Full Transcript

Jen: Good morning. You know that I talking about marketing, you know that I talking about content. And I recently met a friend, Claudia Schalkx. She's in the Netherlands, and we are on completely different schedules, but we love to talk about marketing. And so we thought, why not bring our conversations just online so that people who are struggling with some of the same marketing things that our clients struggling with could benefit from our conversation.

So Claudia is a marketing expert, and one of her, I think her superpower is that she can see a problem before it even fully outlined for the person having the problem. She just got almost like this X-ray vision, I think. 

Why not have these conversations transparently so that we can learn more about marketing?

So, Claudia, thank you so much for being here.

Claudia: Thank you for inviting me you mentioned the topic I was thrilled.I was really thrilled. 

Jen: So let's talk about the topic.

When you and I meet entrepreneurs... I work with, mostly solopreneurs. They're usually struggling with something in their business. Something's not working for them, and they usually have a very long explanation for what they think is the problem. And so today I wanted to talk about what are some of the issues that you see them struggling with that are actually they don't know that it's the problem, but you know that it's the problem?

Do you know what I mean? 

Claudia: Yeah. Well, the biggest issue I see is that their marketing foundations aren't solid,. So they either fly or ignore, taking time to really get to know their ideal client or divine persona or avatar, how you want to call it. And that is definitely one of the pillars on which your marketing rests, because if you don't know your clients and I dare to say better than they know themselves, how can you create content that addresses their needs? That calms their fears? That feed their dreams? For one. 

Jen: I'm going to take notes while you talk so that we can get all of your ideas out. But this idea of knowing your audience better than you know yourself. I say the same thing, but why are people so resistant to doing that?

Claudia: Oh, because it's boring work. It's definitely boring work.

And the thing is, there are all these resources that tell you where to find information like data mining or Internet forums or market research or go to Amazon reviews. And you get information. But when you have the information, they don't tell you what to do with that information.

So all of a sudden, you’re drowned in this information and you don't know what to do. So the research, the interviewing, the qualifying information can be very boring. And if you are not clear, what do you want to do with your business or why a buying persona is so important, you definitely don't put the time and effort.

Jen: Yeah. When my clients actually do this work, because I kind of have to convince them that it's important, I actually can't go any further with them until they do this.

So my private clients are kind of stuck with me. They're just going to do it. But my group clients, could skip it if they wanted to., I always say it's like the unsexy part of your business, finding out what they're thinking.

Claudia: Well, have you seen that image of the iceberg where you only see the tip of the iceberg, the sea level, and the huge iceberg? This marketing foundation is exactly the same thing.

It's underneath. Nobody sees it. It's a lot but it's the hard work.

And it's even harder when you're starting your business or when you are pivoting your business to something else. And you're trying to attract clients that you haven't worked with before, because if you have clients, you have to gather the courage to go and interview them. And I recommend that you interview them face to face instead of sending them a survey because when they give you answers, you can dive in and ask for more details.

But if you are starting and you don't have clients, then you're a bit like walking in the dark and you start with it's an ideal client, but you don't know. So it all adds to the uncertainty of your business. And when you're starting, there are so many other things you don't know, and you really just want to start.

You know, many of us, me included, we became entrepreneurs because we wanted to do more of that thing we love. So in my case, for instance, helping entrepreneurs to grow their business with marketing that works for them instead of the other way around, not them working for the marketing. For you it's making content easier so that it can do the heavy lifting for your business and for other people. Well, everybody has a thing.

And then on top of it you throw marketing. And frankly, a few of us have had marketing in a way that we can apply it without having studied or having a coach or it's one of those things like school. You're thrown into life and you don't know anything about taxes. You don't know anything about buying a house.

Jen: Writing a check. 

