The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you byEsther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business,
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. Welcome back to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today I'm joined by Patty K, consultant, speaker, and writer from pattyk.com, and we're talking about standing out by being yourself. Welcome, Patty.
Thank you. I am so excited to be here.
Yeah, we finally got you on the show. We've been back andforwarding so much. But does this date it? Does that date suit? Does the otherdate suit and then at the end of the day, it didn't suit Melanie. So I'm on myown today, guys, bear with me. This is the first podcast I've recorded on myown in almost three years, so we've done quite well to get this far. But Patty,you're very welcome. Explain a little bit about yourself for our lovelylisteners.
Absolutely. So I'm a marketing consultant and I specialisein working with solo entrepreneur, professional service provider kinds ofbusinesses, what I would call trusted advisors. Part of the work that they dowith their clients is provide advice and insight and education, and that'swrapped in a relationship as well. And the thing I help my clients with morethan anything else is messaging. How do they talk about what they do in a waythat gets the interest of their next clients and explains what they do in a waythat inspires those people to reach out and connect with them and ultimatelybuy from them?
Yeah, well, that's what we all want at the end of the day,is to connect, make those relationships work. And obviously the sales, it'swhat we all need, especially right now with the big recession hanging over usand just after a couple of years of COVID and not having events, not being ableto go out and meet people in person. So what's one of the main things that youwould sit down and talk to your clients about? How do you get them to findtheir message?
I'll share my big secret about marketing. Seriously, nobodyever listens when I say this, but it's actually easier than we think it is. Andyour clients will tell you exactly how to market to them if you listen to them.So marketing is all about effective. Marketing is all about getting inside thehead of the person who's going to buy from you and speaking to them accordingto their interests. So when you think about your next client wandering aroundin the world hoping to run into you, they've got a problem that they want tosolve that you can help them with, or they've got something that they want thatyou can help them with. And so that's what you talk about. You talk about theproblems that they're experiencing or you talk about what they want and theywill tell you in the very first conversations you have with them. Your firstdiscovery call or consultation when you ask them about, hey, what's going on?What inspired you to book this call with me? And they will tell you and youwrite that down and then you put that in your marketing material. So ifsomebody shows up on your call and says that they've got this terrible backpain and they've tried everything and nothing works, that's what you can putinto your marketing. "Got terrible back pain, tried everything and itdoesn't work?" And that's the kind of messaging that lands with clients.But what we tend to do instead is get wrapped up in what we do and how we doit. And how do I explain this complicated thing that people don't understandwhen it's really just a simple offer to help people get what they want or solvethe problem in front of them.
I see. Keeping it simple is the most effective way. We doget so wrapped up in our own sort of issues and in our we released an episode acouple of couple of weeks ago about marketing jargon, which a lot of marketersget wrapped up in. And how do we explain what Click Rates is and the clickthrough and all this? How do we explain it? Simple terms. Keeping it simple,like finding their pain point and meeting them there. That's something that weall need to hear a lot. We all need to remember every time. It's like you said,if you don't meet your audience where they are, then they're going to gosomewhere else to someone that is meeting them. Okay, so you've got your copy,your content, and your messaging. Does it all have to be the same? How do youstand out? That's a topic that we're talking about today. Stand out from therest with your copy and your content. If everybody is marketing that they'vegot the solution to the bad back.
