Sheryl Plouffe argues that coaches and consultants waste time juggling dozens of marketing tools instead of focusing on what actually brings clients: content, speaking, and direct service. She switched to Kajabi, an all-in-one platform, in fall 2018 and says it costs less than paying for separate tools while freeing her to do live trainings and podcasts.
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Stop feeling overwhelmed as you grow your online business. Forget marketing funnels. Do this instead. Sheryl Plouffe, Video Strategist here, and in this video I want to really shed some light on what is happening in the entrepreneurial world, and it's almost reaching crisis levels of the amount of people— coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs— experts and speakers who are getting so mired in marketing funnels— complex, complicated, heavy marketing funnels— that they're losing sight of the actual things that they need to be doing in their business to actually grow it. So that's what I want to talk about today. And there's one fundamental key thing that I really want you to consider, and I did it in the— in, let's see, it was late 2018. I wish I had done it way, way, way sooner, but I did it in the fall of 2018 and have never looked back. So let me paint the picture of what the problem is to start with. If you're a coach or consultant, you know, and you have services or products that you sell, maybe you've created them yourself, maybe it's a course or it's a program or coaching or consultation or a product, whatever it is, you know, you need to have marketing, right? Marketing is a function of business. There is no business in the world that has reached any level of success that didn't do any marketing. So we know that marketing is a function of the business. But the question then becomes, how do we do the marketing? What kind of marketing do I do? And the thing is, just by nature of what it is, marketers happen to be really good at marketing. So, the marketers are marketing to you, to me, to all of us. They're marketing to us to make us believe that we need 8,000 different things. 8,000 different SaaS products and 8,000 different, you know, tools and this and that. Like, the landing pages connected to the CRM connected to the email service provider and then I gotta get the quizzes and I gotta get the the contests, and I— and it just goes on and on and on. Oh, and then I got to create all these apps and get these apps to talk to each other and create zaps, and then I've got to do all these other things. So what happens is that we go down this technological rabbit hole and we ignore the things that are actually going to help us to build the business, which is to speak and talk to people and, and help people and be of service. That's where we learn the most about what's going to grow our business, by actually working with people. Duh, right? So what I want to share with you is, again, coming back to the fall 2018, I was in that world, you know. I was heavily in that world of cobbling all these things together And when I think back now, I go, wow, how did I spend so much time on the wrong things? And thankfully, we're at a place now where tools like the one I'm going to tell you about exist. And so what I want you to really consider is that from a marketing perspective— now listen, I'm not saying you don't need any systems. You need a system. But you need to be smart about what that system is. And you do have to do marketing. What I'm talking about when I say funnels, marketing funnels, I'm talking more from the perspective of these really big, heavy, complex funnels that take us away from the actions that we need to take to actually grow our business, like creating content, like talking to people, like speaking. And so the thing I want to propose to you is to seek an all-in-one marketing platform. Yes, it is going to be a little bit more of an expense for that all-in-one marketing platform than it is to, say, have, you know, one, one thing like that does one function. Okay, like if you look at each piece individually, but I promise you that if you really sat down with a piece of paper and you looked at all of those 50 things that you have monthly recurring fees for and you were actually to mark that down, you would find that an all-in-one marketing platform is actually more economical in the long run. But here's the thing. If you're new to this world, if you're wanting to create your first program, want to create a course, want to have clients, or maybe you're in the early stages of that, maybe you've hit 6 figures but you haven't reached a million yet. Like, you know, you really want to be looking at an all-in-one marketing platform that you can grow with. And I did this in the fall of 2018. I'm going to give you the one that I suggest. And listen, you can use the one I suggest or not. But that all-in-one concept is what you need to forget the marketing funnels and forget the complexity of all that and actually be building the business and focusing on income-generating activities. So an all-in-one marketing platform is definitely the way to go. I suggest this to all my clients who are wanting to, again, get into digital marketing and want to have the website, they want to have the products. They want to have the marketing capabilities, the automation, the email sequences. They want to have the forms, the events. They want to have landing pages and they want a blog. And they also want to have a way to track people within this, within a system, and maybe even be able to do quizzes and assessments for them of the learning that they're doing with them. Or they want to have even an affiliate program. All of those things that I just mentioned are possible with an all-in-one marketing platform. The one that I recommend, the one that I've been using since the fall of 2018, is Kajabi. Far and away one of the best decisions I ever made. What happens in entrepreneurship is that there are a lot of shiny objects. There are smart marketers who are marketing to us and making us feel like we need that next shiny object. But when you get into an all-in-one marketing platform and stick with it, now you're saving yourself time, energy, and money in the long run because you're not chasing after every single thing that shows up in your Facebook feed because you've been retargeted. So stick with— whether it's Kajabi or find another all-in-one marketing platform. The important thing is to get into an all-in-one marketing platform as soon as you possibly can. One of the things I'm seeing in this post-COVID world is a return to back to basics. It's a return to, to trying to streamline and simplify things as much as possible. Yes, we live in a digital world. That's not going to go away. We're going to need to have systems and digital tools to do what it is we want to do online, of course. But we are going to a place now where people are looking for simplification. You know, wish I'd gone to Kajabi 3 years sooner than I did. Here's why I didn't: because I was so invested monetarily, um, and time invested and energy invested in cobbling 8,000 things together that I just couldn't bring myself to do what I knew I really ought to do, was pull the Band-Aid off and go, okay, I'm just going to have to ignore the fact that I spent countless hours and thousands of dollars on other tools and start fresh. But it came to a point where I was like, I just couldn't ignore it anymore. I knew that I had to pull the Band-Aid off, and I was just gonna have to say okay and account that all up to experience, chalk that up to experience, and say, you know what, it's just time to simplify. I can't imagine where I'd be today if I hadn't done that. If I hadn't actually done that, I would still be in that deep, deep dark place of trying to integrate this with that and all these different things. And, and it's— and what I wouldn't have been able to do is to actually be doing things that are actually helping my business, that are actually helping people and making an impact on the world, such as doing free live trainings every Wednesday, such as creating a YouTube video every Thursday, such as repurposing that video into a podcast and doing a Facebook Live and doing, you know, a whole variety of different other things like on Instagram Instagram Lives, and creating content that's actually helping people. I get messages from people saying, thank you so much for that, I didn't know that that was a thing. Or I wouldn't be able to do all that if I was head down in funnels. If I was head down in marketing funnels, none of that would be possible. People wouldn't be able to find me on YouTube, connect with me, and become a client within sometimes hours. Those things wouldn't be possible if I was headfirst down in marketing funnels. So, so give that some thought. And for those of you who are new to this whole thing and you want some advice or you're frustrated or you don't know what your next step should be, please comment below. I would love to be able to just give you some, some quick wins and some quick advice to be able to move you in the right direction and possibly save you, who knows, months or maybe even years of frustration ahead. Thanks so much for watching. Please check out these other videos on my channel. Remember, new videos every Thursday. Subscribe, and I can't wait to see you in the next one.
