Make Money From Google Without Ads

Prefer to watch this blog content instead of reading it? Head here to watch it on the Brandmerry channel.

When I started my business, I did what most entrepreneurs do and I created a website. 

I created a website, and nobody came. 

For about two years, I experienced a trickle of website traffic which resulted in a trickle of leads, which of course resulted in zero sales, at least from my website anyway. 

Then I implemented a powerful tool we all know, yep SEO, and I watched as I started making money from Google. 

Today, I make thousands of dollars every single month from Google without paid ads, and I'm going to share with you how I do it. 

All right, let's get you all set up here so we can have a really great conversation about using Google for your business. 

As I've already mentioned, I really believe that this can work for every single business. And this is actually something that we teach inside of my program, Roadmap to Freedom. We have all kinds of different types of businesses, doulas, coaches, consultants, graphic designers, photographers, and product-based businesses. I've seen it work and I want to share with you exactly what you need to have in place for this to work for your business as well.

Like most entrepreneurs, you probably have a website, or you're thinking about creating a website, and that is amazing. But what we neglect to think about is how that website is going to get traffic. That's where SEO comes into play. 

But before I get into that, let's back it up just a little bit and talk about what I'm selling on my website, because I think this plays a really big role.

A lot of people think that in order to make thousands of dollars every month, you need to have courses on evergreen. You need to be doing affiliate sales, maybe that's in the back of your mind, selling e-books, selling a product. 

And all of that does work, don't get me wrong, but what I'm making this money from is my high-level one-on-one. I just wanted to share that because I don't want you to think that you have to create a course from the ground up to then sell it in order for this to work. 

You can very easily package your one-on-one services into a 1:1 relationship and sell those because that's what I'm doing. And as I've already mentioned, product-based businesses, all kinds of businesses, can benefit from this marketing strategy.

Make Money from Google Step #1: Your Offer

So the very first thing that you want to have is an offer because if we're going to be getting this traffic, we want people to take action. 

Now, that's not to say that you can't implement SEO early on in your business. If you're going to do that and you don't have an offer yet, make sure you have a lead magnet. I talk a lot about list building on the Brandmerry YouTube Channel and on my podcast, The Brandmerry Podcast.

But essentially, you want to have something that your audience can take action on. Why is this important? Because the type of SEO that I'm going to encourage you to implement is going to apply to someone who is at the final stages of the customer buying journey.

What is that, Michelle? What is the customer buying journey? I talk about that entire process more in-depth in this video right here, so definitely check that out.

But essentially, your ideal customer could be coming in at the very beginning stages of understanding their problem all the way to the point where they are ready to invest. They know the solution, they know their options, and they're just looking for the right person. 

That is the target that we want to capture with this strategy because those people are more likely to sign up quickly. They need less warming up and they're ready to invest. So because of that, they are turning to Google to look for very, very specific solutions to their problem.

We often think about SEO as it applies to blogging. And while that is amazing and also something we teach inside of Roadmap to Freedom, you can get started with just site-wide SEO. 

What that essentially means is that you want to categorize your website for your industry or your title. So if someone is looking for a branding coach, they would go to Google, type in branding coach, and come across my name, which would lead them to my website. 

The person who is looking for a branding coach is most likely in a place where they are ready to hire one.

Make Money from Google Step #2: Research

This is where the second step comes in. At first, we talked about your offer which is very, very important. The second step is going to be the research. You are going to have to do very thorough research in order to rank on Google. 

This is something that we teach the entire process step by step inside a Roadmap to Freedom because it does matter.

You can't just guess. There are so many entrepreneurs who are just guessing on what their site title should be. They're just guessing on what their blog title should be. There is data available to us on the internet that will tell us how likely we are to rank and if people are actually searching for that.

So there are two tools that I love to use in my business. I've shared them before on this channel. One of them is called Ubersuggest. I will often use Ubersuggest when I'm creating SEO for my blog post. 

But then what do I use when I'm wanting to create my site-wide SEO? That tool is called Keywords Everywhere. Y'all, it's a paid tool, but it's like $10 for a ton of searches and a ton of data. And it's worth every freaking penny because you don't know what you don't know about keywords. And if you can really get the data to back up what you want to title your site and what you want to put in your site description, then you're going to be able to rank, show up, and get traffic a lot faster.

So Keywords Everywhere is my favorite tool. Of course, there are a lot out there. Feel free to do a bunch of research and find the one that works for you or just use the one that I recommend.

So back to the research. You're going to want to determine what is your industry, what is your title, and are people searching for those specific keywords? 

So you might have to get a little creative with it. For instance, I have clients who are photographers who have a really broad location base and there might be a lot of searches and a lot of competition for that location base. 

I'm not suggesting that they don't use those keywords but that they find some smaller markets, cities, towns near them that are also getting great searches that they can show up for. Because if there's less competition, you're more likely to show up not only on page one, but also near the top.

Really think about how you're saying things. Branding coach, for example, that's something I've been ranking for a really long time. Couple of years ago, we added personal branding consultant. There are all kinds of different ways that you can talk about your industry, your title, and your products.

For instance, let's say you create holistic skincare in San Diego, California. There are a lot of different ways that you can put these together to create your site title and your site description, but you want to make sure that it's backed up by data, that people are actually searching for it. Otherwise, it's not going to matter.

Make Money from Google Step #3: Implementation

Okay, so after you've done your research, then you want to start to implement the keywords that you have. So you're going to want to focus primarily on your site title and your site description. 

Every single website provider offers this. Myself and my clients use Squarespace quite a bit, but if you're using Showit WordPress, Wix, anything like that. You can add your site title and your site description.

Now, it can be really tempting when you're starting out to do this for every single page on your website. And that strategy is a little bit more complex because you don't want competing keywords. This is, again, something that we teach inside Roadmap to Freedom. But for now, I just want you to put this on your site title and your site description. That's going to autofill it for your homepage. That's where people are going to be visiting.

So when you're doing this implementation, you're adding these keywords, it's also really important to note that your website is going to make a big difference in the success of this traffic. 

You can have a beautiful website, but your messaging can suck. Or you can have great messaging, but your website isn't compelling. 

You want to make sure that your website is optimized for these conversions because traffic means nothing, it's just a number if it's not resulting in leads and sales. 

This is another level of SEO that we stress so much inside of my programs because what is on your website, how it is formatted, what you're offering, and your messaging, plays a really big role in this strategy even working at all.

Make Money from Google Step #4: Creating Content

Then the final thing that you want to do after you have implemented these pieces, is that you want to start creating relevant content on your website. Now like I mentioned before, this site-wide SEO strategy will start working immediately. I started showing up in search pretty quickly. I think it was about three months before I started showing up on page one. We started to see an increase in traffic. Now I've just broadened that because I have a lot of blog posts. I have a lot of content on my website.

Because Google essentially wants to know, is what you're saying actually relevant? If you're saying that "These are the keywords. This is how I want you to categorize my website," are you lying? Are you telling the truth? And by creating blog posts, additional pages, content that mirrors those keywords, then you're ultimately telling Google that "I'm legit." 

So I have a lot of blog posts on branding, marketing, brand photo shoots, all those different things that really back up my claim to being a branding coach, and a personal branding consultant. So over time, you'll want to create these blog posts.

Now, fun fact. Blogging will not only help you show up via your site-wide SEO, but when you can implement really great SEO on your blog, you can also then rank your blog posts. So then you can start attracting your ideal customer at those early stages when they're just looking for solutions to their problem. 

As we all know, blogging is a fantastic way to share content with your audience, bring in new leads, warm up your audience, so on and so forth. All the things I love to talk about. Again, another training inside of Roadmap to Freedom.

