S2E2: You don’t have a marketing Problem
Let’s cut to the chase here, friends. It’s time to talk about the biggest problem I’ve faced in business to date. I thought I had a marketing problem, but I was wrong. Tune in to hear what the true problem was, what the strategy is moving forward, and why relying on the trope that social media is the ONLY way to solve the problem of lead generation is highly problematic.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to Probably Bothered the podcast that cuts through online business meds so that you can redefine your version of success because I believe if you aren't a little bit bothered, you probably aren't paying attention.
Okay. I hope you grabbed your London fog and turned up the volume on your headset because… headset, what is this? The nineties? Headphones. Headphones. Anyway, this is gonna be a little bit longer of an episode because I've gotta get you up to speed. So of course I am hanging with the pup, sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table.
I’m commandeering my living room as my podcast studio and not apologizing for it.
So let's dive in. This is episode two of season two of Probably Bothered. I titled this episode, you Don't Have a Marketing Problem.
A Little Story goes with that title, so about three months. I right around the time I recorded, I'm burning it all down. I was convinced I had a marketing problem. I wasn't selling as many websites as I would want in a given month given my income goals for my business. And I thought, I just need a way to get the word out about my business. I have a marketing problem, people don't know about me.
and I think that I should give the disclaimer here that the title that I'm talking about here is me. I don't have a marketing problem.
I'm gonna jump into my favorite part of Probably Bothered, which is what bothers me and what bothers me today. Cuz I guess it changes. It does change the fact that if you don't have consistent business, if you don't have enough leads, you are told it's a marketing problem you're told to get on social media.
And get the word out post constantly. People will find you and then you'll get leads, and then you'll have a consistent business. It's really a lot of times kind of the only advice that we hear from marketing experts, from social media experts. I'm loosely classifying, you guys know, you know the story by now.
Here's the thing. , we the collective, we as humans, had businesses and some of those businesses were wildly successful before social media ever existed before the internet ever existed. So social media is not the only answer to an inconsistency problem in your business. And I promise if you stick with me, I told you in episode two I would get into what led me to this big change and this strategy.
So stay tuned. I'm getting there. But let's keep, let's, let's rewind again. Back to a couple of months ago, I had a bunch of meetings with several wonderful, smart, talented people trying to figure out the source of my marketing problem in my business. And after about five or six conversations, I realized I do not have a marketing problem.
I have a strategy problem, and. Preface this conversation by saying that I have an MBA with a concentration in strategy and entrepreneurship. And I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying that with the full transparency, that sometimes we are moving too fast to recognize the root issue. Sometimes we don't take the time in our business to properly diagnose what's actually happening.
And on the flip side. A lot of times when we talk about business strategies, and entrepreneurs we're told: figure out your offer. Figure out what you charge for it, and figure out how many of those things you need to sell in order to meet that revenue goal that you have for your business. So if, for example, you have an offer that you sell for $500, your revenue goal is $2,000 a month, you need to sell four of them to meet your revenue goal.
There's your strategy, right? But no, it's not that simple. We know that it's not that simple. If it was as simple as selling as many as you need to sell to make the money you wanna make, Then we wouldn't have business coaches, we wouldn't have people asking these questions, and we wouldn't have people who are not meeting their revenue goals in their business.
Right now you have kind of a frame of reference of all of the thoughts that have been swirling in my head for the past couple of months as I've embarked on this journey to figure out what my strategy is going to be. And I have one more little segue and then I promise I'm jumping into it.
I ended season one telling you that I was burning it all down. Now we have to get to the point where we build it back up, right? And my new obsession that will help you understand where I've been coming from is my obsession with this book, the 12-week year. Now, I don't wanna steal the thunder, but the basic summary is that we waste a lot of time as humans.
We think, oh, I have. A goal for next year. Maybe it's a New Year's resolution. Maybe it's your goal for your business. I have 12 months to do it. That's a lot of time. And then suddenly you have 10 months, but like, ah, you still have 10 months. That's a lot of time. And so on, and so on and so on until you've one month and you didn't accomplish any of your goals.
So basically the book argues that we take our goals for a year, wrap them up into 12 weeks, and then. Week effectively becomes a month, and suddenly your time is very, very precious. And what it forces you to do is really look at, if these are my end goals, what's my plan of action to get to that endpoint?
And that's what I was missing in my business. I was missing a plan of action. So I needed to figure out what I wanted my business to look like, what I want my goals to be, and how am I gonna get to those. And the thing that I realized I've re, I've had a lot of realizations, let me tell you a lot of realizations.
