Getting Started Part 3: Find Your Tribe

Be everything to someone instead of something to everyone.

image lovingly shared from @taramilktea

The idea of putting ourselves and our products out into the world where there is so much competition can be truly scary and sometimes even makes us second guess the very choice to go into business. 

I'm here to tell you, you're not alone. Most people have those nagging thoughts about not being good enough or that no one will buy what they're selling. In fact, you can also look at competition as a positive: it means there is an audience for it. 

The thing is, you are good enough.

You have more wisdom than you realize. I mean look, you may not be the only one selling exquisitely crafted handmade pottery or planning beach weddings, but that doesn't mean you won't be incredibly successful. You just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other, start with the right audience (you're tribe) and be everything to those special people rather than being something to everyone.

This goes back to the first part of this blog series about understanding your value and what makes your product/service unique. In the end, we have to lean on ourselves and what makes us and our expertise special and unique. 

So how do we find and connect with our tribe? 

First, we have to flip it and focus on our ideal customer. We have to understand what is important to them. What problems do they need solved that we can help with. A great way to really visualize your ideal customer is to create a customer persona. Depending on your business, you may have 1-3 personas or as many as 10-15. I would suggest starting with your top 1-3 to get started. 

Questions to consider as you develop your personas are:

• Personal Details (household, job title/industry, aspirations)
• Demographics (age, education, income, location, gender)
• Personality (social engagement, communication preferences, hobbies)
• Goals (what drives them)
• Challenges (biggest pain points)
• Fears (what keeps them up at night)
• Solutions (how does your product or service make their life better)
• I also like to pop in a photo of what the potential person might look like. 

To make it a little easier on you, I've created another freebie download in the form of a Customer Persona Template to keep everything organized in one place. You can get access to it here.

Now, when it comes time to actually fill in the customer personas, there are a few ways to go about it:

1. Interview customers (if you have them). Consider providing an incentive for their participation.
2. Send a survey to subscribers (if you have them). Consider providing an incentive here as well.
3. Analysis of customer purchasing behavior (if you have sales). Look for trends to see what interested past customers to make a purchase.
4. Another really fascinating way to get some great information about your potential audience is with Facebook Audience Insights. You will need to set up a Facebook Business Manager Account via business.facebook.com. Just follow the prompts to set up or you can get more help with this link from Facebook. 

Next we put on our thinking cap and hypothesize about other brands that may be of interest to our tribe. The only caveat here is that you will need to think about brands that have a large Facebook following for there to be enough data. Let's go back to the fictitious brand of children's clothing made with organic cotton that I provided when we worked on defining goals in the second part of this blog series. I would probably be correct to assume that the mother who is purchasing clothing made with organic cotton may very well be interested in purchasing other products for her children made with organic or without potentially harmful ingredients. One business that I would consider a contender would be The Honest Company. They make a wide variety of products for baby, personal care, cleaning, and vitamins made without potentially heath-compromising chemicals or compounds.

To get to Audience Insights in the Facebook Business Manager, just click on the stacked icon, hover over "All Tools" and click "Audience Insights". Here is a screenshot of how to get to Audience Insights. 

I typed in "The Honest Company" into "Interests" within Audience Insights to see if they have enough fans for this experiment - they do. See the other screenshot below for where to go.

That's pretty much it. Now you can tour around and view a bunch of really great information about the audience that likes The Honest Company's Facebook page or any other Fan page that you are able to pull up with enough of a following. Cool stuff, right? 

Now that you have your pep talk from me, all the pertinent questions to consider when crafting your customer personas and some really awesome ways to fill in the information, what's next?

Loves, it's time to start crafting content that will connect with your tribe.

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Thank you so much for reading! I looking forward to continuing to help you tell the story of your brand, products/services through thoughtful, valuable and informative content. 

I hope you found value in this three-part blog post series about getting clarity with your brand. Please get on the list for my weekly email to be the first to know about new free resources, ideas and inspiration to keep you moving forward. 