We really understand the importance of SEO as an entrepreneur. So the reason I wanted to share this with you is that this has been consistent. This has been happening for two, three years now where I'm making thousands of dollars from someone finding me on Google. 

This can be a mixture of my high-level one-on-one, which is where most of that is coming from, but also then discovering my website and opting into my email list and joining the Academy or buying one of my other courses or programs as well. The possibilities are endless. 

And if you're an entrepreneur that doesn't want to invest a ton of money in ads, like myself, and really wants to focus on these organic strategies, this is the best place to start.

So like I said at the beginning, this strategy can work for any type of business. The real meat of this is that you have to do the research. A lot of people think, "Oh, I don't want to sit down and do the research, so I'd rather just post every single day on social media." 

But in the long run, you're going to save yourself time. Not to mention, you're getting in front of quality leads, people who are ready to invest, rather than just putting a bunch of content out there and hoping that it lands in front of the right person.

Conclusion

So I've shared with you this step-by-step of exactly how you can do this for your own business. But if you don't want to do it by yourself, then you can join us inside of the next round of Roadmap to Freedom, where we teach you exactly how to set up the SEO, how to do the research, and what to look for so that you can start ranking on Google. 

As I mentioned, we also talk about blogging. We talk about video marketing, Pinterest and so much more so that you can take the pressure off of social media and still get your brand seen and paid. If you want to learn more, go to brandmerry.com/freedom.

P.S. Roadmap to Freedom doors are opening soon!

This live group program will help you create an online business that allows you to create a life of abundant experiences and impact. This high-touch program helps you simplify the process so you can make more money on your terms.

And, the 2023 cohort is going to be better than ever with updated content, lifetime access, new bonus content, and more! Join the waitlist and be the first to join in January 2023.

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- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -

DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES

START HERE ↠

LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS

START HERE ↠

MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR

START HERE ↠

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- READ THE LATEST POSTS -

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MEET MICHELLE

Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.

I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.

I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.

This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.

What is Branding and How To Build A Personal Brand

What is Branding and How To Build A Personal Brand

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

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If you didn’t already know, at Brandmerry, we focus on two key elements for building a business, both branding and marketing. And today I want to share with you a snippet from my free on-demand training called the Build a Better Brand Method. 

Inside of this free video training, I share with you the signature framework that I have used to support hundreds of entrepreneurs in building a scalable brand that just feels really f*cking good. 

It feels like them. 
It's a strong personal brand. 
They get to show up and do their thing online in a way that feels amazing.

This free on-demand training is available for you to watch if you go to betterbrandmethod.com, but I thought it would be really fun to give you a little teaser. 

I'm going to share with you what personal branding is. 

I'm also going to break down my signature branding framework. This is the six-part framework that I teach inside of my program You Branded. Inside of the training, you are getting the entire framework step-by-step, plus what happens at each level and how each level builds to the next. 

After you dive into this blog (or listen to the audio above), I encourage you to go to betterbrandmethod.com to sign up for this on-demand training because in addition to what you're hearing today, you are also going to get some amazing content on the training around storytelling, writing your brand messages, doing ideal client work and more. 

WHAT IS A BRAND

I want you to start thinking about the brand as the ultimate experience that you are creating for your potential customers. 

It's made up of the feeling and the connection that someone has about the experience that you've given them online. 

It's made up of the stories, the emotional connection, and different experiences as a whole. 

If they watch a video from you, if they see an Instagram post from you, if you have a business, then personal branding allows you to create a deeper, personal connection with your audience that will build trust. 

It ultimately goes deeper than just a product or service. Yet, so many people make the mistake of branding around a product or service when they start. 

I don't want you to do that because things are going to change within your business over time and you don’t want to have to shift your branding as a result.

Your product or service is not a brand. 

A brand needs to be about the business as a whole, the company as a whole, you as a whole showing up as your true self because as we'll learn, purchase decisions are made based on human connection. 

They're not made because of that product that you're selling, because I bet you, someone else has the exact same thing. 

We all know it's true. 
We know what our industry looks like. 

But you can stand out and you can become profitable when you focus on building your personal brand. 

Think about your brand as the beating heart of your business. 
Without it, you won't have anything. 

In fact, Richard Branson said, “The way a company brands itself is everything. It will ultimately decide whether or not your business survives.” 

So, remember it's essential.

WHY YOUR PERSONAL BRAND IS IMPORTANT

So why is your personal brand important? 

We've talked a little bit about it, but let's break down some of the key pieces. 

REASON #1 TO CREATE A PERSONAL BRAND FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Your ideal customer is shopping around, right? We all know that. Let's not pretend it's not happening. 

It is part of the client buying process. 

So why would they choose your product or service over someone else that offers the same thing? 

Your brand. 

There was a study done by Harvard University that found that we make purchase decisions based on an emotional connection that we feel. So, although we think it is because we list out how many modules are in something, or how many videos they get, or how many calls, someone's made a decision by that point. 

That logistical information might help them to commit today, but they've already decided based on a connection. 

That's why creating a personal brand is so essential. It allows you to share more story, it allows you to build connections, and they ultimately will move through the buying process faster.

REASON #2 TO CREATE A PERSONAL BRAND FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Branding also impacts every single element of your business. 

You cannot have a website without a solid brand. 
You cannot show up on social media without a solid brand. You won't know what to say. 
You won't know what aesthetics to choose. 
You won't know what you're ultimately leading people to. 

You can't have a solid marketing strategy without a solid brand, because so much of your marketing strategy relies on your ideal customer and your messaging. 

You can't advertise without a solid brand because you won’t know who to target or how best to communicate with them. 

Your copy will suck if you don't have a solid brand because your messaging will be less than mediocre and you will not stand out and will not convert. Your content creation will fall flat.

In fact, many entrepreneurs who have had their business for a while come to me because they're having trouble staying consistent with their content. 

When we fill the holes in their brand, suddenly it all works and makes sense again. Your brand impacts every element of your business.

WHY DO YOU NEED BRAND STORYTELLING?

So what role does storytelling play in branding? 

I've talked about storytelling a lot on the Brandmerry Blog. 

When you integrate story into your content, it is 22 times more likely to be remembered. This includes copy on your homepage, email, advertisement copy, social media, all of it. 

That is because storytelling has major effects on the brain. Inside of your audience’s brain, there's dopamine firing, there's neuro coupling happening. 

I think just this stat in and of itself as an entrepreneur always spoke to me because if I'm going to take the time and the energy to create content, which we all are because it's important when you're building an online business, I want to make sure that people actually remember it.

In addition to the power of storytelling, 86% of consumers say that authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like and support. 

Now, this comes down to being your true self online and building a brand around that rather than something you think people might want. 

81% of consumers said that they need to be able to trust a brand in order to buy from them. 

This again is where storytelling and personal branding comes into play. Storytelling is such a great way to build connections so that people feel like they know you and they can trust you. And as we mentioned before, it's oftentimes the reason someone will make a decision between two very similar products.

If you Google photographers near you, you're going to have a lot of options. 
Why are your ideal customers ultimately going to choose one over the other?

It's going to come down to trust and an emotional connection. 

And to close out my statistical rant, 64% of consumers around the world said that they would buy from a brand or boycott it solely because of its position on a social or political issue. 

Your story, your values, and your mission are the foundation of your brand and will help you communicate these things with your audience, stand your ground, and speak up on the things that your audience cares about most.

BRANDMERRY 6-PART BRAND FRAMEWORK (STEP-BY-STEP)

All right. Let's dive into this six-part framework, that we call the Build a Better Brand Method. 

Phase One: Story

At this stage, the emphasis is on identifying your strengths, your transitions, things that you've gone through in your life, different paths that you've taken, and experiences to ultimately define your niche and create your profitable brand story. 

