When you don't know what to post...

Hi, everyone. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist, Money mindset, coach. I made the mistake of picking up the clicker as I was waiting for the live to start. And Luna thinks that every time the clicker happens, treats are gonna happen because this is what we use for training. So let me show you. Touch. Touch. Good girl. But see, she's like, looking to my hands and I don't have anything. Oh, my gosh. Hi, love. Hi. Are you gonna go live with me? See? Say hi to the Internet, Nona. Say hi to the Internet. No. She thinks I'm pointing to trees. Oh, God. I know. This is not what I planned, Trevor. Hi. This is not what I planned tonight. What was I even gonna go live on? I think I was. Oh, my God. What is it? Yeah, when you don't know what to post. Okay, so if you don't know, every Single Friday at 11am Eastern, I host Brave Biz Labs, which is a free group business coaching call. I do it every Single Friday I 11am Eastern. It's 60 minutes. Anyone can show up. You want me to do the show live or the training? Live. Tell me which one, Alex. So this call is something that I started during the pandemic, and it has been so incredible for my community that I'm just going to keep going with it. But one of the things that I notice is every single week I get some variation of the question, what do I post on social media to get clients? And hi, Steven, welcome. To which I always answer, well, it depends on who your client is. Okay, let's start off that the fact that you're posting the fact that you are showing up and posting on social media, congratulations. You are doing the hardest part of getting started. Okay? You cannot get clients if you. If they don't know that you exist. Okay, well, bye. You can't get clients if they don't know that you exist. So you are showing up in their awareness. Doesn't matter if you are posting pictures of ferrets, okay? Just keep showing up. But if you want to show up and have it convert people who are interacting with your posts into actual paying clients, here's where you got to start. So usually I asked back, you know, who's your ideal client? Sometimes they don't get an answer back. Sometimes they're not sure. They know that they want to do coaching or they want to do consulting or they want to do something in the health space, but they're not really sure who. Who they can target beyond that. Now, one of the things that does happen when someone's a little iffy about who their ideal client is is they default to posting about their service. Right? So let's say you are a personal trainer and you work. You know, you work in a gym, and you're trying to get clients in your area. You can absolutely post about the things that you make your clients do. You can absolutely post about your diet. You can absolutely post about your certifications. You can absolutely post about the gym and the equipment that's available there. But here's the thing. No one gives a crap. No one cares. No one cares because no one pays $120 an hour to go to a room with a bunch of other strangers and sweat and be uncomfortable. That's just not what they do. What people do spend money on. What they will spend $120 an hour on is, oh, I'm gonna look good in a bathing suit this summer. Okay? I'm gonna feel confident walking into a room at my sister's wedding. I'm going to feel like a badass weari that I haven't been able to fit into in three years. All right? Which I think we can all relate to that, especially post pandemic. So you really have to understand what your ideal client is stressed about, what they're frustrated with, what they are afraid of and what they want more than anything else. Okay? When you're just posting about your services, you're informing people about what you do, but you're not telling them how you are useful to them specifically. All right? So understanding what your clients are struggling with in the here and now and just naming it is one of the most powerful things that you can do on social media to get actual paying clients. Now, some of the pushback that I get from this is, well, Katie, like, I don't want to be negative. I don't want to be negative. I don't want to talk about problems all the time. And here's the thing. Being negative is taking, like, a normal scenario and looking at it in a really negative light, right? So let's see. So I had to find a parking spot for my car. I found a parking spot two blocks away from my apartment. I could absolutely be like, oh, I had to park two blocks away from my apartment. That sucks. Or I could just be neutral about it, right? I could just be like, okay, well, it's fine. Like, that's living in a city. Sometimes you have to park a little farther away from your apartment. You're not taking, you know, their life and making it worse, Right? You're not taking their life and be like, oh, poor you, your life sucks. What you're saying is like, here's what you're generally talking about to your friends, your loved ones, and here's what you're thinking in your own head, right? So let's use the example of someone who would want to work with a personal trainer. Maybe they used to be really fit. Maybe they were an athlete in college, they got their first job, they burned themselves out. They really fell out of any routine of working out. And the pandemic hit and they tried to build a routine at home, but they just couldn't stick with it. They really need like, like that group camaraderie that comes from being on a sports team to be able to stay to routine. Now one of the problems that they could face is like, where do I even find