Stress Management In Business

Being a business owner or an entrepreneur is one of those things that everyone thinks is super sexy on the outside, but can be one of the most brutal and mentally demanding things you will ever do.

Think about your college days when you stayed up extremely late studying all night to cram for a test you weren't quite sure you were going to pass.

This is the lifestyle of the entrepreneur or business owner. Everyday working to make projections, understand the flow, spot trends and then running out of hours in the day to complete it. Day in and day out.

This often results in a 15 hour workday 6 days a week. People trudge through this every single day until one day they snap and can't take it anymore.

How do you work to manage this stress, take a deep breath and survive the onslaught of endless hours and the seemingly never ending workload?

You learn that the workload is going to be there tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Once you understand that it's not going anywhere, you develop a system to where you have goals set up to attain.

These goals include long term goals and short term goals. Your focus every day is going to be to make it to the short term goals and not think about how far away the long term goals are.

In the past I was in a program where my entire life goal was to just make it to lunch. If I could make it to lunch life was good and I would survive the day.

But if I started thinking about the end 6 months out I would begin to doubt myself due to the overwhelming nature of how far off it really seemed.

Back to surviving the stress of entrepreneurship, you can do this in your business. Make a list of 5-6 tasks that you can complete in an 8 hour day. Complete those taste and organize the next days tasks.

If you can do this and continually work on only that days specific tasks you will move into a mode where you're automated and not thinking about year long goals and how far off it seems and how you're never going to make it.

The next thing that helps to manage stress is to take time off at least once a week and literally do nothing. Maybe it's a Sunday where you sleep in a bit and relax and recharge.

I won't lie and say that this is extremely difficult to get yourself to do, but 100% rewarding if you can force yourself to do it and not work for the day.

Lastly find a hobby outside of what you're working on and spend at least a couple hours a week doing it and EXERCISE! It's funny how quickly we are to skip our fitness, when it can be the one thing that keeps you sane and makes you feel happy after a tough day. This can be playing basketball, martial arts, yoga, painting etc.

The key is, it needs to be outside what you're consumed in and working on so that you can get away from it all and not have to think about how stressed out you are.

This all ties into being organized in your life and with that I mean you need to schedule these things into your day and force yourself to follow that schedule. This way your work and stress relief activities are all scheduled in and you work into a system of following that schedule.

Scheduling also allows you to have an end to your day when you complete your final task of the day.

Being an entrepreneur is an extremely stressful yet rewarding career field and understanding stress management and working to become organized are the keys to being able to navigate it successfully and not going to crazy while doing it!

Remember, never let the bigger picture overwhelm you. always be aware that what your long term goals are, but understand you need to focus on the short term to get there and not go crazy and become overwhelmed.

Building Brand Awareness Through Workshops

Getting people to come into your facility is one of the most difficult things for most business and gym owners to do. Creating a strategy and understanding how to do it is even more difficult.

The awareness stage begins with getting people aware that you exist and working to convince them to come into your facility for a low barrier opportunity or you go somewhere that you can partner with another business to attract more people to your brand.

To do this you want to offer simple workshops that shouldn't take more than an hour to do. The price of entry to these workshops is an email address so you can send them email follow ups after and invite them to future seminars.

Now it's important to point out that the goal of these seminars is to move people into your monthly memberships not to try to market workshops as an additional revenue stream.

As you gain a larger email list you can potentially do workshops that you charge for, but for this blog we are focusing on building awareness around your brand through workshops.

These workshops don't need to be extremely in depth, but they should tackle common pain points people give you. Some examples of these workshops include:

• Shoulder Pain Relief
• Low back pain relief
• Meal planning
• Everyday nutrition
• Simple stretches for pain relief

The point behind the topics I listed is that they are there to showcase your expertise and to showcase the fact that you work with everyday people who have real life pains. Not to mention that it builds a relationship with people who are not connected to your brand.

I would set up a monthly or bi monthly workshop series, create Facebook events for each one, and make them register for it through a CRM or another registration tool. This allows you to collect their email address and contact info.

Once you get this setup you can make a short (1-2min) promo video post to your social media accounts, ask your members to share it and email it to your list. The most important things to be aware of here are that:

1. You HAVE to be consistent with this or it won't work. Posting about the workshop 2x per week and emailing it out twice per week is a good strategy.
2. The emails you collect should be entered into a sequence that nurtures them long term with your newsletter or a specific campaign and about every 3-5 nurturing emails they should get some sort of call to action asking them to come in for a consultation. You're building trust and brand awareness with the workshops, but you won't sell them until you ask.

This is an excellent way to showcase the fact that you work with regular people who have regular pains and to collect their info to get them into your facility as members later on.

This is especially effective if you sell a very high priced fundamentals program as your primary offer. You can choose to charge for this or not, but remember this is to drive people into your core product of fundamentals + memberships and if you do this long enough it gives you a very large list of people to market to in the future.

There's More To Leads Than This

When you hear the word relationship, what do you think of? It's probably not marketing is it?

Well I'm going to try and convince you that marketing is ALL about relationships and how strong you can build them. Those relationships dictate everything about your prospect and what they expect from you.

The way we think of marketing in a general sense is how many leads can it produce and how quickly can it be done. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing if done in the right order, but is a major headache if our audience is not warmed up to is first.

If you want to build up a following of people who trust you, recognize your brand and feel a sense of connection to you. You have to understand how relationships and human dynamics work.

When you meet someone you don't just go right up to them and ask them to marry you. If you did and by some miracle they accepted that relationship would not last long at all.

It takes time to get to know someone, date someone, move in together, and then finally get married and live your lives together. Your chance of getting a yes and the relationship lasting is much higher if you actually know the person.

