What if you could play to your STRENGTHS in marketing, instead of thinking you have to overcome your weaknesses?

Marketing is a lot of energy; creating content takes a lot of time.

Let's do them BETTER, so we don't have to do MORE.

Better marketing. Not more.

HOW's that sound?

Today marketing expert Claudia Schalkx & I discuss this idea of streamlining your marketing efforts, strategy, & tactics by focusing on your STRENGTHS.

What can you embrace?
What can you let go of?

Let's talk about it! 

Watch The Full Interview! 

Jen Liddy 

Have you ever wondered what it means to have a marketing strategy? You might be thinking about strategy incorrectly. You might be thinking too broad, you might be thinking too narrow, and you might not even have a marketing strategy because it might freak you out to think about having a marketing strategy. 

You might not have a marketing strategy because you don't see yourself as a marketer; you're an expert in some other field. But if you are a personal brand, a solopreneur, trying to get into the digital space, you have to market yourself. 

So I have Claudia Schalkx here, my favorite marketing expert, and we are going to talk about strategy.

Claudia Schalkx

Lovely topic, Jen, you're so good at choosing.

Jen Liddy 

Let's just talk about some mistakes or misperceptions that people have about this idea of a marketing strategy. What are some of the big problems that you see in this realm?

Claudia Schalkx

What I see is people confuse marketing strategy with a marketing plan. Marketing strategy with a digital marketing strategy, so those are the things that end. They don't see that communion between the business goals and their marketing, so those are the biggest.

Jen Liddy  

Okay. I just wanna make sure I get this, they confuse marketing strategy with a marketing strategy with digital marketing strategy, and then I missed the third one.

Claudia Schalkx

They don't connect their marketing strategy with their business goals.

Jen Liddy 

Right! Like, why are we doing this in the first place? First, let's start there and reverse engineer back?

Claudia Schalkx

You've heard me many times saying that marketing is the relationship with your customer. A marketing strategy is how you will make that relationship go from zero to profitable, and the customer stands central in your business. Your marketing strategy has to take into account your business goals, so if your business goals are like, increase revenue by 20%. Your marketing strategy has to help you get to that revenue - your marketing strategy might increase our leads by 50%.

If your conversions are not good, you need to see why you don't have convergence instead of increasing the number of leads, but that is a topic for a different day. 

Jen Liddy

It is, but I want to just put a pin in this because if you're listening to this, and your brain is already going, "I don't even know what my conversions are!" then stop here, and go find out what your conversions are because then you probably have to work on your sales calls.

And that's a different conversation, but I just want to say to everybody listening, when they're listening to us, and they're lost on something, it just means you stop right there and fix that before you fix the next thing.

Claudia Schalkx

Yes, only not in this case! Continue listening to what marketing strategy to see what the role of conversion is in your marketing. But moving on, you have your business goals, and you need a marketing strategy to reach those business goals. 

Say you want more revenue - that's because that's why we have a business besides the fact that we want to do what we like. Your marketing strategy has to consider how you will achieve that additional money you want to bring in. Is it leads? Is it more clients? Is it increasing the price? Wherever you work for you because one of the steps in your marketing strategy is to see what is working well and what is not working well in your business. 

What is working well, you do more of what is not working, you review, and you either get out of your process or improve. The conversion falls precisely under that category, so when that marketing and your business goals go hand in hand, your marketing becomes much easier because the end of your process is the extra revenue or whatever you want to achieve with your business, then you back engineer.

Jen Liddy

Question: Can you give us some examples of goals that somebody would have other than increased revenue? Like what are some other goals that your clients work on?

Claudia Schalkx

Your business goals are to become an authority in a given field. Let's say neuroplasticity or something very competitive, so your marketing strategy will be strongly based on getting your positioning and getting that positioning knowing. That it's not necessarily more money, but that means you have to make an extra effort in getting out there and being seen, so your marketing strategy, in a word, is visibility.