that? Where do I find that camaraderie? Where do I find that supportive system that I can just plug into and be motivated by other people? You know, let's borrow from Abby Wambach. Where's my wolf pack that I can just tune into? Now for someone like that, you just talking about your gym or, you know, your certifications, they are not going to give a crap, okay? Because they probably have a certification too. They probably know the gym frontwards, backwards, sideways, all the ways, right? But you talking about your group program for ex athletes who need to be in a community to stay consistent, because being consistent on your own when that is your history is so, so hard. You just naming that you're not, you're not making a negative spin on that. You're just naming. It's hard for someone who comes from that background and who really relied on that to stay consistent. Not having that makes staying fit really hard, you know, and by the way, if this is really hard for you and you're an ex athlete and you want to get back in shape, but you can't do it without a group. I have this amazing group of incredible human beings. Everyone is here for the same reason, because they are inspired by you see, somehow you're pointing to the thing that frustrates them that they're feeling stuck on. And you're saying, you know, you're just saying, oh, here's your problem. I have this solution. I have this thing over here that is so useful to you. It's. We don't have to sell ourselves hard. We don't have to brag. We don't have to make big claims about amazing results that we're going to get them. We can't guarantee results. Right. Oftentimes when we're doing like a consultative service where we're telling people a little bit of what they have to do, but mostly they're in control of their own lives, we can't guarantee anything, but what we can do is just name the things that are happening in their life and then say how our thing is uniquely positioned to help them with that now. So you want to talk about their problems, you want to talk about their pain points, you want to point to the frustrations that they're talking about already in their life. You also want to point to what they want, right? What do they want? So let's use this ex athlete, like maybe, maybe she bought this dress when she was 25 and this is like her favorite dress. It looks so good on her. She feels so confident and so beautiful and she has so many good memories in that dress. And now she's just like a couple sizes too big for it, right? And the pandemic, you know, made a lot of us balloon up a little bit. And so what she really, really wants is to be able to wear this dress to a big event that she has coming. Right. That's like one of the things that she wants. You can point to, like, what's that thing that you'd love to be able to fit into again? Right. Whatever it is, you know, my group, if that's your goal, we're going to work towards that goal with you. That, that is going to be the goal of the group. Everyone is going to support you in reaching that goal. Right? You're not guaranteeing anything. You're saying, here's what you want. My program will support you in getting there. If you're committed, if you join, you know, so you want to like, look at the problems that they're facing, you want to look at the good things they want on the other side of working with you. Now the other thing here is you need to figure out where your ideal clients are hanging out. Okay? Because if you're trying to market to like 23 year old women who are in their first job, you know, maybe doing internships, maybe they have a couple different jobs to make ends meet. They're probably not going to be on LinkedIn. I'm sorry, they're just not. They will probably be on TikTok and maybe Instagram. Instagram is more for like the millennials, right? So you're going to want to show up where your ideal clients are showing up, right? Because you posting somewhere where they're not going to see it is not, is not going to help anyone. Okay? It's not going to help you get clients and it's not going to help them with the problems that they have that you could help solve. All right? So you're going to want to figure out where it is that they're showing up. And this is why it is so important to have a very clear defined niche. All right? Because you could be a personal trainer that works with 23 year old young women. You could also be a personal trainer who works with 45 year old men who are, you know, dads of three. How you market to them is going to be completely different. The problems each one of these groups has is completely different. The goals they would have is also pretty different. Where they're hanging out is going to be extremely different. All right, so you want to make sure that you are showing up in the social media space where your ideal clients are. Now. I hear so often, but I don't really like that space. I haven't gotten comfortable. Well, good news, bad news. You can show up anywhere. Your clients are pretty much everywhere. But if you want to have a really successful business, if you want to enlist, you know, high paying clients and you want to have plenty of them, it's going to be to your benefit to show up where they hang out and get comfortable there. And if it's that much of a misalignment, if where they are naturally hanging out doesn't feel good to you, I would question if that is the right niche for you. Oh, Lauren, is this hitting home? So sorry, didn't mean to call you out personally. So you're going to want to really get real with yourself. Is this the model that you want to pursue? Is this