.

How did you sign up? Think about the ones that you didn't sign up for. What made you not do that? The most important thing is to ask in all of these situations, but not just about joining your email list, ask them if they want the value you're going to provide. Nobody wants any more email. Nobody wants to sign up for your email newsletter, but people do want budget tips, marketing tips, book recommendations, discounts, the white paper, the checklist, the how-to guide. Whatever it is that you're offering of value to your subscribers, this is what they want.

When you're not talking about this as joining your email list, again, you're trying to sell the value that you provide, you can have signage, you can have a QR code on your business card, a QR code on all your flyers, brochures, direct mail, a popup on your website. Popup on your website, most marketers are annoyed by these. However, they will still tell you that they are the number one generator of people on their email list for the most part. Social media, share. Ask if people want your discount, your freebie, your checklist, or whatever value proposition you have for the email address. That's important. Put it in your email signature. Again, sell the value, not join my list. But you can put this everywhere.

So far we're growing your email list from scratch. We started with friends, family, and prospects. We're keeping it top of mind. We're placing it everywhere in all of our communications, whether it's in person, print, or online, and we're sharing the value. Now I want you to think about why people subscribe. They want discounts, and promotions. They want to support a cause if you're a nonprofit. They want exclusive content. For most of you all, you're service-based. That means freebies, downloadables, and things like that. Now, I'll get into a little bit more detail on what those are with another question. But again, you want to share with people how often you're going to email them, your privacy policy, and make sure that they know that they can unsubscribe at any time.

Top three things to do. Number one, start and preload your list with those 20 to 50 people that want to support you and your organization. I probably wouldn't do your nieces and nephews if they're not in business or your kids or things like that. It's not about quantity, it's about quality. But these people have been supporting your business and supporting you, going out and doing what you're doing, so it doesn't hurt to keep some of these people in the loop, even if they're not necessarily going to buy your services, because they'll be able to talk about your services. I still remember someone was asking me for a referral for a real estate agent and I said, "Oh yeah. No, I've got several. Here's a great one."

I referred this person. Then they called me back to let me know that they weren't going to be reaching out to that real estate agent because they forgot that their cousin was a realtor and their mother reminded them. That should never happen within your family. Your family should know what you do and be able to refer you when it's needed. Again, friends, family, prospects, then also you're going to be putting it everywhere you are, whether it's in person on your business card, on flyers, brochures, direct mail pieces. You're going to be putting that online with a popup on your website. You're going to share it every so often on social media, asking people if they want things.

You're going to add it to your email signature. People are going to want to hear from you and hear what you have to say and share. Question number two that I get that ties into number one a bit is, what do I build as a freebie or downloadable? What is this online value that I can provide, because I don't have discounts, because I don't sell a product? I am the service. Let's talk a little bit about that. I have eight different things that I usually recommend people test out. Number one is a case study or success story. Showcase how using your product or implementing your service saved somebody time, money, whatever it happens to be. Number two is custom research. Who doesn't love to hear custom research?

Hootsuite does this a lot. HubSpot does this a lot. They'll list the top 10 Instagram stats of 2022, things like that. Well, people like to read those and understand those. If you can create some custom research, people will definitely pay for that with their email address. Think about a toolkit, different things that you use all the time in your business. People are always looking for recommendations. Putting together a list of items or some sort of toolkit that people can use to make their jobs more efficient and effective is something to keep in mind. You can also do an online workshop or webinar, which people pay before with their email addresses all the time. I know I sign up for webinars all the time.

Don't always go, but I do try to always listen to the replay. Checklists are awesome. If you're doing an event and you're trying to figure out what you should be doing, the checklist is a great guide for that. How to guide, sharing someone how to do something step by step by step is extremely important. People, again, will pay for how to learn how to do that. Resource guides, I love resource guides. They're a little bit like toolkits, but a little bit different, but you can share a bunch of resources of where people can get information, ideas, things like that. And finally, a quiz. I'm working on a quiz right now myself. Hopefully it'll be launching soon after this podcast launches. I'll be sure to update the show notes with a link to that quiz.

