About the Guest:

Amy Hager is an esteemed organic marketing mentor currently serving at the Joyful Business Revolution. With a passion for empowering individuals to harness their unique strengths, Amy helps clients develop authentic, effective marketing strategies void of traditional advertising methods like Google or Facebook ads. Her core focus is to help businesses align their marketing efforts with their innate gifts and energy, thereby fostering genuine connections with their ideal audience.

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Episode Summary:

In this engaging episode of "Building the Abundant Woman," host Samantha is joined by Amy Hager, the organic marketing mentor from Joyful Business Revolution. Amy shares invaluable insights into leveraging one's unique gifts to create effective marketing strategies without the reliance on traditional advertising platforms such as Google or Facebook ads. The conversation dives deep into the nuances of aligning business practices with personal energy levels and intrinsic strengths, providing a fresh perspective on how to approach marketing authentically.

Amy articulates the importance of storytelling in marketing and the need to connect with potential clients on a personal level. Highlighting her own experiences transitioning from corporate to entrepreneurship, Amy discusses the common pitfalls many women face when setting up their businesses and emphasizes the significance of creating a business that adds joy, not stress, to their lives. Key concepts such as understanding your content personality and the power of consistent, strategic messaging are explored in depth, offering listeners practical advice to apply in their entrepreneurial journeys.

Key Takeaways:

• Align Marketing with Personal Strengths: Discover how to leverage your unique energy and expertise to develop effective marketing strategies that resonate with your audience.
• Storytelling in Marketing: Learn how to connect with your clients through storytelling to build trust and rapport quickly.
• Content Personality Types: Understand the five content personality types and how to utilize your dominant type to create impactful messaging.
• Creating a Lifestyle-Friendly Business: Amy discusses the importance of structuring your business to fit your personal life, avoiding the trap of creating a "business prison."
• Consistent Strategic Messaging: The significance of developing a consistent marketing message and sticking with it for at least 90 days to evaluate its effectiveness.

Notable Quotes:

1. "We really believe that you are your best messenger and your best marketer." - Amy Hager
2. "Marketing really is here to create conversation. And a lot of times, people go into presentation mode in marketing." - Amy Hager
3. "When you can articulate the experience that you're going to create to guide people from island of stuck to island of success, that will always help you feel more confident when you're bringing on new clients." - Amy Hager
4. "When you can double down on what your innate strength and innate gift is and let the rest go, I think that's the best advice I can give anybody out there who is starting a business." - Amy Hager
5. "Be okay with having strengths and weaknesses, and really let your strengths be strengths and let the weaknesses go. We don't need to improve upon them." - Amy Hager

Resources:

• Amy Hager on Facebook: Amy Hager
• Joyful Business Revolution Website: Joyful Business Revolution
• Content Personality Quiz: Content Personality Quiz

Don't miss this episode full of transformative insights and practical advice for building a joyful and authentic business. Tune in and stay connected for more enlightening episodes of "Building the Abundant Woman"!

0:00:33 - (Amy): Hey, thanks for having me, Samantha. So I am Amy Hager, the organic marketing mentor at the Joyful business revolution. And again, we really believe that you are your best messenger and your best marketer. And we've just kind of find out that joyful way that aligns with your energy and your expertise so that you can get in front of the people that you want to be working with and support those clients that you're really, really great at supporting. So it's amazing there's people have so many gifts to give in this world. I just am somehow lucky that I got the marketing and messaging gift.

0:01:20 - (Samantha): Right.

0:01:51 - (Samantha): Awesome. Well, that's usually always one of the first things is people want to tell you exactly what they do all the time, and it's like a giant poster they're just walking around with. So as, like, say, this person, this mom who's getting, you know, she's ready to start a business from home, just, she's home with her kids and things like that. Or even the woman who's just like, I really would rather be at home enjoying my space or being able to travel when and wherever I want to.

0:02:33 - (Amy): Yeah. So I think the one thing that when we start businesses is we're usually leaving something else, whether it's our kids are grown up and, you know, we want to re enter or enter the workforce or we're leaving, like, the corporate career that just drained our souls. And I think the number one mistake I see women do is they create businesses that are more like prisons. And so there is this dream, right, that you can travel, you can be at home, you can do these things, but then there's this internal struggle of, oh, my gosh, I didn't do enough of my business today.

0:03:34 - (Amy): That's where my prime time of getting things done are, and making sure that we build a strategy that allows that structure, but also flexibility, so that you can build that business and you can be in flow when you're meeting with clients and marketing and doing all the things that need to be done and doing it in the way that is aligned with your energy. For the right part of the day. For the right part of the week. For the right part of the month, too.

0:04:04 - (Amy): And so I think what really came clear to me is I used to be an association, like nonprofit executive director, and I had a lot of autonomy to where I could pick my hours. I could decide when and how I should be doing things. A lot of times I scheduled meetings based off of my energy, because I'm like, I'm the ones got to execute this sucker.

