How to Build a Lean Marketing Strategy When You Have ZERO Marketing Department | Tiny Marketing Club Series

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Ever feel like you're a one-person army in the marketing world, trying to do it all? Well, gear up for a tactical masterclass in lean marketing that's about to change the game for B2B service businesses. I'm your host, the lean marketing guru and voice behind the Tiny Marketing Show, ready to share my secret blueprint for success. We'll navigate through selecting that one dream client, perfecting a signature offer, and honing in on one social media channel to amplify your presence. Plus, I'll reveal how to create resonant content that speaks directly to your client's deepest needs, all with the savvy use of AI tools like ChatGPT.

It's like finding the golden ticket to Willy Wonka's factory, but for marketing strategy. Join the circle of trust as we discuss building a community that hangs onto your every word on social media, and learn my 4C method to content creation that cuts through the noise without taking up all your time. Discover how 'Gateway Offers' can be your best friend, enticing potential clients and opening doors you didn't even know existed. Balancing life as a founder, marketer, or even a multitasking parent? These insights are designed to slot right into your bustling schedule, transforming your daily grind into a lean, mean selling machine.

This membership is for B2B service founders struggling to market their businesses sustainably. We will help you build and maintain a lean marketing engine that helps you build authority and visibility with your dream clients, making it easy to increase your pipeline without burning out. Build your lean marketing engine and the systems to make it so damn easy for you to keep it up without a team or big budget.  Apply for the Club.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey friends, this is day one of introducing the Tiny Marketing Club on the pod, so in today's episode, I am sharing the audio from my masterclass on how to build a lean marketing strategy in six easy steps when you have zero marketing department. So stick around and stay tuned for that. At the end of this episode, I'm going to share some bonuses that you get when you join as a founding member of the Tiny Marketing Club. Are you a B2B service founder who is stuck in a marketing role and you aren't really sure where to go from there, how to market strategically, effectively and systematize in a way that will work with the time that you have? That's what we're getting into today. I am teaching you the lean marketing engine that I bring my clients through so you can market when you have zero marketing department. But before we get into that, who am I?

Speaker 1: 1:03

I am a lean marketing consultant who works with B2B service businesses. I am the host of the Tiny Marketing Show, where every week, I'm sharing actionable insights on how to market when you have zero marketing department, and I'm the mom of two boys. I hang out over on LinkedIn, so if you aren't yet, go follow me there and make sure to follow the podcast too, so you're getting those alerts when the new episodes are dropping. I help B2B service business founders launch and grow a lean, organic marketing engine that makes selling easy. Imagine not having to sell, and so your dream clients are excited to buy from you. Are you ready to fill your pipeline with ready-to-buy fans? That's what you'll do with this marketing engine. Now tell me, how do you do this with no marketing department? When you work with me, you get strategy and systems for you, so I'm going to get more into this at the end, but I am launching the Tiny Marketing Club, which is where you are seeing. This is on that sales page, and the Tiny Marketing Club it will be the hub for all of this. How I'll teach you how to do this, how you will launch it, how you will maintain it, because there is no point in marketing if you're not going to show up consistently and actually do it. That's what this is all about. So, when you're building a strategy that will work for you the person who is the founder, slash marketer, because you are the person that is running it all this is what you do. You have one dream client, one signature offer, one main social channel, one core content, two lead generators and one gateway offer. I'm going to show you exactly how to do this right now.

Speaker 1: 2:58

But first, who is this for? This works for the people who can't get prospects on a sales call. You're struggling to network because you don't have a give. You're getting too many wrong fit leads. You're getting pushback on if you can actually solve the problem because your prospects are lacking trust. You can't get prospects to notice you because you're lacking visibility. You don't have the authority that is telling people giving them that hell, yes, I want to work with them. And you're getting objections about your price. And that's all about visibility and authority. And as soon as you start establishing this strategy, you get those things. You aren't going to get these objections anymore. People will pay what you say they should pay because you've already earned their trust and showed them that you know what you're doing.

Speaker 1: 3:59

Let's start with the one dream client. You need to have one dream client that you want to clone to make this work. So maybe you've already worked with that client and you can. You have your niche. You know who you want to replicate. That's great. We'll get into that in a second. But if you don't, here are some things that you can do to make it work. You can look at your past corporate career. Who have you worked with in the past that it would be? You know that you can get results for who would get the biggest transformation from your offer. Those are good places to hypothesize. Start with a hypothesis and go from there.