People love quizzes. They're easy. They're low stress. You can have some great conversations with people showcasing personalized results after they fill out your quiz. It's amazing what people will do and how many people will actually sign up to get their results emailed to them and grow your list faster than ever before. Your freebie can be one page. It can be 10 pages. Just make sure it's digestible and actionable. That's the most important thing. You want the people that read this and paid for this with their email address not to hurry up and unsubscribe the next email that you send. You want them to begin to know, like, and trust you. And to do that, they need to be able to see what you're putting together.

They need to be able to see that they can take action on it and that it can make a difference, because then it's like, "Oh wow! This was free? I can't wait to see what else she has to offer." And eventually they'll be paying you for the services that you do because you gave them so much value. Moving on to question number three, what content do I use for my freebie? This is a question I get asked all the time, and this is the trick, you need to know your audience. Do not, not, and in my notes here I've underlined not three times, do not make any assumptions. When I was the Jeep advertising manager, we had amazingly detailed personas driven by research and focus groups. It was amazing.

When I moved to wholesale insurance, I had to pick up the phone and ask questions. I also tagged along on sales calls and listened to the questions being asked. Nowadays in my small business marketing, it is similar to what I did at the insurance wholesaler. I asked questions, I write down questions, and I'm asked regularly different questions. I take notes of those to make episodes for this podcast, to create blog posts, to create social media posts, to create freebies that help people grow in their marketing more effectively and efficiently. In episode four of Imperfect Marketing this season, I spoke with Scott Lawrence of Headshots by Scott Lawrence. He has a successful YouTube channel and it's all based off questions he's asked by customers getting their headshots.

What do I wear? What do I do? How do I do my makeup? What poses do I need? Those types of things really help prepare his customers. They're the questions everybody is asking. I find many of my clients really don't understand their customers, and that's really the core of the problem. What content do they use? Well, if you don't know what your target audience is looking for, then you won't know what kind of content to create that's going to incentivize them to pay with their email address, right? If I ask a lot of my clients, "Well, what drove that customer or client to buy from you?" I get a lot of surface answers. "Well, they needed it. Well, they didn't have the staff."

You need to go deeper. What is the pain that drove them to want to spend money? Okay, they didn't have the staff. They could have waited, right? Well, no, they couldn't. Well, why? What is it that drove them? What is that ultimate piece that put them over the edge to work with you? That is the question and getting them from where they are right now to where they are answering that question and buying from you is truly what you're trying to create with your freebie. I do not recommend that you send out a survey or an email to people that says, "Hey, can you answer me a couple of questions? Why did you buy from me?" No, that's not going to get you what you need.

You want to pick up the phone and call or have a Zoom meeting or say, "Hey, can we take five minutes at the end of this status meeting to talk a little a bit about what drove you to hire me? Or if you have a list of prospects that you want to work with and aren't working with yet, that's even better. Let's start with them. Let's ask them some questions and figure out what's motivating them right now. What are the things that they're struggling with? How can you help? Are they even open to hiring out the services that you provide? Or are they open to buying a product? Someone asked me one time, they said, "Well, of course, there's no competition. They're going to have to buy my product."

I asked them, I said, "Well, what are they doing right now?" They're like, "Well, nothing." I said, "Does that work for them?" The person was like, "Well, yeah, but it'll be so much better if they have my thing and use it." What's going to drive them to do that? The status quo may be okay for them. You need to make sure that they know it isn't and understanding your customer and the questions that they're asking and where they are in their customer journey is really what's going to drive you to create the content that's going to get them to not only pay with their email address, but also to eventually purchase from you. Let's move on to question number four. I get this all the time.

It's a bunch of different variations of, "I don't know what to post, or I don't know what to share on social media, or I don't know what to write in my email." This one could be an entire hour show on itself, but I'm going to keep it short. Number one, like I was talking before, start with the questions that you're asked on a regular basis. If you're not asked these questions, ask your staff, "What questions are you being asked on a regular basis?" Number two, follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of posts should be value added and only 20% should be promotional. Now, I truly believe that 100% of them really are promotional because people aren't building a relationship with you over social media and they want to know, like, and trust you.