With love,

Arica

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Getting Started Part 2: Define Goals

"A goal without a plan is just a wish." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Hi Love! Thank you for popping over to read the second part of this series to get our ducks in a row and build a strong foundation of knowledge around your brand. These discussions and exercises will inform how to develop the best strategy to attract customers/clients for your business.

If you haven't had a chance to check out part 1 which helps bring clarity to your mission, you can go here to read and see how I suggest you use the free Brand Clarity Workbook that I created for you.

Ok let's get to it. 

I remember way back when I was in one of my first Director of Marketing roles. The business was growing quickly and I think a lot of times small business owners are too busy to think through a marketing strategy. They just want results, and fast. So it means a lot of trial, error and quick pivots. However, I feel this leads to a lot of confusion and frustration for the people running marketing efforts. As much as we want the owner to be happy and for the business to be successful, we also believe patience can be a virtue. In most cases, marketing initiatives require multiple variations of testing before it can be ruled out. One single change can alter the outcome drastically. For example, the day/time you send an email blast can be huge.

So what do we do? Well, first we need to be clear about our goals. This way when we begin to develop a strategy or when we are creating a single campaign or piece of content, we can always check ourselves to ask, "Is this ___ supporting my main goal?" It will help avoid a lot of wasted time on potential projects that don't support the goal. Sometimes you have to know when to say no to efforts that are not the right move in the current state of your business.

Now, when I say "goal", I'm speaking in general terms, but it's important to break down and clear some confusion around the differences between goals, objectives, strategies and tactics.

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GOALS: The easiest way to think of a goal is that it's the "What" not the "How". Goals are what you want to accomplish as a broad primary outcome. 

Example for a children's clothing brand, their "goal" might be: To be the preferred choice of organic cotton, casual children's clothing for suburban mothers in the United States. 

It doesn't matter if the goal is lofty. The point is to keep everyone in the company focused on efforts that support this main outcome.

OBJECTIVES: Here is where we get a bit more realistic and measurable. Objectives outline necessary steps to achieve the primary goal. Think of objectives as actions, such as: increase, double, sell, deliver, convert.

Example for the same children's brand: Grow an email list of women ages 27 - 45 with children, who reside in suburban communities. 

STRATEGIES:  A strategy is the "How" and also the "Why" when it comes to fulfilling the objectives that relate to the main goal. It's both because the strategy is speaking to what the approach will be and it's why you are taking it. Might be easier to understand in the example.

Example for the children's brand: Create authority and credibility via endorsements of the clothing brand and designs by collaborating with top mom bloggers and editors.

TACTICS: These are all the action items to be fulfilled in order to carry out the strategy that will meet objectives and support the main goal.

Example list of potential tactics for the children's brand as it relates to the overall goal, objective and strategy outlined above:

1. Compile list of potential bloggers and editors for outreach.

2. Coordinate a photoshoot to showcase product.

3. Design a visual representation of collection (potentially a digital lookbook).

4. Outreach to media with pitch, imagery and offer of physical samples (or actually provide).

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Now that we have the difference between goals, objectives, strategies and tactics clear, I invite you to download my free Goal Worksheet and fill in based on your particular business.

As always, feel free to share with me via arica@writtenandstyled.com if you have questions or would like feedback. 

Don't miss Part 3 next week, where we will close out this series with a discussion all around determining your target audience and why it's so important to get clear now before you start creating content. I'll be sharing some really interesting ways to use Facebook as a tool to get tons of great data. Sign up here to be the first to know about the post. 

Cheers to creating content with clarity!

-Arica

Getting Started Part 1: Bring Clarity to Your Brand + Freebie

"The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision." - Helen Keller

I recently met a business owner with a great product. They came to me feeling a bit lost in all of their marketing efforts. They were doing a lot, but it didn't seem to be bringing them much in the way of leads and sales. Their current marketing efforts were focused on attracting customers that may not have valued this particular product because it didn't align with their mission and values. In the end we determined that the root of the cause was loosing touch with their initial vision, having unclear goals and missing the mark with their core audience.