Speaker 1: 4:42

Now, if you know who your dream client is, start interviewing them. Have conversations with them. You want to know what do they do when they have a problem. What are their biggest challenges? What do they want their life to look like? Screenshot this Just take a second and screenshot it now so you have all of the questions. But start interviewing them, surveying them, asking them on social media posts, asking them when you're on networking calls these questions Are they part of any communities? Those are great places to find new clients. Find out where your dream clients are hanging out. So have conversations with them, especially when you're launching a new offer. When you do this, you can tell them a little bit about the offer. You can start asking them exactly what do they want included in the offer, what would be the most helpful for them, and you can create the offer for your dream clients and oftentimes it'll sell for you because you're having those conversations. They're excited about what you're talking about and they want in.

Speaker 1: 5:52

Now, if you're not launching a new offer, here are some other things you can do. You can review the sales transcripts from sales calls that you've already had. Join forums and do a little digging, see what questions are coming up on the Slack channels. They spend time on the Facebook groups. They spend time on the communities, the circle communities they hang out in. Look at reviews of books similar to your offer. What do they wish was in there? So what I've done for this the chat GPT trick I'm referring to here is, for example, storybrand is really similar to my offer in that it's one core customer that we're going after. So I asked chat GPT tell me. I asked them to look at the reviews of StoryBrand, tell me what people are saying is lacking, what's missing, what do they wish was in there? And that helped inform what my offer should look like and start scheduling connection calls. And those are just calls that you'd have like networking calls, where you can start having conversations with people, tease out what your offer is, ask questions. So you have a starting point and you know where you should be.

Speaker 1: 7:13

Next is one signature offer. Direct your dream client to one signature offer to make it easy for them to understand how to work with you. Have you ever been to a restaurant where it's got like All right, think back to Schitt's Creek when they went to Cafe Tropicana and they opened up that giant menu and it's like six pages deep and they just didn't know what to do with it. That's what your clients feel like when they're looking and they're seeing all of the offers available to them. Instead, direct them to one signature offer so it's really easy to understand how you can transform their lives. And no, that does not mean that you only need to have one offer, but you need to do it strategically and you need to point people to one specific offer to make it super simple. So when you're creating the other offers that are around your bullseye, you want to make sure that they make sense together, that it's kind of an upsell or a downsell or an add-on to that signature offer or one below your signature offer. You can have add-ons that you sell on the back end, like you sell your signature offer and then you're like this is available, this is available. But it's a lot easier when they know what they're getting as a baseline and we'll get into this more later but that gateway offer will help you figure out what those add-ons should be and you can direct them to. You know should they go for the downsell or the upsell or the bullseye. Another thing about this is it's a lot easier to plan your sales cycle and revenue forecasting when you have a bullseye, that signature offer, that you can use to figure out how much money you're going to make or how many you need to sell in order to reach your revenue goals.

Speaker 1: 9:17

One main channel. So, despite what you hear, you don't need to be everywhere, but I will show you what to do with the other channels. It's impossible to build a community when you are everywhere unless you have channel managers for Facebook, for X, for Instagram, for LinkedIn you probably don't, since you are a founder and focus there. You can always expand later. Instead of being on all channels, lock in the accounts on all of those channels but redirect them to the core channel that you're going to spend time on.

Speaker 1: 10:01

So use pin posts and the bios in order to do that. So your pin posts most of the time. Order to do that. So your pin posts most of the time. They offer three pin posts, like on Instagram. So tell them what you do and who you do it for. Take them to your lead generator and tell them where you spend your time online and then in your bio, you can push them over to your core channel where you actually spend time, and make sure that you just you know, just explain what it is that you do in those. But this takes away the obligation, because you're setting expectations from the get-go. They go to Instagram, for example, and they see, okay, they don't spend time here, but they actually hang out on LinkedIn. But you're letting them know right there in the bio, so they're not going to be DMing you there. You've set those expectations and that builds trust.

Speaker 1: 10:57

When you set expectations, now why do we do this? You'll spread yourself too thin and you'll make zero traction. The point of social media is being social. You need to build a community and when you're spread too thin, you can't do that and you won't spend enough time on any one platform to understand how the algorithm works and build relationships. So you're not going to get anywhere with it. So choose one and do it confidently. I promise you it works.