Ultimately, it's all promotional and should be on brand, but you should only ask people to do something that's a direct promotion once a week, no more than once a week. Then select themes for your posts and populate those themes using a content calendar. There's a few resources that I've linked to in the show note for this, and that includes my five hacks to creating content ideas quickly and easily for solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. I also have a recent live video where I talked about using a content calendar and have a guide inside the five hacks that you can download and start utilizing to really plan out your content. But if you don't want to use either of those, really start with questions that you're asked.

That's the most important thing. If you're not sure about those because you're still too new and you're not getting a lot of questions yet, type your topic in AnswerThePublic.com or just in Google. Look at the auto complete that Google gives you, and then also look at that people always ask section. Google and AnswerThePublic are a treasure trove of information and questions that you can answer easily on social media and provide value and answer the questions that people are actually searching for, right? Go ahead and start planning. Moving on to question number five. I don't have time to, you can fill in the blank, post on social media, write blogs, do a podcast, whatever it happens to be.

That's just you saying it's not important. I don't have time means it's not important. Yes, time is finite. Yes, we have a limited amount of it, but we figure out how to get done what's important. If that's the situation and it's not important, I want you to tell yourself that's okay, but own up to it. Don't say you don't have time for it. If you're just looking for a way to streamline, that's where batching comes in. Batch your content. Plan it, write it, edit, and then schedule it. It will take you from 20 to 30 minutes a day to 45 minutes a week, or even just an hour a month.

Because once you're in the groove and you're leveraging your content calendar and your themes, and you're writing one day, editing another day, and then scheduling a third day, you can really cut down what you're doing because you're not forcing yourself to come up with ideas every single day. If you're just starting out, I encourage you to think about scheduling things about a month in advance. Three times a week, schedule in advance. And then you can supplement with more relevant stories, articles, pictures, et cetera, on the other two days a week. You can be posting up to five times a week just with effort of an hour a month. It's not that you don't have time. It's that it's not important to you.

Ask yourself if it's important to you. If it's not, posting on social media, writing those blogs, that's okay. That's totally fine. You don't have to. But if it is important to you and you know you need it for your business to grow, then I don't want you to say I don't have time anymore. I want you to say, "This is important to me. I am going to make it happen." Up next is question number six, do I have to be on camera? I hate my voice, video, pictures of me, whatever you want to share. I hear this so, so often. Yes, we are our own worst critic. Please do not worry about it. Mostly if you are your brand, you have to be on camera. Your voice should be on screen. You should have video and pictures of yourself, whether you like it or not.

Whether you've hate your weight loss goal, or whether you don't like the number of times you say the word so in your podcast, I have a tendency to edit that word out a lot in mine, you really need to be there. If you aren't your brand, then no, you can totally get away without being on camera, without having your voice everywhere, without being in video and pictures. But I find there's very few people that can get away with that. Again, people want to know, like, and trust you. They're building a relationship with you. Why not show them who you are? You're going to have meetings with them. You're going to be on the phone with them. If they don't like your voice, they're not going to listen.

But if you have really great content to share, they're probably going to get over it. So think about that. Are you your brand and would you becoming your brand or a piece of your brand add value? I had a client ask me this question. "I don't want to be on camera, but all the people in my industry are always putting up pictures of themselves." She started putting up pictures of herself and her engagement has gone through the roof. This is how it works. People want to connect with you. They want to see that you're a real person and hear from you. If you're still adamant that you're not going to be on camera, no voice, no video, no pictures of you, make sure that you are putting pictures of real people, video of real people.

They get a lot more engagement, and ultimately, it is truly your choice. But the choice is, where do you want to go with your brand? Are you the core of your brand? Because if you are, then you need to be front and center. Question number seven, how can I double my sales? Yes, I do get this a lot. I used to get back when I started my consulting business, I used to get the question, "I would like to start posting on Facebook to double my sales." My answer was not going to happen. It was pretty interesting, but it really does depend on your business. Let me give you a few suggestions of what people can do. Number one, you need a budget. This is not going to happen magically and organically.