Claudia: Yeah, and you still have to do it, right?  And marketing is exactly the same thing. So then you grow frustrated and you let it go. So one of the things I do to prevent boredom is that I first help them to understand what is their unique process they bring to market because when they do that, they see that they have a unique process then the buying persona becomes clearer. And now that they have a process working on the buying person, it makes it easier. So that's one of the things I do.

But definitely, it's a step you shouldn't fly over like if it was nothing.

Jen: Can we just break that down for a second?

Claudia: What do you want me to break down?

Jen: So how does your unique process actually help you with this problem we're talking about, about not understanding your audience. 

Claudia: Okay, the thing about the unique process is that it has several elements, but the most important element that it has is the departing point and the endpoint. The departing point is what is the question or what do your clients come to you for? In the words of your clients?

Jen: That's the big one.

Claudia: Because, for instance, among the services I give, I also do branding. Branding can serve for many things. Can serve to grow your business to attract clients. But branding also has the role of helping you decide what are projects you're going to jump in? What are the partnerships you are going to join? What is your mission? When somebody comes to me and they say, “I want more clients”.  That's what they say. They don't say I branding or I need a logo. Or they say, “When I explain what I do people roll their eyes. And my tongue gets tied and whatever.” 

So when you start with the question your clients ask you, you already start to unravel who you're buying persona is, because then you're focusing your solution or your skills and expertise in the function of the problem they have and not a function of a specific solution you have. But the process, you have to date them from A to B…

For instance, you and I the other day about this client of mine who has catering and event service. Right?

So with COVID, she practically lost her business because at least in the Netherlands, we couldn't do any type of gatherings. So she called me in tears and I asked her, “Why is it that your clients hire you to do events?” And then she said, “To grow their business to launch a product.”  

That's a different approach to see her business because the moment she stopped seeing their business as a strict process or as catering and events, and she starts to see her business from the point of view of her clients, she can create endless services to serve it. And for instance, she is a great networker. She can help her clients the network. She can introduce them to people. She can teach them how to network. 

So the biggest thing and this process address many other things as to the “What do you do?” question, “What problems you solve?” etc. But the biggest thing is it forces you to see your clients from the problem they are dealing with and not to see your clients from what skills do you bring to the market to solve the problem.

It's a complete turn to your marketing because it’s endless to the services that you can create. If you see the problem instead of stepping into the market because you have an idea, or you have a skill but you step into the market because you see a that you can solve is a complete turn. Turning what you're going to turn and how you're going to it and turn into the clients you are going to to make a living. 

Jen: How do this practice without talking about it all the time?  

Claudia: That's a good question. First, it’s not a process as such. It’s more the way you do things. Well, yes it’s a process. It’s how you take your clients from A to B. So, I call it The Proprietary Solution. Some other people call it a signature system. Some people call it a framework.

But the thing about this is it's so unique to you. It's your thing. It's the way you do it. It's how you take people from A to B. So what I do is I talk about how you do things. And in this exercise with my clients, I take them through several steps where they realize what they do as a solution. And then they see they don't do events are catering, but they do monitor the stuff.

So for instance, for a long time, I was convinced that I taught marketing foundations. But every year I interview my clients and constant answer was order in the chaos and structure. So, you know, that also says the kind of people that I help, people who need a bit of structure and have this chaos. And because of the chaos, they can’t work.

So that's where you see, “Okay, If what people say I do is give them order and give them structure, that means that I have to add that to my communication. That I to add that to my content. That I to add that eventually to my message.” Do you know? 

Jen: So what I to really bring to the light is that when people don't really know who their audience is and they don't know their audience deeply, and then they're not speaking to the problem, they're more speaking about, “This is what I do. These are my skills. This is my signature system.”

They're not really talking about the problem. What always winds up happening is they say  “I don't have enough business. I'm not getting people. People are not interested.” And it's not that.

It's just that you're focused on the wrong lane of your business.

So you wind up wasting a lot of time and what I find is people wind up trying... They're searching all over the place for a fix when the fix is to go back and find out what your audience is struggling with and the words they use to describe it.