This is the same way we need to start thinking about marketing systems and campaigns. You have to show your audience who you are, how you can help them and that you are a brand they can let their guard down with and trust.

You do this by producing content that your audience wants to see and that will produce value to them without asking for anything in return. Now in order to effectively nurture that audience you have to keep putting the content in front of them and constantly interact with that audience.

After you've moved them from a cold audience then you can start to enter the next phase, which is potentially asking them to buy your products or come into your facility. A warm audience that trusts you is also much more likely to convert when using different lead generation tools AND they will stick around much longer once they do convert.

The takeaway from this is that we cannot just focus on using lead generation tools as our only way to produce leads for our businesses. A long term marketing strategy that focuses on building a relationship and building awareness around your brand is key to developing a system where you have a consistent and more predictable flow of leads into your business.

This strategy takes consistency and might take 6 months to a 1 year to starting producing results, but it moves you into a long term focus for your business rather than trying to figure out short term strategies all the time.

If you want to win in business and marketing you need to be thinking years ahead of the game and working to understand how you can get yourself there by establishing micro goals along the way. It's even better if you know someone who you can talk with and who can hold you accountable for your goals!

Remember marketing is a long term game. Play it right and the pay off is always worth it. Focus on the short term survival game and you will eventually lose!

Relationships Keep Customers Around

A relationship is something you often think of when you are close to someone or when you've made a connection with a person.

In business the relationship with your customers is what keeps them coming back to you for years to come.

If you are capable of building a strong relationship at every stage of your customers experience that bond will grow until you've developed a sort of cult like following with them.

If you think about companies with raving fans like Apple they have a core group of customers who will use their products no matter what.

They release products and are completely sold out within minutes and by just having one of these products you are a sort of "cool" status symbol.

Now how do we develop the relationship with the consumer to that high of a degree? It starts with being hyper aware of exactly what the customer journey through your funnel looks like.

From that what does the experience look like? Are they complaining or dropping off at any point? Is there anything unique that makes them go "wow" when they get off the phone with you or leave from a consultation?

You can start to understand by putting yourself into the shoes of the consumer. Work through your funnel from your social channels, to your website, email, phone call and if you have one initial consultation.

As you're working through this write everything down. What's boring? Indifferent? Irritating? What does your content say about you? Is everything congruent?

Take each of these things and adjust and modify based on what you see and what feedback says about your brand. The relationship is developed by providing an incredible experience, over delivering on what you offer and then continuing to wow them long term.

For example, in the boutique gym industry, like the CrossFit industry, it's common practice to have someone in for a consultation before they attend classes. Now going from the consultation straight into classes makes it hard to develop that 1-on-1 relationship.

To combat this and separate us from the pack we have a 3 session assessment and a 1-on-1 fitness for life foundations program the client has to complete before they can move into group classes.

This allows us to attach the client with a coach and allows the coach to develop a strong relationship with the client before they enter group classes. Then in group classes they still meet with their coach anywhere from 4 times per year all the way up to 1 time per week.

In terms of client happiness and longevity this is the best thing we've ever done and moves us out of the commodity market and into a market that we own and have created for ourselves. It's not about the class at that point it's about the relationship and level of comfort approaching the coach with anything.

If you are truly interested in developing a relationship with your consumers it takes looking at your entire pipeline and understanding friction points, opportunities to wow the consumer and always being aware of what they say and how they feel.

The more opportunities you have to showcase your unique brand personality the better the relationship will build in the long run.

Gone are the days when companies could just hire automated machines to handle communication and outsource help centers.

Because by outsourcing, though you save money, you can never get them to understand the flow of your brand and where you want it to be. Customers will pay more for an experience or the ability to talk with someone they can relate to.

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL

Keep Your Marketing Consistent

How many times have you had a good experience with a company only to have it ruined by the next encounter?

Recently I had a conversation with a customer service representative with a large corporation. The wait times according to the automated system we're going to be "lengthy" so I was prepared to wait.

Maybe I was lucky or maybe they were trying to get me to use their digital assets to communicate as the cost is far cheaper than a live person. But I was connected with someone within minutes.

I had recently been on their website and made a change to my account, but noticed a small issue that I wanted to talk with someone about.

The representative I talked with was absolutely amazing and I noticed at several points she validated my questions aka what I like to call a "stroke" and then reversed what I asked with a question or what I call "reversing".

She looked into the issue and gave recommendations on what she could do and she also gave me insight into how she uses it, how it has an effect on her life and what she felt about the change I wanted to make.

I really enjoyed this 23 minute conversation, because I felt as though she really cared about my issue, was 100% genuine and wholeheartedly embraced the company's vision.

Getting everyone to embrace the vision of your company is one of the most difficult things a large scale company does. This leads me to the topic of congruency in your marketing.

Congruency is simply making sure that your vision, your employees and the customer experience is always aligned. If that alignment breaks somewhere along the line your customers will have a bad experience, which they will often tell many different people about.

Now where this company lost their congruency is after I got off the call with the representative. I hung up very happy about my experience and even commented that "That was the best customer service call I've ever been on".

This is where the company went from experience based marketing to interruption marketing. Everyone has experienced interruption marketing at some point.

Think back to when you were visiting a website and an annoying pop up literally popped up in the middle of the screen. How did you react? If you're anything like me you went into a frenzy looking for the close button.

Or how do you feel about TV commercials? Chances are you use something like Netflix so you don't have to watch them.

The days of being able to interrupt people to market to them are over. People are just too busy to deal with it in today's landscape.

Now when I hung up with the the customer service representative I was feeling pretty pumped about the experience, but not longer than 15 minutes later I received a call from an unknown number.

