How to Effectively Promote Your Business | MARKETING TIPS FOR SMALL BUSINESS
Having a brand that you're able to kind of tell a story build a relationship. I think that's better than just keep on trying to sell and ask people for business. A good quote to remember is that people don't buy your goods and services. They buy into the relationship, the story, the emotion and every single little interaction that they have with your business should leave them wanting more. Hey guys it's Linh Podetti here helping you to achieve time freedom, so you have more time for self, family, business and life. Now in this video, you're going to meet Annie Phosavanh who is my marketing manager and also a good friend and travel blogger at Instagram @AnniesBucketList now she works at Outsourcing Angel, my company where we help companies hire virtual assistants, who are not task-based but decision-makers. Now in this particular video, I asked her about what
marketing strategies to focus on or to work on if you're new. If you're a beginner or you may have a limited budget, here as Annie shares her experience as she's worked for many famous and well-known companies like Havaianas, Nude by Nature etc. So listen as she shares all her tips here. Hi everybody today I have my special friend and marketing manager an Outsourcing Angel Name Annie Nguyen to come here to not knowing anymore sorry she's got a Cambodian and I'm not going to attempt to pronounce it yet she'll introduce herself properly and she's here to talk about marketing because she's a brain child behind not just what to do in marketing but how to structure it so it's you're always proactively doing your marketing rather than reactive so welcome Annie hi thanks for having me and how do you pronounce your surname so you know like in Vietnamese we have the soup like Pho and then the number seven, just pho-seven. First of all
Will my husband he had his like email address as William Pho like and the number seven for ages and I didn't know what it was until I realized that's how you pronounce the search there's something about you as well when we're talking about that it's you being able to break down something that's so broad into kind of more structure for me so before you came in i kind of knew everything about marketing but my brain was everywhere i didn't have a plan it was always reactive and then you came in and you sorted out so love to hear your thoughts on when you came in working on me in marketing what did you see you know what was your perspective well you know how i am like even in the house i have to have everything like very um thought out methodical even like you know what food i'm gonna cook during the week i have to write down like a plan and like buy those exact groceries make sure i use up everything so when i first started working at outsourcing angel like we have our huddles where like all the management admin staff we we talk about everything that we're doing during the week and i remember the first time we had that huddle i was like man there are so many ideas so many people are doing so many things at once but because everyone was so busy like working on things they weren't really like working in things they weren't really working on things and they were just stuck doing like whatever tasks that they could pick up to keep themselves busy instead of thinking strategically how does this add to the bottom line and does the marketing also help the sales team and does the marketing also helped like operations vice versa so i felt like everyone had great intentions and great ideas but they're all busy working in their department whereas really everyone should be working together including marketing towards the same strategy so we're telling the same stories and resources are being used in the right way yeah i think my first impression was there's a lot going on everyone's working on something but it's all segregated and we needed to work more harmoniously together to tell a story together because outsourcing angel had a great purpose but whether or not that was being communicated well it needed improvement so that was my first impression yeah you raised a good point because we always had ideas and then we implement everything we try everything whereas you would go how does that fit in with that and why are we doing that when this is already working we should double down on a certain strategy too i i guess can you elaborate on you know because i think most people fall into that trap of like trying different marketing strategies strategy yeah so a good example was like when i first came in and um you were saying you know we're not really doing like um anything on instagram properly we should be on instagram we should be doing this we should be doing that and to start with it was like all right let's set up the instagram properly and then the marketing team were trying to split their time between facebook instagram youtube linkedin and just trying to be the jack of all trades for the master of nothing and then after a few months of running it we realized okay well instagram is great because it gives people an overview of your brand and like when people go to your profile lynn they it's good for them to get a gist of who you are and what you do and you're a real person and that we're active on there just because we exist but our leads were really coming from like linkedin lead generation and you building connections on linkedin we had some people come to our facebook and send facebook messages but really i think people were coming to our facebook to look at our reviews and the type of content we put online to see if they're if they hire a va with us if they could do the same thing so then we started looking at how are people using each of these platforms to connect with us and then we allocated resources accordingly so we spent more