Erin Flynn

Today, I am here with my friend, Natalie McGuire, and we are going to trash talk ideal customer avatars, which I absolutely cannot wait for because we both kind of hate them a lot. My biggest gripe is that we do these customer avatars, and like you said, they’re not based in reality, that we’re inventing this fake person who is our ideal client who may or may not actually exist in the world because it’s based on just whoever we think wants to buy. I love this idea of the face to face Zoom, because I think especially when you’re developing copy for your website or content or developing a new service, getting that really, really raw feedback and information from your past clients is going to be so valuable in using the right language. And I think it can be really uncomfortable at times, but if you set your emotional state and you are a willing participant, and you’re willing to listen, and you’re willing to see where someone maybe said something in a certain way, or used a very emotionally charged word, or maybe their face started to change a little bit, or maybe their eyes started to well up in tears, and you can do a well-placed tell me more.

And if you feel like, gosh, I don’t have bandwidth for that, I would really think about like, well, what does the time that you’re spending marketing look like? I would look at if you’re seeing that you’re getting more traction, then I would start to think about like, what are the things that you’re doing on that platform that you feel like are getting you results? So I think looking at the feelings that are behind what you’re doing and the, either what you’re helping people with or the feeling that you’re creating in that, I think that that can be a really great way of looking at, oh, this is the thing that’s interesting to people. I think that that allows you to try things that maybe you wouldn’t, like I would have a year ago never posted about things like the emotional cycle of change because I would have been like, nobody cares about this.

And so it’s up to us as creative business owners to always be talking about our services as if there are new people coming into whatever funnel that we’re attracting them into, Instagram, our email marketing, whatever, treat it like it’s the first time that they’re ever hearing about us. But before that, I think that we’re not paying attention as creative business owners, enough attention rather, to how our business performs. Tiffany Tolliver: I have found that for my clients to have the most time to give me what they need to give me, I need to finish things in a certain timeframe when they become a client. And I think also when people think about niching, people think it makes them small.

Cami Farey: So now my number one focus with marketing is getting in front of people who don’t know about me already, specifically through getting in front of other people’s audiences in different kinds of partnerships. And I think in terms of getting in front of other people’s audiences, we tend to think if I post five times a day on Instagram, or if I post this on Facebook or whatever, we’re going to magically get clients from that or grow our email lists because that is what a lot of people say. I guarantee you, you are following people on Instagram, you’ve got past clients, you’ve got friends, you’ve got colleagues, you’ve got people you already know who fit the criteria and that is your low hanging fruit. And I think so useful, especially because this is a tactic I see used for people who sell courses like us, we’ve done JV webinars and stuff together, but I don’t think people use it service wise.