Jen Liddy

When you work with people, I know that the whole foundation that you do with people is to figure out your strengths and weaknesses. We're not going to focus on improving your weaknesses; let's focus on your strengths first. 

What's the next step once they've said this is my goal, and these are my strengths in creating a marketing strategy? 

Claudia Schalkx

Let's say that your marketing strategy is the destination where you want to go, and your marketing plan is the steps you will take to get to the destination. In your marketing plan is where your strengths come in. Let's suppose our marketing strategy is a menu - you have a dinner menu, lunch menu, takeaway menu, right?

Your marketing plan will be delicious that you will be serving. So ideally, you will cook the dishes you are good at, together with the dishes that people want, and there is a combination between what you're good at and what you want.

Because marketing is a long-term game, and your marketing strategy is also a long-term fit. Where your strengths come into play because you have to be consistent and coherent, to be consistent and coherent, you have to play with your strengths. Otherwise, if somebody like many of the discussions you and I have had, if you're not a blogger, and you're not a writer, and we create a marketing plan or strategy that is heavily based on you creating content after the second blog, you will throw the towel in the ring. 

You have to think this is your strategy and when you start to back-engineering it, how are you going to achieve it? That's when you have to think about your strengths. 

Jen Liddy

Okay, so we started by talking about people confusing marketing strategy with a marketing plan. And you gave us that great visual of the menu versus the dishes on the menu. Let's talk about why it's so confusing for people to have to think about marketing strategy. What's the problem with it?

Claudia Schalkx

Because people don't do it - that's the short answer. 

Jen Liddy

Why don't people want to have a marketing strategy - or they don't know how to?

Claudia Schalkx

Marketing strategy requires you to sit down and think about what you want to achieve with your business. We tend to focus more on tactics because that's easier to apply, and that's the reason why so many content and initiatives and steps we take don't pan out the results we want. They are not part of the strategy - they're isolated tactics, so when you have a strategy, for instance, becoming a known name becomes an authority. Then your plan is, "Okay, what am I going to do? I have a PR plan, a media plan, a content plan, and a speaking gig plan."

And when you see the context of everything, all your efforts make sense, but we usually forget. Going back to the menu, it's like you do groceries, so the tactics are everything you bought, and your marketing plan is the brown bag where you're going to put your groceries.

Jen Liddy  

I love this whole metaphor. 

I like this because it talks about not only strengths, which you and I talk about all the time, but it's reverse engineering, which is really what marketing is. And if you don't, if you don't know why you're doing any of it, you wake up in the morning, and you say, "I need to post on LinkedIn," but you don't know why you're posting on LinkedIn. 

That's just a tactic, versus it being part of a bigger strategy, and I think this is why it's so exhausting for people because they're like, I'm doing all the things I'm showing up, and I'm posting, and even if it's not regular, I'm there.

But it's not cohesive, so it doesn't feel good for you, but it also doesn't feel good for your audience.

Claudia Schalkx

You don't build up because your audience can't follow the track of your thoughts, but last time she was talking about this or that, so. And it's not only why you are on LinkedIn; it's what you are posting, whether LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook. 

I guess when you are content with your clients, you see exactly the same thing. If they don't have a content plan - start to put out content that may be very good content. Isolated it's a very good piece of content, but it's not going to pull the car in the long term if it doesn't fall into the puzzle.

Jen Liddy  

Going back to the menu I'm thinking of, do you guys have diners where you have these menus that are like 10 pages long?

Because here we have these diners that are all different like you can get breakfast at night, you can get Italian food, or Greek food - you can get whatever you want. It makes it really hard to make a decision, and it's completely overwhelming. I feel like that's sometimes what we do when we don't have a strategy and we just wake up and we start throwing ingredients at something.

Claudia Schalkx

Exactly. 

How many times have you opened a cabinet in the kitchen, looked at what's in there, and said there's nothing to eat. What you have in the cabinet are ingredients, and if you don't have the plan what you're going to cook, you can stare at the ingredients till Doomsday, and you won't come up with what to do with ingredients. 