time on linkedin lead generation because that's when we were getting really good leads and building great relationships and it actually resulted into clients the youtube we were actually getting leads from that so the marketing team would start working closer with sales and when a lead would come through we'd ask how did you find us and we found that people were coming through youtube so we started doing more youtube content and then facebook and instagram content was kind of secondary because the youtube content comes first and we put all the punchy information there and we're telling people in the youtube video make sure you download this building landing pages for it and then we're sharing that on instagram and facebook because they're kind of secondary just to increase our reach but it's not like we need all of our marketing to be focused on facebook instagram youtube and everything with the same importance so yeah it was looking at how our audience interacted with each of the different channels and with the resources we have how do we split that so it's more focused if we had all the money in the world of course i'd have like 20 people looking after instagram 20 people looking after facebook but it's not like that so you have to really look at things strategically well i'd love to hear about a bit of your background because you used to work for bigger companies how did they do their marketing what can small businesses learn from them yeah so 10 years ago i think it was like more than 10 years ago was when i started working in uh marketing i worked at a marketing agency which is where i met neil in but um back then i was just an account manager so i helped businesses big and small figure out what their marketing strategy was and then hire an seo manager or an adwords manager and then help them with their strategy and then eventually i moved on to work internally so i was the marketing manager for havianas so you know the flip-flops sandals yeah wait if you say thongs and there's like an american person watching this they're going to think something else so you have to save them so i'm marking manager for havianese and then i was also a marketing manager at a cosmetics company a well-known cosmetic company in australia eventually because i wanted to work with a charity and help people i moved over to guide dogs australia and now obviously i work for you but that means that i've had experience working for a cosmetic company in australia a um flip-flops company that's international and then a charity that's like kind of government-owned so it's all very different experiences so working for a bigger company they had a lot of resources but obviously big companies have like a board of directors there's a lot of things that are like red tapes that i couldn't do and get more creative about it but because we had more budget there was um basically two marketing budgets that i could have one was just a branding marketing budget so i could have i had this huge amount of budget just to splash it on like youtube ads and all i cared about was the the reach and the views i didn't care about conversions because that was just the branding bucket and that's the advantage of working for a big company whereas working for a smaller company it's like okay this is our budget and we have to see what is the return on investment for every dollar that we spend yeah so you didn't have that branding marketing budget i think that's the biggest difference so right so would you say as part of social media now like when we're creating content that is in a way branding part where you know because it takes a bit of time to nurture like you know you might bring a whole month worth of content and to get a few leads or something but that's also that's kind of kill two birds one stone right branding and conversion yeah i think the the great thing about outsourcing angel is that we always want to give value so our brand strategy is kind of like give value give value give value and we get business whereas other companies they're just trying to sell sell sell sell ask for your business so having a brand that you're able to kind of tell a story build a relationship i think that's better than just keep on trying to sell and ask people for business but a good quote to remember is that like people don't buy your goods and services they buy into the relationship the story the emotion and every single little interaction that they have with your business should leave them wanting more and like feeling happy and feeling good so even if they like pass through our website and ask a question like a simple question hey just wondering where are your va's from you know like our our sales person should be able to tell them that information but also give them value like um by the way i know you didn't um maybe you didn't see this but i'd love to give you like a free ebook that we just made and let me know if there's anything else you need if it's christmas time we'll be like hey it's been a while like merry christmas want to send you all our love and sometimes you do a little video as well and you're like i heard that you came through perhaps i'll see angel on the ceo i just want to say hi and all of those things kind of tell a story and make people feel like oh if i'm in these guys hands i'm in good hands you know i knew a really good point because people might think marketing is just instagram linkedin social media but marketing is so many touch points within the whole client experience right like you mentioned when they inquire it's like how are you marketing how what does your website look like and what is the message and then once i become a client like even i am part of the marketing where i want send that welcome video and hey how are you going that is still marketing it might not look like in the form of social media but