They needed to shift.

Here is what I suggested they focus on first:

#1 Bring clarity to the brand with a clear company mission. 

#2 Define goals. 

#3 Determine core audience.

In the initial phases of marketing your new business, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. There is a lot on your list. The concept of "content creation" may be confusing and foreign - you just don't know where to begin or what to talk about. So before we get started creating awesome content for your business, let's take a step back and get a few things in order first. 

Because I like to provide my content in smaller bites, I've created a three-part series with foundation guidelines, free templates and advice. In this first part of the series, it's all about getting clarity on your brand and mission.

If you already have a marketing plan in place, you may have some of this worked out. If so, I still suggest you answer these questions and compare them to your initial plan - you might find your answers have changed over time. 

If you never created a marketing plan, this is a great place to start. I highly recommend creating a plan, but by no means do you need anything highly formal or exhausting (with some exceptions if you are looking for investors...).  In many of the businesses that I've worked for where there wasn't a formal marketing plan in place when I was hired, I developed a simple deck in PowerPoint. It was easy to digest for upper management and my team. I included fun visual examples and it didn't take months to create. 

As we diving into step #1 of bringing clarity to your brand, here are a few questions to get you started:

1. What is your company mission?

2. What is the single most important value that you provide customers?

3. What makes your product/service different from the competition? 

Here are examples of potential answers to the questions above for an eco-friendly toothbrush brand:

1. Help make the world a better place by providing a high-quality toothbrush alternative that is considerate of the environment along with being dentist approved with stylish design.

2. Allow customers to feel good about caring for their necessary dental hygiene with an environmentally friendly product that is sustainably grown, organic, BPA-free and biodegradable.

3. An alternative toothbrush for adults, children and pets with an environmentally friendly and dentist approved materials as well as stylish design for the same price as typical plastic or nylon toothbrushes on the market.

To make it even easier, I created a free Brand Clarity Workbook for you to fill in, plus a few additional questions and simple identity forming exercises... :) Get Access Here.

If you would like to run your answers by me, please send to arica@writtenandstyled.com. I'd be happy to have a look. :)

Don't miss Part 2 next week, where we will get into defining goals. Sign up here to be the first to know about the post. 

Cheers to creating content with clarity!

-Arica

Get thoughtful work done first.

As you sit down to begin work for the day, what are you doing first? Wait, actually what did you do when you first woke up? I have a sneaking suspicion that you might be picking up your smart phone to either check email or browse your social apps of choice. Yes?? When you start working, are you again starting with email and the small tasks that are nagging at you to be checked off a list?

Let me say that you are not alone in the struggle. Here is an excerpt taken from the wonderful book, Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series 2013 by Jocelyn K. Glei, 99U): 

"....So long as he arrived at work already feeling tired, he instinctively put his energy into executing simple tasks. Doing so allowed him to feel productive without having to expend too much energy. It was the equivalent, he came to realize, of a sugar high" (p.53).

We all do it time after time (some more than others). It's so rewarding to check things off a list and feel like you are getting ahead, but when it comes time for the big important tasks, we fall short and it's easy to procrastinate. 

What should you be doing first?

Well, everyone has to find their own flow, but I find that it's easiest to focus on my writing early in the morning or late at night when everyone is still asleep. However, later at night means I'm probably working up some stress hormones because I've already put in a full day.

As Benjamin Franklin is quoted to have said: "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

So I've begun getting to sleep and waking up early to write. Actually it's 6:11am as I write this now. I even finished early enough to take in the sunrise! Great way to start the day.

Quick Tip: 

Try and find time in your week that is dedicated to solely generating ideas for the content you want to write about. This way you are ready to get to writing rather than get to contemplating topics. 

Cheers to creating great content with clarity.

-Arica