If you want to double your sales in the next three, four months, you're going to need to invest in marketing in one way, shape, or form. Number two, what are you willing to do differently? You're not going to get where you want to get by doing what you're doing today if it's not working and getting you where you need to go. Number three, think about how you can increase demand. Can you introduce new products, promotional pricing, things like that? How can you get people to act and really want to pull the trigger? Number four, grow your email list. Your email list is the greatest asset that your business owns and you own it. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, that is all rented land.

Some of you may remember when Facebook went down for a day. Twitter had a really, really good day, but Facebook went down. You can't export your list of followers and get all of their email addresses. It's just not an option. Because of that, you're going to end up not owning your contacts. If something happens to a social media network or they change their algorithm or anything else along the way, what you've been doing may not work anymore. You own your email list. It is the number one asset that you can build, and it is the number one asset that can sell products for you. Let's go ahead and talk about our last one, and then I will sum up everything. Question number eight is, do you have something or a tool that can fill in the blank?

I get a ton of these questions on a regular basis. I have shiny object syndrome with tech and I've used a ton of different things. You can visit KendraCorman.com/resources to see some of the tools I use in my life and for my work that make my job so much easier, from Harvest for time tracking to LIVEpigeon scheduling prerecorded video to go live, to StreamYard to actually streaming live video to multiple channels. All of these different tools are amazing. They save me time and effort, and I don't have to be super techy to know how to work it and integrate everything together. They are pretty much plug and play and I'm all done with them. Be sure to check those out. If you have a question about a specific product or a resource that's not listed that you're looking into, let me know.

I'd be happy to look at it, check it out, let you know if I've used it, what I think of it, because I've used more than what's on that list, but that's what I'm using now and really, really like in my life and in my job. Just to sum it up, we covered eight questions that I am asked regularly, or that you went ahead and submitted for this episode. Thank you to those who submitted this for this episode. I appreciate it. We started with talking about how to grow your list from scratch and growing your email list is a huge asset as we've covered. I do want to make sure, again, that you start with your friends, family, and prospects, think about the last email you signed up for, making sure that you're asking in all situations, have that join your email list.

But again, don't use those words. Use sign up for a discount, sign up to get exclusive content, whatever that happens to be, sign up for this freebie. And then transitioning to the second question, we talked a little bit about what to build as a freebie, from case studies to custom research, to toolkits, online workshops and webinars, checklists, how to guides, resource guides, quizzes, something that's digestible and actionable that people will pay for with their email address. Then we talked about how to determine what content you use for your freebie, again, starting with the questions asked by your target audience. Understanding them where they're at in their process and where they're headed is key.

Then we want to talk about the variations of "I don't know what to post or share on social media." We talked about starting with the questions that you get, only post promotional stuff 20% of the time, and then select themes for your posts and populate those themes using a content calendar. Again, I have links to those types of resources in the show notes that will help you determine your themes and build out a content calendar. Up next was question five and we talked about not having time, which is really just a fancy way of saying that you don't want to do something, and then it's not important to you. Commit to what is important to you and what you do or do not want to do.

Again, not wanting to do something is totally fine. It not being important for you or your company, that's totally fine too. But own up to that and don't say you don't have time. Question number six was, do you have to be on camera? Yes, probably. Odds are in favor of that because you want people to know like and trust you. The thing to keep in mind is that if they can connect with you through video and voice, that's going to go a long way. Then question seven was, how can I double my sales? Again, it depends on your business. You might need to invest in advertising. You might want to invest in networking groups. There's a million different ways to do it.

But the core of those things are figuring out what your budget is for those marketing initiatives, because this doesn't happen magically, figuring out what you're willing to do differently, how you increase demand, and growing your email list. Because the one tactic that I believe is universal is growing your email list and using email marketing to grow your business. And then the last question was, do I have something that can help you with a million different things? I probably do, because again, I'm addicted to technology. Again, visit KendraCorman.com/resources and you'll find some of my favorite tools that I use every day in my life and in my job.

Thank you again so much for tuning in for this special episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'll see you next week same time, same place on another episode of Imperfect Marketing.