There's a few things to keep in mind here. One, and I alwayscome back to this, is put yourself in the shoes of your future client and kindof view the situation through their eyes. So you are one of many voices thatthey're being exposed to. So what you want to do in order to stand out is A,you want to make sure that you're talking about their pains and their problems.And that's going to go a long way in a lot of cases because everyone else isout there being clever and creative and talking about what they do. And you canstand out by talking about something that is interesting to them in languagethat they understand, that's super simple. So that's one piece of it. The otherthing is to be repetitive. It'll be boring to you, but you really want to bethis broken record that says the same thing over and over and over again. Andit's consistent. You start to get known as that person that helps with that andit takes multiple repetitions of a message before somebody actually takes itin. Once again, think about the flood of information that you have coming in.You're going to miss one message, but if you see it several times, then you canstart to remember it. And just in all of this is to kind of keep in mind thatall of this incoming that we have isn't necessarily all about you and yourbusiness. The person that's receiving all of this slew of advertising in frontof them might not be hearing about anybody who does what you do other than you.So we often want to say, how do we stand out from our competitors? But whatwe're really looking for is how do we stand out from the general noise? It'shelpful to stand out from competitors if you're in that place in the sales kindof cycle where somebody is actually comparing you to competitors becausethey're making a decision about who they're going to go with is very differentfrom standing out in a social media feed, which could be full of all kinds ofstuff that might get their attention. And then the third thing is being you,because nobody can compete with that.
Even if you have a twin, they can't be you, although theymight confuse people, but, yeah, they're definitely not you. So many people getbogged down in the what and the how and they're not really focusing on the why.You're out there to help your clients. It's not, yes, we all want the sale, weall like the money at the end of the day, but if you're not in your business tohelp people and to improve something in their life, then you might need toreconsider your business. If it doesn't excite you and motivate you, then youmight need to find somewhere else to stand out.
Yeah, it's one of the things that one of the soap boxes Ilike to climb up on about this is, a lot of the business advice that we get.Speaking as a solo entrepreneur, a lot of the business advice we get is meantfor big business and it often comes in the form of do your market research.Where's the gap in the market? Who are your biggest competitors? What do peoplewant? Go and survey people and find out what they want and then do that. So yougo out and you survey people and you find out that what they really want issomebody to come in their yard and scoop dog poop. If you're not really excitedabout helping pet owners have a poop free lawn, that's going to be a reallyhard business for you to market and sell. It's extremely hard to market andsell something you don't actually want to do. So I take the opposite kind ofangle with this. If you're going to be a teeny, tiny, itty bitty little smallbusiness. If you're going to be a solopreneur, start with what you want to doand what you feel passionate about doing. What's the service you want toprovide? Where do you get excited about helping a client. What uses your skillsand your abilities and your interests? Figure that out first so that you'reinventing days and weeks and months and years of doing a thing that you'regoing to enjoy doing. Then when it comes to the marketing, you look from the otherside towards you, like from the client side, and you go, who is going tobenefit the most from what I do? Like the stuff that I do? What problem is itgoing to solve for people? What are they complaining about that what I do canbe helpful, and then take your marketing from that. You don't have to worryabout taking some kind of market share in the coffee industry or something likethat. It's like you just have to you just have to get enough business for youto sustain a small business. And there can be like hundreds, thousands ofpeople who do what you do and they all do just fine.
Yeah. In our business in marketing, there are loads that dowhat we do, so we all have to stand out some way or another. Do you need tohave a huge audience when you start out?
No! Just start out with one, right? It's like you need yourfirst client or customer and start with the people that you know. Not in thisannoying bug your friends and relatives to buy something even though it's notrelevant to their interests. But when you think about who are the people thatyou know that could help you get started with your business? Who in yournetwork of people who already have a degree of know, like and trust with, whocan you talk to about your business? Who might buy from you directly or whomight know somebody who could buy from you directly? And you can start withthose one on one conversations. And this is something that as individual humanbeings, it's a competitive advantage over a big company that doesn't do thatkind of personal kind of connections, right?
Yes.
You can get your first few clients from talking to peopleone on one. I work with some people that are incredibly successful, incrediblysuccessful in their advisory, kind of practises. Multiple, six figure, kind ofsolopreneur type of people who have virtually no public social media presence.You would look at their website and you go, yeah, I'm not even sure they're inbusiness. Right? They don't have that. What they have instead is a very close,well connected network of people who actually know, like and trust them and arepositioned to be able to send them business. They have happy clients that staywith them over time and who send them referrals. And that's the business. Andwhen I ask them how they established it, they talk about stuff like, well, Iwent to networking events every day and I made a goal for myself to collectfive new business cards and have five coffee meetings, and in a second, it addsup over time. And I had these conversations with people one on one, and I gotsome clients and it just kind of started the ball rolling. They weren't eventhinking about something like social media or website, they were just goingright to conversations. That still works.