Claudia: Exactly.

And to give you an even more narrowed down idea of this, let's suppose you have a dietician. Right? A nutritionist.  You would think that everybody who wants to lose weight could be her client. But the thing is, the drive to lose weight is not the same for everybody.

So you have to be very careful how you're going to work your message. So you have, for instance, the new mom that has this baby fat, right?

If you ask her “What is your problem?” she will say, “Every time I look at myself in the mirror, I can't recognize my body. When I wear my clothes from before pregnancy, I look like a potato back. My marital life is suffering because I don't have self-confidence.”

You know, has she said in these three things, “I am fat”? No, she's talking about self-confidence. She's talking about not recognizing herself. So if in your message you talk about you're going to lose weight, you're only going to eat carrots. And this is an exaggeration of course, right? 

And five times a week you're going to be in the gym. Your message, even if your method is the best one, isn't going to click with her because you are talking about something that doesn't resonate with her situation. And the same thing with a plainly overweight mom. You know, she might say, “When we go to attraction parks, I don't fit in those seats. So I am the one taking the picture and I am not part of my memories, of my family memories. I want to have the energy to run behind my kid.”

So then again, if you come and say “Yes, you are going to be five times a week in a gym and live on water, celery, and carrots,” that’s not going to match. So you really need to understand what is the driver for your client to look for help because if it’s not urgent enough (and this is the other problem) people will not take action. So one of the things you have to figure out is how urgent this is for your client. Is it urgent today or urgent in a week? Because if it’s over a week it’s not urgent enough.

Jen: I don't know if ever told you the story. I had a friend call me. She had just gotten out of college. She had also, while she was going to college, she had gotten a life training certification and she was about to start her business. And she contacted me.

We did a call and she actually was not a good candidate for coaching because it wasn't an urgent problem for her. She had started her business. She wasn't actually in pain yet. She was almost doing a preventative strike against what she knew or thought was coming. But when I told her the price of private coaching, she was like, “Oh, no, that's not for me” But she had not been kind of ping-ponged around enough in the business world to know that this is a problem right now. And that was an A-HA, for me because I'm like, “Oh, people at the very beginning, I'm not for them. They have to download a thousand freebies that will live on their computer for a hundred years before they’ll come work with me. 

Claudia: I agree.

Jen: Yeah.

Claudia: When I started 10 years ago, I wanted to work with starters because starter entrepreneurs usually commit two big mistakes, which is creating a logo and a website, that's the first step. Which are the worst two steps you can take, right? 

Jen: We’ll talk about that next week. 

Claudia: You can look at your website differently. Many of us think that the moment we have a website and we have a logo we are entrepreneurs. And two things that will change definitely as you grow in your business are your website and your logo. So those two significant investments are not wise to be your first investment. But I realized that people who were in the first year of business hadn't had the chance to understand how good marketing could benefit their business and what's the role of marketing in their business.

So they were kind of uncoachable for me. And I work best with people who have been in the trenches for one to two years that they have tried think that they have got to know themselves better as entrepreneurs because it's also very important and that they start to develop a better look at what their skills are and what they like and they don't like.

So, yes I am in the same camp as you. People who have been in business for some years, and then they can really value what coaching can do for you and see it as an investment and not as an expense.

Jen: This actually brings me back to what we talked about at the beginning, which is have to your audience really, really deeply. So if you understand that your audience and your audience isn't necessarily your immediate client. Like they're on a journey, your audience, it's not going to happen quickly.

And I too many entrepreneurs forget about that. So if you remember that your audience, might be with you for a long time, and they might be learning from you and taking some how-to content from you and trusting you. But until it gets to be an urgent pain, they won't make the leap. I think we need to remember that.

And until we know our audience deeply and the many facets of their journey, we are still going to feel frustrated with content creation and frustrated with marketing because it's like, why isn't this working?