This is when you're really getting in touch with who you are as a person and the different things that you want to provide, the mission, and your values so that you can ultimately carve out your little pocket inside of your industry. 

Remember, a lot of us are offering the same exact thing. 

I'm not oblivious to the fact that there are other people offering branding work and supporting people with their branding but I found based on my story and my experiences, my little pocket, and then from that am able to create a really profitable brand story.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Profitability comes from your specific niche and by using your story from the get-go to define your expertise and your strengths, you'll easily incorporate it into your brand as a whole. Many people make the mistake of saying this is my niche, because they're like this is the product that I want to sell, and then that's their niche. 

You can niche down based on your credentials, your expertise, your experiences to give you a leg up in your industry. It's one of the things that I did when I was starting out as well. 

So this is the first stage. You need to understand and get super clear on your story before you can move on to the next piece and at the end of this phase, you're ultimately going to know your specific niche and how you're really going to use your superpowers to stand out in your industry.

Phase TWO: Your Customer

That leads us to the second phase. Phase two is all about your customer. 

Once you've identified who you are, your strengths, your story, and those experiences that you want to share, now we move into who you're talking to. 

Who do you ultimately want to attract to your brand? 

Now at this stage, the emphasis is on identifying deeper layers of your ideal customer. This is ultimately who your brand will be supporting and doing the research to better understand who they really are is essential. 

Too many people skip this step. You might be one of them. I was. I did it. I skipped the step in the beginning and guess what? I didn't make any money. 

So when you get back down to the customer market research, you are able to really know your ideal customer, which is going to play a role in everything that you are going to create moving forward. And yes, it's going to take a little bit of time, but I promise it's going to be worth it in the end. 

In fact, the knowledge that comes from deep ideal client market research will impact your overall messaging, your overall copywriting, the words that you are going to use on your website and social media and your overall marketing strategy. 

Because how do you know where to show up and market if you don't know who you're trying to attract? 

The second phase is going deeper into really understanding who your customers are. I'll give you a little hint on this one. It's not just the demographics that everybody stresses about. 
What is their age? 
Are they married? 
Do they have kids? 

No. We're going deeper than that. We're thinking about what their struggles are. 
What are their weaknesses? 
What are their strengths? 
What keeps them up at night? 
What do they ultimately want? 
Why do they want it? 
What's standing in their way?

Those are just some examples of the questions that we need to be asking ourselves when it comes to phase two of the branding framework. 

Phase Three: Your Messaging

Phase three is your messaging. How do you communicate and tie those pieces together to bring in and attract your ideal customer? 

At this stage, the emphasis is on consistency. It's one of my favorite words. 

Crafting messages that really represent your brand as a whole, not just the individual offer. 

You will notice, I haven't talked about a single product or offer yet. Because we're talking about the brand as a whole, we're talking about the experience. How are you ultimately supporting your ideal customer to go from where they are to where they want to be? 

This is important because a consistent presentation of a brand has seen to increase revenue by 33%. Look, we can all get every little bit that we can, right? 

The messaging consistency will make sure that your overall brand message never gets confusing and is super clear to your ideal customer, meaning that the brand as a whole solves the problem and then the individual products or services go into the logistics of how you do that. 

Phase three is focused on communicating your strengths, your expertise, the experience that you're providing with what you know about your ideal customer, what they want, what's standing in their way, all of those things and crafting it into messaging for your brand as a whole.

Phase Four: The Offer

That leads us to four, which is crafting your signature offer. 

Now at this stage, the emphasis is on building your core offer and signature framework. I know it's really tempting to start off with a million offers out of the gate. If you're just starting off or you're having trouble selling what you currently have, strip it back, become known for something, build a reputation around something, get results around something, and then add more offers down the line. 

So inside of You! Branded, I specifically tell my clients, we are focused on one thing right now. Let's get good at that one thing and then scale. 

At this stage, you want to determine the pillars, the phases of your offer, much like the one that you're seeing right now. And that will allow you to monetize more consistently. This is really important because part of the branding process is figuring out what you're going to monetize. 

But many people either do it too early and then they've got nothing to back it up, or they figure out their brand and then they create their offer and then their brand and the offer aren't connected. 

It only makes sense to craft a signature offer that can scale with your brand over time. Don't do it backwards or you're going to find yourself very confused with communicating your offer and your brand and all the different things. 

Phase Five: Your Voice

We cannot create a personal brand without talking about your voice, the voice of the brand, the voice of the company, how you're going to show up.

So at this stage, the emphasis is on defining the authentic voice of the brand, of the characteristics to make sure that your true personality is coming through online. Many of you are most likely starting out as solopreneurs, meaning it's you with a business idea and a plan in place and you're going forward with it. 

Showing up and sharing your story and building that trust is going to be incredibly helpful. That's how I started as well. 

Even though my company Brandmerry isn't my name Michelle Knight, I'm still able to build a personal brand because again, we're focused on personal connection. I know that someone is ultimately going to decide to work with me or maybe purchase my services because they have felt a connection to me over somebody else that may offer the same thing. 

This is the stage where you want to identify your brand values as we talked about in the beginning. How you want to be perceived and your mission.

Then you'll be able to use those to communicate with your audience, not just through your copy in your messaging, but also with your aesthetics. This is important because authenticity matters. 

81% of survey consumers said that they need to be able to trust a brand in order to buy from them. That's a pretty big number. 

Defining your authenticity from the start will allow you to show up 100% as yourself online and maintain and build deeper trust with your audience. 

Phase Six: Connection

And that leads us to phase six, which is all about connection. Now in this stage, the emphasis is on building an emotional connection with your audience. Studies show that we make purchase decisions based on an emotional connection. So you want to determine this while branding so that it flows not only through your copy, not only through your aesthetics, the visuals, the photos, the colors, the fonts but also in your marketing efforts as well. 

This is a very, very, very important part of the process. 

Many branding mentors, coaches, educators, course creators do not teach the importance of emotional branding. This is something that I have become known for in my industry. And as we know, purchase decisions are based on an emotional connection so it is important. 

It's not enough to have a great product. It's not going to lead to consistent revenue. Your audience needs to feel something from you.

There are a lot of different ways to do that. Through understanding color psychology, to choosing the right fonts for your brand, to choosing photos that build better brand affinity. These are all pieces that when someone lands on your website, boom, they know what you're about and they know how they feel in that moment. 

So again, this is important because choosing colors, choosing fonts, choosing photos, and choosing elements can feel really overwhelming. In fact, many of you are probably sitting in that right now where you'll pick out a bunch of colors and then two days later, you're like, “Oh, actually I want this color instead.” And you're spinning your wheels for a really long time. 

But all of those pieces are rooted in emotion and when you start with the emotional piece first, then you can choose your branding aesthetics. 

Conclusion

So this is the six-part framework that I teach my clients called the Build a Better Brand Method. 

Think of it as building a new building. In order to add stories and increase the height of the building, you need to take the time to construct a solid foundation. If you don't, the building will not stand.

The same is true for your business. If you do not have a solid foundation, you're going to notice you can't go very high. Things start to crumble. Things start to slip. Things won’t fit and you’ll always feel like something is missing.

So now you know. This is the brand roadmap in this exact order. Now, you should be able to look at this and identify what you’re missing or where you need to start.

You know I'm all about the action so make sure you sign up for the Build a Better Brand Method. 

This might have been a small sample of that free training, but there’s more in-depth information on storytelling, ideal customer and messaging within the class. 

This is a free on-demand training teaching you how to completely elevate your brand and business. You can learn more at betterbrandmethod.com.

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- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -

DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES

START HERE ↠

LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS

START HERE ↠

MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR

START HERE ↠

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- READ THE LATEST POSTS -

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MEET MICHELLE

Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.