Speaker 1: 11:32

Next is one core content. So choose one core content and a cadence that you can commit to. It's truly all about building trust. If you say you're going to create a weekly podcast and then you publish your podcast once every two months, you're going to lose trust with your audience. You don't want to say that you'll show up and then not show up. Your goal here is to build trust and teach them something valuable so you can build that trust with them. That's what it's all about. Now, if you're telling me that you don't have time for this, you do. Choose a cadence that works for you, even if it's once a month. So I am telling you, you don't have to show up every week, but if you say you are, do it. You can choose a cadence that's once a month. You can have a panel or you can have a networking event. That's once a month and that's totally fine. Choose a core content that works for the cadence that you can stick to. So once a month is perfectly fine, but make it something like a panel or a private podcast release, something that makes sense for it to be once a month. Posting a podcast once a month, it's going to be weird. That's not anyone's cadence for a podcast.

Speaker 1: 13:00

Use the theme day method. This is what I teach my clients to do is look at your week as theme days. So Monday morning marketing is mine. It's Monday while I'm recording this right now. Choose one day to do your marketing and then the days that you're going to do client work, the days when there's going to be overflow work. Choose theme days and it gets a lot easier. You can also work with a group and have co-working hours for accountability buddies. That's what we do inside the Tiny Marketing Club. We have co-working hours, so you have a group of people holding you accountable to do your marketing. When you say you're going to do it, you submit what your plan is for Monday morning marketing ahead of time. So you are actually going to show up, because then you're like I can't let everybody down.

Speaker 1: 13:55

You can also double up on the work by using interview style content, so you can also do biz dev while creating that content. So if you are doing interview style content like a podcast, oftentimes the people that you are interviewing become referral buddies. They might introduce you to new potential clients. You can make your content work with BizDev too and then have everything work together. So I'm going to dig more into that in the next section work together. So I'm going to dig more into that in the next section, but first let's talk about what the I don't have time thing.

Speaker 1: 14:38

So my 4C method for content creation starts with the most, which is core content, and goes all the way down to the least amount of time, and any of these will work for you. So core content is episodic or series content that you commit to doing on a regular basis, like a podcast Campaign. Content is batched, so you spend a weekend, for example, completing all of it around a core offer. So it could be a blog series on objections, transformations, limited beliefs around your offer. The point is you're doing it all at one time, it's all leading to one specific offer and you're batching it. Next is collab content, so that's co-creating content with someone else so you can borrow their audience and they can borrow yours. An example of this could be you host a webinar where someone else is a guest speaker and then they host a webinar where you're the guest speaker. You guys are borrowing each other's audiences. You can do that once a month and you're building your list while also creating content.

Speaker 1: 15:44

Last is curated content. This takes the least amount of time, curate other people's content into playlists, guides or channels. So an example of this would be to compile a podcast playlist on the topic of social selling. You can do this right on Spotify. It's super simple and you can create a landing page for it, and it's really valuable. It doesn't take a ton of your time. So these are four ways that you can create content.

Speaker 1: 16:13

When you are a founder and you don't have an insane amount of time to dedicate to marketing. You can also choose a hybrid option. So if you need to condense your marketing even more than what I talked about in the 4C method, you can choose a hybrid core content lead generator. Examples of this are a webinar, a workshop, a private podcast, virtual summits, audio summits, panels, networking events, roundtables. All of these are content, but they also need to be opted into, so you get email addresses too.

Speaker 1: 16:55

Okay, let's get into the two lead generators. Choose a lead generator that plays well with your core content so you can constantly guide content fans to your lead generator, guide content fans to your lead generator. So what I do is I do a series, I do a podcast series, and it always leads to some sort of lead generator that I have already been prepping my audience for, because we've been talking about it for a month Now. I recommend two lead generators. I recommend two lead generators One is passive and always on and the second is active and time sensitive. So passive, always on lead generators should be like a quiz, a PDF download, templates, bundles, private podcasts, guide, mini course. These are things that can live on your website indefinitely. Active, time sensitive ones create urgency and FOMO, so you're more likely to get a bunch of people. At the same time.

