There’s a growing issue in the business world as more and more entrepreneurs join the self made club; and that is believing everything can be fixed with one task, one mission, one workflow, one funnel. And honestly, that’s not how it fucking works — there is NO single answer. Everything we do as humans, is based on lived experiences; everything we have, everything we say, how we interact with different things, it’s all a combination of the things that we’ve done or experienced in our lives. As a business owner, it is our job to help people through those connections, through those experiences they’ve had, and the only way to do that is to understand the complexities of the human experience. So when you are marketing, when you are building your business or client experience, you have to be cognizant of those human experiences to be able to connect and grow.
Human Experience is worth SO much
Where businesses seem to fail, where they do not grow, where they work for a while and fizzle out, is when they do not consider the human experience. It all comes down to niching. So many business owners have grand ideas when they start that are beautiful and wonderful, however, instead of looking at what exact human experience is required for their service to be successful, or this product to be it, they just say, “well, whoever buys it, is my audience.” The problem with that is that you cannot tailor your messaging, your branding, your experience, to the person who needs that product most.
Humans are not generic creatures
Let’s say you create a course on how to implement a Pinterest strategy that’s generic, with branding and messaging that’s generic, and you don’t market it to your target audience as “a course for entrepreneurs who want to implement a Pinterest strategy on their own, or with a team,” – or whatever your course is about – nobody is going to know if that course is applicable to them.
Now, if you build a course about how to stand out with branded Pinterest pins using a custom strategy based off of your brand voice, and you teach people how to have pins, messaging, a strategy that stands out, Asana templates, and all of your pin templates are in Adobe Illustrator, then that course – technically – would fall under the headings of “Pinterest for entrepreneurs, with team members who utilize Asana, and Illustrator, and who want to maximize or improve their Pinterest strategy from what they’re currently doing.” That’s a different experience than just random people who were wanting to learn how to use Pinterest. So let’s go back to where we started.
People need to know that you will “get” them
People need to feel like what they are investing in is a good investment. They cannot do that if they don’t know what a product or service is for, they don’t know if the person on the opposite side of the screen will understand what they’ve been through and what they’re going through, if they will understand their niche. If you have a client that has had some type of trauma in their life, they need to know if you are a trauma informed person. Perhaps you are a coach who helps people through divorce, they need to know how you can help them, if you have been divorced, and you have a story, it needs to be out there. All of these things are extremely important, and help relate to others’ human experience.
Keep reading your audience…
No, one marketing point will not satisfy every person, we have intersecting moments of time, we have email lists, social media, websites, all these different areas that people interact and engage in and it’s naive to think that one email, one social post, one website will change someone’s life. It is a reiteration of your brand voice, your messaging, and your solutions over a period of time that layers up to a point where people can trust and invest in you. Using a different period of time, a different amount of emails, a different amount of social posts, affects whether or not a person is ready to invest with you. With some clients, an average of five emails, a couple social posts, one live webinar, will be enough for these people to be ready to invest.
But then there are other audiences who have trust issues. Folks who have been through shit that you cannot imagine and who cannot immediately invest in a product because they just can’t. They don’t have the human experience that confirms this can be something they can trust. You might have to send 50 emails and have them follow you for six months, with layers upon layers upon layers information. And if you do not look at your analytics, and you do not figure out what it is that helps people make that mind shift, you will be stuck.
If you do not layer your messaging, if you do not have multiple ways to connect with people, if you do not have all the different things that are specific to your audience and their needs, your business is going to start to fizzle because you are not having the same consistent layering that the people you want to serve need.
Put the cookie cutters away!
Now, I’m not big on the cookie cutter solution, so I am not saying everybody needs live webinars, or emails, or everybody needs to be on Instagram, or any of those things – it’s important to look at your own analytics, your own businesses, your clients, and all the people you have served, asking what motivated them to work with you? Is it that they had a personal referral? Is it that they met you in person? What is it about you, and them, and that relationship, that let them trust you and helped build confidence. And it is that unique scenario that you need to look at.
Talk to your clients
So what I would encourage you to do is figure out what you’re layering needs to be; whether it’s four layers, or 25 layers, go back to all your clients. Send them a questionnaire with questions that help you figure this information out. What were they struggling with? What made them confident that you could help them? How many other people had they reached out to and how many other people had tried to help them and couldn’t?
The unpleasant folks are still helpful…
Reach out to the people that weren’t successful, who weren’t the best clients, who weren’t the people you want to work with; the information they’re going to give you is going to help you refine what human experiences are not a great fit. You’ll learn what people have in their lives that prevented you from being the best person for them. You can then speak to that in your messaging, in your posts and in your branding. And once you have all that data, then you can build an intentional structured layering plan, and you can figure it out.
We’re here to help!
Now, not everybody can do this on their own. Not everybody has a team behind them that can do this. There are several ways that TeamMolly can help you; if you have a team but what I’m talking about does not sound like something you can do, definitely check in with our one on one strategy solutions, we help teams figure things out all the time. Your team executes, but we help give you the strategy you need. If you are a solopreneur and you need help figuring out how to be more intentional, what all the layers are, how to read your analytics, all of those things, the “Make Shit Happen Hour” is for you, and that is where you need to be.
Take a breath, you’ve got this!
If you are at the point where you cannot invest in your business, you cannot do anything because you are just starting, you’re burnt out, or you’re still in that hustle, copy paste hell and you cannot get out yet. I see you, you are doing great, you will get there, and for right now, just follow the guidelines in this blog post and you will find some clarity. Nothing in business is perfect and nothing in business is permanent. It is all learning. It is all adjusting. And it is all being resilient. It’s okay if you take baby steps and do things slowly, and it’s okay that not all the things get done, because you are one person, and you need to take care of yourself and protect who you are.