I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.

I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.

This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.

Market Research: How to Perform Better Research for Your Brand

Prefer to watch this blog content instead of reading it? Head here to watch it on the Brandmerry channel.

I'm going to make a pretty big claim right now and say that ideal customer work can make or break the success of your business. And there are a lot of different reasons for that. I'm going to cover those in today's blog and I'm also going to share with you how to conduct better market research. 

We no longer needed to get on the phone with individual people every 90 days. We don't always have the time and the capacity for that. Now I'm not saying that that's not a good strategy, but there are other more effective ways to do ideal customer research that is actually going to help you in the long run with your marketing. 

There are two things that we do really well over here at Brandmerry and that is helping you build a personal brand around you and your story and teaching you how to market very effectively, to have incoming leads for brand awareness, and ultimately converting them to paying clients. More income, more impact. That is our goal. 

And both of those categories rely on ideal customer research. 

I know you've heard about the ideal customer avatar. You might even be at a place where you're like I'm so sick of this work. I get it. And I hope that at the end of this blog, you're feeling revamped, re-energized, and you have a new strategy to get the feedback and the information that you need to totally elevate your branding and your marketing. 

So why is ideal customer work so important?

Well, at the end of the day, you have a business. You're selling to someone and you better know who the heck they are or they're not going to buy from you. As I've mentioned, ideal customer work plays a role in both branding and marketing. 

So from a branding side, we want to focus on ideal customer work to really understand who your customer is at their core. Understanding what their big problems are, their struggles, their goals, their aspirations is incredible information.

You can even use ideal customer work to find out what social media platforms they're hanging out on, where they get most of their information and other people that they look to for advice in your industry.

The branding work and ideal customer work can help you set a very strong foundation for your brand and your business moving forward.

Once you know who your ideal customer is, it's much easier to craft your offer to serve them at the highest level.

You can craft better messaging, which has got to play a role in your website copy and your marketing. You're also able to better understand emotional branding, which I talk about in this video right here, where I share a little bit more on how we make our audience feel and the connection that we create. 

In addition to that, one of the things that play a huge role in branding is the art of storytelling. And in order to tell great stories as a business owner, you've got to know who you're telling those stories to. It's not enough to just share stories to share stories. We want to share stories that are going to motivate our audience to take action, aka buy our product or our service.

So from a branding perspective, ideal customer research is so important because it's going to set the foundation for everything that you're going to create in your business. 

From a marketing perspective, it's all about content. 

When you're thinking of content, you want to make sure that you're thinking of content that not only attracts new people to your community but also moves them through the client buying journey. 

I talk about that entire journey, that entire process in this video right here. 

It's really important that you understand that your content is there to not only let people know who you are, build that brand awareness, pull them in and attract them, but ultimately connect with them, leading to the sale. 

It's so important to understand who you're talking to and ultimately who your business is for.

KEY ELEMENTS TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER

I want to share with you some updated strategies for doing your ideal customer work. But before I do that, let's talk about some of the key elements that you need to understand about your ideal customer. 

TIP #1: IDENTIFY DEMOGRAPHICS

I recommend that you start broad and then narrow it down a bit as you go. 

So this stage is all about the demographic. These are the things that you know about the person that you ultimately want to work with or who your product and service are ultimately for. Depending on where you're at in your business, you might have more information about this individual or you might have nothing. 

At this stage you want to think about the individual people who AREN’T the right fit for your brand, ultimately starting to narrow it down.

One of the ways to do this is to focus on things like demographics. 

What do we know about this person? 
Is this person just graduating from college? 
Is this person a working mother? 
Who is this person?

And I'm not recommending that you have to focus on men or women or mothers or not mothers, but those are some of the things to start considering.

What do you know about the individual that you want to work with? The offer that you're ultimately creating, who is it really designed for? 

This information is going to help you narrow it down from everyone, which is not an ideal customer, to getting a little bit more specific. 

TIP #2: ANSWER THE TOP QUESTIONS

Then the next thing you want to do is answer a few top questions.

• What is the problem they are facing now?

Every single business has to solve a problem. This is actually part of the niching down process.

If you don't solve a problem, you're going to have a really hard time selling anything. And just so we're clear every product, every service can solve a problem. It's your job to figure out what that problem is and narrow it down really specific to your ideal customer.

So let's say that my target market is new moms and I sell a program that teaches you how to tidy up your house. The problem is that new moms don't have a lot of time in their schedules. They're tired of a messy house. It's overwhelming. It's weighing on their shoulders, not speaking from experience at all. And they want to understand better strategies to keep it maintained if you will. Keep their sanity. 

So the problem is that they want to be able to tidy up their home in a limited amount of time. And they don't understand exactly how to do that. 

Every single thing comes down to a problem. 
What is the problem that your ideal customer is facing?

• What are their struggles with that problem?

How are they feeling about that problem? Where are they now? 

This is incredibly helpful with marketing because it allows you to connect with your ideal customer and allows them to feel seen, heard and understood. 

• Where do they want to be?

So they've got these current struggles, they've got these pain points, they have this problem. What do they ultimately want? 

If they resolve this problem, what does life look like for them? Do they suddenly get to make their eggs in 10 seconds and stop cursing every morning at their pan that keeps sticking? 

You want to understand what the core problem is, where they are now, and what those pain points and struggles are. 

How would they describe that to you and where do they ultimately want to be?

• What are the specific obstacles in their way?

Why haven't they solved the problem yet? Why haven't they done it on their own or with another product or service? What are some of the things that they're specifically looking for that they haven't found? 

Another thing that you can start to explore is the objections. 

I find that these are incredibly helpful for service-based entrepreneurs. If someone hasn't solved their problem just yet, they probably have some obstacles standing in their way. 

What are some mindset pieces that they have? Maybe they think they don't have enough time to do the work. Maybe they think that they don't have the energy or the capacity to take on something else. 

What are those objections? These are incredibly helpful when it comes to selling your product or your service. If you can understand these obstacles and the objections your ideal customer is going through, then you can use that in your marketing.

So these are just some questions that you can start to organize the research that I'm about to give you my favorite tools for, into these little categories. 

This is going to help you with your branding and your marketing overall. 

MARKET RESEARCH STRATEGIES

So let's now talk about some of my favorite ways to do market research. 

Number one is a free tool that not enough people know about that is incredibly powerful. When you think about your own life and your own customer journey with different products and services, where do you turn when you need something? Google. 

We all go to Google. It is a database of information.

And the free tool that we love to use is called Answer The Public. 

Answer the Public

What Answer The Public does is it takes the information from Google and it categorizes it into questions and into sub-categories. So you can go on to Answer The Public and type in an ideal customer that you know you want to work with. 

You can type in a core problem. 
You can type in your industry. 
So you can start as broad as you want. And then it will divide it up into a bunch of different webs. 

Let's say I type in brand photography. I am a photographer and I want to sell brand photography and I want to better understand my ideal customer and what they're looking for when it comes to brand photography. 

I can type in brand photography and then it's going to show me all of the top questions and searches related to brand photography.

With each of those, you can actually click and it'll open up another tab and show you the Google searches. It'll show you the most popular blog posts, the most popular websites. And you can start to do a little bit of research. You can get as granular with it as you want, but what this is really offering you is information on what your audience is asking. 

This can go back to what they are struggling with? 
How are they phrasing their problem?
What outcomes do they ultimately want? 

Answer The Public is an incredible, helpful tool and it's free with a few searches every single month. So you can definitely use it to your advantage.

YouTube

YouTube is a search engine platform meaning that people are turning to the platform to look for solutions to their problems. 

