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Marketing Secrets | What You Don’t See in Someone’s Marketing
When it comes to entrepreneurship, it’s very easy to get swept away in how successful everyone else is… the successful launches, new offers, client wins…. and miss out on the struggles happening behind the scenes…. the missed client payments, the refund requests, and missed deadlines, working when sick, feeling like it’s time to find a “real job”.
So, today, I wanted to bring you behind the scenes and point out 4 things that most, if not all, entrepreneurs are experiencing that you WON’T see them talking about in their marketing.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- When it comes to creating your monthly content calendar and sitting down to create your content (because you’re batching it, right? 😉), the first step is not writing in the monthly calendar. It’s not even writing your categories and important dates on the calendar. If that’s where you’re starting with your content planning, well, all you’re creating is a plan. But what you need is a strategy. What’s the difference? A strategy is like the inner structure of a building, while the plan is the decor. A strategy is what helps you achieve your goals, and your plan is how you achieve them. Your strategy is where you’re leading your audience, and your plan is what you’re talking about and when. Without having a strategy first, putting together a plan will simply mean pulling ideas out of thin air. So, how do you start with a strategy? By starting with your goals, and working backwards to ensure you’re moving your audience toward them. What are your yearly goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, and weekly goals? And how can you translate them into content your audience wants to ingest? You’ve got to consider those questions before you even begin deciding what it is that you’ll post about. And if you want a simple way to create both your strategy and your plan? Grab your Chasing Simple Content Planner. The planner is my number one bestseller – And for good reason too, because this massive 130+ page planner was designed with strategy in mind. It’s not merely a place to write down what you’re going to post, and when. Yes, that’s part of it. But first, you’ll walk through intentional pages full of strategic questions to get your brain moving in the right direction before you even start writing down your topic ideas. In addition to the traditional calendar pages, you’ll find: Yearly planning pages Monthly prep work Monthly reflection questions Repurposing worksheets and so much more! If taking your content to the next level is a goal of yours, the Chasing Simple Content Planner was created for you. Grab yours for just $27 at amandawarfield.com/planner/
- This week’s action step: DM either me, or someone else you’d like to make a connection with and say hi!
- This week’s book recommendation: Maggie Moves on by Lucy Score
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
When it comes to entrepreneurship, it’s very easy to get swept away in how successful everyone else is. The successful launches, new offers, client wins, and miss out on the struggles happening behind the scenes. The missed client payments, the refund requests, the missed deadlines, working when sick, and feeling like it’s time to find a real job.
So today, I wanted to bring you behind the scenes and point out four things that most, if not all, entrepreneurs are experiencing that you won’t see them talking about in their marketing. You’re listening to episode 196 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by the Chasing Simple Content Planner, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield.
com slash planner.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, how do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head when you think of marketing. Welcome, friend. This is Chasing Simple, where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Chasing Simple Marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business. So that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients, such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell.
Reading in our hammock, watching Gamecock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me. If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing is the thing that they started their business to do.
Which is why I’m here, to help make marketing simple and less time consuming. So that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love. Each week I’ll bring you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? When it comes to creating your monthly content calendar and sitting down to create your content because you’re batching it, right?
The first step is not writing in the monthly calendar. It’s not even writing your categories and important dates on the calendar. If that’s where you’re starting with your content planning, well, all you’re creating is a plan. But what you need is a strategy. What’s the difference? A strategy is like the inner structure of a building, while the plan is the decor.
A strategy is what helps you achieve your goals, and your plan is how you achieve them. Your strategy is where you’re leading your audience, and your plan is what you’re talking about and when. Without having a strategy first, putting together a plan will simply mean pulling ideas out of thin air. So, how do you start with a strategy?
By starting with your goals, and working backwards to ensure that you’re moving your audience toward them. What are your yearly goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, and weekly goals? How can you translate them into content your audience wants to ingest? You’ve got to consider those questions before you even begin deciding what it is that you’ll post about.
And if you want a simple way to create both your strategy and your plan, grab your Chasing Simple content planner. The planner is my number one bestseller, and for good reason too, because this massive, more than 130 page planner was designed with strategy in mind. It’s not merely a place to write down what you’re going to post and when.
Yes, that’s part of it, but first, you’ll walk through intentional pages full of strategic questions to get your brain moving in the right direction before you even start writing down your topic ideas. In addition to the traditional calendar pages, you’ll find yearly planning pages, monthly prep work, monthly reflection questions, repurposing worksheets, etc.
And so much more. If taking your content to the next level is a goal of yours, the Chase and Simple Content Planner was created for you. Grab yours for just 27 at amandawarfield. com slash planner. So the first thing that you’re not going to see inside of someone’s marketing is timing. And I’ve shared the story before about how I realized.
that some of these alleged overnight successes had actually been marketing themselves as a personal brand long before they ever started selling something, so that then when they started selling something they were a quote unquote overnight success and they built a six figure business in the first year.