Yeah. And it's a lost art, really. I mean, COVID definitelytook away our networking, like one on one and our coffee meetings and thingslike that, but there are other ways around it. Even if you live somewherereally remote and there isn't a physical networking event close to you, thereare still online networkings going on. There are still people. One thing thatCOVID definitely taught us is that the world is very small and the world isvery connected. So you don't have to rely just on your next door neighbours andyour friends and family in your zone, in your area, in your small circumferenceto buy from you or to refer you. There are people maybe on the other side ofthe world that could also. Patty and I are talking in Northern Ireland andCanada right now, so there is nothing to stop you from going out and hitting upan online networking event in a different time zone. Perfectly doable.
Absolutely. And there are so many there's so many of them,so many opportunities to do that. And the other thing, too, is to even changehow you look at social media. A lot of people look at social media as like, oh,here's a great place where I can advertise and I can promote and I can talk andI can put myself out. Or you can look at it as the world's largest networking eventand here's a way to connect with individuals one on one through social media.Like, you can make human connections that way as well. It's the other side ofit.
Yeah, it's the social part of social media.
Exactly. Everyone's all focused on the media side. But thesocial part is great. It doesn't have to be, you don't have to run a Facebookcommunity with 100,000 people in it or whatever. You can just go and drop intoone of those communities and look for people that you might make a connectionwith, especially if you're an introvert and you don't want to be all loud andnoisy. You can have one on one connections with people.
Yeah. And one thing that people keep asking is, what socialmedia platform should I be on for my business? So you were talking earlier onabout the businesses that you specify or specifically work with. Where wouldyou recommend that they hang out?
I don't know that there's a right answer for this. What Ilook at is, okay, who are your clients and where are you most likely to findthem? So when I work with clients who work like my clients are a lot ofbusiness coaches, management consultants, leadership trainers, executivecoaches, that kind of thing, it's like LinkedIn, especially if your clients are40 plus, 50 plus on LinkedIn. I don't know, maybe the younger generations areon TikTok. I like LinkedIn. LinkedIn seems like a really good place to meetthose sort of people. Whereas sometimes I work with business coaches that workwith startups and they're working with new solopreneurs so Facebook orInstagram or TikTok or something like that. That might be where more of thosekinds of people are, maybe even just because they think that's where they'resupposed to be marketing themselves. Right? So it's kind of like, where do youthink your people are? And the other piece of this is where do you want to be?Where are you willing to make an investment? Because when you look at the statsfor how many people are on all of these networks, and it's like, okay, there'sa billion people on Facebook and I need 25 clients to make my businesssuccessful. Probably a good chance, right?
Probably. But then we come back to the whole how do youstand out from the noise if there's a billion people talking to a billion otherpeople? It's a lot of noise.
Yeah. And that's why you really want to go back to themessaging thing, is to talk about the things that your prospective clients areinterested in, because that's what's going to get their attention. They gotthis stream of stuff, stream of stuff, stream of stuff. And then it's like butif you talk about something that's actually on their mind, they're going there.They'll be like, yeah, you can solve that for me here wasting my time onFacebook because I have this thorny problem I can't get over. And then there itis. There's the answer.
Yeah. Do you, it's not a belief, but do you believe in ads?Do ads work?