You can use YouTube's basic function by typing in brand photography. We'll just run with this topic, brand photography, and see what YouTube is suggesting auto-populates.

This can be incredibly helpful for finding some of the top searches within your industry. 

Further than that, you can start to explore some of the top videos and look at the comments section, see what people are asking and if it's a really popular video and you're seeing that it has tons and tons of views, that's probably a top struggle that your ideal customer is dealing with. 

So not only looking at the topic for the video that has a bunch of views and saying, “Wow, okay, this must be something that my ideal customer is struggling with if everyone's watching this,” but also exploring the comment section. 

This can be incredibly valuable for grabbing specific language that your audience is using.

Pinterest

To piggyback off of YouTube, another search engine platform that we like coming in at number three is Pinterest. 

Oh, I just love Pinterest so much. As a marketer, it's a freaking goldmine. 

Pinterest uses a very, very similar feature because it's a search engine where it will auto-populate with the most popular searches. 

So if you're going in for brand photography, you type brand photography in the search bar, Pinterest will help you out and tell you the top searches for brand photography.

It'll just kind of fill in those keywords. Again, another incredibly helpful way for you to start to get content ideas and information from your audience.

Amazon

The next one uses another popular platform that we're all familiar with and that is Amazon. 

Look, no matter how you feel about Amazon, it is where people are buying their books. So one of the things that I started doing really early on in my business was starting to explore book reviews. 

Finding books that were related to my industry. Now I totally understand this might not work for everyone. With all of these, take the ones that will best serve you and your industry and run with them. You don't have to use all of them, but this is a really helpful one especially if your industry typically has very specific topics and books related to what you do. 

So let's say I am focused on marketing. I can go to Amazon, type in marketing, and choose the book option from the dropdown.

This is going to show me all the top marketing books. I'm going to look for the ones that have the most reviews because that's where the information lies. 

I can then go to that book, I can read a little bit about it. 

What was the general idea of the book, scroll down and start reading the reviews. Now the positive reviews are nice, but what you really want to focus on are the negative reviews. 

What did people say? 
Did they say it was too simple? 
Did they say that it didn't answer this question? 
Did they not like it because of X, Y and Z? 

This is going to give you more information about what your audience is looking for and a possible gap that you can fill in your content creation.

Community Forums

The next one is all about community forums. Now I'll be honest with you, I don't use this one very often, but I've had a lot of clients who find success and use them for themselves. 

The community forums, Reddit is a great example of this, where you can go type in a specific topic, whether it's a specific problem that you've identified for your ideal customer, your industry as a whole, or something that you specifically do. 

Personal branding would be a great example for my business. Type that in and see what people are talking about. See what types of questions individuals are asking. This is a really helpful tool for getting very specific language for your ideal customer. 

In addition to that, and one of the platforms that I'm a little bit more familiar with and comfortable with is Facebook groups. 

Now, I am not suggesting that you go into every Facebook group and you just start asking random questions. Exhausting, outdated. We don't need to do that anymore.

Facebook has a search function, so you don't have to do all of the outward postings and choosing a cute pic for attention. We just get to go into the Facebook group that we know is full of our ideal customers, go to the search bar, and start typing in very specific keywords related to the things that you offer, your industry, your problems and see what questions come up. 

Whether that's a single post or actually in the comments. I have found gold mines in Facebook groups before.

In fact, and I'm going to be sharing with you, how I map out 90 days worth of content, that video is actually coming out next week. One of my favorite places to find content ideas are Facebook groups. 

Survey Your Audience

The last one I'm going to share with you is really helpful if you already have an audience. Now, you don't have to have a huge audience. You don't have to have thousands of email subscribers or fans on Instagram or whatever you use to classify an audience for your business. Although I recommend that that's your email list. You can have 10, 15, 100 people. It doesn't matter. 

This tool is really helpful for getting really specific information from people who've already said yes to your brand. And those are surveys.

Every 90 days-ish, I will put together a survey for my audience and ask very specific questions like:

What are you struggling with right now?
What is the number one problem that you're facing?
What are you looking to do within the next 90 days?
What would you love from me?
If I could create one piece of content that would help you, what would that piece of content be? 

And that's incredibly helpful for getting specific feedback from your audience, making open-ended questions so you can get very specific language and then using that to create your content moving forward. 

Conclusion

So no matter which one of these options you choose, I hope that you see that there is so much information waiting for you on the internet. 

The biggest thing I want you to remember is that we’re focused on getting specific language from our ideal customer. 

It's not enough to assume what our audience is saying. We really want to use the words that they are using to describe their current struggles, to describe their problem, to describe where they ultimately want to be. 

That is going to help you with your marketing. 
It's going to help you with your messaging. 
It's going to help you with your consistent income as a business owner. 

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- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -

DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES

START HERE ↠

LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS

START HERE ↠

MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR

START HERE ↠

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- READ THE LATEST POSTS -

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MEET MICHELLE

Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.

I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.

I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.

This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.

Lessons in Marketing: Resiliency Pays Off

Lessons in Marketing: Resiliency Pays Off

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

LISTEN ON APPLE PODCASTS

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When it comes to marketing, you've got to be in it for the long game. 

Despite what you might see posted on Facebook Ads, the reality is most people aren’t making $10k in 10 days in the beginning. It takes longevity and dedication, something I’m here for, in order to create sustainable growth as a business owner.

Wouldn’t you rather have consistent $10k months than one week with $10k? Not that you have to choose, you can have both, but from what I’ve seen many individuals create one-hit-wonder marketing strategies that aren’t sustainable.

Resiliency matters as a marketer and if you don't have this resiliency, if you're not really paying attention to the data, to the details, you're going to struggle in marketing your business.

So, in today’s post, I’m sharing.

MARKETING LESSON #1: HAVE MEASURABLE GOALS

I don't know if you have noticed this, but sometimes you plan things, you put in a lot of energy, a lot of time, and you write all the emails, you do all of the things, you put in all the strategy, and then you're like, okay, something seems to be wrong; something's not working.

We're going to talk about how to actually identify what's not working in just a minute, but this is going to happen in business. 

I think it's really easy when we're looking at the way specific marketers are talking about their products and services, and think it will automatically work for me and my business. We know this is not true.

So much of a strategy working depends on your audience and who you ultimately want to attract to your brand and your business. But when we go into marketing with this idea, or with this expectation that this is going to work exactly how we have it mapped out, we're really setting ourselves up for a lot of failures. 

There's a difference between these crazy expectations and having clear, measurable goals. 

As a marketer, it's really important that you have these clear, measurable goals that say, okay, in 30 days let's see where we're at. 

If we haven't noticed a 2% or 3% or 4% improvement, then let's talk about some changes that we could make. Let's watch it again another 30 days and see. 

Then after that, maybe we have to decide that this isn't right for us.
Or maybe we have to decide to implement something else into our strategy. 

That's essentially what I'm talking about when I'm talking about this resiliency in marketing. 

You've got to be in it for the long game. 

This is the thing about marketing, my friends. It is a long game. But so is being a CEO and a business owner. You don't want a business for two months and then you're like, "I'm done with that." 

You put a lot of time and energy into making that happen. So, this resiliency as a business owner is incredibly important and it’s going to help improve your marketing.

MARKETING LESSON #2: DON’T QUIT TOO EARLY

Once you’ve gotten super clear and specific with your goals, it’s so important to put in the energy and effort consistently, but a lot of small business owners quit too early. 

They quit right before things start to shift. 

One of the things that happened to me a couple of years ago when I launched You! Branded is that it wasn't working in the beginning. It wasn't selling and I had signed up for a whole program to support me in making this happen.

So I kept making small adjustments and then I kept making small adjustments, and then we started to see a little bit of an increase and I'm like, "Okay, let's keep making some small adjustments." 

Then within a year, that product alone brought in six figures to my business because of those small adjustments. 

Could you imagine what would have happened if I would have been like, "This doesn't work! Screw this." Which is what a lot of small business owners do. 

We often get the first response to something, or don’t see the sales we imagined and we immediately throw in the towel, but this resilience and dedication to making small improvements can result in consistent income in your business.

If you’re constantly setting goals and then throwing in the towel when they don’t work right away you’ll always be creating and not selling.

SMALL IMPROVEMENTS FOR MASSIVE CHANGE

One of my favorite books is Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's helped me so much with my daily habits in both life and business, and what he talks about and what we don't focus enough on is 1% improvement every single day.

The same is true for your marketing. 

We're typically looking for something to go from 10% to 90% in 48 hours. There's no proof that shows it’s going to happen. The growth we see is incremental growth, changes that have to happen to lead to the larger leap. 

If you are improving even a little bit over time, just 1% daily, that's going to snowball to ultimately be that 90% improvement. 

You have to be open to making changes. 

You have to be open to making these small adjustments. 

You need to set clear goals for yourself. 

LESSON #3: DATA DRIVES DECISIONS

Why are the goals you’re setting so important?

The answer to that question is that data drives decisions. 
When it comes to marketing, data should be driving your decisions. 

The fact that you're like, "Oh, but I really, really love this title. It's so great." But, the data shows that nobody else loves this title or nobody else understands what you're saying. If you’re not willing to change then you’re too emotionally attached to it and not reading the data.

Or, "But, I really love this color." Yeah, but the data shows that that color on a button does not work for you. 

Data needs to drive your decisions, especially your marketing decisions and when we're talking about this resiliency and making these small improvements, then you want to make sure that you're looking at the data to know what to adjust.

DATA YOU SHOULD BE PAYING ATTENTION TO

When it comes to data there are obviously numerous things you can measure. However, here are some of the most popular for business owners to monitor and track.

Landing Page Conversion Rate:
How many people land on the page and how many people actually follow through with what you're asking them to do? In this case, an opt-in to your lead magnet and email list. 

Typically if you’re promoting something free to a cold audience, you're looking for at least a 30% conversion. We share this information inside of the Academy, by the way. So if you're ever, like, "I don't even know what these conversions should be," we talk about your data and your numbers inside of the Academy a lot.

Email Open Rates:
When we're talking about email open rates, if no one’s opening them, it’s a sure sign that your subject line is underperforming.

It could also be deliverability, but that depends on your email platform. That's why we love ConvertKit. 

Typically, it changes based on your list size, but 18% to about 24% is average. 

If you have 10,000 people on your email list and you're hitting a solid 22%, great. If you've got 40 people on your email list and you're at 90%, fantastic. As your list grows your conversion will shift as well.

If you're feeling like your email marketing doesn't work, then look at your numbers, starting with your email open rates. If your people aren't opening your emails, it's because your subject line sucks. So, let's focus on increasing that first - remember to make one small change. 

Click-Through Email Rates:
If people are reading your emails, but they're not clicking through, then that's your CTA (call to action). 

What are you saying in your email? Are you using the right messaging to get people to take action? Sometimes we group everything together and we're like, "It's not working." And, then we don't make these small adjustments that would probably shift everything.

When you start to get into the habit of making those small adjustments frequently and looking at the data, you can make these informed decisions. 

It took me about five years to like webinars. I'm in my fifth year of business now. There were periods of time where I was convinced I would never do a webinar again.

It wasn't webinars that sucked. It was that I wasn't great at doing webinars. I needed to fix my game. I needed to get really, really clear on what I was teaching on that webinar. I needed to get better at my CTAs. 

I have clients who are like, "Live video doesn't work." And I'm like, "Live video does work, but let's figure out why yours isn't working and let's fix it." 

Put your marketing hat on and ask yourself very specific questions to discover what’s not working, rather than generalize the entire thing.

BTW, a good click-through rate for your emails is 1-3% and on a webinar, you’re wanting between a 2-5% conversion rate.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE DATA

If you don't have a ton of data, try looking at what your audience is responding to. 

What kind of posts do people like that you post on social media? 

What type of blog topics get the most click-through rates in your email marketing? 

What are people asking you about over and over again? 

When it comes to marketing we want a clear target and we want to take actions to get us closer to that target. That's how you create marketing that works for your business.

MARKETING LESSON #4: CREATE MARKETING GUIDELINES

One of the things that I implemented a few years ago to help drive my decisions in marketing, were marketing guidelines. 

These marketing guidelines for my business specifically helped me step into the CEO role of my company.

I talked about it in this post a few weeks ago.

My marketing guidelines as a CEO are that:

• I don't need to post fresh content daily.

• I focus on longevity, so I never want something that's going to disappear or that I can't keep and repurpose. That will allow me to create high-value content. 

• I drive traffic to my home base (aka website)

Those are my three guiding principles when it comes to marketing.

You want to create your own because that's going to allow you to come back to these very specific pieces when things aren't working or when something new comes out and you’re wondering if you should implement it into your strategy. 

There’s always something new and you can’t keep up with all of it or you’ll burn out!

These guidelines will help you determine if it is in alignment with how you want to run your business. 

The example that I gave a few weeks ago was Clubhouse, which is a great platform and people absolutely love it, but it does not hit my criteria. 

It's high value, I will give it that. But it requires you to show up often and the longevity is not there because things disappear. That's just not in alignment with my core guiding principles as a marketer. 

So, when it comes to resiliency in marketing, you want to say, what are my principles? 
What are the things that are important to me? 
What are my values as a marketer? 

Make sure that when you're committing to a new marketing strategy and that you're putting in the time and energy to get the data you need. Because marketing is about resiliency and it's about longevity and it's about consistency.

MARKETING LESSON #5: CONSISTENCY IS KEY

This isn't a fluffy word. There's a reason that we talk about consistency in business and why it is so important. 

If you're setting a goal to see how blogging works and then you post one blog every month, it’s going to take you a while to know if blogging works for you.

But if you set a goal to see how blogging works in 60 days and you’re diligent and post weekly, then you’ll have the data to look at and make a decision on where you go from there.

Thinking of redoing your entire website because you’re convinced it doesn’t work?

Well, let’s fix what you do have because redoing it is going to take you a long time and maybe some money. Let's instead make some of these tweaks and modifications. Let's see if that helps before you now waste six months of your time writing new copy and redoing your entire website.

Now, of course, there's a time and a place to redo your website, if your brand has changed, if your ideal customer has changed. But we're so quick to not put that marketing hat on and say, "Let me look at this with a lens of data and see, what could I change?" 

We’ve recently made changes to our marketing strategy at Brandmerry because of what the data was showing. To hear all the behind-the-scenes of that change be sure to LISTEN to Episode 7 of The Brandmerry Podcast here.

CONCLUSION

Data-driven decisions are so important as a business owner and I really, really hope that you see that.

This message that I wanted to share about resiliency in marketing, it cannot be 100% an emotional decision. You need to follow the data and you need to know what’s working and why! 

This is what we teach inside of Brandmerry Academy.  You can go to brandmerryacademy.com to check it out. 

I hope that this was incredibly helpful for you. I hope this motivated you to start looking at the data to really look at marketing in a way of its longevity. 

It isn't a one-hit-wonder strategy. It can't be a one-hit-wonder strategy

We have to keep ourselves on our toes with marketing, it's essential. And so if you struggle with that, if you want more accountability, if you want to know how to look at the data in the right way, we cover that inside of The Academy.

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- FREE GIFTS YOU'LL LOVE -

DISCOVER YOUR BRAND STORY IN UNDER 5 MINUTES

START HERE ↠

LEARN HOW TO WRITE AN ‘ABOUT ME’ PAGE THAT CONVERTS

START HERE ↠

MAP OUT 30 DAYS OF CONTENT IN UNDER AN HOUR

START HERE ↠

---

- READ THE LATEST POSTS -

---

MEET MICHELLE

Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.

I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.

I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.

This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.

Marketing Strategy Example for Solopreneurs

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

When I first started my business I felt overwhelmed with the idea of constantly creating content, notice I didn’t say consistent here because for a long time I thought consistent meant constant.

This is actually not true, consistency is what works best for YOU!

Once, I realized I could map out how I wanted to show up, where and how often I began to bulk my content creation days. Every Monday, I would have a few hours, kid-free, to write my blogs, social media posts and emails for the week.

This was crucial in making sure I could get my content out into the world, increase brand awareness and attract quality leads.

But, as any business grows so do the creative juices and I began to think of new ways to reach my audience. Many of these included live videos, pre-recorded videos, podcasts, Pinterest strategies and more. That’s when I became mildly obsessed with streamlining my marketing.

Over the past five years, I’ve become a master at not only my own marketing strategies but also supporting entrepreneurs in doing the same for their business. It’s the core principle inside of signature membership Brandmerry Academy!

Today, I’m giving you a look inside of my marketing strategy so you can steal it for yourself.

Let’s get started!

MARKETING STRATEGY TEMPLATE: 4 KEY PIECES

Before we get into the exact strategy you can steal from me, it’s important to take a birds-eye view of marketing as a whole.

There are four very important key pieces to a strong marketing strategy.

MARKETING PIECE #1: STRATEGY

The first piece in a strong marketing strategy is the strategy and systems. 

This is getting a strong foundation in place so that you can show up and market your business consistently. 

And having the pieces in place that are going to not only bring in new leads but also convert those leads into email subscribers and paying clients. 

This stage includes a strong website, core messaging, email marketing platform and onboarding, plus a weekly workflow which we’ll talk about in a bit.

MARKETING PIECE #2: AWARENESS

In the Awareness phase, you're making sure that you're touching on all of those stages of the buying process, and that people are constantly learning about you and your brand. 

This is typically where all those cold subscribers are coming in, people who find your blog on Google, see a pin that you created on Pinterest, or a video on YouTube. 

They're coming in not knowing you previously, and becoming aware of your brand and how you ultimately support your clients.

MARKETING PIECE #3: ATTRACTION

Attraction is where someone who is now aware of you moves into being attracted to your brand, your mission and your work. This is where the magnetic energy starts to build. 

They're ultimately at that phase where they want to learn more. 

This is where having a lead generation piece in place is so important because the people who are ready for more can buy or join your email list where they move a little bit further through the customer-buying process.

MARKETING PIECE #4: CONNECTION

And then the final phase is what I like to call Connection.

This is where you are ultimately connecting and building trust through your marketing efforts and leading people to the sale. 

Think about it as an upside-down triangle, where you've got cold leads coming in the top through awareness, moving into the second phase, warming up a little bit, into the bottom phase where they feel that connection and they are ready to purchase.

All of that is part of your marketing strategy. Making sure that you have the systems and the solid strategy in place so that all of those pieces work very effortlessly together. 

Now, it's time to steal my strategy. 

Just like I promised you, I'm going to share with you the seven-piece marketing strategy that I use in my business.

MY 7-STEP MARKETING STRATEGY

MARKETING STEP #1: CREATE YOUR WORKFLOW

One of the core parts of the Systems Phase is creating your workflow. One of the things that get entrepreneurs so freaking hung up is the idea of consistently showing up, but there is a way to fix this, and that is making sure that your system and your workflow are established. 

Now, I teach this workflow inside of Brandmerry Academy in great detail, but for a limited time, I also have a freebie for you if you want to just dip your toes in the water a little bit. 

You can go to brandmerry.com/repurpose, where I teach you how to master the art of repurposing and create a workflow for your content that you can repeat week after week after week. You’ll get your hands on my Content Creation Repurposing Guide!

This is the same workflow that you have heard me talk about numerous times in my videos and blogs, where I take a video and post it on multiple platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. 

I transcribe that and turn it into a blog. 
I share that blog on Pinterest. 
I share that blog in my email. 
I share that blog on social media. 

My goal is to make sure that I am extending the life of my content.

You want to create this workflow very early on so you understand where and how often you are going to be showing up with your marketing efforts. That is going to allow you to create a workflow that you can just plug the various content topics into and repeat week after week. 

So, number one, create your workflow. 

Again, something we talk about and cover in great detail inside of the Academy, but you can also get your hands on a small portion of that at brandmerry.com/repurpose if you just want to dip your toe in the water.

MARKETING STEP #2: LEAD MAGNET

Number two is making sure that you have your lead magnet set up. 

This is part of that Systems Phase again because as you start to build that brand awareness and attract more people to your brand and your business, you want a way for them to stay in contact with you. 

It is not enough to say, "Hey, just follow me here. I hope you actually see my stuff." We want to make sure that we have a way to email our community members. This is where you're able to talk about your products and your offers more effortlessly because these people want to hear from you.

So, the second thing that you want to do when setting up your marketing strategy is to make sure that you have a lead magnet established. 

This includes making sure that you have that free gift whether that's a PDF, a video, audio, quiz, or something similar. You’ll want to create your landing page or opt-in page as a way to capture their information. 

My favorite platforms for this are Leadpages for opt-in pages and Convertkit as my email platform. I like this combination, but many of my clients will just simply use Convertkit, as they do have the ability for both opt-in pages and general email marketing.

After they’ve opted into your free gift, you’ll need a way to send them the gift via email, and put them into a nurture sequence, where they get to learn more about you, your mission, your brand, and how you are going to support them. You can also offer up your product or your service in that email sequence if you have something readily available.

You don't have to wait for the perfect offer, you can always focus on nurturing them and building deeper trust and go back to add your offer later. 

Having your lead magnet established early on is so important because as your marketing picks up, and it can take off very quickly, you want a way to capture those quality leads.

MARKETING STEP #3: WEBSITE

Now, one of the things that I teach over here at Brandmerry, specifically inside of Brandmerry Academy, is the power of a website. I know a lot of people will sit there and tell you that your website isn't important, but here's the thing: your website is a home base for your expertise. 

When you use the strategies that we teach at Brandmerry like SEO, where you don't have to show up and post every single day on Instagram, or utilizing search engines like Pinterest, where you can extend the life of your blog post and make sure that you're driving traffic to your blog for two, three, four, five, six years down the line, then your website is important. 

Now, if you want to show up every single day on Instagram and post all the time and just try to convert those people into sales, and that feels like a good strategy for you, go for it. 

But, I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs who follow that strategy and struggle a bunch, where they're like, "Well, I have all these subscribers but nobody's buying from me." That is why we teach the strategies that we teach for evergreen content over here at Brandmerry because in our minds it’s much more effective.

So, with these evergreen strategies, it's important to have your website established. 

I’m not asking you to hire a designer or spend months building the “perfect” website, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. It can be very simple to start, and you can continue to add on to it as you go. 

What I recommend to start is a very simple homepage, where you have your lead magnet, where you tell people a little bit about who you are and who you serve, and you can link to your product. 

Having an additional page that shares your product or your service with a link to purchase, book a call or submit an application.

Followed by additional pages for your ‘About Me’ and your blog.

You can have your website set up in no time, because as we know, it's not about perfection, it's about putting it out there. And you can continue to add to it and build. 

This is one of the things that we teach inside of the Academy. There’s an entire brand new course all about creating your website, where I walk you through step by step by step what pages to have and what to include on them. 

Remember, think of your website as a home base where you're going to be setting your evergreen traffic so that you don't have to show up on social media every single day, multiple times a day.

MARKETING STEP #4: BLOGGING

Please, start your blog from the get-go. This is going to be powerful for you because it's allowing you to create strong content on your website so people can learn a little bit more about you, a way for you to showcase your expertise and authority and create content that lives on.

You can then utilize SEO so you can show up in Google and other SEO platforms. 

And, a little hint, if you have your workflow set up, you're creating long-form blog content, which you can then cherry-pick pieces out of and put on social media, or email your list, or create a small reel about. 

So, because you're creating a piece of long-form content right out of the gate, you're actually giving yourself smaller chunks of content that then you can put out on various platforms. Having a blog, in the beginning, is powerful.

Now, if you're not someone who likes to write, don't think of blogging as just writing an entire post every single week. There are a lot of different ways that you can create blog content. One of them is writing the blog, but the second one is how I create my blog posts - starting with a video.

I create a video because I happen to enjoy video content more, transcribe that and turn it into a blog. 

Another option is starting with a podcast or audio recording. You can transcribe that and put it onto the blog. 

I'm not saying that you can't also start with video or start with podcasting, but because we're going for a simple strategy, bare-bones, you need a blog, and you want to start it right away.

If you're like, "I can do video and blog," then let's do it. That's why the workflow that we designed in the first part is important. You can get yourself into a system and you can use awesome marketing tools to streamline your energy. 

One more thing about the blog is that it's important to have that text for repurposing.

Remember, you can use that long-form content to create multiple pieces of content to show up on social media. You could take an entire blog post, pull out individual sentences, and have an entire month's worth of content for Twitter. 

There's a lot of really strategic ways to extend the life of your content, so start with the long-form and then can thank me later.

MARKETING STEP #5: PINTEREST

Pinterest is a search engine optimized platform, meaning that people come to the platform to find very specific pieces of information and the platform uses the keywords from your content to categorize the content. This means if someone is looking for travel tips and you have a post on travel tips, you’ll show up as a resource for them.

I talk a lot about SEO because I love it so much. Feel free to dive into last week’s post if you need a deeper dive.

This SEO strategy is why Pinterest is a more powerful platform than some of the social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook because people aren't specifically going there to solve their problem and seek out solutions.

Pinterest users tend to be further along in the buying process, as opposed to Instagram or Facebook. They're ready, they know their problem, they're seeking out solutions and they're ready to purchase. Where on the other platforms, you're just throwing content out there and hoping that it hits the right person. 

So, integrating Pinterest is powerful. 

Now, I'm not going to do an entire video on Pinterest. It is a whole strategy in and of itself. But if you're serious about marketing and you're ready to use this platform, which I highly recommend, we teach it inside of Brandmerry Academy.

It is an entire monthly marketing mini-course, learning how to use Pinterest effectively in your business. We're talking thousands and thousands of monthly traffic, anywhere from a thousand to what we see over here at Brandmerry upwards of 25,000 website viewers a month. Pinterest is a powerful tool to support you in doing just that.

You've got the blog because you followed Step 4, now, integrate Pinterest so you can create that consistent traffic to your blog.

While I’m not sharing the entire strategy here, there is one little piece of information that I will give you. When you create your blog content, create anywhere between five and six Pinterest pin-sized variations of your title. 

Let's say, you tilted your blog “Three Ways to Improve your Content Creation”.

Go to Canva, choose the Pinterest template, make five individual pages, design them all just a little bit different. Change out your brand colors. Put a photo back there. Maybe change the text a little bit. And then, put different variations of your title on those images.

One could be “Three Tips to Improve your Content Creation.”
One could be “Want to Improve your Content Creation? Read my Three Tips here.” 
Another one could be “The Number One Tip You Need to Know About Utilizing Tools to Improve your Content Creation.” 

You can change them up.
You can change colors, font, photos, etc, but have at least five different variations. 

Then schedule those to release over the first week or two when your blog gets out into the public. You can continue to share them on different boards, etc. This is going to allow you to create fresh content on Pinterest, which is important when it comes to utilizing Pinterest.

Again, check out Brandmerry Academy for the complete training.

MARKETING STEP #6: VIDEO

Now, number six is where you get to incorporate video. This is where social media does come into play just a little bit, but we're focused on using video rather than just static content, which will allow you to reach more people because these platforms love video. 

Now, you don't necessarily have to do videos on Instagram or Facebook.
You could use YouTube as well, but hey, if you're creating the video, why not put it out there on a bunch of different platforms so you make sure that you get in front of your ideal customer?

Video could look like Mondays with Michelle, which is an entire video that I record that I put on Facebook and Instagram every single week. Video could look like using Instagram stories, because those work incredibly well for moving people through the buying process, building trust, and leading them to the sale. It could also be live videos on a platform of your choosing.

Let's not forget our friends' Instagram Reels or TikTok, these short-form videos that are highly educating and highly entertaining do well, and these platforms love to push these types of videos out. 

So, no matter what you're doing in your business, no matter what feels good for you, figure out a way to incorporate video at this stage so that you can start to build that know, like, and trust factor with your audience.

MARKETING STEP #7: KEEP IN TOUCH WITH YOUR AUDIENCE

And then finally, number seven is to figure out and design your weekly touch base with your growing audience. 

Now, if you remember back to number two where we talked about your lead magnet, it's important that if you're growing this email list that you are emailing them, and not just when you want to sell something. 

Email them and let them know what's happening regularly. 

We tend to, as marketers think that everyone sees our content the first time that we put it out there, but that's just not true. You want to make sure that you're getting in front of your audience and that we're hitting them wherever they are. 

Our audience is busy, they’ve got a lot going on and they've got a lot of information coming their way. So if someone has said, "Yes, I want to hear from you," on your email list, do yourself a solid and email them.

This could be focusing on emailing your list every single week when you release your new blog.

It could be making sure that you share your new video every single week via email.

If you've got a podcast episode, sharing that every week. 

Remember, you're creating new content every week so you can just email your audience about that. And then, if it feels good to, you can always take it a step further and include additional story or additional resources to email and stay in contact with your audience multiple times a week. 

But, the bare minimum is once a week. That's what we believe over here. Highly, highly recommended to keep a strong and healthy email list.

CONCLUSION

Those are the seven pieces of a solid marketing strategy. You want to have these core pieces in place and then every day focus on taking three important actions: Growing your email list, nurturing your existing email list, and working on making a sale. 

Watch this video on Youtube where I dive into a deeper strategy about these 3 daily marketing moves. 

That is the seven-part marketing strategy that I want you to steal which will allow you to show up daily to attract new customers with ease.

Roll these out phase by phase. You want to have one, two, and three, ready to go for your systems. 

Then your blog and start to integrate Pinterest. 

Remember, you don't have to do it all at once. Think about it in phases as it will make it much more manageable.

And, again, if you want support with every single part of this process plus more, because there's a lot when it comes to marketing your business, we believe in simplifying it inside of the Academy. 

Head to brandmerry.com/academy to get signed up before doors close.

P.S. Have you tuned in to The Beautiful Climb podcast? I release new episodes every other Friday on topics around productivity, motherhood, habits, goals and going after the life of your dreams! Check out past episodes and be sure to subscribe at thebeautifulclimb.com

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MEET MICHELLE

Hey there, I'm Michelle Knight and I an online branding and marketing consultant for female entrepreneurs.

I believe in the power of storytelling and using that superpower to brand and market yourself online...oh and to set yourself free.

I'm obsessed with living a life of freedom, so much so, that my family and I now travel full-time while running my business from the road.

This blog serves as a home base for all things branding, marketing, content creation and more.