So they’d been building that audience, right? That’s part of what I’m talking about as far as timing, but the other side of things that isn’t just, oh, I, I Made it or I became successful or I hit the six figure mark in however much time There’s also the idea of timing as far as creating offers specifically so When you go to create an offer Most of the time it’s not This major, giant success right off the bat, right?
It isn’t making you thousands of dollars right away. It’s not selling to hundreds of people immediately. Most of the time, you have to really carefully construct your offers. And it takes, it takes shifting through as if it was an onion, right? So you’ve got this offer, you’ve got this onion, and you know what you want to do with it.
But you have to somehow peel back enough layers to make sure that what your offer is doing is also what your audience needs from you. And so, 90 percent of the time, I would say, we have this offer in mind and it’s got all of this cool stuff and we have all of these goals with it and we want to teach all of these things and do all of these things for people.
And it’s a big, massive thing. thing, an onion, right? A big old onion. And then we put the offer out there and we get some bites. And over time we slowly peel back what it is that our clients and our audience members and our students want. And eventually we get to that core, that core of the onion, that core of the offer.
And that’s what becomes successful. But that’s not going to happen the first time you launch something and it’s probably not going to happen the second or maybe even the third time. It’s going to take multiple iterations and you’re going to reiterate and reiterate and reiterate. We can find ourselves feeling like, Oh, my offer wasn’t successful, so I’m just going to throw it away instead of reiterating it.
Now it’s one thing if you put an offer out there and you get no sales and you had people on the sales page and you talk to those. People or at least some of the people and they just say yeah, it’s just not for me because of XYZ But there are a lot of different things that you can look into to decide what it is that went wrong.
Even if there were no sales, it might not be the offer, right? It might be that you didn’t get enough people on the sales page. It might be that the marketing, the copy on the sales page, isn’t great. It might be that the marketing to get people to the sales page wasn’t what it needed to be. There’s so many different pieces to Any sale and any marketing effort that it could be any number of those things and so that’s a totally different episode that I could do but When it comes to is it the offer?
It’s probably not even if you didn’t make any sales It’s probably just it needs some peeling back. So What does that look like in practicality? Well When you put an offer out there, what you want to make sure you do is you want to do all you can to get sales, obviously, right? Whether that’s reaching out individually to people who have shown interest, whether it’s just asking market research questions, whether it’s, you know, offering extra bonuses for beta clients, beta students, right?
You, you want to make sure that you’re doing all you can to get people in there and you’re not just saying, Hey, this thing’s available. And then. Leaving it at that. Once you get people in there, what we tend to want to do is we tend to think, okay, well the launch is over so I’m going to move on to my next big project.
No. What we want to do is we want to make sure that we are really pouring into the clients or the students that have purchased this offer. That means holding their hand through the entire thing. That means really diving into what it is that they’re doing and helping them finish it. So if it’s a course, even if you’ve pre recorded everything, You want to make sure that you are following up with those students, encouraging them to finish it, encouraging them to get through it, seeing what their problem points are.
And if it’s clients, you want to make sure you’re touching base regularly with what it is you’re doing and what it is that they need from you. You want to make sure you are with them 100 percent of the way of this. Then once the time is over, once the work with the client is done, once they have completed the course, or if you have a And I don’t mean they lose access, but I mean, 90 days until this thing at the end of those 90 days, even if they didn’t finish, follow up and say, Hey, what did you like about this offer?
What would you like to see done better? Where can I improve? Where’d you get stuck? And ask those questions because you have been holding their hand along the way they’re more likely to answer. And then you have to take those responses. You have to figure out what the true needs are, because again, sometimes they’ll say, oh, I just didn’t have time.
Well, that’s not actually a way that you can improve the offer, right? But maybe it’s okay, they didn’t feel like they had time. Maybe they were either overwhelmed or maybe they needed to, you know, have things broken down a little bit more. Maybe there’s too much, you know, you can brainstorm a bunch of different ways.
So you take that feedback and you brainstorm what it actually means for your offer. And then. What you want to do from there is you want to improve this offer. So again, we haven’t moved on to our next project, right? We haven’t said, okay, well, launch is over. I’m doing the next thing on my list. No, we are still in it with this launch, with this offer.
So then you improve and you plan your next launch and you launch it again. And you do the same thing until you know that people are getting through this course or this. People are seeing results, people are telling you what you need to hear, and you’re able to take that and improve your marketing. You want to, if at all possible, relaunch the same offer two or three times and improve it each time before you send it to Evergreen.
And that’s what I mean by timing. You have to really put in the time for each offer to Make it successful. And that’s not something that we see necessarily what we see is we see someone pumping out new offer after new offer or new offer, seemingly, but most likely what’s happened is they have spent the time reiterating these offers.