Claudia: Yes, definitely. And you know, the thing about content and knowing your client and the customer journey is that you need to create content for every stage of the customer journey because you don't know which stage your potential client might be in the moment. If you keep your content very basic and you can still help clients that are more advanced, and you keep it out of your library of content, right? You might be missing precisely that moment that you say, that they have been following you until they saw that piece of content that really struck the chord with them.

And then they can say, “I need to talk with Jen”, or “I need to talk with Claudia”, or “I need to talk to come to a conclusion to help.”

Jen: Yeah, you just gave me an idea for another training I'm going to do the membership site because this is so true. What kind of content do you create for somebody who's just found you and I at the beginning of their journey, and their pain isn't heightened enough. And what do you do all along the way?

Oh, that's going to be fun to create.

Claudia: You can add to that search intent.

Jen: What is it?

Claudia: Search intent.

Jen:  I know that my expertise, my special sauce is content creation, which is just a slice of marketing. What is your expertise? So how do you fit into the whole marketing problem that people have to answer that question?

Claudia: To answer that question, allow me to take a step back.  And I like to say that, people, become entrepreneurs, and they enter into entrepreneurship through different doors. So there are some people who have been entrepreneurs or are born entrepreneurs, and they start a business in one way. Then you have people who have been in corporate and then they become entrepreneurs or people who had a gig on the side. They like the flavor of it, and they become entrepreneurs.

So what happens is along the way, you have some gaps. And then you say, “But I've been doing everything the gurus say! You know, I've been posting, I've been this. I’ve been that. And I still don’t have results.” 

What I do is I come in and I what are the gaps in your marketing and I streamline, what's working and what's working good. And what’s not working, we try to see what works best. If it should be there or it should be taken out. 

That's the first thing I do, which is a business review because if you have reached this point, you are doing something right, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. And this is the other thing that I with many products in the market is that they all force you to go to any departure point where they don't take into account what you've been doing so far. So in everything you buy in the market or most of the things you buy in the market, they don't take the time to see what have you been doing so far and what can you do with what you already have?

So many of these products force you to reinvent the wheel or you don't take a look at what you have done and repurpose it, repackage it. And that is what makes so many of these solutions, things that we leave in the digital drawer or we never finish because they are not taking us into account. 

This is where people like you and me come because you and I see the people see the person and see the problem.

It's not only the problem.

We see the person in the problem and we match the solution.

So what I do is I see what you've been doing so far, how we can repurpose it so that you can go to market as fast as possible. And the other thing I do is pull out your unique process, your unique signature solution out of your head and help you to market it and to brand it so that standing out in the market is easy for you. Creating content is easier for you. 

And telling what do you do? 

Jen: That's a hard one for people. You know, I just had a client email me the other day about... she and I working on her process for years. She never thought she had a process and when she did, she said, “I feel like I'm legit now. I feel like I'm not just winging it.”

And why I think that's important when it to marketing is that marketing takes some confidence and courage. And if you feel like subconsciously, “I might attract somebody to me and I don't know if can help that person because I know what my own process is. I don’t know what my four-step process is or whatever.” You're going to unconsciously sabotage yourself.

Claudia: Definitely.

Jen: So I think having a signature system and it doesn’t have to be fancy. The other thing about a system is people feel like they need to have their own signature system that nobody else has ever thought of but like, all we're really doing is taking this piece of this piece.. 

Claudia:  They already have it. The funny thing is they already have it.

It is only it has become so second nature to you that you don't realize that you have a process in place. And what I to add is a signature solution or your signature process or your proprietary process, whatever name you want to give to it, it's not your signature course or your signature, you know? It's the umbrella from where all the other services you create grow from.

So when you understand how is your process, you know, then you can create additional products or services. For instance, one of the things I realized in my process and this is part of my message as well, is you should be doing marketing that suits your style. So if you're an extrovert or an introvert or like me, a one-on-one person, you need to find a marketing strategy that works to your strength because otherwise, marketing will be unsustainable.