I think marketing is exactly the same thing, with the question of what are we going to eat tonight? And then knowing that you open the cabinet and say, "Okay, I can use this in these ingredients."

Jen Liddy  

I have a question to talk about how we can leave this particular thing into the strategy talk. About two and a half years ago, I really wanted to grow my network of people who were interested in talking about business. I wanted to do it locally, this is all before 2020, and so I was very intentional about joining several local groups rather than these, just like giant Facebook groups. 

I wanted to join some local women's business groups, and I wound up getting on committees, becoming very involved, and part of the board. It really did grow my business because it grew my relationships. Now that's not necessarily digital marketing, but it was a very intentional strategy. I had to grow personally and professionally and get my business out there in a different way than I really ever had before. Would you consider that a marketing strategy?

Claudia Schalkx

Yes, but when you say I ended up in committees and all that stuff, I would say you have to clarify why you want to network that way. What are you going to get out of those meetings? Who are you going to connect with? Who are you going to give time to? 

It's like the same thing with social media I'm going to give my time and my attention to.

Jen Liddy  

That's a good point! I really like to grow my business by creating one-to-one relationships and small group relationships. So for me, it was a good use of my time, but if I really wanted to get up on stage and market from the stage and be more of a speaker, I probably should have been focusing that time on getting speaking gigs or getting on other people's podcasts.

Claudia Schalkx

But for instance, going back to the networking example, you may have a goal, and then you end up talking with somebody who doesn't ask you questions, so suddenly interested in telling their story. They only talk about themselves, and there is really no conversation, so what do you do? You stay there till the conversation dies spontaneously - ain't gonna happen, you cut the conversation short.

Jen Liddy  

That's a good point - so then everything is strategic. 

Since we were talking about something that's not digital, let's go back to that original idea of they confused marketing strategy with a digital marketing strategy, so in your mind, what's the difference between the two?

Claudia Schalkx

Well, the marketing strategy is bigger. 

It's an umbrella, and then you have a digital marketing strategy, which is how are you going to achieve your digital marketing goals? What channels are you going to use, and what are your assets? 

Your assets are, for instance, your profile, social media, your images, your internet, everything that is that you have under control those are your assets. For instance, you have old media, which is your website, the social media profiles, your blog, but you can also have third-party media. 

Like people who write for medium or write for blogs for other media, then you have the earned media, which is whenever it comes to you, because of the work you've done, media relations, PR record referrals. Last but not least, you have the paid media, which is advertising, so that requires a different strategy than you would in the offline world. 

It needs to connect with your main strategy because, ideally, your main strategy is connected to your business goals. You start with your bigger marketing strategy, and then you see which part of that needs to be rolled out digitally.

Jen Liddy  

When you think about your own marketing strategy as a whole, what would be your favorite kind of marketing strategy?

Claudia Schalkx

Okay, my marketing strategy is going very nicely to your first example about conversions is, I know I convert when I have one-on-one conversations. 

My marketing strategy is all about generating these one-on-one conversations, so you have these conversations by sharing your knowledge and discussing and rendering it available for people to benefit from. But nonetheless, it's still a way to position ourselves, so if people want to talk with us about this, they know they can reach out to us. 

I have 20-minute marketing calls where I solve a problem you have. My content, not the content I do for my clients, has more holes than a colander, but my strategy is geared to these conversations. In these conversations, I know that I am at my best because I am very intuitive. 

That is one of the other strengths that I put into my tactics, so I have this strategy clause, where I put all my senses into that person's problems and goals to find the best solution for the person, whether it's me or somebody else so nobody leaves a discovery call without a solution.

Jen Liddy  

Yeah, you have like an 80% conversion rate on your discovery calls, right? 90%? Oh, excuse me. 

All of the clarifications you've created today can free people up if they can start thinking about the menu - down to the ingredients down to them with your example of not bringing a bag to put the ingredients in is another great example of how micro we sometimes are focused on our content, or our marketing, the use of our time and energy. 

