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Marketing Q & A

I know for a fact you're not already to assemble your plan, but I want to believe that you now know what goes into your plan and we're going to go over that again in the next session, but for almost fifteen minutes, I think I am free for questions. Are there questions way has had a very complex question, which is very specifically I was reluctant and even are actually just saying whether we should go for it but let's, try it, you'll have time, so this has come from yoga flight. I says I have a question regarding my branding because her husband and her you go fight our ultra boehner sort of many diverse interests they were trying to capitalize on. For example, with professional sky divers, we do yoga and partner yoga, which is known as yoga flight do you know that? Okay, very structures in that their writers that photographers therefore time our beers and they're interested in all things social and media and tech so that's the background she's also in a room with their his professional ...

weapon grab designed it so the challenges is it better to labor our interests and professions all under one business name or should they set up many diverse businesses? Difficulty is in captivating the middle one businesses and then for tax purposes do they funnel them under their name rather than one company that's what they do right now so I don't know under their name right now but they're not sure okay, let me answer the easiest clear cut part first if you are going to have multiple businesses, you are wise to gain a get a corporation and have a bunch of dbs even a sole proprietor can have a number of dbs doing business as and they really become business units. So you keep each business unit separate because you do need to know which businesses costing money in which businesses making money therefore which one is cannibalizing but you can have a number of dbs under a single corporation or a single business. The question is, should you? It is very, very difficult use your own experience when somebody comes up to you and starts ruffling through a bunch of business cards to decide which business card to give you how much confidence do you have in their ability to be great at that one thing it is easier no it's harder for you and easier to sell and easier for a customer to understand if you figure out what thread runs through them all we have a friend who's a north a pedic surgeon who decided he want to run for state office. How do you tie those together? What we decided at a time when there's a lot of healing that needs to go on he's a healer so we kind of put through healer and precision you know the precision to enact the healing and whatever um it's important for them it sounds like what's going through what seems to be common in all of theirs is a tremendous interest in motion capturing motion and uh coming up with an outcome that creates a better person and environment or something I don't know they need to come up with something that allows them to offer a number of things a department store you walk into a department store and there are all kinds of departments within that store and yet you went to that store because overall there was a brand image that you believed suited a set of values that you're seeking in some ways they need to think of it as a department store and what is the over arching thing for it? I think about a web site I tell people treat your website home page like a business lobby or a department store lobby where you walk in and there's the thing of where all to go and from there you can direct them to a number of different areas so long as they all make sense but if all of a sudden your department store and you start doing car service well it works for sears well, maybe it didn't I don't know cause but they always had sort of that automotive industrial fix it so they could do the car service in a way that nordstrom couldn't, so you have to make sure that your brand is elastic. Whatever you come up with is elastic enough to make all these things make sense under it, but if you can a boy, I would vote so strongly for one brand that's kind of how amazon diverse fight is that it was very much an online book seller, but they then followed into what meant very natural markets and they've become, in a way a department store online, they say where you can buy anything in the I've got it written in one of these books anything in the world online or something like that, I mean, they always said and their whole thing was a dizzy amazon think about their logo from the beginning amazon and hooks up the aid of the sea with the arrow that they always said kind of emulates jeff bases a smile, but they were always a disease so all of a sudden adding some more stuff between a deep, very elastic so it's worth it to think about what ties it all together, what makes them the credible supplier and and I'm spending time on this because it is so common for small businesses, an independent businesses who don't get great at one thing, they try to get graded a lot of things it has to be something with an overarching theme that people believe your best of that of course is selling is the story of nike this morning that wasjust shoes now it's everything it's got anything to do with athletics is so much so that they actually are more a service provider now isn't at it than it did they in any way but you're right I mean events everything pretty I was just going to say that a lot of creative types we have that problem it's a burden and a blessing that we're so good at so many things and we love to do so many things, but I had that experience where on my business card I had like six different titles and I was always reframing what I was gonna say to every single person and then I realize that certain things were cannibalizing the other ones and really acknowledged like where? What was the business and what was the hobby and as painful as it was, we were even talking about it like some of these things they're like your babies or you like love to do them, but you just like have to let it go to really become a master in a certain area that doesn't mean that you can't keep doing elements of these things it's just might not be your title or might not be on your web site it might not be but it might be something that's interesting enough to someone else that you could sell it you could put the domain name onto a biz myself and you know you could figure out is there a way that you can sell off that component and actually benefit doubly from decided to clean up your offerings so sometimes it's worth it to actually invest a bit more in making it trans something that you could transition and then get rid of it but there's nothing wrong with having multiple products under a single brand and and I'm going to use you again brigitte because she's got ggo guinea and now she's introduced your bodacious well that is an offering under her brand and it maybe someday she decides to flip it and the one is becomes the umbrella for the other but you have to fit things together in a way that you do the hard work of making sense of it so that you can explain it in a sense that's kind of been