The Business Lounge Podcast with Kimberly Ann Jimenez
Welcome to The Business Lounge Podcast! Each week we'll share proven marketing strategies to help you build an audience of buyers, create impactful content, and grow a profitable business without compromising on your values with your host, Kimberly Ann Jimenez!
Kimberly is an Online Marketing Strategist, Educator, Founder and Thought Leader in the online marketing industry.
Having worked with 33K+ small business owners & entrepreneurs across an array of industries over the past decade, Kimberly and her business partner Chris Harris are obsessed with helping you level up your marketing game, and grow your bottom line.
They co-lead their flagship program, The Business Lounge, which teaches business owners & entrepreneurs like you how to navigate the confusing & often overwhelming world of online marketing and build an unapologetically profitable business on your own terms (and without compromising your faith, your family or your freedom).
Join us at kimberlyannjimenez.com/businesslounge!
The Business Lounge Podcast with Kimberly Ann Jimenez
S6 EP35: Transform Your Marketing Strategy: Discover the Power of Audience-Centric Approach to Boost Sales
Are your marketing efforts falling short? Discover why many businesses miss the mark and how to turn things around. Inspired by David Ogilvy, we explore the power of deep audience research to uncover unique market opportunities. Learn to avoid the trap of competing on price alone and create products or services that truly resonate with your target market. Stay tuned!
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TBL fam. Today we're going to talk about the number one reason why your marketing efforts are not leading to more sales. Stick around.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Business Lounge Podcast, where each week, we unpack the hottest online marketing and business strategies so you can grow your business, increase your bottom line and make a bigger impact. And now here's your host, kimberly Ann Jimenez.
Speaker 1:What's up guys? Welcome back to the show. My name is Chris. Let's go ahead and jump into this. This was something we revealed yesterday to our group coaching clients inside of what we call TBL Plus, which stands for the Business Lounge Plus, which is again the group coaching tier, and they really benefited from it a lot, and we've been trying to figure out. You know, how is our approach different? How have we helped people get these incredible results?
Speaker 1:It really starts with changing their mindset first, and unfortunately, when you are trying to change people's mindsets, it doesn't really help you if you're batting up against a lot of common beliefs. We talk about this often in marketing is tearing down common beliefs. A lot of times we'll have general practices and orthodoxies that we follow and we don't even know why, and I'll give you an example of one before we get into this. Remember when you went to college, right, and there were no assigned seats. You could sit wherever you wanted to, and yet almost every single person would probably come and sit in the exact same seat every single day for the entire semester. So there's just general practices and procedures and protocols and common beliefs that we hold that we don't even realize are present, and so it's a matter of taking the unconscious and making it conscious, and what's happened in marketing is we have generally followed the masses in a lot of ways and, unfortunately, the masses are those that are seeking engagement, trying to gather influence, build big followings, and not necessarily to advertise or market for a business and if you're listening to this show, you are likely a online business owner, because that's who we work with by and large. So let's talk about the paradigm shift that we're going to make here today, and there's a graph that I'm having the team clean up and it's going to be all of our website. So make sure you stay tuned for that, and or follow us on YouTube, because I'll probably be covering it there as well, to show the visual representation, because it is really powerful.
Speaker 1:But let's talk about it. So we practice what we call a top-down marketing approach versus the alternative, which is what we see largely play out in the marketplace, called what I'm calling the bottom-up marketing approach. Marketplace called what I'm calling the bottom-up marketing approach. So let's start with the right way. Right, in my opinion, and this is the way we've learned it from the OGs of marketing, the David Ogilvys, who's known as the grandfather of modern marketing. I mean, this was literally go back way back in the day and this guy was basically founded a lot of what we do today in terms of the purism, or the purity, rather, of marketing.
Speaker 1:So basically, everything that he was preaching and teaching is about starting with researching your audience right, and what happens when you do that is you're able to find the unique opportunity in your market. You're able to understand your people at a very deep and intrinsic level. You're able to understand the ways in which they have been underserved in the past by the other solutions in your market. If they've hired a coach before, how was that experience? If they were a member at a certain gym, how was that experience before? If they joined memberships before, like an online program or something, what was that experience like? And what you'll find in having those conversations is it'll guide you towards finding what we call your blue ocean right.
Speaker 1:That was made famous by Russell Brunson, but it's really the new opportunity and or the differentiated opportunity in your marketplace which is so important. And when you don't have that differentiation, it's a race to the bottom in price, because when you can't differentiate in the value proposition, what you end up doing is differentiating on price and you're just going to undercut the market with cheap, cheap, cheap, and we're seeing that a lot. We're seeing these like low ticket memberships where they're trying to serve 10s of 1000s of people at $7 a month or something and it's like man, you've got to have so many people to make that business work and the headache alone with the administrative stuff and the support tickets alone is a nightmare. I can tell you, because we've had a big membership before where we were serving lower ticket people and it was not fun. Those are the biggest screamers, are the people that are paying the least amount of money. It's crazy. So the audience is your North Node right. It's where you start. It's what guides you. You follow people, not platforms. We preach and teach that all the time.