This is interruption number 1. Calling from an unknown number is a surefire way to get your marketing efforts ignored.

When I answered, the voice on the other end was a robotic automated answering machine. This immediately moves the experience from being wonderful with the person to being inhuman and hard to connect with.

I hung up the phone and didn't participate in whatever the machine was asking me to do.

Now how could this experience have been made better and more congruent based off my initial experience?

From my perspective, before I hung up with the customer service representative, simply saying something like "she would be very grateful if I participated in a survey for her based on my experience" and asking if it would be okay to transfer me to the survey at the end of our conversation would have worked!

Why? Well, because I was so happy with what happened at that point, I would have participated right then and there!

This is also an example of congruency and sticking with the experience I had initially. Rather than interrupting me later, this would have provided a smooth transition from my good experience to rave about that experience.

Think about this in your customer journey. Are there points to where they may have a bad experience? What are this points and how will you adjust your process to eliminate them? 

Always remember the customer experience and congruency in your brand are major deciding factors for people to continue doing business with you. If you confuse them or change things up they will abandon your brand!

Kindness Priming

Can you remember the last business you walked into and how you felt from it the experience?

Now let's switch gears a bit. What is the one business in town you look forward to going into and never leave without a smile?

Why does that business do such a great job in making you happy? A lot of businesses claim to be focused on making you happy and smile, but are they really working towards that end?

• McDonald's says smiles are free, but I don't feel any different in there or when I leave (I actually haven't visited a McDonald's in years so maybe things have changed)
• Chipotle has a healthy vibe and culture, but I am still left feeling indifferent when I walk in there.
• Starbucks is focused on the customer experience, but I am still left with no real feelings toward the brand when I enter or leave

If there's one thing we always want from our customers and clients it's for them to be happy with us and what we do and the idea of being happy is significantly more difficult than the practice of getting people happy.

If you think about the typical consumers day it probably goes something like this:

wake up tired from lack of sleep, get the kids up for school, but they are being little monsters and don't want to cooperate, maybe eat breakfast if time permits, drop kids off, experience a commute with drivers that make them seriously stressed out, show up late for work, get in trouble, get off work, go to the gym (maybe) and do it all in reverse.

Where's the happy life portion of this stressful day and where do these people get to feel like the day was joyful and fun? More often than not people don't get those feelings on a daily basis and that's why they are so powerful.

This is where your business comes into play and why the micro or boutique gym world that I come from is so incredibly powerful in instilling the community concept in people.

Of course there are ways for you to build what I call kindness priming into your business culture. I wrote about culture in a previous post and it should be 100% instilled into your business in every aspect.

But there is another way we can ensure people walk in and immediately smile. That's the concept of kindness priming. To put it simply, priming is where an exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another stimulus.

So if we focus on kindness priming we can instill a sort of continued positive stimuli on our clients. Meaning that with the initial kindness primed a person is more likely to be more receptive to repeated acts of kindness or being positive toward that client. It will also reduce the effects of negative stimuli and create a sort of resistance to it.

Think about it this way: by showcasing your facilities kindness and excitement that your clients are there the second they walk in the door you are pushing the negative stimulus of the day away and effectively priming them to shed the misery and be happy, which will prime them to continue to be happy at your facility and create the construct that your facility is their happy place.

Now how do you actually do this? It's a lot more simple than it seems and what I found to be effective is to have a unique greeting you give your clients every single time they walk in the door. This greeting should be loosely regulated in that your employees can put their own positive spin on it and the greeting should be used in everything from when a person calls, to when they walk in the door.

We keep it simple and say "Welcome to StoneAgeFuel, where the streets are paved with gold" it doesn't matter if it's their first time or 1000th time in our facility.

They get the greeting the second they walk in, when they enter the gym area and then when they leave everyone uses their name and says "bye, we will miss you!"

No one enters or leaves without an excited greeting and now people feel let down if they don't get the greeting. That's how powerful it has become in helping to push toward that positive construct and shedding the negative emotions of the day.

By priming your clients with kindness the second they walk in your door you are also priming them to be happy with each continued interaction in your facility and less likely to respond to any negative stimuli from their stressful day.

This combined with all the interactions with other clients and your staff and you have a recipe for a solid kindness priming strategy.

Now it's your turn. I want you to create a greeting everyone gets when they walk in and something you say when they leave. Try it out and comment on this post letting me know how it went!

Building the Culture and Experience of your Business

Have you ever walked into a business and immediately noticed that something is different about the business? Maybe they have an interesting name, the way the place is decorated is organized in a different way than your used to, the employee are probably even seemingly playing the part ever so well.

When you're in that situation you remember the experience, the conversations, the decorations and the name of the business. Why? It's because you were immediately immersed into the culture of the company and everyone who represents that culture believed so strongly in it that they portrayed it perfectly during your visit.

Maybe that culture is so strong that you notice it in their social presence.

• Is there a certain conversation style?
• Are they a bit goofy?
• Do they respond on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc and immediately make you lol?
• Is the information they put out organized around all of this?

You're probably wondering how you build this into your business structure so it manifests itself outwardly and without issue from your staff.

The key to building this is to instill it into everything and really develop an understanding of your style. Are you focused on being different, serious, goofy, funny, witty etc?

Whatever your focus is you must instill this into EVERYTHING. If you are a bit goofy and off the wall you probably need a familiar greeting when people walk in your door, call you or send you a message from social.

For example our greeting at StoneAgeFuel is:

"Welcome to StoneAgeFuel, where the streets are paved with gold"

It doesn't matter if the person walking in has been a member for several years or has had zero contact with us. Everyone gets the greeting every time they walk in the door.