When we really should be asking, what can our marketing do for us? Are we really focused on going to the grocery store? We should be focusing on the menu, but we're focusing on being at the grocery store and picking up random spices.

Claudia Schalkx

You have to go a level higher; you have to think, for instance, how do you want to feel after you have eaten?

Jen Liddy  

That's an even better question.

That goes back to our conversation last week about your strengths and what marketing makes you feel like shit, and what marketing makes you feel good and energized? 

And where you should be spending more of that time because if you eat from the bakery, you feel like garbage - you feel lethargic, then maybe you shouldn't be at that register.

Claudia Schalkx

Yeah, definitely. But you first have to think, what is that I want to achieve with that delicious meal? Then you can decide what meal you are going to make, go to the recipe, go to the ingredients, and then walk through the store.

Jen Liddy  

Yeah.

I think that until you know, and this is why the plan you and I actually help people create that roadmap for themselves like they once you know. So for me, my roadmap is I take people from content struggling and being invisible to being a content powerhouse - that's where they go, and all along the way. I know what I'm reverse engineering for, and I don't ever feel like I'm at the grocery store, just picking up random spices.

Claudia Schalkx

Today if at some point you find yourself there - go back to your strategy, and you can pick it up from there because life happens. 

Two weeks ago, my hard drive died, and it really got me off track from my personal things, like my meditations, because I was fully focused on getting my laptop up and running again. Things happen, you get derailed, you get off track, you're testing your things, but if you have a strategy, you have a handhold that you can always go back to it.

Jen Liddy  

Yes. 

I would suggest that people get on a call with you - those 20 minute calls that you do. You get really laser-focused; they can identify something and plug the hole. 

I think what's happening for most people when it comes to marketing, especially if they're not marketing experts, if they are an expert in health or nutrition or design or whatever it is, they have to market themselves, but it's their least favorite part, but you really do help make it more palatable and easy.

Claudia Schalkx

When you ask very concrete questions, you can get to the root of the problem very quickly, and that's how these 20 minutes really go.

Jen Liddy  

You also have done it for so long, it's like breathing to you, and you can kind of see what people don't see you. I just want to say one more thing about this, if you are somebody who has invested a lot of time in your marketing, and you've paid for a website, and you've been posting on Instagram, but you're not doing the right things, and it's not working anyway.

Many people are very resistant to going back and doing that rootwork. I think for this to really work for people, they have to be willing to say, whatever I'm doing now is not working, and I'm open to shifting or going back and examining my foundations.

Claudia Schalkx

And you know, if you're doing your foundations right, you just have to do them once and then review them every so often to make sure you don't have holes in your foundation or your buying persona hasn't changed. 

As your business grows and your experience grows, you may decide to do something different, so you're buying persona changes, and you need to go back to work.

Jen Liddy  

Yes. 

Once you do the foundation the next time you go back, it's all easier! You just took a look at my new website, and you were like, I really like it, but it took me like half a day versus the 16 to 20 hours it used to take me to update my website. 

When you have the foundations, and you get the laser focus, and you get really lasered in on what your strategy is and what your messaging is, through these foundations, it's incredibly, much easier.

Claudia Schalkx

If you go through the growing pains once, then it's just a question of plugging back and, you know, redoing it with less pain.

Jen Liddy  

I'm going to just wrap up by saying if you're struggling with a marketing strategy, you don't even have a plan, you're calling it a strategy, you might not have what you need then Claudia is really excellent at helping you with that. 

I can help you with the content stuff after the marketing strategy is in place because it's really not even worth doing the content until you get that marketing done, so I've put her website here, and her 20-minute calls are quite excellent. 

I hope you take advantage of getting in on her knowledge. Anything else, Claudia, this is a great topic.

Claudia Schalkx

That's enough food for thought.

Jen Liddy  

All right, everybody. Thanks for showing up. I'll talk to you next week. Bye!