I think ads work great for some businesses and lesseffectively for others. Once again, it's like, how do people buy? So when youknow who your clients are, then you know how they buy. So one of the things Ido when I work with my clients is I will interview their clients to get theinformation. So I'll have interviews with their clients and I will ask: it'slike, "well, if you didn't know my client and you were looking to hirethat kind of service, how would you go about it?" And that's when I go tosearch on Google, or more likely, I would ask some people in my network, andI've had people explicitly say, I would never buy that kind of service throughGoogle search. I would never buy that kind of service through social media. Iwould buy it through my trusted network and say, okay, so what does that meanfor your marketing? Whereas with a different client, with a different kind ofbusiness, they might be all, I'm on Instagram. That's where I see stuff, is onInstagram so that's you'd be able to catch my eye there. Or even better, Iwould meet them at a conference, an industry conference or an industrymagazine. Sometimes they will actually name an industry magazine. It's like,oh, well, they should run an ad in some magazine that I'd never heard ofbefore, but it's just for that particular industry. So sometimes look beyondjust social media is easy, and there it is. But maybe there's a better way toreach the people you want to reach that's not that.
Definitely and I mean, like we were saying, social media isa lot of noise. It's a lot of effort. It's a lot of investment in your time andyour energy, and there's a lot of negativity. Like, if you put a message into amagazine, you'll never hear what people didn't like about your ad in themagazine. But they're very keen to tell you on social media what they didn't like,not as keen to tell you what they did like. So maybe yeah, maybe do think aboutwho, obviously we've always said this, think about who your audience is. Thinkabout where they hang out. Think about what they need, what they want. At theend of the day, it is your business, but you're not buying from yourself. Soyou definitely need to take all of these points that Patty has been telling uson board today and just maybe take a step back and reevaluate. Okay, we'recoming up to the end of the year. Reevaluate go into the next year, the nextmonth, next week, with a whole new set of fresh eyes on what you're selling,what you're offering, whether it be a business that's offering services orwhether you're offering products. Take a step back, rethink, what is my client?What do they want? What do they need? What have they bought before? What dothey look for? And maybe yeah, interview your clients. I never thought of doingthat. Never thought of asking my clients. Some people even forget like, Ialways forget to ask where they found us. Like, how did you hear about us?Sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes they come through referrals from otherpeople. But other times, like, this random person from this random placerandomly messaged me. That's cool. Ask. This is for myself as well. How did youhear about us? And then focus more attention on that area.
Absolutely. The interviewing your clients, your customers,it's brilliant. And it's just simple questions. It's like, why did you hire mein the first place? What were you hoping to get? What did you like best aboutworking with me? It's like those kind of questions. Even better, swap with oneof your business networking pals and have them interview five of your clients,then you interview five of theirs, they might be more willing to talk. It'seasier. Yeah, it's one of the things when I interview for my clients, I have noproblem saying, oh, you really like that? Tell me more. Tell me more about whyyou think they're awesome. What was really great about that? Whereas if I wasinterviewing someone who was talking about me, I'd be a little shy about goingthere. I've got no problem when I'm interviewing someone else, so it kind oftakes the pressure off. And it's easier for the client too, because they canlet their guard down a bit as well.
Yeah, that's true. Well, it's been great, Patty, honestly,all the tips and advice you've given. And you have an ebook for our listeners,don't you? Tell them. Tell all of us what they can expect from the ebook.
Yes, I've got a little ebook and it's all about, well, someof the stuff we talked about today. But it's how to build a marketing machinefor a trusted advisory kind of a business. If you do some kind of servicebusiness, freelance business, working with clients one on one, it's got a lotof information about my perspective on how to be client centred and what to puton your website and how to approach your content marketing and all of that. Soit's available for free on my website. https://pattyk.com/free-ebook/
And it will be in the show notes as well, whenever they getup on our website. Thank you so much for joining us today, Patty. It's been brilliant. We could have talked forever. There's just so much, but people, just when you're listening here be you. You're the only one who can be and stand out at it. You are outstanding as you are. That's it for today, guys. We're back next week with another episode of Monday Morning Marketing. Until then, bye bye.
Bye. Thank you for having me. It was great.