145. The Power of Simplicity: Clear Your Marketing Clutter and Grow

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom, one business at a well. Hello. Hello, friends. Hey. How's it going, ladies? Here I am. Finally. I was having some technical difficulties, and. But I'm here now, so I'm really excited to be with you today. I'm just gonna exhale, take a breath, and just come present with you all because I'm really excited to share with you what I have to share with you today. I have been coming live each Wednesday with a mini marketing. Let's see, what am I calling it? A marketing mini masterclass. And so I am here, finally. I had some technical difficulties, like I said, but here I am. I have great stuff to share with you today. And the last couple of weeks, we've talked about setting your Q4 target and thinking about really how you can achieve that and putting your plan together in order to do that. And really what I want to talk with you today about is how to declutter your marketing, plan your marketing activities, and really focus on what creates clients for you. So how's that sound? Good. All right, let's dive in. But before we get started, in case we don't know each other, my name's Melissa Kellogg Lueck, and I am a marketing coach and consultant for women entrepreneurs. And I absolutely love helping brilliant women to feel, to grow. I. Well, let's see. Okay. I'm. I am experimenting with a new introduction, so don't mind me. This is a revision in action, right? So really, what I love most is team teaching brilliant women entrepreneurs the skill of marketing so that they can feel as great in their marketing as they do and as skilled as they are when they're serving their clients. So marketing. In my world, I love to think about marketing as serving your future clients. And so it can feel as great as when you're hanging out with and. And serving and doing your. What you do best. Your marketing can feel just that great, as great as that does. So that's what we're all about as we stumble through the introduction. But I hope you get the message, and I hope that that resonates with you. I. All right, so let's talk about decluttering your marketing plan. So I feel like this time of year, what I often see in my own business, as well as with lots of clients, that our marketing can feel kind of cluttered and that we feel like we're doing too many things. So many things are going on and we're not keeping up with it all. We're not keeping consistent. We're not sure what's working, what's not working. So really today I want to help you dial it in, right? I want to help you tighten it up your plan and simplify it so that you can stay consistent and be doing the things that you absolutely know are moving the needle in your business. And, and so the purpose of marketing is to be creating sales opportunities for us, right? So marketing is not just a vanity exercise, which, you know, a lot of things that we see out there in the world that kind of looks like it, but it's really not the purpose of it. From a CEO perspective, your marketing should be creating sales opportunities, should bring, be bringing in clients for you. And if it's not, or if you don't know if it is or not, then we're going to clear that all up for you today. So, and thank you for being here live. Those of you that are joining live, say hello. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you. And for those of you that are going to enjoy this in replay, say hello as well. Replay and say hello. And I really hope this is useful and meaningful for you today. So, so first of all, let's just think about what is clutter? And so in order to declutter, we want to know what actually clutter is and what does it feel like? How do we decide what is cluttering our marketing plan and what is not? I'm putting my slippers back on. My feet are cold this time of year. It's like hot, cold, hot, cold. Okay, so the Oxford Dictionary, I looked it up, defines clutter as a collection of things lying about in an untidy fashion or untidy mass. So that's what, what clutter is. So if your marketing or your business feels like a collection of things lying around in an untidy mask, it's time for a little decluttering. And that's what we're going to do today. So what that, what that means to me as a marketing expert is that if you have marketing activities that are not flowing into one another and flowing in your client journey, that is clutter. Right? Those things are clutter. If you have half finished marketing projects laying around, that's clutter. If you are have marketing activities in your business that are not, you're not consistent with or that you loathe doing, I would consider that Clutter, it probably doesn't need to be there. Right? And if you have marketing activities that are not working, or you maybe don't even know if they're working or not, that could be clutter. Right? So we want to, you know, I think about, you know, if we think about a messy closet, right? So say you're the marketing department. I'm using air quotes, right. The marketing department of your business is a messy closet. So let's get in there and what we know from our organizing friends, Tracy Hoth is a friend of mine. And so if we listen to her, it's like you're going to pull everything out of the closet and see what we have, right? And we're going to sort it and figure out what we want to keep, what we don't want to keep. And so I'm going to walk you through specifically regarding your marketing, how we're going to do that. All right, so how do we know what's what? So first of all, we need to take an inventory of all of your marketing activities. You got to pull everything out of that closet. Let's look at all the marketing activities that you've been doing. What have you tried, you know, tried a few times and didn't keep up with? Or what has. What have you tried that's actually stuck, that, you know, is working? What have you been consistent with? What have you been inconsistent with? What have you stopped doing that maybe was working? So let's just pull all that out and. And we don't have to make judgments on it yet. But just so we know, what are all the things that we're dealing with? Right? And then once, you know, once you kind of have an understanding of all the marketing activities that you've been doing that your team