Uh, but the thing that I realized is I'm a big-picture thinker. I, it's so easy for me to have huge ideas and to think of the possibilities. It's how my brain works. But strategy for me is not in the big picture, it's in the little detail. . Now, the big picture is the vision. It's just as important because if you don't know where you're going, then there's no need to have a strategy because where the heck are you going?
But I can easily figure out the big picture. I wasn't able to easily figure out all of the tiny steps it took to get there. Now I promise I'm not trying to drag this out. Talkers who tell a story using only 15 second views. So let's cut to the chase. What the heck is the strategy for my business? Not, not the, not the strategy, not the be all, end all, but the strategy that I am working with for my business.
So I have split my business into two different offers and the podcast, so we'll go through all of them. The first, of course, Custom website projects. Now, one of the struggles that I have had over the past year with my custom websites is I kind of had it made when I started my business. My first client ever was a part of an incredible community, and the founder of that community loved her website.
We had a quick call and for the first two years of my. When I was side hustling, they sent me 95% of my business and kept me booked out for the capacity that I was able to handle as a person who had a full-time job. Now, in this past year, for a few different reasons, they're still sending me leads. Uh, it's not as consistent as it has been.
So I realized on that side of my business, I was waiting for somebody. To mention my name and a room that I was not in. I had no control over when a lead came to me because I did not have a system in place to proactively get the word out in a way that I could control about that offer. my primary course of action on my custom website side of my business.
And shout out to Kristi Mitchell. She was a past podcast guest. I'll link her show in the show notes, uh, for helping me figure this out. Is creating a funnel for my custom website projects. What that is going to look like is that I'm going to test out a new. Masterclass, a monthly masterclass. The idea behind it is I've realized if a lead is coming to me off of social media, for example, or Google for example, uh, it's a tough sell for somebody who doesn't know you to barely follow along and then jump from no relationship other than.
A website or social media into a multi-thousand dollars investment. So the goal is to make that easier through this masterclass. Now, the masterclass doesn't have a name yet because full disclosure, I have to figure that out next week. But basically, it's going to walk. participants, friends. I'd rather call them friends.
It's gonna walk my new friends through everything you need to think about to prep for your website, to prep, to work with a website designer, uh, to have a clear and concise website strategy and all of the things that kind of hold people back from feeling ready to move forward with a custom website.
There's a little bit more to that funnel, but. That's basically the gist is that instead of making that multi-thousand dollars investment, you can make that smaller investment, get a sense of who I am, how I talk about websites, a sense of if we're a good fit, and it makes it a little bit easier to say that initial, yes.
Now I'm trying not to make this too long, so I'm happy to go into more detail if y'all want, but I'm gonna switch to the new side of my business. Still websites, but. I have come up with a new idea that really, really answers the question of consistency in my business, and this is one of those, remember at the end of episode one when I said, if you didn't have an example, if you didn't know the rules, quote unquote rules, using that loosely, uh, how would you run your business?
How would you think about your business? One of the, the examples that is often given as a website designer is if you want consistency in your business, then you charge your client for the initial project that they do with you, aka the website design, and then you charge them a retainer. And that's how you get consistency, right?
Because. , you have 5, 10, 15, 20 of those retainers stacking up month after month. And then y you have a pretty decent income over time for doing, you know, odd projects here and there. Being able to jump into your client's sites when they need you. Um, being able to look at their analytics and provide recommendations depending on the designer, they offer different things in this.
now for me, I didn't feel good about that. I didn't feel like that was the answer for me or for my clients. And a lot of that has to do with how I communicate with my clients about our relationship upfront and the fact that I don't think that you really need me once my job is done. And again, I can get into that more in detail later if you guys are curious, but.
I had to think about consistency in a different way. And so when I started this, of course, I wanted financial consistency. I wanted to be able to know every month I'm making at least $5,000. All of my thoughts were around this idea of how do I get to the point where I know what money is coming in the following month?
And again, there are two ways to do that. , generically speaking, as a website designer, there's that retainer and the idea that you are so booked out that you know what's happening the next month before the first month closes. Now, for me in my business, a lot of my messaging is about working very quickly, and I love that it's how I like to work.
It's how my clients like to work, and because my clients like to work like that, it's not working quickly for them if they can't get in with. pretty quickly, right? So even if I can do their website in one week, it doesn't matter if that week that I have available for them isn't for three more months, they would look for someone else.
So when considering the idea of consistency in my business, I decided to look at it from a different perspective. And what I realized is, while I love projects that have a definitive start and end and don't last forever and ever and ever, What I hate about that is that I often work with incredible people one time and I don't get to continue working with them.