unless you put your mind in that like how do i make the client feel so special in every way that is marketing would you say yeah and the thing that we've done recently at outsourcing angel is like working closely with other departments so part of marketing is like like emails so email automations and in our email automations when somebody downloads an ebook or a lead magnet from us previously it was just a message from outsourcing angel like thank you for downloading this like by the way here's a cool video you want to watch but because we're working the marketing team's working closer to sales by heidi our like salesperson she's like the face of sales right so we've decided you know what it's time to introduce heidi early into that process so even if they just download our ebook the thank you email should be from heidi like hey whoever's downloaded this my name's heidi i'm i'm the outsourcing specialist here just letting you know that i'm here if you need any help and and there's like a personalized little picture of her like pointing to our whiteboard with like tips so marketing isn't just marketing it's also like sales and every interaction that you have you need to kind of list out all of those touch points and see how you can improve them because there's no point spending all your time and effort on making your website your social media look beautiful and attracting them and then they come in and they have a kind of a crappy experience or like not a memorable experience they'd rather go with somebody else who maybe their brand it looks okay but then when they are actually starting to talk to people they they have that like that feeling of i trust these people right away yeah and that's what i'm teaching our students at productizekit right now is that don't worry too much about marketing marketing and trying to get more clients when you first need to work out what are you selling how are you adding value and then test it on clients and then fine tune it so that it's so perfect and so good that when you feel like you're really ready then you are about marketing right because the last thing you want is 100 clients coming in and you can't serve any of them well and then you screw up your whole business right yeah yeah it's like that leaky bucket theory like make sure that your bucket has like everything is sealed and ready otherwise you're going to bring in all these leads it's going to be all this water into the bucket and then if it's a leaky bucket it's going to be put to waste anyway so make sure your bucket is is good um so kind of work from may i think it's maybe like working from the inside out like once they're inside how are they feeling are they being looked after and then start making sure everything from the outside matches um but if you want to start then it's from the inside out cool let's just say if you had to map the inside out what would from the inside step look like in terms of because right now people are like i want to learn more marketing like what what should i learn and there's so much to learn right from linkedin instagram and all that stuff too but i wanted to teach people or help them to prioritize what to get right first so we already mentioned that the kind of fulfilling of the service you know getting the the project right what would you say the next thing is yeah so the marketing doesn't end at just getting people through the door it's what happens when they like after they've come through and how they're being nurtured through it and how is it going to encourage them to like refer their their friends and refer other people so this probably doesn't apply for everyone but you know at outsourcing angel we started our affiliate partner program we're trying to get people really involved with like our i'll try to get our clients more involved by creating like a hub for them with all of our resources there like all of our ebooks all of our downloads and we're always trying to to add value so we're really trying to think like what else what else can we do beyond just giving them what they ask for and i think that's really important to us yeah every every business is is different i can't say like every person should try and start to build a client portal or like a affiliate partnership program or or whatever it is but yeah you kind of have to it's like let's just say we've got the client we serve them well would you say the next step is creating like a lead magnet and opt-in campaign like learn to do lead magnets and create landing pages as the next step and then having that then you would then choose one of the channels because i'm just trying to think imagine you're starting a business from scratch and you're new and you're you don't have all the money in the world you also don't have all the time in the world what would you do in a reverse order to make sure that you just prioritize the right thing hmm that's a hard question i know yeah it's a hard question like uh something that was like a big revelation for us this year as well was um we were looking at what our competitors were doing and we realized like a lot of them were just surface level like trying to say like oh we have the best va's and we we can give you the best price and everyone was trying to cut each other on price and and say that they can offer every va for every single task and we're like our message it's not hugely different but we want to show like our heart and souls so what we did was like highlight more of our vas show that they're real people we interviewed them use that as content put that on our website so that people can scroll through their profile see their experience see their examples of their work so i think just building that portfolio for your business to say look this is like real work that we do and these are the real people who work on on your things and they have