has been doing, then we can move on to step number two, which is evaluating. We want to evaluate. We want to know what is working, what is not working, and what lessons you're learning from what's working and what's not working. So I want you to look at every marketing activity that you're doing, look at each client that you've brought in. Think about their journey, which is so helpful. I was just doing this, going through this process with a client the other day, and it was just really insightful for her to see how the clients are coming in. And we really dissected it down to some. Some of the minute details that maybe you think aren't important, but really, you can study what your clients and your business is telling you and learn so much, and so think about the journey that each client has taken with you. You don't have to maybe go through the entire history of your business. Let's just look at this year so you can go back and look at every client you've brought in. Think about their journey. Consider also the metrics that you're keeping. What are you tracking? Because whatever you measure is what's going to improve, right? So consider what metrics you're keeping. Are you tracking data that's useful for you in making decisions? So for example, if you're looking at social media, for example, and you're looking at, in, you know, you can track engagement, you know, what does that mean? And is it useful for you to know? Right? Is it useful for you? Because when engagement goes up, then consultations go up and then sales go up. I don't know. I would say that for most of the businesses I work with, women in trust driven industries and relationship driven businesses, and usually a lot of those vanity metrics that social media tracks do not indicate sales or do not change, you know, based on sales and buying behavior. So you want to make sure you know, what are the metrics that you want to be tracking that are actually useful to you as the CEO in deciding am I going to keep this marketing activity or am I not going to keep it? So I'm just looking at my notes. So think about also what problems are you seeing in your marketing, in your marketing plan that need to be solved, right? So say, for example, you're doing webinars and you're bringing in a lot of stuff, students onto your webinars. There's a lot of people there, but not as. Not. But the percentage of people that are buying or that are converting to a consultation or whatever is your call to action. Say that that's, you know, flat or going down or it's not improving. That's a problem you need to solve, right? You're great at bringing people into the webinar. Now let's solve for why are they not converting? Right? Why is that level of conversion not growing? And those are problems that we can solve. And I am always available to help you solve these, you and I together. So we'll talk about that at the end. But so what are the problems that need to be solved? Are you bringing in enough new people into your universe? Right? Are you nurturing those relationships and moving them along in the client journey? Do you even know what your client journey is? And if you don't, that would be a really great, that would be a really great Reason to schedule a call with me, because I can help you create that. That. Because it's super important. Are you offering people in your universe enough opportunities to experience you and get to know you, get to like you, get to trust you, so that they can work with you or want to work with you, Right? So then they know if they're the right person to work with you. Are you making enough offers and invitations for people to go to the next step? So say you're bringing a lot of people into your, you know, you're out meeting a lot of people, you are starting relationship, you know, business relationships, nurturing business relationships, but nothing's really happening. People aren't moving, you know, they're not coming to your webinar or, you know, buying into your event or whatever. Are all the steps that you have in your client journey. Why is that? So just think about, you know, how are you, Are you making enough offers, invitations? Because if you have a considerable amount of people in your universe and your sales isn't what you want it to be, there's a lot of different ways that we can problem solve that, right? Whether it's, are you bringing enough new people in or how are we doing? What is the effectiveness of your offers and invitations, Right? So, so then once you have fully evaluated and if you want to do this simply, which you know me, I love, I'm a huge proponent of keeping it simple. So if you want to do this simply, just think about the three things and this, you could do this in 15 minutes, right? What is working among all of your marketing activities? Where are the clients coming from? What is creating client, you know, con or sales conversations, new client opportunities? What's working? Number two, what is not working? What are you doing that is not moving the needle at all for you or very, very little or, you know, it takes a lot of time and energy and it's not really creating the return. So I was considered. Those things are not working. And then three, what are you learning as you go? You know, what are you learning about your marketing, your audience, your industry, the buying behaviors of people as a whole? Like, what are you learning specifically? Right? And the data that you collect can really help you with this evaluation. And if you want to know what kind of data you should be collecting, I think I have a podcast episode on that. But that's also something I would be happy to go over with you personally in your. For your specific business, your industry, and what you're trying to accomplish. And then, okay, so we've got the evalu. So we did. We're going to. I'm just going to recap. So, number one, we started with our inventory of all the marketing activities. We just pulled everything out of our marketing closet, Right. And then we evaluated what's working, what's not working, what we're learning. And then step three in this process is to really decide intentionally what you want to keep, what do you want to keep doing, what do you want to be consistent with, what do you want to track and to grow, and what do you want to let go. Right. Because there's