Speaker 1: 17:57

This could look like a panel, a webinar, a workshop, a summit, an audio summit, a roundtable. They have to attend during a set period of time and then it expires. Attend during a set period of time and then it expires. So let me tell you a little bit more about my signature series strategy. So, going back to the Tiny Marketing Podcast, I release my episodes in three to five episode containers that are a series on a certain topic and that series ends in the culmination of a workshop. So each one of those episodes, I'm guiding people to sign up for that workshop and I might pull in some of the guest speakers to be part of it. They might be a guest speaker or I might do a panel instead, where I have all of the guest speakers talking on that topic. But it's a great way to drive momentum toward that time-sensitive lead generator, because you're getting people excited and prepared to learn something in that type of container.

Speaker 1: 19:59

Okay, now one gateway offer, and the gateway offer is a high value, low cost entry point to working with you so you can earn trust with your audience. So this is a gateway offer. How do you pick one? What is easy for you to replicate? Is there a part of your offer that can break off and complete as a standalone? So look at your offer. Is there a part of your offer that can break off and complete as a standalone? So look at your offer. Is there a piece of it at the beginning of it that you need everybody to complete anyway? Could it stand alone? Can you templatize pieces of it and do it at scale? What is something your dream client needs to be prepared for to work with you on a bigger offer? So it could be some pre-work that you are completing as part of that gateway offer.

Speaker 1: 20:49

What you really want and the goal is for you to be able to create a scope of everything they need. You need to be able to identify where they're at right now, where they want to be in the future and the roadmap for them to get there. So this container can look like an audit, a strategy, a report, a brief. It could look like a workshop. If you're doing a group offer, you need to achieve two things with this gateway offer Earn their trust. It's a trust-building offer. That's why we have some cost to it, but it's not crazy expensive. The intention is to build trust and you also want to understand the scope of what they'll need in the future so you can create what they need to do immediately. But you also know exactly how you should upsell them later and what offers you should present to them later.

Speaker 1: 21:47

Once you've completed enough of these gateway offers, you can circle back to the beginning of this process and refine the entire circle even more. So look at this we start with our hypothesis of the dream client, who we think would be best for this. Then we have our signature offer, our main channel, our core content, our lead generator, and our gateway offer, where we're understanding where they're at, where they want to be in the future, what transformation they're looking for. Once we've done enough gateway offers, we can refine everything else. Who is our dream client? What signature offer might be better for them? Where are they spending their time online? What core content do they really care about? What lead generators would provide the most value for them? Every single time, you can reiterate the entire circle. So it's better and better, more refined.

Speaker 1: 22:45

As you can see, each piece of the wheel works together to make your marketing better and better every single quarter. From there, I teach you the systems in order to do this at scale, with the time that you have available. So this piece is the streamline. We're streamlining your marketing, but from there, we'll learn how to systematize it, how to automate and add AI, how to outsource pieces of it, so it works for the time that you have. You don't need to have a giant marketing department. You can do this all on your own.

Speaker 1: 23:25

So let me introduce the Tiny Marketing Club. It starts with Monday Morning Marketing Club, where you will co -work with me. During these weekly two-hour virtual sessions, we get all of our marketing done for the week. At the same time, you have accountability buddies. You are submitting what work you want to get done ahead of time, so you are being held accountable every step of the way. Next, I have the Lean Marketing Accelerator. This is where we will launch this system. We'll figure out exactly what you should be doing every step of the way and we will launch it. So you will have that core content, you will have that main channel and you'll know exactly what to do with every step of it.

Speaker 1: 24:12

The tiny marketing club is the hub. This is where everything takes place. We have a community as part of it. We have two times a month hot seats so you can come and we can work together with other founders to solve those immediate challenges that you're dealing with. We have quarterly group marketing planning, quarterly group sales planning, quarterly special guest experts, a community of B2B service founders to lean on and, of course, that Monday marketing club, where you will be held accountable, will have that space to finish all of our marketing within two hours. Vips can get on-demand Voxer consulting, personalized content reviews and an annual one-to-one marketing strategy assessment to make sure that your marketing is on pace. We'll look at those gateway offers. We'll refine everything to make sure that it is working perfectly to attract those dream clients. After all, you don't want to work with everyone. You want to work with dream clients, and that's exactly what we'll do with this. So that's that. That explains my tiny marketing framework and how we can streamline. That's that flywheel and how we can systematize. We systematize, automate, use AI and outsource where we need to, because our goal is to optimize while saving as much budget as possible. That wraps up the masterclass on how to build a lean marketing strategy when you have zero marketing department.

