EPISODE SUMMARY

This week I talk about how to position your business through better systems. How to understand how important you are at the core of the message to your customers and how you can build a system of positioning that will allow you to play with marketing messages and land on what works best for you and your ideal client.

What systems do you need to support your positioning and marketing efforts and how they can help you understand what's working and what isn't.

EPISODE NOTES

Inspired by lots of reading and writing to create this podcast episode but mainly in reaction to positioning books and what I've learnt from Value Based Pricing and orienting yourself to favour the client over yourself.

Building a Story Brand: https://buildingastorybrand.com/

Obviously Awesome: https://www.aprildunford.com/obviously-awesome

Jonathan Stark Value Based Pricing bootcamp: https://jonathanstark.com/vpb

The main message is "don't forget yourself" in the rush to build a business that you think is the right one. Client doesn't come first when you're the one that's in charge.

Also in the recording I call the episode "Marketing Your Business Through Better Systems" but afterwards I changed my mind - this is so much more about Positioning than it is Marketing.

QUOTES

"How can you build it so that there is a funnel of work waiting for you every time you want to dip into it?" [RB]

"Finding your customer is essential. Differentiation is the core of your message. And your story must make sense." [RB]

"This is a six point list which enables you to turn your ideas into your business." [RB]

"The systems and automations or flow from the core decisions you make these will influence your systems and processes." [RB]

"Using analysis and tools such as MailChimp, or ConvertKit, you'll be able to see open rates of your emails, you'll be able to segment your market into locations, age ranges, demographics, perhaps, you'll be able to tag user behaviours" [RB]

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

customer, work, business, services, products, wished, understand, systems, message, story, step, testimonials, marketing, measure, tools, pricing, building, calendar, order, proposition

Richard Bown 0:00

Hello, this is Richard Bown automation for the nation, Episode 11. Building your business through better systems. How often have you wished that you had a single calendar? Rather than checking your work calendar? Your personal one, your family calendar, your partner's calendar? Wouldn't it be great if they're all in one place? Well, why can't you have that? What is actually stopping you? This Week? I'm talking about making your business fit in around your life, and not having a business interfere with your life but being a part of it. How can you build it so that there is a funnel of work waiting for you every time you want to dip into it? I've been thinking about the essence of what makes a business to sales, drive business, marketing, drive sales, marketing has changed, that's for sure. Finding your customer is essential. Differentiation is the core of your message. And your story must make sense. These six points take even the sales funnel, the edge of your business from a customer perspective, through to your story. Why are you doing this business in the first place? Let me read those out again. And you can think about each step. Sales drive business, marketing, drive sales, marketing has changed. Finding your customers essential differentiation is the core of your message. Your story must make sense. Now you can align those concepts in your head and then reverse the list to work out what you need to do. What do you get? Well, first, you must decide on your story. Make your story right. Second, show your personality and your message. Third, show your customer why you are essential for change your marketing approach. Five, measure your results. And finally, bottom line drives your decisions. This is a six point list which enables you to turn your ideas into your business, you'll see that we don't even need to think about our systems and automations until around step four or five of this process, the systems and automations or flow from the core decisions you make these will influence your systems and processes. Finally, you will be able to measure your interactions to see if they are successful and be able to measure the results in terms of your bottom line, how much money you earn. So let's take these one at a time. Step one, make your story right. What does this mean? From reading, building a story brand and listening to marketing experts. We know that we want to base our story around the customer. We want to make all of our efforts about them. For positioning your product. For example, we can listen to April Dunford in obviously awesome. And we can learn how to make a product attractive for another business. While you want to market to that company, how do you know what you want to do for them, who you want to help is intimately tied up with what you want to do to help them. Deciding on your customer is only half the picture. Deciding on what you want to do for them is also vital because it might not afford between your current capabilities or interests. I believe this is the first step. What do you want to spend your days doing? Who do you want to market to but also what do you want to market, this will decide your story. Therefore, to see it as a two sided coin, here's an example for me. Number one, I create the space for you to find and more effectively collaborate with your perfect client. Number two, you are the CEO or a leader of an SME who finds themselves continuously firefighting when you'd rather be attracting new business or servicing current clients. So I'm giving you space to find and service your clients. This is something that helps your business grow, I deliver you value. This is a form of horizontal specialisation, which is based on my skills and interests. I'm not saying that I want to work with a narrow vertical specialisation. I like the challenge of working with different types of folks alerting their needs. Therefore, I set up my story to make myself at the core of the proposition, the client I want to work for has a particular problem, they can't find the time I am to help them with cost and time saving opportunities through better systems. If you want to take this approach, you can do it to understand what it is you can bring to the table, but also who you want to work with. Who are the people you really enjoy talking to step to show your personality and your message. So we've defined ourselves and what we do at a high level. We've defined our target market and what they do, how can we now go ahead and let them know that you exist? Or hey, you need to get creative? What are the words that you would use that your audience would understand? How can you find common ground, you can do some research to understand what might be effective and what might work. Use Google as your tool to find examples of phrases that might work for you. For example, in my business, I want to encourage business leaders between 10 to 100 million turnover to stop getting involved in the day to day aggravation at their business find some space in order to think strategically about where it should be going.