going to be some things that are not going back in the closet, right. We're going to get rid of them. We're going to stop doing them. You want to know your client journey, and you want to know how each activity flows along your client journey and brings people along in their growth, in their. Their nurture, you know, nurtures their growth and also brings them along in the relationship with you. So you want to know, you know, what are the one or three things that you want to master that are bringing new people into your world, Right? So the speed at which you're growing your audience is the speed at which you'll grow your revenue. Okay. You have to be meeting new people. And if your revenue is not where you want it to be, you can, you need to be growing or your business isn't growing as quickly as you want. You need to be growing your audience, your. Your universe and meeting more new people. And so we can allow for a lot of learning and growing in our marketing and sales, the larger audience that we have. Right. We don't have to be as masterful and, and expert at marketing or sales. If we have more people to. That are being exposed to our work, there's just more room for experimentation. So make sure that you're continually growing your universe, your orbit, the number of people that are in your world. Okay? And then number two, you, you know, what are the one or three ways you're going to master nurturing your audience and growing those business relationships? Right? How will you be getting to know them and what they need and making offers to them? Because when you do that, that's how people come to know you, like you, trust you. And what we're seeing now is that buyers are really looking for relationship, they're looking for connection. They're looking to trust you more before they buy from you. We all have. We all have bought things, you know, too quickly, in haste, and. And we've lost some trust, right? And so this is just what I'm seeing. A lot in the marketplace is that people have longer time frames of wanting to be in your energy, connect with you, have relationship with you, get to know you before they're gonna jump in and buy. Right. So that's completely normal. And it, it, it's fine. We don't have to change that. What we do have to change is how we respond to it. And how we respond to it is we just offer folks more opportunity to get to be with us. Right. And that's fun too. So when you do this process properly, these three steps, you will walk away with a lot more clarity, a very simple marketing plan. You will feel much more spacious, much more confident, and much more capable. Right. When we're feeling inconsistent, oh, my nose is itchy. When we're feeling inconsistent and incapable, it oftentimes has to do with just too many things, you know, in our marketing plan. And so I want to just encourage you to go through this decluttering process. This will really help you to dial in what you are going to really master and be great at for the rest of this year and going into next year and make sure that you are tracking and you have some metrics you're watching and measuring what's, what is going on and where clients are coming from so that you know, you have data to support what you feel might be working or not working. And so this is just one example of something that I teach my clients and work with them on, on a regular basis. And it's super important. I want you to have the clarity and the focus in your marketing because that's what's going to create the sales opportunities and bring the clients in for you and help you to build a revenue and create the consistent revenue and impact that you want. And so I want to help you in that. And the way that I can do that with you personally is on a one, on one call and I can take you through, through this process, give you some real clear understanding of what's going on in your marketing. Especially if you want to be making more, bringing more clients in, having a greater impact than you currently are, it doesn't have to do. It's not about you personally. Right. It's just about making some minor adjustments, minor tweaks. And I would love to take you through that process. And if that is something that you want to take advantage of, there's no cost to that. I'm going to put my link to my calendar here in the chat standby. Let's see, let's go. Grab this. And I would love to take you through this process because it's super valuable. We'll give you a lot of clarity so you know exactly what you want to be focusing on as you're going forward for the remainder of this year into next year. And yeah, so that's what I have for you today. Let's see, next week. We will be back here on Wednesday. And let's see, what are we going to be talking about next week? Let's see, where are those? Where are those? I had it right here and then I moved my windows around and. Okay, anyway, I can't put my finger on it. I'm sorry, you guys. I'm gonna. Let's see here. If I do this. And I go here and I go. Here we go. Okay, so next week, can you believe it? It's gonna be November 5th. And I am going to be teaching about my favorite ways to bring in new people into your orbit and how to ignite new relationships with. With those new people and really just start building relationships because we know relationship always comes before revenue. That bills business is built on relationships. And so I want to teach you how to bring new people in. If you want to be growing your audience, your. Your universe of folks, then you need to be there. And I look forward to seeing you then. If not before I put the link, the chat, if you want to meet with me privately and I can go through this process of decluttering your marketing. And I look forward to seeing you on one of those calls as well. So have a great rest of your Wednesday. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Hey, if you like this podcast, I want to invite you to become part of my community. The link is in the show notes each Friday. I'm going to deliver to your inbox my weekly celebration as well as my thoughts on the latest in business and marketing. I want to keep you in the know about my upcoming events, free trainings, book clubs, all the fun things, even some free gifts. And of course, I'm going to let you know about these new podcast episodes. I'll see you there.