And they mentioned recently, marketing is a long-term game. So if you don't have the confidence or if you don't have the patience or whatever, you will flunk it. So it's very important that you create a marketing strategy that is in line, in alignment, with who you are. So if you are not creating a strategy based on written content, it's not going to work for you, because at the third time, you have to write a blog you will hate it and you will drop it and you will stop being consistent and you will stop showing up. 

So I realized I was helping people to find their marketing style and creating strategies in line with the marketing stuff. So I have a quiz that's called “Find Out Your Marketing Style”. And that is something I have in my process, you know, and it's in my process. I take the time to see what is your marketing style. And because I take the time to see I could create a quiz that it's a But I create a quote that is based on your marketing style, et cetera.

So it's very important that you don't think that your course is your signature process because then you can't create anything else.

Jen: That's right. That's right. That's right.

So just kind of like, it's like a 35,000-foot framework, and then everything is built around that including your marketing, but you can't… So we have to back to basics, which is what we started this conversation with. You can't build any of it if you're not sure who's in your audience, what they're thinking, how they're describing their problem, and what solution they are looking for.

Because like your great example with the nutritionist, if your people are not necessarily looking to become a size two or a zero and they don't want the solution of going to the gym five days a week then you're just going to miss each other.

Claudia: Exactly.

Jen: Yeah. So how can people find your marketing quiz? What's the URL for that? And they just go to your home page https://bridge2more.com/homepage/ ?

Claudia: They can go to the home page and the resources, but it's rich to more marketing style quiz.

Jen: Okay. I've got the bridge to more web page, and I'm going to put that up there,

Claudia: You can go to the homepage and there you find it. You get a lot of information before you need to sign up, and if you want more information, you sign up.

Jen: I'm going to find that and put that in there. Also the specific link.

Claudia, thank you for all the insights that you gave us today. And I to continue this conversation because I feel like we need to marketing more transparent for people because it's such a scary thing. I think I you my story of, like, sitting in the car in the parking lot sobbing, thinking, like, “Why do I have to do marketing? I don’t want to be the one to do it!” 

Well, I feel like if I love marketing, anybody could love marketing.

Caludia:  Well, you know, to close it. Well, Marketing is the relationship with your customer. And the moment you start to see that marketing is your relationship with your customer, you will understand that everything you do is in the function of that relationship. It's as simple as that.

So, you know, so many entrepreneurs that say, “I started this because I wanted to do more of what I love and I want to be more with my clients, but I hate marketing!”

Hello.

Jen: It's almost like the first date in a relationship. Like, the marketing is the first date, you know? Or maybe it's not even the first date. Maybe it's the picking up the phone and, like, swiping, right? Like, if you don't even have that, if you're not even on the app, then you're never going to out on a date. 

Claudia: They don't exist.

Definitely start to think if there is a takeaway from this conversation is that marketing is your relationship with your customer. It's what gets you closer to your customer. It's what allows you to sell the services they need. It’s what gives you the podium to talk about what you do and the solutions you do. So stop looking at marketing as a punishment.

Jen: And you and I need to take our advice because my promise to myself was, I need to put out more offers because I make a lot but I never really put out offers. But now I have an offer. Like I have my membership! And it’s a regular off that anyone can join at any time. I need to have your offers.

We created all your content. You just need to put it out in the world. So believe me, people, we're not speaking from the pulpit. We're down in the choir.

Claudia:  I am also full of doubts.

And sometimes I am like, “Who made me do this?” But I think the possibility of helping other people to grow their business is wonderful. And we should everybody who has that possibility has to use the potential.

Jen: Thank you.

Claudia: You’re welcome. 

Jen: Thanks, Claudia. I appreciate your time today. Bye everybody I hoep you enjoyed this conversation. 

Claudia: Thank you, bye!