Speaker 1:Now, through that going a rung down and I did an upside down triangle, so that's the top right. Then we're going one step down to your product or service. Now, as mentioned, your audience will drive what that product or service entails. How is that product or service going to be different? What are the ways in which you're going to serve? How is that product or service going to be different? What are the ways in which you're going to serve? Whom are you going to serve? Are you going to focus on a certain niche, a certain demographic, a certain age group? Right, all those things really matter and you're going to glean that from that audience research that you've done, from all of those what we call insight surveys. Learning from your audience is going to determine the ways in which you develop and design your product and services, or product or services.
Speaker 1:Now, next rung down is offer. So, once you know that, what you're going to do is you're going to couple your ICA the ideal person you want to work with, that you learned from your audience with the product and services that you've now derived that are going to serve that unique ICA, and you're going to write up and create an offer. Now you might say how is an offer different from a product or service? An offer is how you package it up, it's how you sell it, it's how you message it, it's how you market it. So you're going to use all this ammunition that you've now gathered to package something up that speaks uniquely to that specific person about the specific products and how is different which is a nice way of saying better than the other services that they've maybe tried and failed with before, or how you're solving a problem in a new way. Without that messaging, you're just selling a thing. You're not selling something that actually is gonna create transformation, that's gonna speak to them at a deep level. So that comes next, going a next level down, and I'll give you a recap of these when we're done here. Next, going a next level down, and I'll give you a recap of these when we're done here.
Speaker 1:Going the next level down.
Speaker 1:Now that you have all of that, you've got an offer, you know how you're serving, you know who your people are. It's your long-form content. Now, if you've been around us for a long time, you know we're big advocates of long-form content. The reason being is because we have blogs, we have YouTube videos, we have long-form content that has search ranked for almost a decade at this point, meaning it is ranking so high and it's ranking so high still to this day, that we're still getting leads, lead flow and we're still getting opportunities from it every single day, even to this day.
Speaker 1:Now, why does it matter that we're doing that next, after we put these things together? Because, again, now not only do we have the audience, the product, the offer, we're gonna write the long form content, but through the lens of both the audience and connecting it to our product, service and offerings. Because otherwise, if you just start writing long form content, what you'll find is this you just wrote a bunch of free, valuable information for the internet. You always wanna write through the lens of how does it connect back to your specific audience and to your specific people. That way, when your long-form content is ranking, like ours are, if you'll notice, a lot of what Kim and myself have done with that content is we're finding ways to deliver value, but we're selling through value. We're tying it back to what we sell and how we serve, so that people are aware of what we sell and how we serve, so that people are aware of what we do. I can't tell you how many times people have come to us and they say I get a lot of traffic but I'm not optimized for leads, people don't buy my stuff and it's like, yeah, because you didn't write it through the lens of how does it speak to my specific people with my specific offerings? It just makes sense, right? So once we have that established, we're going to put out and build a strong foundation of long form content output, ideally, once a week, you'd be doing a blog or YouTube video. If you have the time and the bandwidth, you could do one of each, or you could pick one, which is what we recommend if you're brand new, and just do that one. Honestly, I started my first business just doing a blog. It's one of the fastest ways to just get your thoughts and ideas out through the lens of who your people are, with your services and offerings in mind. Right, so? A solid foundation there.
Speaker 1:The next rundown is your micro content. Now, when I say micro content, what I'm really referring to is largely social media content. So, whether you're doing Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or whatever you're on, the best form that we have found in order to do that is to take your long form content and break it into multiple pieces of micro content, so you may be able to create and Kim has taught this for years inside of our content calendar system program where you're creating tens, if not hundreds, of pieces of content from one blog, from one YouTube video, right, so? We create a lot of our reels, from our live trainings, from our YouTube videos. We'll pull quotes from the blogs that we wrote and we're going to repurpose those in bite-sized format onto various social media platforms. Then, from there, we're going to take that micro content and the stuff that does well, we're going to throw it back into the system and we're going to post it again in the future, because why would you not use it again? So the kicker is this Now we've got the audience as our North guiding star.
Speaker 1:We've got the product and service that's curated specifically for who we want to serve and who we're best qualified to serve. We've got an offer with appropriate messaging that speaks to that person. We've written long-form content that's going to work over time and improve over time. It's going to rank and it's going to lead people to our offerings. And now we're going to leverage all of that into splintering off micro content for social media so that we're not spending six hours a day which, by the way, was an average that was found for small business owners is they're spending up to six hours a day creating content for social media. Guys, that's a full-time job. That's crazy. No small business owner, no online business owner, has time for that. I promise you. I know that for a fact. We work with enough of you to know that, okay.