0:04:30 - (Amy): And so that really taught me early on that when I can show up at the best time and best space for me, that's where I'm going to be the best for my audience. And when I bridged into this gap of entrepreneurship, into this industry of entrepreneurship, I should say that's definitely one of my biggest, biggest criteria is to make sure that I'm working in the space and flow that works well with me. And I have a business partner, and we flow very, very differently. Like, I'm going to be on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday on Zoom, usually from nine to 4430.

0:05:17 - (Samantha): Yeah.

0:05:58 - (Samantha): Yeah. And I totally agree with that because, um, so I have two kids, and my oldest is five, and so I homeschool her. And so usually it's like, in my day, I get. I'm one of those everyday kind of people.

0:06:14 - (Samantha): Is like, I just want to do it for a little bit every day. Um, just because it gives me that, like, sense of, like, routine. Um, because I'm not a strict scheduler. Like, if I notice that my daughter's having a rough morning, I'm gonna, like, let her go and get her energy out and, like, go do that, and then we'll come back to school. Like, that's the beauty of our lives, is like, that, you know, we've created it to be this way.

0:06:47 - (Amy): Right.

0:07:14 - (Samantha): She was like, do you want this business or do you want something you can work on one to 2 hours and like, you know, have, have the life with your children? Because I'm one of those, I love to be very, like, connected to my life. You know, I still do the laundry. I still do, like, I love to bake sourdough bread. I love spending time outside with my kids. Like, I'm very connected to my family as where I can automate everything in my business.

0:07:50 - (Amy): Yeah.

0:07:54 - (Amy): Yeah.

0:08:15 - (Amy): Not a light switch and it doesn't always stay the same. Marketing, your marketing and messaging is going to evolve as you do and you have those human experiences. Right. And also as you have more interactions with clients, what I will say is once you have your business running and you're getting referrals in repeat business, that's when you're really actually ready to start marketing the business. And a lot of people think that right out of the bat, they need to market market.

0:08:56 - (Samantha): Yeah.

0:09:28 - (Amy): And if it's working, then replicate that. And that's where that automation piece kind of comes into play. You can automate more of the things because they've worked. And a lot of times people will be like, I feel like I'm just saying the same thing over and over and over again. Well, you are, because I say, create a brilliantly boring business. And when you greet, when you have that brilliantly boring business, meaning your messaging and your marketing is working, meaning you're attracting ideal clients and having thoughtful sales conversations, I call them soulful sales conversations.

0:10:31 - (Amy): No, not if it's working for you.

0:10:34 - (Amy): Growing and scaling a business is all personal, too. If I have a business that's bringing $1,000 a month in and that's all I need in my life and in my business, and that's all I need it to do, then that is wonderful. If someone I'm talking to needs a ten or twelve k a month business because they are the one who's supporting the majority of the bills and finances in their family. All right, we're going to figure out how to build that business for them to achieve that.

0:11:16 - (Samantha): I think that's a, I think that's such a true point. Um, because I think there are especially a lot of women I work with is like, we have this business because, like, we want this business. It's not a necessity.

0:11:32 - (Samantha): And so there's this, like, conflict of like, well, we want this successful business because, like, it's something we're passionate about and all those things. But I think sometimes it's really hard for us to get out of that mindset of like, I'm not going to starve to death next week if this doesn't work.

0:11:53 - (Samantha): And so it's like, that's where, you know, for them, it's like, I just want it to be like, where it's, you know, it's going really well. I always think of Jessica and she laughs because I tell her I used her story all the time because I love it. She has, you know, she makes multiple six figures in her esthetician business, but she has to, like, literally manually, like, do the thing, do all the things. And she's like, I just want it to. Where people are just, like, booking on my schedule. I don't have to think about it.

0:13:04 - (Amy): Yeah.

0:13:21 - (Amy): Right. And I think it does come down to, I'm not gonna lie, it comes down to messaging and marketing it, and it comes down to you being able to explain how you help without actually explaining how you help. So we always say, you know, businesses are like boats. The boat is going to take you from island of stuck to island of success. When you are talking about your boat, a lot of times what we end up talking about is, you know, the snacks on the boat, the drinks on the boat, the seats, the towels, the size of the boat, sometimes the color of the boat. Maybe we'll talk about the motor of the boat.

0:14:06 - (Samantha): Yeah.

0:14:33 - (Amy): And so when you can articulate the experience that you're going to create to guide people from island of stuck to island of success, that will always help you feel more confident when you're bringing on new clients. And I think if you've done it twice, you can walk through both of those experiences to kind of figure out how you're going to phrase it and how you're going to say it. But let's say it's something kind of brand new. You've done it ish in other ways, but because of how you can see the world, you're able to see a more streamlined way of actually executing on this. Yeah, you can articulate that so that someone can say, yes, you're going to be so much more confident, even if you've never done it again or ever done it like in this way before.

0:15:55 - (Amy): Exactly. And I think the other, besides not knowing how to explain what they do, like, the actual words that you say or that you write or that you create, it's the vehicle of how you're delivering the message, too. And so a lot of people get wrapped up in, oh, people absorb content differently. There's people who absorb video, visual, audio, written, or live in person interaction differently. I need to market to all five of those types of people.