Now organizing the aura in your business must reflect your culture. If you are a bit goofy your website content should reflect that and your physical location should have fun colors, but the part most people mess up on is getting their staff on board.

Have you ever walked into a Cold Stone (an ice cream store) and the staff loathes singing when you give them a tip? This is a scenario you must avoid to ensure you don't ruin the experience of people coming into your business, because your employees hate it.

To get your employees on board there are several strategies, but I really like immersing them right from the beginning. When interviewing them ask questions that are based off of your culture and try to get a little bit of wit out of them.

You can ask questions like:

• Describe the color yellow to me
• Teach me something new in 5 min....
• A penguin walks in through the door wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?

The point is not to put them on the spot. The point is to see how onboard they are going to be with using wit and charm in your business and how much they will go out of their way to interact and be fun.

Once you have everything going and everyone on board the next biggest issue it maintaining that culture. It's important that you continue to put it everywhere and make sure nothing gets brushed aside. If it becomes something everyone believes in and WANTS to do. Congrats, you have built a business with culture!

The point of all of this is to continue to provide the customer an experience to remember. With content being everywhere and available to everyone you need to push to give people an experience with your brand that they won't forget. That experience shines through with an amazing company culture and experience strategy in place. 

Now your action items after reading this is to define your culture. What makes you different? What do people say about your business? How do you respond to people in person? On social media? How do your employees interact?

Write all this down and compile it into a culture document that you continue to build by digging deeper and deeper into your company until you're confident that you have something that makes you unique and provide an experience to remember!

ChansLogic Ep013

In this episode we talk about CONTENT! What your content calendar should look like, how to organize it, best practices and how to advertise your content in the most effective way.

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find Chandler on:
Snapchat | cwalkeriii
Facebook | ChandlerSAF
Instagram | @chandler_saf
Twitter | @ChandlerSAF
YouTube | youtube.com/c/chandlerwalkerSAF

Find Steph on:
Snapchat | sbentley02
Facebook | steph.SAF
Instagram | @stephanie_saf

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

Facebook Retargeting

One of the most powerful and cost effective tools we have available to market our businesses is Facebook ads. It is a massive platform with obscene amounts of data compiled about almost anything you are even remotely interested in.

Because of this incredible amount of data Facebook has available we are able to construct highly targeted ads to people who have already expressed an interest in something similar to what you do or fit the profile of a specific buyer persona you have created.

Then there's the Facebook pixel. A little nugget of joy that allows us to track who visits specific pages on our website, what processes they were in when they visited and it allows you to build up a website audience off of that pixel.

When you create an audience from your Facebook pixel based off of traffic to your website it will take the people who visited and compile an audience called website visitors that you can use to run ads to.

Think about it this way: someone visits your website from something you posted on Facebook, looks at the page, doesn't convert and leaves your website. With the website audience created from your Facebook pixel you can retarget the people who visited that page and didn't convert with an ad.

Maybe you say thanks for visiting the site and offer them a free guide, consult etc. The big thing about this is that you are now targeting an audience that is no longer completely cold and by putting your brand in front of them more often you are essentially creating and building a relationship with them to move them from cold to warm to hot. When they're hot that's when you finally go for the ask!

The next idea to look at are look alike audiences. Say you've worked on a website audience, had some success and it doesn't seem to convert anymore or you need a fresh audience that's similar to what you were working with.

The lookalike audience does just that. You will take your website audience and create a lookalike audience in your audiences section of your Facebook as manager. The lookalike audience is exactly what is sounds like. It is a audience with similar characteristics to your website audience based of the profiles of the people in your website audience.

For local and small businesses it's smart to choose the 1% lookalike audience when you are creating it. The key to marketing to a lookalike audience is to not expect them to convert right away.

This is now a cold audience and in order to warm up a cold audience you have to put out excellent content for them to consume. I would spend at least a month putting good content in front of this audience and then go for an ask, which is simply revealing what your product is and asking them to purchase it or book a session with you for a consultation.

You can create these audiences from email lists, video views, content people engaged with on Facebook or even people taking action on an app.

The possibilities to continue to create new audiences and work them from cold to hot are endless and if you show that what you have is worth it by first building trust and a relationship through excellent content then you will garner a following of fans who will use your products and/or services!

Finding Quality Staff

One of the most difficult things to do when running a business is hiring good quality staff members.

Experience always seems to be the most important piece to hiring a good candidate. That experience generally shows in what is put on a resume and how well a formal interview is conducted with the candidate for employment.

But is that what really shows how well qualified a candidate is once we get past the base level of experience or is there another way to see how well someone will work under deadlines and in culture of your company? Can we get past the people who are good interviewers and put them in a position to where you see their true qualities?

The way I look for people who will make great employees is to put them in a bit of an outside the box scenario. This scenario puts them in a situation where there is not necessarily a right or wrong answer, but the need to think critically about the situation and how to approach it.

This completely takes people out of their element and forces them to work to develop an understanding without prior knowledge of what you are asking and with no right or wrong answer you will get an excellent idea as to what their thought process looks like and how quickly they can adapt and react to a situation.

The most important skill for me when I look for someone to hire is the ability to think critically and someone who is always willing to put in the work without excuses.

If someone can think and work this way I know that I can depend on them to be able to work through any scenario that comes at them. This is important because in the real word these scenarios are always full of new things that you wouldn't have learned in school.

In the boutique Gym industry looking for people in their last year of a science based or kinesiology program at a university gives you a full year to work with them as an intern and to bring them into your culture and what you do.

At the end of the internship you can make a decision as to whether or not it makes sense to offer them full employment.