Speaker 1:And then, lastly, the bottom rung, and this is one that maybe makes you cringe a little bit, but is paid advertising. Right, it's paid ads. That doesn't mean you have to do it, but beyond six figures requires ads. If you want to go from, I would say you get to 100,000, I don't want to say easily, but without ads you can get to 100,000. Going from 100 to 500,000 or 500,000 and beyond, it's case by case, but by and large, it usually requires ads. Now here's the kicker, though. This is why it works in this methodology, the top down marketing methodology, because ads should be throwing gasoline on the fire, not just trying a bunch of stuff and seeing what sticks. By the time you get to that point, you've done all this work leading up to this point knowing your audience, selling that offer, messaging it appropriately, the long-form content's working. You know what your people want, you know what they like to consume, and you've seen it work on social media, because all of that is based on research. Right, it's not guessing, it's not speculative, it's based on research. So then, what we're going to do is we're going to see what's been working, what topics people like to hear from you about the ways that you've made the most amount of sales, what gets people in the door as a lead, and then we're going to make sure that we just amplify that. So I always say, the work that you're doing, the organic work, the hustle work, the research work that's like building your campfire. You're sitting there, you're rubbing your sticks together, right, you're trying to get that spark to fly and then, once you get that fire going, you're going to then pour gasoline on it In this case, the metaphor that being the ads to really make that, turn that into a big old bonfire, right? But if you just try to pour ads on something that there's no flame, it doesn't really do anything. Maybe you get lucky, right, maybe you get really lucky and we've seen guys do that occasionally but it's not repeatable and we teach repeatable foundational processes around here. So that's the top-down marketing approach. Now, that's what we teach, that's what we live by, that's what the OGs in marketing have taught, and we've embraced that and tried to carry on that legacy of that very sound marketing practice, right? Let's talk about the flip side. This is the side that most of us are following right now, and I'm not saying that to be critical, I'm not picking on anybody here, it's just this is how we've been led, and so raise your hand to yourself. Obviously I can't see you, but raise your hand if you can resonate with what I'm about to tell you. Bottom of the barrel, right?
Speaker 1:So instead of starting with audience, what, what, what do most of these people start with? You get the marketing bros, the bro marketers, that they're going to hack an ad together. It's the fancy words and it's the gimmicks this and the models in the background, and the money and the cars and this and that I'm not saying those guys don't have success, because they do, but a lot of the ones that aren't successful, the ones you don't see, the ones that haven't made it, uh, they're hacking and gimmicking and the ninja strategies and stuff like that. They're starting with the ads and it's largely not a really differentiated offer. It's just trying to put something out there, uh, that sells a certain product, right, and maybe they get lucky, maybe they make some sales, Maybe they just charge a very discounted price and that's how they make money. But we've all seen those people, right, it comes across as gimmicky and it doesn't really have any depth to it. It doesn't really speak to anybody specifically. It's a very much a commodity offering, right? Most of you aren't that.
Speaker 1:Most of you don't start with ads, but that's really what we see often with a lot of the bro marketer types, but where, normally, where most of you start is the next rung up, which is micro content. Now, what that means is this it means you start an Instagram account and you put entrepreneur I own this company, founder of this and then you just start posting content and the aim, or the thought process is that, as you put out content, it's going to land with people and you're going to attract people and you're going to figure it out as you go. Right, people are going to, you're going to post about this and you're interested in that and you're chasing this. You know trending music and that's going to get you exposure, and so what you find is that it's really not speaking to anybody specifically. You have a general idea of who you want to talk to. Maybe it's like I work with women or I work with business owners, right, but it's very broad, it's not really specific. It's not really specific, it's not differentiated. It's just I'm putting out content and hopefully I get a lot of engagement and a big following and then maybe I'll figure out what I want to sell, or maybe I'll start making sales when my audience gets bigger, right? So the problem is that it doesn't really land with enough people, right, because it's not really specific, it's not precise enough, because it's not built on research, and so what you're probably finding, if you're doing that is that, yeah, you're creating a lot of stuff for the internet, but it's not turning into a lot of sales, it's not moving people to DM you to want to go to your sales pages, it's not driving traffic to your website, and so you're kind of just a little frustrated, you're getting a little bit overwhelmed with the time commitment that it takes and you're just like why am I doing this so much? I'm spending six hours a day creating this content and I'm just not making sales. And sometimes it feels like I have an expensive hobby. And I say that with all the love in the world because I promise you, I have been there too and I have done that as well, and that's why I'm giving you this framework. So usually that's where a lot of us start, right.