the ideal client that you want to pursue if you don't enjoy where they hang out? Because I want you to remember something. Your social media, when you're running a business is not for you. Your website for your business is not for you. All these front facing things that we have on the interwebs, they are for our clients. They are specifically set up hopefully so that when they come across it, either our website or our posts online, they read it and like, oh my God, that's me. Oh my God, that's me too. That, that doesn't really fit me, but that fits me. Oh my God, that's me. Did they, did they like hack my phone or something? Are they reading my text messages? Are they linked up with the FBI who has all this stuff? I'm sorry, Lauren. You want them to feel like you are speaking directly to them. It's really hard to do that when you're trying to talk to everyone. It's actually impossible to do that when you're trying to talk to everyone. Okay? You know, really, if we, if we look at big, big brands that have massive followings that, like, are able to sell to different demographics across the board, we're talking big budgets here, okay? So, like, let's talk Target. Okay? Target doesn't sell to absolutely everyone. Okay? There are people who don't shop at Target either because they're too wealthy or maybe they're, they don't make enough money, they go to Walmart instead. Target focuses on a very specific demographic, all right? But it takes a massive, massive amount of money to be able to target people within that demographic. By the way, fun fact, and this is a little creepy, I hope, I hope I don't scare anyone. Target can actually predict when a woman is going to give birth to a baby before she's even announced that she's pregnant to the world. Okay? They track every purchase you make. So specifically that they can predict within about six weeks when that baby is going to be born. Okay? The coupons that you get in the mail, you know, it's like little flyers from Target that gets sent to you. Yeah, they, they have the ability to customize those to each and every one of us. The reason why you see random things that aren't for you is because they don't want to creep you out. Okay? There's a reason why I get barbecues and big screen TVs in my, in my mailer every month, okay? It's because they don't want to scare me. They don't want to scare me by only showing me the stuff that I would absolutely be interested in, but they have the ability to do that. You are a single person running this business. You don't have that capability yet. You might someday, but for the meantime, it's going to be so much more simple for you to just pick a goddamn niche. Pick Elaine. Pick an ideal client who you can serve and help and empower and just run with that. Beyonce shops at Target. No one is too wealthy for Target. Okay, Lauren? I'll give you that one. Absolutely. Oprah also shops at Target. And I'm not saying, like, and not all rich people shop at Target. Like, I think the Kardashians probably don't shop at Target, but they're a little snooty. Sorry if I'm offending any Kardashian fans anyway. So, yeah, if you're struggling with what you should post online. Ask yourself, do you know who your ideal client is and what is it that they're struggling with and what is it that they want? And then also check in on is this the right place for me to run into them? All right, if you are struggling with any of this, any of this, any of this and all of this, okay. If you're just struggling to get paying clients and you really just don't know what you don't know, then here's what I want you to do. I want you to register for Brave Biz Labs. I'm going to be. Let me post it in the comments right now. So Brave Biz Labs, I host it every Single Friday at 11am Eastern. You can literally show up and ask any question you want to. You also do not have to participate if you don't want to. If you are nervous, you can absolutely just sit and be a fly on the wall and hear what other people are asking and, and let the information just kind of seep into you. There's no shame how early in your business you are. Okay? So sometimes I get people coming who you know, have like a very successful multi six figure business. They're asking really advanced questions. I'm giving them answers that can scare the crap out of someone who's just starting. And here's what I want for you. If you come and you hear those advanced questions, I don't want you getting nervous that this isn't the place that you belong because it is the place that you belong. Okay. Even if you don't know how to phrase what you're struggling with in the form of a question, I want you to ask it in that space and know that that is a safe space and there's no judgment for where you're starting because everyone who runs a business had to start there also. Okay, so I'm noticing I put it in the chat, but it's only showing up on the Facebook and the YouTube. So I'm going to go back to LinkedIn when I wrap this up and add it into the chat. So be sure to look for that. I'll also be posting about it in the next couple days. But anyway, I hope this has been really useful to you. I hope you've enjoyed my dog making out with me me in the beginning and I hope you have a little better of an idea of what you can be posting online to get high paying clients. If you have any questions for me, you know where to find me. Just shoot me a DM and to Lauren and Steven and Alex and Trevor, thank you so much for joining. I hope you enjoyed and I will see you all soon. Katie McManus, business strategist, Money mindset coach. I will talk to you soon.