When I find someone who fits the mold that I am looking for I bring them in to talk about what they can offer and understand how they think. This starts off with questions asking why they want to work with us.

In these questions the typical "I want to help people" response isn't good enough. That response is followed up with "it's great that you want to help people, but what makes you feel that way?"

The other big question I have for people who want to work in the gym is "are you more interested in working out yourself or helping others get better and improve their lives?".

I ask this because I really want them to understand that we don't want people who want to be competitive fitness people. We want professionals who are devoted to helping their people succeed, which sometimes requires that your own athletics gets put on hold

Once we get through this phase it's time to put them on the spot and see how well they perform in scenarios. One I like to use is a scenario where I complain of knee or shoulder pain and they have to analyze what's going on, why it might be happening and tell me how they would fix it with a 6th grade vocabulary.

I'm not looking for an exact and scientific explanation as to how to fix it. I'm more so looking for how well they can act and get on their feet.

The key to hiring good staff is to find them young and in university where you can take your time to mentor them, force them into a critical thinking mentality and dig deep into their why. Once you've done all of this you will have a very good idea as to whether or not it makes sense to bring this person on your staff.

I feel that the actual person and their critical thinking capabilities always trumps a fancy resume and experience. Though if you find both. You've found a unicorn!

Creating Buyer Personas

Understanding who your customers are is a critical piece of understanding how to market to them effectively and how to build a relationship with them before they walk in your door.

This is also an excellent way to know who you should be marketing to in the first place. If you try to market to everyone you will lose, but if you understand the specific nuances of your market you will win!

If you think about it you can’t sell anything or develop a relationship with someone before you get to know them and if you don’t identify your ideal customers you will not be able to work to generate a relationship and specifically target the people you can ideally work to create a relationship with in the future.

In a nutshell know who your best clients are and work to understand them, who they are and what specific nuances they have. With this you will be able to target your new customer based on the exact characteristics of your current clients or customers. This way you're always looking for exactly who you want to work with!

Now the hardest part is understanding how to develop these personas and what questions you need to ask to ensure you get all the best and most important information.

Outlined below are what I think tend to be the most important questions to ask people. The best way to get these answered is sitting in front of your clients and asking them directly, asking questions based on their responses and generating a conversation around their responses. Of course this is not always possible so email, phone etc are also options.

How do you develop buyer personas?

• 1-on-1 meetings with your ideal clients
• Focus groups composed of your ideal clients
• Listening to what people are saying on social media
• Emailing out questions to your clients

What information should you include?

Who they are?

• Name
• Email
• Income level
• Address
• Phone Number
• Gender
• Married
• Education Level
• Age
• Job
• Interests

What are they all about?

• Goals
• Why they couldn’t achieve those goals
• Where did they look to achieve those goals
• What was the biggest challenge in finding a solution
• Did these feelings have an effect on friends and family?

Why did they choose you?

• How did they feel when searching for a solution
• How did they feel when they found a solution?
• What would have made the process easier?
• Why did you come to us and not a competitor or similar product?

Once you have all of this down organize it into a message that includes the specific pain points they mention in each segment and then organize it into a specific client identity based on the demographics.

Now you can give these identity names like: Shopper Sally or Business Owner Joe and from there you can use these identities to run ads on your digital platforms and specifically target these groups of people. 

From there you can organize those pain points into commonalities from the people who fill out your buyer persona survey and from those commonalities you can create bullet points from the most common ones and use that to creates ads and write content on your website.

One thing I like to do when looking for commonalities is to underline the pain points they identify, write those pain points down on a list and mark how many times those specific pain points are mentioned.

This gives me a great list of items I can use for future marketing, common pain points and it helps when writing copy to help draw people into my funnel!

You Have To Go For The Ask!

Content is king! At least that's what we're told. It's often touted that if we produce a bunch of high quality content and distribute it effectively then we will bring in as many customers as we need, develop a following and produce awareness around our brand.

You work hard producing blog posts, taking pictures, creating entertaining and educational videos and post them to all your social networks. Maybe you even promote that content well across your networks and get it in front of a ton of people. This is often a process you work on for months and months with lots of late nights trying to think up good stuff.

But then the unthinkable happens....you don't get a ton of return or no return at all on what you're producing and you just can't seem to figure out why with all the work you're doing to make your content so great. Our first thought in this scenario is that a content driven strategy just doesn't work for your business or that you have no idea what you're doing and need help.

Now take a step back and think about what you've produced. Out of all the educational, motivational and downright awesome stuff you produce at no point did you actually ask the people following your brand to come in and try your product or service out. People are very process oriented and will do what those that they trust tell them to do or ask them to do.

Working to develop the following and building trust around your brand is one of the steps in the process, but we can't forget that once we build up a solid relationship it's okay to ask people to come in and try out what you have or to buy your products or services.

It doesn't even have to be sales oriented copy in your ask. You can put something like:

We ❤️ you Reno! Let's get together with a free 1-on-1 introductory training session!

This is simple, friendly and continues to build the culture around what you offer. It takes the consumer out of the typical sales transaction and into a warm fuzzy feeling about you and what you offer.

While it's true that content is the most important aspect to building a recognizable brand and developing awareness around that brand.

Now you can't ask every day or it'll get old and you will lose trust with your consumers for being too "salesy". Every business is different and the best way to get an idea of when you should go for the ask is to do it after you put out different pieces of content.

Maybe you ask after three pieces one time, five pieces another time, seven the next and so on. Once you've done this for a bit you can get a feel for how often is too often and what is just right!

I'd say a good average would be after 3-4 pieces of really good content. You'll want to ask the same audience that you gave the great content to!