I came up with a phrase stop firefighting then did some research and found some great articles which say what I want to say lots of good quality articles from trusted sources means we've stumbled onto a rich vein of quality keywords that will help get your message across. We can use Google and SEO as our friend here. Not necessarily to drive traffic to our site, but we can use it to differentiate and not be similar. However, the use of a common language here is important Since if we use the same language that our target audience understands, then half the work is done for us. We don't need to invent or explain new terms. Step three, show your customer why you are essential. While we have established that our customer has a problem, and we can potentially help them, how do we then go on to show that how would this would look at why we are the best fit to things, sharing our particular specialisation, and then sharing testimonials that match up with those solutions. So we can niche further into our specialisation, showing how we do things that will affect our customers ability to stop fighting fires. These are the tools and techniques that we employ to make it happen. Next, we can also show how this how this has been done effectively. For others. Testimonials are obviously a great way to do this, ideally with a photo attached. Case studies can also work but these can be sometimes too long or read to appeal to casual browsers. A snappy set of testimonials can add a real impact very quickly. You might need to repackage your services or products in order to make it appeal to your ideal customer. But again, we go back to the touchstone. What do you want to do. So make sure that your products or services are things that you can find yourself getting excited about. There's no point selling things if you don't want to do them. Step four, change your marketing approach. This is what we've been building up to. Until now we've carefully looked at what we want to do, who we want to help. And we've reached out to them and showed some personality and our message to make things click with them. We have them interested because we know a little bit about them. They know a little bit about us. But mainly they understand that we know their problem. Now it's time to show that our depth of experience is unparalleled. This is something which I won't cover today, it's a subject all to itself, the relationship between what you want to sell and who you want to sell it to is of course, very intimate. And this whole process will be a loop which we'll need to iterate through several times. In order to understand where we ended up. Step five, measure your results, you're not going to qualify every lead, you're not going to convert every one of those into a sale. But you can learn from every interaction. How by using the right system to start with. This is where we get into the system's parts, using analysis and tools such as MailChimp, or ConvertKit, you'll be able to see open rates of your emails, you'll be able to segment your market into locations, age ranges, demographics, perhaps, you'll be able to tag user behaviours, understand how your customers are navigating your content, what buttons they're clicking on, you can see what percentage of those on your list go on to make purchases, and how their behaviour affects this. The more you understand, the more you can do to better serve your customers, and even preempt or predict their wishes. And once. This isn't mean doesn't have to mean dystopian levels of oversight, and having to spend time and money building custom tools. These are off the shelf solutions which allow high levels of knowledge about your customer. But in order to make sense of them, you need to be clear on what your proposition is and what your customer looks like. Step six. The bottom line drives your decisions. So it's great having clarity, you have an idea of who you are, you know who your customer is, you've shown your customer, why you are essential. You've got a marketing approach that fits with you and your customer. You both find it valuable and you like what you're selling. You are measuring what you do in your outreach and your conversations. So now you want to see some results. Measuring is fine, but that doesn't put bread on the table. So and this is tied up a little with the products and services you offer. Again, you do need to make sure that you are charging the right money for your services. And you're not just giving stuff away. And you're not just charging so much that no one can see any value in it. However, I'm not going to go into pricing today either. That's really not my speciality. If you want more information on pricing, and also on products and services that I wholeheartedly recommend Jonathan Starks value pricing seminar, and the work he does with his group coaching. I'm a member of that, and I've learned so much from him in the five months I've been working with him. Additionally, if you want more information on how to pitch your products and services, and how to build products and services, he's also the person to talk to. I really hope you've enjoyed my take on how to get your marketing message honed, and a system in place. This is really a method that I've used the land on a way of working that fits well for me. It may not fit you or everyone but I hope you do find it useful in some way. For this week. This is Richard Brown on automation for the nation. Wishing you Goodbye and good luck

Transcribed by https://otter.ai