families they have a story and they have personality and this is like yeah if you could showcase that i think it's really it's really helpful because um people especially if you're from a service business your clients want to know who's working on their business yeah i think showcasing those things can make you really unique yeah really well because yeah the next step is like now that a lot of the new startups might have worked with a few clients it's now showcasing those examples and testimonials improve your current website and so that when people come in they're not like oh no you don't look credible enough or listen i don't understand what you're doing but you do that as a priority first so that you know even if you're talking to someone and you tell them about it they can check oh i want to buy it or even getting into learning to do instagram and mark and that because to me even that at that stage is when you're ready to scale would you say yeah and if you just want to have instagram and facebook for the sake of having an account and sharing whatever content it's still not going to work for you so if you do want real content then get real content like show the real work that you're doing for clients ask your clients hey can i interview you for like a like a little video and then share that video on on your platforms turn it into a youtube video like what you do like you interview some of our clients as well and you do collaborative videos with them so the last video you did was like how to like get work with the like linkedin virtual assistant and you're talking about linkedin tips with one of our like marketing agency clients so yeah if you can get your clients involved in that that's great otherwise if you can get your staff involved then you can showcase like the heart of your business and that'll make you more memorable but if you can like if you have time on top of that then definitely building those lead magnets so having any free things that you can give out that would add value to people is is good because they're going to use that template that ebook or that worksheet that you put together and they'll remember you for it they might go back to your website for more they might share it to other people it has your branding on it and those things are like evergreen content it's always going to live there so yeah those two things work really well together just having that value adding content that you can give away for free and also having the content that showcases you as a real person real business real people as your staff love that let's end this video with what are the mistakes that you see people do on social media yeah i mean besides the obvious like people not knowing how to optimize their content and use it properly there's also people that just try and overuse everything so i think if you if you exist on a platform just make sure that it's quality over quantity all the time like there's no point sharing one post a day but those posts aren't really value-adding or people aren't going to follow you for it it's better to have like those two or three posts in the week that are actually like making giving people a memorable impression of you so it's always quality over quantity i think in the past as well um we were so focused on pumping out all of these like things to give away for free like oh here's a worksheet here's a template but there were like stock standard things that you get from anywhere and now we know to every time we create something we're like hey this is what we use internally at outsourcing angel and this is a tip that you want to get anywhere else so that people actually relate it to us and it's not just the stock standard thing that they can get from anywhere so yeah quality over quantity that's the main thing a lot of people think it's the other way around and just try and exist on every platform all the time all day but yeah totally like it took me a long time to get that and mistake is people just not getting on to too many platforms at once and not knowing how to use any of them well but i would say if i could do it all again i just do really well on one platform get so used to that that it's like riding a bike you can ride without even thinking about it and then getting on to the next platform that priority yeah if your business is doing well on linkedin don't be sad because you're not getting instagram followers that week you know like think about where the quality actually is for you and where the leads are and those other platforms might be secondary they might help you get your message out there but they might not be your primary so yeah i need to prioritize your platforms thank you so much annie i learned so much and i'm sure whoever's watching this well now if you're watching this and you're curious about how to get mentored with growing your business or improving your marketing then check out productizekit.com and of course if you're a client of outsourcing angel then you get to work with people like annie who will be there to assist you that you have any marketing help but yeah thanks for watching guys thank you well there you go i hope that you've gained a few advice and insights from annie right there now my favorite part is that i wish that i did take annie's advice which is to start slow to do one channel at a time rather than dabbling into so many different channels and they're not doing well in any of them i'd love to hear in the comments below what was your favorite advice from annie now if you want direct help from me for your particular business i would like to invite you to join productizekit my mentoring program which you can see in the description below but otherwise if you love some more content about how to grow your business then there's more videos here for you to watch and then i'll see you soon
2021-05-08 09:40