Remember content is gold, but you have to go in for the ask every so often or you'll never get any business!

Sell Like You Mean It

In the world of business, selling is a necessary component of what we do and while it's true that most people hate selling due to past experience or preconceived notions about it. It doesn't have to be that way!

When most people think of selling they think of that slimy salesman who will do anything to sell their product and doesn't care about the person after the sale is complete.

But what if you could sell in a way that determines whether the product or service is actually a good fit for the consumer, establishes upfront ideals on what the transaction will look like and moves the consumer into a position to where they don't feel like they are being sold.

The key to doing this effectively and ethically is to always stay on the no and have the goal of your sale to be a decision, that being a yes or a no. Establish upfront with the consumer that either way you are 100% comfortable with their decision and your time together is to help them make that decision. This eliminates the "I have to think about it" part of the follow up process.

Your goal in this sales process is to work to develop an understanding of what the customer actually wants and actually needs. It's often much deeper than what they actually tell you their initial reasons are.

To figure out what they actually want. You need to ask questions based off of their responses and questions. For example, if the first question is based on price you want to develop an understanding of what they can actually afford and then produce a range of prices that you offer.

For example:

Q: What do you charge?

A: Great question, price is something that is incredibly important to be aware of. Is price your primary concern?

Q: Yes, my budget is very important

A: I appreciate that and totally understand how important price is in a decision

Q: Do you have a specific budget you're trying to work with?

A: Yes between xxx-xxx

Q: Thank you for sharing that with me. The range of our prices is (higher than what they say). Is that something that you can afford?

Another important aspect to getting people to trust you is to work to understand who they are and what they do by asking a question for every question they ask. The process is called stroke, reverse, nurture.

The stroke is basically a validation that what they asked is legitimate and important to you, The reverse is where you ask a question, and then nurture is where you continue to build and show them that you care with your questions and responses.

For example if you meet someone out and about who asks about what you do:

Q: So what do you do?

A: That's funny, I was just about to ask you the same thing!

A: I work in IT consulting

Q: Wow that sounds like a great job. How do you like it?

A: It's great except that I sit at a desk all day!

Q: I can totally understand that. I actually work with people like you who work in IT consulting and sit at a desk all day. They always seem to have nagging lower back pain, but you don't have any of that do you?

A: Actually I do and it kills me everyday. How do you fix someone like me?

Q: Well the funny thing is I have no idea if I can actually help you out. I'm not really sure, but if you'd be interested I'd like to invite you to my facility where we can talk a bit and see if if makes sense to work together?

A: I would love to come down. Do you have a card so I can call you to make an appointment?

A: Aw man I actually don't have any cards on me or even a pen (this is not typical in a sales transaction and puts your roles into a more balanced format), but I can take your info and put it into my phone to follow up with you?

A: That sounds great!

Remember selling is about developing an understanding with the consumer, working to create a relationship where both sides are respected and appreciated and coming to a decision as to whether your product is actually a good fit for them. Because it is absolutely not a good fit for everyone!

Getting Your Content Out There!

In marketing today it's common to be told you need to utilize an inbound strategy to build up trust with your audience in order to show them that what you offer is a good fit for them.

The inbound strategy focuses on a few key aspects to get information to consumers. One of them being production of content in several different forms. In this blog post we're going to be talking about how you should distribute your content in order to get it in front of as many people as possible.

Your videos should be placed directly on Facebook and YouTube, blog posts should live in your blog and if possible you should work to guest blog for as many people as possible.

Now we have a bunch of content, but we want to get it in front of your network of people. You want to share your videos and blogs posts to each of the networks they are not already on.

Blog posts should be shared to Facebook (via their instant articles format if possible), Instagram by placing the link to the article in your bio, Snapchat by putting a simple URL in the text field and asking people to screenshot it and by emailing it out to your list of people who have opted in to receive information from you.

Videos are going to operate in much the same way. They go directly to Facebook to maximize reach and YouTube to gather a following on that platform. Facebook will give you significantly less reach for sharing a YouTube link to Facebook so this is why we do not just post on YouTube only.

Sharing videos is done similar to what we did for blogs. For Instagram I'll usually alternate sharing my Facebook and YouTube links for videos and the same with Snapchat.

We should also look at a repurposing strategy for content. This is a huge timesaver and a way to maximize the ability to use your content and to put it in front of as many people as possible in the different ways they consume content. Think about the ways people learn, listen and evolve:

• Some people listen
• Some people watch
• Some people read

Our goal is to put out enough content to make sure we capture all these segments and the different ways people learn and consume.

Repurposing is simply using content in different ways. For example if you make a video you turn that video into a blog post, then turn that blog post into a podcast, turn that podcast into several different quotes you can place on pictures.

If you did a weekly video podcast you could essentially take bits and pieces of that podcast and repurpose it to make several different pieces of content that you can use to market your business.

Your goal with all of this is to build up a base of subscribers in all your different platforms to ensure you have a varied base and are not depending on one platform for everything in your marketing efforts.

Ultimately email will be your primary driver for follow ups as you will have the most potential for reach and follow up.

Building a Lead Generation System

**UPDATED 2018**

I'm often working on building systems to generate leads for businesses, which is a time consuming and tedious task.

It's more often about testing multiple variations of the system, the copy, the ad, the means of delivery etc.

In one of the most recent systems I built out it was a matter of getting leads to a high end product ($1000+) and converting those leads to a free consultation to then sell the package.

The first step in creating this is understanding the specific industry you're creating it for. This takes time to research the local area, understand the business and the funnel and interview the best clients in that industry to identify pain points.