Speaker 1:Next, you hear somebody like me or somebody like him say you need to do long form content. It's. The reason your efforts aren't working is because you need to be on YouTube, and that's where people are, you know, making money, and that's how they're getting good leads. Or they're doing a blog, and that lives forever. You've heard these people say these things. Right, it needs to serve, it needs to rank for search and so on and so forth. And so you start writing a blog. But here's the problem is, it's not researched. It's still not researched. It's just now.
Speaker 1:I'm just creating either even longer form content and I'm just writing about what I want to write about, but it isn't connected to a specific person that I want to sell and, more importantly, I don't really have an offer that I want to connect it to. That speaks with a lot of velocity to the offer, meaning people aren't going to see that and be like, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I've been looking for, because you started at the wrong end of the spectrum but you've been told that's what you need to do. So you create long form content. Maybe you went to Google trends or Uber suggests or something and you looked up some terms that you could rank for and you just put in those blogs and let's see what happens. Let's see if I get traffic Right.
Speaker 1:But again, it's not strategic, it's just I can actually maybe get some traffic from this, but we're not reverse engineering the actual sales process. It's like we'll get to the selling. We're not ready to sell yet. We'll get to the selling and I'm here to tell you that's not the right way to go about it. Right. Then, once we're doing that, we're like well, I'm going to put an offer together. Right, I can you start selling? I'm tired of doing this for free. I'm tired of whatever I'm going to, you know, put on my bio like I sell this or I do that, or DM me for whatever.
Speaker 1:And so you try to put together an offer, right, and then you tie that offer to a product or service right, you're putting those two together in conjunction and you're trying to massage that and send people to it. And what have you? And you know people aren't taking you up on it and you're like, oh my gosh, when I launch or I talk about, I go live and talk about a product I'm selling, I get crickets and nobody's really engaged with what I'm doing. Um, I'm not making enough sales. I make, if I really, really hustle, maybe I make some sales, but I feel like I'm not getting paid what I'm worth.
Speaker 1:These are things we hear all the all the time, right? So that's the next rung up from that, that path that we're talking about, from bottom up versus top down, and then finally, finally, we'll see people, and often and it's sad, but we do see a lot of people that come to us that say I'm finally ready to connect with an audience, right? So all of that to say is you're going from the bottom up, hoping that you'll land with an audience, but without actually researching the audience first. How much sense does that make, right? So the metaphor that I like to use is this Anybody can sit down and put together a casserole, right, you can throw it together, you can figure it out.
Speaker 1:Maybe it tastes good, maybe it doesn't right, but having a recipe makes it so much easier. Why would we not do that? It's like men putting together furniture at Ikea. Sure, they can figure it out, but how many times do you have to put it together and take it apart and figure this out and analyze this? It takes a lot longer, a lot longer. So we always want to have a guiding star in anything that we do, whether that's the recipe book or whether that's the instruction manual to put something together. We want to make our lives as seamless and as easy as possible with the most direct point A to point B that we can possibly create. Your audience is your direct A to B. It is your straightest line that you can possibly create.
Speaker 1:When you have that, when you know who your person is when you're speaking them directly, the rest of it should fall into place. When you have that, when you know who your person is when you're speaking them directly, the rest of it should fall into place. When you do bottom-up marketing and you're trying to start from the bottom and then force your way all the way up to try to reach an audience that's not qualified, vetted or researched, it's harder than it needs to be and it takes a long time. Maybe you land with something. Maybe after a year or two you put out enough content on social media that gets people and you're like, ah, when I do this, they like it. But it's harder than it needs to be.
Speaker 1:If you talk to your audience first and it's as simple as doing some insight surveys, which we teach inside the Business Knowledge Membership we can literally do 10 of those one-to-ones, learn who we want to serve and then start building from there. That's the foundation that's going to make things everything. That's going to make everything much clearer, and then from there we can say great, I know who and how I serve, in the ways that my alignment of my skills is also in alignment with who these people are and what they're looking for in the ways they've been underserved. So, again, hopefully this gives you a little bit of an insight. I hope this gave you some aha moments like, oh my gosh, I we we taught this. Yesterday. People were like I have been doing bottom up and that's all I've ever been taught. I've only been taught bottom up marketing. And so I'm here to give you some newfound hope and hopefully you now have that.
Speaker 1:Maybe you're in a situation where you're frustrated or you're overwhelmed or you're not getting the results that you want and, hearing this, you're like I can do that, because here's the deal, guys Business doesn't have to be hard. It's a matter of figuring out what works and doing more of that. Sometimes we overcomplicate things. When you start with your audience and you build from there, you're making your life so much easier. So, again, I'm going to include this graph on our website. You're going to see a lot more of it and actually, from a visual representation standpoint, it's very clear what we just talked about. But you get the general gist and I did the best I could with this medium and I will probably be covering it on our YouTube channel as well in the near future. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Make sure to subscribe to the show for more of this. Leave us a five-star review if you feel like we earned it and we will see you guys in the next one.