Speaker 1: 25:59

Now I'm going to share a bit about the Tiny Marketing Club. If you are watching the video version of this, I am sharing the screen right now so you can see what it looks like. So you can watch the video version of the masterclass right here. But I wanted to go down and show you what the bonuses are and what's included in the Tiny Marketing Club. So all members of the tiny marketing club get Monday morning marketing, which is the jumpstart for your week, so you can get all of your marketing done at the same time and just check those marketing tasks off your plate.

Speaker 1: 26:37

Next, we have weekly content prompts. If you are struggling to figure out exactly what to talk about in your content, we'll help you with our content prompts. We have bi-monthly hot seats, so if you have something that you're struggling with, then bring it to the hot seat and we'll work through it together. It's all B2B service founders. So you're in good company. You're going to be getting advice from me on the marketing front but also other B2B service founders so you're in good company. You're going to be getting advice from me on the marketing front but also other B2B service founders.

Speaker 1: 27:06

We have quarterly group marketing and sales planning, which is amazing, and I've done this with strategists for my own business. There's nothing like it when you can actually forecast your revenue. Believe it or not, you can actually forecast it, so we will plan out what your marketing should look like in order to reach your revenue goals every single quarter. We have quarterly special guest experts, so I will bring people in to teach special workshops for you. Now, all of the workshops that I do are going to be paid, starting soon, but for Tiny Marketing Club members, they will be free. We will have a B2B service founders community. It's going to live on Heartbeat. It's really, really cool. There's a screenshot of it on the sales page so you get an idea of what it will look like.

Speaker 1: 28:00

And then networking on autopilot. I've talked a million times about how co-marketing and co-creating content is so beneficial, because you get to borrow someone else's audience. Well, we will automate that process for you. So you're assigned someone every quarter, if you opt into it, to either network with or build some sort of co-marketing with to borrow each other's audience Plan, a webinar swap Plan, a newsletter swap. So for the basic tiny marketing club it's only $500 a month and it's 50% off of your first month. So it'll only be $250 to get started.

Speaker 1: 28:41

Now VIPs get VIP Voxer access. So 24-7, asynchronous text and audio consulting with me. You can send your questions or you could send links and get my perspective on what you've created. We have VIP accelerators. So when you are building out that lean marketing strategy, we work together to build out what that framework looks like, what it should look like for you. But the accelerators will help you launch each piece of that framework.

Speaker 1: 29:14

You get project discounts. If you want to work with me, you get 50%. You get 1, 5, five, 15% off done for you projects and then VIP strategy sessions. So once you have this is an annual commitment, the VIP version is. But the fourth quarter of the year you get a VIP strategy session with me where I will work one-on-one with you to make sure that your marketing strategy touches your dream client and attracts them, so that one. So, going back, the regular tiny marketing club is a quarterly commitment, so you're committing to three months of it, and VIP is an annual commitment but you get a 30-day trial. So if after 30 days you're like not for me, you can just let me know and I'll let you go. So to get started with a VIP, it's only $750 because you also get 50% off your first month and then bonuses that are only available for people who join the waitlist.

Speaker 1: 30:22

And remember the waitlist is no obligation. Just because you join the waitlist doesn't mean that you need to hand over your credit card information. It just lets me know you're interested. So people who are on the waitlist get a searchable resource library. That's worth $3,000. You get a 60-minute one-on-one strategy session with me. That's worth $750.

Speaker 1: 30:44

This is actually my strategic spark sessions which, if you check out my reviews, people rave about. They love them. So you'll get your lean marketing strategy framework built out with me one-on-one. For everyone else it'll be a group sitch. You get one week of async one-on-one consulting value of $250. Now that comes with the VIP, but tiny marketing club basic members will get that for one week as a bonus. And then last, linkedin engagement threads to boost visibility and increase your leads, also worth $250. So that's over $4,000 in bonuses for waitlist members. So make sure to head to the show notes page, jump on the waitlist. Remember you are not obligated to work to actually join, but it gives you access to those $4,000 in bonuses if you do choose to join, access to those $4,000 in bonuses if you do choose to join. Tomorrow's episode we will get into who the Tiny Marketing Club was built for. So you'll know hey, this is me or this is not me, if it's a good choice for you. So I will see you tomorrow as we continue the Tiny Marketing Club series.