Once we've finished this discovery phase it's time to create several variations of the ad copy and pictures to test initially. I prefer to use tools like AdEspresso to test these variations. At this point we understand who we are targeting and where we are targeting specifically.

The next phase is figuring out where to run the ad in a market with a multitude of different options. I most often choose Facebook as it provides the best and most advanced capabilities and data to target and run ads.

The specific demographic I was building this lead generation system for was looking for people ages 35+, who make a higher level income and more often than not are family based and grounded in their careers. Facebook was the best option for this demographic.

Now that I had my variations, my demographics and my targeting in order it was time to test different variations of the ad using different means. I tested the ads using:

• Facebook Lead Ads
• Clicks to website
• Landing Page Views 
• Conversions on website

From this initial testing I found (and this is generally the case) that:

• Facebook lead ads don't work well and are expensive to run. Sometimes people give the wrong email and phone number due to it auto populating in the form. I had to create a check box to have people certify that their info was correct.
• Clicks to website performed very well, was inexpensive and converted the best
• Landing page views outperformed clicks to website and encouraged people to actually look at the landing page
• Conversions were good, but we didn't have the volume for it to work as effectively in this specific industry.

In summary landing page views and clicks to website works very well for the small business that is focused on bringing in leads, but is not bringing in in excess of 100+ leads a day.

If we did have this higher volume (50+ leads a day) I suspect the conversions would have performed significantly better as Facebook would work to target more people like the ones converting.

Next I found that (and this is probably obvious) mobile wins in terms of ad placement.

Audience network gets clicks, but doesn't convert well.

Instagram itself doesn't always doesn't convert (stories are actually starting to yield some impressive results) well just yet in their ads. Surprisingly enough desktop and right column performed reasonably well. I'd still recommend starting with a mobile approach.

Finally after testing 48 different variations of ad copy, pictures, headlines, call to action buttons and demographic targeting in several different testing rounds I found that the most important pieces were the ad copy, the landing page and the headline.

The key pieces to the ad copy and headline were:

• Calling out your intended demographic
• Including key pain points that you found during the discovery phase
• Humor
• The headline must be simple and state what you're doing. It reinforces the ad copy, but does not repeat it.

The key pieces to the landing page were:

• Short sentences with bullet points and bold headings
• Use scarcity to encourage people to take action 
• Pop up forms always outperformed forms on a page
• Exit intent pop ups improved conversions
• Power words like "imagine", "secrets" etc
• Social proof from real people 

The takeaway form this is that if you want to build something that coverts you have to put in a ton of time testing the different aspects and variations and the different nuances of that specific niche.

One thing to note with all of this is that what works in one market may not work in another. This is why it's so incredibly important to test and to initiate a thorough discovery phase prior to starting any campaign.

Creating A Content Calendar

One of the hardest things to do when creating content is to organize what you need to produce and then putting that into a workable calendar. With this post I'm hoping to give you a bit of insight on how you can successfully create your own and as a result get organized and start regularly producing good quality content. 

First off you're probably wondering why content is important and you might even be wondering what content actually consists of.

The reason content is important in our marketing is because we have to establish a certain level of trust with the consumer before they will buy our products. Gone are the days when we could put up an ad with a cheesy sales page and generate leads from cold traffic. In fact it often takes 5-8 exposures to your content before the consumer will convert.

In today's market we have to show that we offer value in our products before the consumer will trust us enough to come in and see us. We develop this trust via content that showcases how our products or services can help people live their lives a little bit better or solve some sort of pain point. 

Content actually consists of pictures, videos and blog posts to name a few. These are all ways to showcase the unique aspects behind your products or services and you should be using a combination of all of them for optimal results. Sometimes you have to put yourself in the consumers shoes and ask yourself. What is the customer looking to fix specifically? What kind of pain are they experiencing? From the answers to these questions you should reverse engineer your content to help solve these pain points.  

 Now in order to build an effective content calendar we need to understand our industry and what makes the most sense to reach the largest amount of people. I recommend creating a content calendar monthly. This way you can evaluate the next months content and be prepared for events or anything special you need to include for the next month. 

Start creating your content calendar by mapping out how many pieces you'd like to produce per week. For starters I would go for 7 posts per week focusing on two videos, two blogs and three pictures per week. These pieces should be focused on providing helpful tips and strategies and showcasing your business in action. It's especially important to showcase your staff and customers as it builds a human side to your brand. Shoot for at least 1000 words on your blogs, keep videos anywhere from 1-3 minutes and always include your logo on pictures.

When you start to build a larger audience and are consistently getting a good amount of exposure to your content pieces it might be a good idea to bump up to 9 posts per week and finally 15 posts per week when you've really grown and are getting a ton of engagement!  

An example of a content calendar would be  

• Monday Motivation  
• Tuesday Tips  
• Wednesday Recipe Day  
• Thursday Insiders showcase  
• Friday Customer Showcase  
• Saturday a compilation of the week  

Once you've nailed down what you're going to post you'll need to pick the specific days to post it on your blog and respective social media networks. To get an idea of when people are online you can check your google analytics and Facebook analytics. It will show you when the largest amount of people are online everyday. Post your content on those times to maximize exposure. 

Finally set a date each month with your staff to go over your new content and to build a calendar for the next month. The more your team is utilized the more good ideas will come about and the more interesting your content will be! 

There is one tool I really like to utilize for putting your content together and placing it into a calendar with a due date to be posted. That tool is an app called Trello and I highly recommend organizing your content calendar with it! 

Now get out there and create some beautiful content and content calendars to wow your future customers and to build the trust and bond that they need to be comfortable with your business!

The Business Of Listening!

How many times have you actively listened to your customers and really tried to understand what they are thinking and why they think that way?