And so they have a launch cycle that they can move through because they have done that work to improve these offers. But we don’t see that we just see them. Oh, well, yeah. This quarter they’re launching this thing. Next quarter they’re launching that thing. Then they’re going to launch this thing. And then every December that, you know, we’re seeing their launch cycle because they’ve done the work with their offers and they’ve put in the time to make their offers what they are today.
The next thing that we won’t see in someone’s marketing kind of goes along with the first point, but There, there’s another side of it that I’d like to point out is offers that don’t sell. So when we see a launch, the job of the business owner of the marketer is to make it as appealing as possible for their audience to buy.
And so you’re not going to see someone tell you that their launch flopped or that an offer isn’t selling, especially during the launch week. There may be times where, I know I’ve done this, where I’ve said oh, this was a total flop and I kind of showed you the behind the scenes of that so you could get a realistic glimpse of, hey, sometimes this happens, but for the most part, you’re not going to see someone say, yeah, this offer didn’t sell at all.
You’re not going to see that, right? Why would they tell that in their marketing? Unless it’s part of their platform, right? That transparency like it is part of mine Like my goal is to make marketing really transparent and to make business itself really transparent But that’s not gonna be everyone’s platform It’s not gonna be most people’s platforms or maybe they do but in a different way, right?
So that’s something you’re not gonna see you’re not gonna see someone say hey this offer didn’t sell and so it’s really easy to look at someone’s marketing and go hmm Man, they’ve had a lot of launches this year. They must be doing really well. A launch doesn’t mean the launch was successful. So just something to keep in mind with that.
The third thing that you’re not gonna see in someone’s marketing is the late nights to meet deadlines. I personally have fallen into a bad habit of this lately as I’ve gone through some personal things over the last, gosh, six months and There are a lot of times late nights to meet deadlines and that’s just something you’re not gonna see you’re gonna see people showing you Hey, look, I’m working on this this this and this today and I’m accomplishing so much and sometimes that’s true Right like as women We tend to have one week out of every month in our cycle where we’re like, yeah, I am on it and I am crossing things off the list and I’m killing it.
But that’s not the norm. And so when we see someone post something like that every now and then of how much they got done, we think that that’s normal. When in reality, there are days when they just don’t feel like it. And there are days when They have to stay up late to meet deadlines and force themselves to stay up to get things done And they’re not proud of their work there are days when they have to choose between doing something fun and meeting a deadline and there are Entirely too many business owners out there that want to paint this image of if you’re working hard You’re not doing business, right?
And that is just not the case being a business owner even if you’ve got quote unquote passive income and even if you are able to travel and do all of this stuff. It’s hard work and it means hard decisions sometimes. And you know what? Sometimes it means late nights to meet deadlines. So if you’re looking at other business owners and you’re saying, man, they don’t seem like they’re doing any work and I am busting my hump and getting nowhere.
It’s because you’re only seeing the highlight reel. And the final thing that I want to point out that you’re not going to see in someone’s marketing. It’s kind of a three for one. You’re not going to see the uncertainty. You’re not going to see the failure. Then you’re not going to see the mistakes.
Because we all make them. We all have moments where we go, I don’t know if this is the right decision. Or, you make a decision, and in hindsight, you go, well, that was terrible. I wish I’d never done that. I feel like a failure now. You’re not going to see those moments where someone wants to throw in the towel.
Again, there’s always going to be the exception to the rule. Sometimes people are going to say, Yeah, hey, here’s, you know, here’s what I’ve got going on. And this really sucks right now. But you’re going to see that far less often than you would see the reality of how often it happens. So, those are just four things that I wanted to point out.
as far as the behind the scenes of what it looks like to be a business owner. Because I don’t want you to go into this year with expectations of yourself that aren’t realistic. Entrepreneurship is hard. It’s a lot of work. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not full of joy and that it’s not exciting and fun and full of freedom.
But in order to appreciate the freedom, it’s best if we have a realistic look at what some of those hard parts are so that we know, yes, to expect them, but also so that we know we’re not alone, and that when we’re dealing with these things that It’s normal and that it’s not what it’s not that you’re doing anything wrong or that you’re not meant to be a business owner So I hope that you take this and you feel some relief your action step this week is Just to send me a DM on Instagram and say hi Or if you don’t want to DM me DM someone that you would like it to make a connection with and just say hi because the best way to combat The hard parts of entrepreneurship is connections and community.
So that’s your action step. DM me or someone else that you want to make a connection with and say hi. Now your book recommendation for this week is Maggie Moves On by Lucy Scor. This is a, it’s a total rom com, total quick read kind of book and it’s about this I don’t know if she’s a general contractor or a designer, kind of a little bit of both.
And she is restoring this old Victorian mansion and is flipping it essentially. And she ends up, you know, getting involved with the landscaper that’s doing the work and she’s really resistant to it and he’s, you know, all of that fun stuff. So if you like those types of books, Maggie moves on by Lucy Score and I will link to that in the show notes.
And until next time, my friend, I hope that you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes, as well as all the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast. And ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
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