0:17:00 - (Amy): When you start delivering your messaging in that one way and let the rest go, it's amazing to see who you end up attracting into your business and how much more aligned they are. And so I'm a live in person person. So is my business partner. 90% of our clients are live in person people.

0:17:21 - (Amy): And that is a okay. Like, we jive so well, we're able to really help move them. We did realize, though, if we were the founders of the content personality and there's five of them, we do still need to figure out how to speak to all five of them. And so we brought people on our team in those different content personality types to fill those gaps. And so when I've seen people either stop doing all five or go from one that they thought they were good at because they like it, a lot of people like writing, and they're probably good at writing, but writing is not usually the way that you energetically connect with people the most.

0:18:00 - (Amy): And so that's what we really want to do. We want to make sure that you're creating from that place to get people into those conversations. And, you know, when you're alive in person person, it's that that interaction, whether it's here on Zoom or physically in the same. It's like the energy that you're getting off from the other person is giving you good energy, and you're aligning a video person. They don't need anyone else in the room to be able to explain things really, really well.

0:19:05 - (Amy): And she's like, I ended up forwarding that to my family and saying, my friend Cindy says it best. This is what I think about you. And so, you know that written is your best way to communicate. When other people are actually using your written words and giving you credit for it. And then your visual content personality type, you need something visual with you to explain things. And so maybe it's photos. Maybe it's an infograph. Maybe it's a PowerPoint slide.

0:20:10 - (Samantha): I think that's so true. And I've heard that a lot of times is like. Is like, you can always hire out your weaknesses.

0:20:17 - (Samantha): You can't hire your strengths.

0:20:20 - (Samantha): And so it's like, what was it? It's like, if my kid makes a b in math, but they're like, a tennis superstar is like, I'm going to buy them tennis lessons. I'm not going to get them a tutor.

0:20:34 - (Samantha): And it's like, because obviously, like, the better that we are at our strengths, and, you know, and I talk about that all the time, like, because when I get on a podcast or something like that is like, I get clients, like, right and left.

0:20:48 - (Samantha): I mean, I had my first five figure month because of a podcast episode that I was on, and it, like, wasn't even hard to close people from that because they had just listened to me. And every person I've, like, sat down and talked to him, like, hey, this is how you do it.

0:21:05 - (Samantha): But, man, putting that into seven to ten second Instagram reels.

0:21:10 - (Samantha): It's, like, not my jam. No, not my thing. But I can't, like, you know, at the same time. But you're like, I'm trying to get clients. So it's like, what are you. Because not. Not everybody in the world is gonna let you be on their podcast, right? So it's like, so what do you. You know, so realizing those things, it's like, every time I've been on a podcast episode, I get clients.

0:21:43 - (Samantha): Literally. I have done the math, and it's like, two clients a month.

0:22:13 - (Amy): And when you set that intention for your strategy, the rest becomes a lot easier. But again, a lot of times, we're told we have to show up in multiple places, multiple platforms. You don't. I double down on Facebook and do. I don't mind, like, LinkedIn and, yeah, I don't mind Instagram, but I'm really great at Facebook. That's where I can show up every day. And I guarantee you your clients are on every single social media, YouTube, podcast platform out there.

0:23:04 - (Samantha): It's a struggle bus. It's a struggle bus. I'm like, if I could just, like, go in and, like, into a room of 500 people and be like, hey, I've already, like, done all of this for you. All you have to do is, like, go watch this step by step. And people did that. Like, I would. I'm like, give me a room. Yeah, because I'm gonna get in my rooms.

0:23:58 - (Samantha): Yeah.

0:24:18 - (Samantha): Yeah. I love that. All right, Amy. Well, where can everybody find you Facebook.

0:24:53 - (Samantha): I'm literally going to do this, we get off. I'm going to do it.

0:25:15 - (Samantha): We can all do this. Every one of us can do this.

0:25:19 - (Samantha): Well, Amy, thank you so much. I know this is not the last conversation I'm having with you, for sure, but I just know that, like, everyone when they hear this is like, I think it's going to make, it's going to make it so much easier. Instead of trying to force our, you know, our round self, round self into a square peg, it's like just not, we're not going to do those things anymore. And so I think that's the huge step here is that we just need to align what aligns with us.

0:26:15 - (Samantha): Or if you're a homeschool mom and you're kid and you're comparing yourself to somebody whose kids, like, their kids go to school all day long, compare yourself to those people because it's just not going to work for you. It will work. And there are tons of people out there that can, like, share this love in this place of where you're at, but quit trying to copy the people that don't work for you.

0:26:42 - (Samantha): Yeah, I love that. So, all right.

0:26:46 - (Samantha): Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for your insightful. Like, I think this is going to help a lot of people make some, you know, some changes, some good, solid moves in their business from here. And I hope you guys enjoyed the episode, and we will see you next time. Bye.