And yes, of course, you know, they come back for add-on pages or some additional support when they need it. But, uh, what I thought was an interesting angle was looking at the idea of consistent relationships in my business, but then I thought, how do I have consistent relationships when I work on a project?
And what I came up with was partners. What if I could identify partners who were the kind of people who are so ingrained in their clients' businesses that they weren't website designers? But they were often asked to take on the task of website design, whether it be add-on pages or a full website project because they were so involved with the marketing, the messaging, the launching of something in this person's business that they were the natural go to for that client.
What if I could partner with people who were doing websites but didn't really want to be doing websites? to create an interesting offer for them and for their clients. And so that is what I've done. I basically put together an offer where I partner with specific people and offer semi-custom websites for their clients.
Now, the benefit to this, Is one, it gets those partners out of that role of website designer when they really don't want to be a website designer. Uh, it also gives a more cost effective version of website design for their clients and for me. There are a lot of benefits actually. The first, among them being that I now have very specific relationships that I can maintain.
That means that instead of doing one project and not hearing from that person ever again, yeah, I might do one project in one month with a partner, but then the next month I have a different project with them, and the next month I have a different project with them and so on and so forth. . I'm really excited about this offer because it's changing the way that I work.
It's changing the way that I think about my business and it's, it's, it's just change. And I think that it's a positive change I'm gonna get into in a later episode how I really. figured out what this offer was going to be, what it was going to look like, how it was gonna function, what kind of systems I needed to put around this offer, because that's a pretty lengthy discussion, and this show is already lengthy in and of itself.
So I will come back to that, but, The one thing that I realized is that it was not very straightforward because I didn't have a model for this. I don't know of anybody else doing something similar. So I had to really figure out logistically how to make it work the best for my partners and how to make it work the best for me.
So we'll get into that in a later episode. And then the last thing, of course, Changing gears altogether, this podcast now I'm very open with you guys. This podcast started as a branch of my business that really pertained to the coaching side of my business. It's where I wanted to have big conversations about big ideas that other people weren't having.
And I love this podcast. Honestly, I do. The first season is something that I am incredibly proud. The conversations that I had with you on season one were life changing. They, they probably in a lot of ways, got me to this point where I could think about my business differently, where I had the confidence and the clarity to make these decisions and to move forward knowing that even if I didn't have all the answers, this, this is the right path for me.
So the question became, if I was suning the coaching side of my business, what happens to the podcast? And the one thing that I really didn't wanna let go of is the why. Why I started this show because I had this huge frustration, and I know you guys know this story, but stick with me. I have this huge frustration about.
Why people weren't talking about things that were blatantly obvious to me. They were staring me in the face, and I thought for sure other people had to be sensing this too. I couldn't be the only one, but no one was saying a word. We were all just kind of going along with this status quo. So in order to stay true to this idea of talking about things that no one seems to be talking about, but also sharing a realistic look at business.
I'm so excited about the path that I am moving forward with with this show, and again, full thanks and full shout out to, to Danny Hamlet, who helped me realize this strategy, but the idea that I can share a behind the scenes look as I am developing this new portion of my business. Honestly, I think it's going to be revolutionary because a lot of times, one of the things that bothers me and this, no one is at fault for this.
I think this is by nature of being a human being, but a lot of times, experts and people who are five, 10 years into their business talk about business from the point that they're. . But a lot of times we don't get the perspective of being in the thick of it. And I'm really, really excited to be able to share with you while I'm in the thick of it, a real time, look at what's happening and the mistakes that I'm bound to make because nothing goes smoothly the first time.
I've already made some mistakes and I've already learned from them and adapted. So we will get into all of that. And you know, here's the thing. I wanna build a business that I. I wanna build a business that isn't dependent on social media, and I wanna build a business that I can step away from when the time comes in a way that feels good to me.
So putting together all of these pieces is my attempt and my best guess at creating a business that scales without my time and attention and effort being at the heart. So that means I will have time to focus more on conversations like the one you and I are having right now. Alright, now that you have the update tune in each week as I start sharing in real time what I'm doing to meet these goals, both on the custom website side of my business, the semi-custom side, and this podcast.
If you haven't had enough of me yet, then. book a call with me. I'm going to include a link in the show notes, but it'll be becca wood.com/pb chat. I just made that up, but I, we'll go with that. Um, so book a call with me, grab a time on my calendar. I would love to meet you. I would love to hear your thoughts about the show.
I would love to hear about your experience in your business and see if there's any way that I can help you as we connect and grow. All right. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. As always, if you resonated with this conversation, if you would like to pass it along to a friend, I would be endlessly grateful.
And if you want to subscribe or leave a review as well, that would make my day. It would make my week if we're being honest. Until next week, this was probably bothered.
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