One of the most impactful ways to reach people is to listen to what they are saying and creating a plan of action based around exactly what they want.

When people aren't that interested in what you're selling it's important to figure out why and from that why you develop an understanding of how you can improve to truly "speak" to them to capture their attention.

Marketing in the past was all about just getting your brand in front of people as often as possible in hopes that people will be so inundated with your brand it'll be the one they think of when they need a solution. This was something only very large businesses with extremely high media budgets could do.

Today while brand awareness is still incredibly important and should be a major part of any marketing campaign it is not as difficult or as expensive to get your brand out there and available to the consumer as it once was.

With the advent of social media there are a million ways that are very inexpensive to showcase that you do listen and that you do understand what the consumer wants. This makes it very easy for them to begin to develop a relationship with your brand as they follow the journey your brand takes them on.

The way we begin to understand what they want is to send out surveys via email asking questions about

• Why they came to you
• How they felt beforehand
• What were they looking for
• Where did they look for a solution
• How they feel now
• If they tried a competitor and how your brand makes them feel different
• What would they improve and how would they improve it

It's even better if you can sit down with people and ask them these questions in a 1-on-1 environment. You'll get a MUCH better and much more sincere response this way.

From the answers to these questions you can construct a persona of your ideal buyer type and from that you can reverse engineer your marketing strategy to focus on attracting that ideal buyer and ultimately bring in the EXACT clients you want in your business and who are looking for exactly what you have to offer.

It's much easier to sell your products to the right people who actually need them if you've already set a baseline for who walks in your door before they even step foot in your facility or head over to your website.

They should walk into your business saying that they feel like you were speaking right to them before they even contacted you due to everything they've read and seen from your brand.

By listening we can develop a strategy focused on who IS actually buying our products and WHY they are buying them. It's not a guessing game if you have real actionable information from people who already use your products.

Commoditization vs Personalization

For small businesses there are two simplified pathways to pursue growth and to work to build a long term sustainable business. 

1. Commoditization
2. Personalization  

Lets start by looking at the commodity market for a small business. By focusing on being a commodity the business loses its identity and must be entirely price sensitive based on similar comoditized competitors. The focus is generally a race to the bottom with each competitor focusing on trying to outlast the other competitor. This way the last business left standing effectivly owns the commodity market. 

The problem with this is that small businesses will generally be overrun by much larger businesses and the small businesses with investor backing that can go for years with little to no profit to win a price war. Not to mention the dozens of other competitors in the area. 

The commodity market is a slippery road for the small business and in my opinion the focus must be in identifying and creating a niche to focus on. By effectively creating your own unique brand and your own unique methods and philosophies you carve out your own niche in the market.

This allows you to price in a way that makes sense for long term sustainability and it moves you out of the commodity market and into a personalized market where you focus on your product and what makes it unique. 

The key for a small business to create long term success is by differentiating yourself from the commodity market and always be looking for what's coming next that can pull you into that market and evolving to remove yourself from that scenario. 

Finally be so good at what you do that no one can even come close to your product and the quality and value behind it. 

Facebook is about building trust....not selling

Facebook has a massive user base of many different people from many different cultures and walks of life. People go on Facebook and other social networking sites to be able to unplug, see what there friends are doing, check out the latest news from around the world and to feel a little more connected to society.

Because there's so much attention on Facebook and so many people are on it businesses and marketers see it as an opportunity to sell products and services. If there's that many people in Facebook it must be pretty easy to sell on the platform right?

Turns out people don't want to be sold on social media. They want to get away from the selling, click bait marketing and other common tactics employed by marketers. Think about it; when your scrolling through Facebook and you happen across a blatant ad you scroll right past it. You don't have the time or patience to listen to another blah blah blah sales or landing page about features and benefits of a supposed wonder product.

So what makes you stop and click, share, comment or like something on a social network? For most people it has to be something that sparks emotion; it's a funny video or picture, meme, article that you find interesting or an educational piece that gives you some valuable info that you can use. Once you see enough of this stuff from a page on Facebook you start checking it regularly, like the page and begin to trust them as a resource for content you enjoy.

This is how we build a relationship with people and show them that we care more about them than sales by providing a tremendous amount of value at no cost. Now that we understand how people want to interact on social media and how they consume content on it. Why are traditional marketers still relying on short term tactics for selling with click bait Facebook ads, sending people to a landing page with a countdown timer (that never really hits zero), promising certain features and benefits and then sending a series of spammy emails encouraging people to hurry and buy now?

It's because they don't understand the changing landscape of marketing and haven't taken the time to learn how people want to be interacted with on social media. Plus it's much more difficult to produce content that actually helps people for free and the results take longer to show up in the form of new customers. But when they do you form a powerful relationship with your customers, because you already given them so much. Your brand will become so engrained with them that they will go out of their way to purchase the products and services.

When looking at the ideal strategy to build your brand and get people to purchase your products and services it's all about building that trust and developing a relationship with your customers. You do this by focusing on what they want and how they want it and this is through producing incredibly valuable information through blogs, videos, funny pictures and videos and interacting with them and talking back and forth when they have questions. It all comes down to LISTENING to your customers and reverse engineering your strategy to address their wants and needs!

ChansLogic Ep005

Welcome to the this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We will be making weekly videos answering questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we recapped our time in Salt Lake City for the 2016 USA Weightlifting National Championships and USA Weightlifting Olympic Team Trials, what happens at the gym when we are gone, our coach preparation, branding and of course appearances from Pepe!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

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Facebook | ChandlerSAF
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Twitter | @ChandlerSAF

Subscribe to my channel | youtube.com/c/chandlerwalkerSAF

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases