Today’s Quote: Success with digital marketing is the result of sound strategy, not perfectly executed tactics. – Phil Frost
Welcome to another episode of the podcast that teaches you how to be a ridiculously good virtual assistant.
Today we are going to talk about marketing and making a simple plan that works for you. And why that’s probably not what you think it is.
Click the play button above to tune in, or choose your favourite podcast player below:
Connect with Tracey D’Aviero, VA Coach and Trainer
Episode Notes:
First things first, what is marketing?
Marketing is about creating digital communication that helps VA clients get to know you and move towards working with you, with a few steps in between.
Why is marketing so hard?
Because we were never taught how to do it.
And because there are SO many options out there to use as marketing tools, we can get confused and overwhelmed very quickly, trying to be everywhere and do everything.
Just like we tell our VA clients to outsource what they aren’t good at, or don’t know how to do, we have to do the same thing with our marketing. To a point. Basic marketing knowledge is important as a business owner, so if you don’t know what you need to do and why, you need to learn that.
And there are some things you can learn to do for yourself – and some that you may consider outsourcing as well. The thing is, don’t try to become a marketing expert if that’s not the service you offer your clients. The key is to get the marketing done – and to understand why you are doing it, and to be able to measure it.
That’s called planning.
A simple marketing plan can help a ridiculously good VA like you clarify what you are intending to do, how to do it, and whether it is working for you.
The flow goes something like this: marketing goal – strategy – plan – action – analytics – sales conversation – clients.
Marketing doesn’t just mean posting a few social media posts and then getting clients.
There are a lot of components to marketing (if you weren’t sure of this, try googling marketing and seeing ALL the things that make up marketing – enjoy getting confused and overwhelmed!
So we start by setting a marketing goal – but what is our goal?
It depends on what you already have set up.
Here are some examples of marketing goals:
Build awareness – this is where you let people know about you and your business. Awareness is often called brand awareness, but you can also just call it awareness of you and the services you offer your clients.
Generating leads – building your audience is an important marketing goal. That doesn’t always mean list building or creating a freebie right off the bat, but it does mean getting more eyes on your services and your content.
Showcasing expertise – showing your people how great you are to work with is a key to success in marketing. Of course you have to have an audience to show it to, so you see how things fit together. But being able to showcase how you support your clients is essential too.
Increasing engagement – Especially on social media, we don’t want to just be pumping content out – we are looking for engagement with what we put out there – and engagement with US too. When people know about you , the goal is to get them to a sales conversation, and sometimes that can take a while.
Generate revenue – of course the ultimate goal is to get clients, and to make sales – so this is clearly a common goal – but marketing doesn’t start with this.
As you can probably see, all of these goals sort of nest inside one another- so if you don’t have the first ones in place, that’s where you should start.
In order to get clients, they need to know about you, you need to be building your audience, they need to see and understand how you can help them, they need to reach out to you, or react to you, and then you need to invite them to sales conversations and sign them.
Easy huh? LOL
So let’s work with the first goal – to build awareness .. start getting the word out about your business.
First you need to choose your best service. The more focused you can be the better. That means that your content and conversations will be more focused too. You’ll be talking about how you help clients with a specific service, and that is cohesive. And in your networking too (you can be found in searches for your key services in FB groups).
Next you need to choose your best client. When you know your best services, you can figure out who needs them the most. Choosing a target can feel limiting sometimes but it really is a smarter way to find lots of clients who need the same thing. It makes your work easier.
Obviously you also have to know your rates, and how much it will cost your clients to work with you. You should know your services and rates inside and out as you start to market your business.
Only then can you start to plan your content. Planning your content is a very good idea as well – choose 3 or 4 solid topics to create content about, that are directly related to your service offerings. If you have seen my content matrix, you’ll know that I suggest choosing 4 topics, and then also choosing 4 angles to write about too. The matrix gives you 16 topics you can easily write about., which is 4 months of weekly blog posts.
Here is the link to the exercise:
www.YourVAMentor.com/content-matrix-4×4
Remember always to maximize your efforts too but using great seo, researching keywords, using hashtags as necessary, and making the content you are creating work harder for you. And always include a call to action so your audience knows what you want them to do next. I’ll talk more shortly about what to do with a blog post to get more traffic out of it.
The next steps are to promote your content on social media channels, make daily connections and to be active with your networking.
See how many things are involved just in setting a building awareness goal? That’s why marketing is so big – and why we often do it wrong.
It’s simple, but we need all the blocks to fit together to work properly, which is why it’s not easy.
The last piece as with any goal is to track your results so you can make changes to your plan and your actions if they aren’t working properly for you. These are called KPIs, or key performance indicators.
So what are good KPIs for a goal of building awareness?
Traffic – actual numbers of who is seeing what – that can be google analytics, insights on facebook or other social media platforms.
Referrals – these can include direct referrals, but also tags and mentions, and shares on social.
Connections – how many people are joining your communities, or connecting with you?
Follow up conversations – tracking every actual conversation that starts can help you remember to ‘go back’ and check in on people periodically to build relationships (do this in a google sheet, don’t rely on messenger or FB groups to find this info)
Comments and interactions – similar to referrals, and follow up – you want to keep an eye on these as well, and always respond
Search results – when you are coming up higher in google, or when you are coming up in group searches, that’s because you are putting out quality stuff
Even though this sounds like a lot, it’s not really – and it’s a little system that you can put into place easily for your business. So that when you start to move to the next step, you already have this stuff in place.
It’s a regular, repeatable, simple process that helps you achieve your goal to get your business in front of your potential clients.
Automate what you can – systematize what you can’t. And then you don’t have to spend much time at all each week implementing this.
So here’s what it could look like:
so … weekly short blog post (use the content matrix for blog topic ideas)
… repurposing blog content into smaller pieces, using the same topic and content
… templates for images – use Canva so making images doesn’t take any time at all – suggest 4 templates as well
… small buckets of time for connections – this you can’t really automate or schedule, so you need to find time to do it, but not a lot of time – 20 minutes a day is more than enough most of the time
… tracking sheet for interactions – I can’t overstate this, to keep track of who you are connecting with and interacting with in a google sheet. It makes follow up much easier to keep track of.
Make things as simple as you can and hold yourself accountable to do those small daily action every day – only 20 minutes means you can always fit it in.
And it helps you become a ridiculously good virtual assistant (and hint, hint, you can help your clients to the same process!)
Don’t try to do everything at once.
By breaking things down and focusing on one goal at a time, you will work more focused and you’ll get better results. The daily actions I will keep talking about because it works. Tracking your results is essential so you know what’s working, so you can do more of that. And you can change course as necessary if things are not working.
This will work for you – I promise!
And then the next things you need to do is to build your audience.
This is about creating a facebook group of your own, or finding other networking connections. It’s about getting in front of as many of your target clients as you can, now that you have great content that you know they will love! Lead magnets, building a mailing list – all part of your goal of building your audience.
That’s for another episode though!
Need Some Help?
If you need some help figuring out which marketing goal you need to start working on now, reach out to me at tracey@yourvamentor.com. I’ve helped hundreds of VAs through their challenges and got them on their way to the next thing. I’d love to do the same for you. I do private coaching, and registration for my new mastermind group The Virtual Circle is open now. Maybe one of those is right for you!
That’s all I’ve got for you this week, thanks for tuning in to learn to become a ridiculously good Virtual Assistant.