preoccupying my mind as we've been going through all of this is pretty much what you're saying is well the consistency factor how you have all of these things that you know they mess together some way because if you're one person and you're good at these multiple things there is a through line it's just finding that right through line for what I'm doing that through line and figuring out how can you explain and convince someone of it in twenty words, because you've all met enough people in networking situations where they begin to explain things, you kind of get dizzy and you end up not thinking you're dizzy, you end up thinking they're dizzy and that's, not the way to make friends and influence clients. So maybe you could make friends with people like interesting people, but in terms of getting clients, they need to understand very rapidly what you do best and it's hard to think you do everything best, but what you can do. I talk about somebody in one of the books who owns a clothing store, and they also just door french food. They want to have a blogger on french food, I said, tie it together tight together with so many of our clothes we learn about from french fashion and to support that interests were also into french food, and for those of my customers who also love, you know, the parisian style or whatever, I keep a block, you tie it together for them so that they don't wonder what what is she doing with that? And and all of a sudden it actually supports the brand message of the boutique. But it's your job to lace it all together and if they want to ask more questions later that cz an interesting dilemma that applies to me before questions and I'm going to actually poses to procedures I want to put you on the spot, but I think this might be something experience and then we'd love to get bob was taken and as well but that the young if the answer's no that's fine no, what do you do when your product is a service we've already established is in the same businesses you that depends on your presence it's not easy to sell it online, especially when you travel a lot. So have you account that I mean, how did you just, you know, really keep your business going on it's a product service that needs you in person? Well, I think I started producing videos, so there are a lot of sites online such as yoga vibes dot com where I have literally dozens of videos, so when I can't be there in person, I can always refer my private clients or even my my public students that are come to the group classes to go take my classes online it's also great because when I meet people on social media that I've actually never met in real life and they like the image that I'm poor training of the brand they can go watch my classes there or I've done retreats in bali, indonesia, or a festival in indonesia or around the u s and I'll meet someone once and they'll want to keep taking my classes and you can do it online and it's great, you know, maybe you get a quarter per click, but when five thousand people are watching your videos, that really translates fantastic, I'm sure it's very helpful barbecue ever alone in that I would say it comes back to what I said earlier business model, multiple streams of revenue, even a youtube channel. If you can get enough traffic, you can end up getting ad revenue through something like that, but it is worth to figure out what can you do? How can you deliver your service so that I don't sound too materialistic? Deliver your service first even when you're not there and make money second, when you're not there, so you're not doing it just to make money, you're also doing it to serve better, to serve more, to serve more efficiently and profitably. We had a question come in, and this is in reference to earlier in the segment kayla was asking with respect to frequency is their recommendation for frequency in amount and time before moving on to another tactic if there is no our ally. Yes, there is there's there's, not an exact formula, because it depends on the media you're using. If it's broadcast if it's not, um, immediate response, you're not going to get up like they say with an infomercial, if you don't get us, nobody hears probably doing infomercials, but if you don't get those calls ringing immediately, go back into the drawing room or the the editing room and redo the call to action in other ones you have to set up before you run of communication. Any communication you should know what action you want out of it. You need to know that for two reasons, first reason is so you can create a message that inspires the action you want. We can tell you the number of times we've heard people say I ran an ad, it didn't work, and we say, what can we see the ad? What did you want it to do? Nobody called both the phone number is teeny and there's no reason to call, even call for a free estimate, anything there's? Nothing, no wonder it didn't work. So if you know what you wanted to do, you're more apt to ask for that action number two you know what you're going to measure, and before you run it, you say before we determine maybe you buy a schedule, but every schedule has an opt out even if it costs a little bit of money to opt out, you can always break a schedule you say at this point, if it's not delivering well, we will redo it or we will pull it will go to a different people code their ads, they code their ads so that different departments or whatever so they can see which messages are working do so maybe testing that's a beautiful use of google words, for instance, where you put out different messages and see which ones get the click through understanding there's an error rate because there's a real fat finger problem I'm going on where people touch ads where they don't mean to or competitors touch adds just to cost somebody else money, but but still it's an indication see which ones work back the ones that seem to be working, pull the ones that aren't and know what you're going to measure and know in advance when you're going to say that didn't work and to use that term again failed fast way ask you judge is asking, can you speak to what kind of title you give to yourself when your business owner I thought negative negative things about one calling themselves and owner or ceo and all those things now you were saying this yesterday when you formed your business that you went back and forth over what to call yourself I never had a business um title on my business card ever which confuse people because they didn't know but peter was always dissuade turned out he was the president and I didn't want to be the nice president so eventually we had a board meeting and I became the chairman but I also didn't want to use a chairwoman because it just felt and so I never put ever a title they just knew that I had ideas and I would make their program happen I never call myself a business owner business owner is what's in it for me what's in it for them I call myself a small business advocate find out look at your linked and this gives me a good chance to talk about the linked in profile look at your linked in profile what does it say if it says business owner that really says nothing figure out something that is optimized to their wants fly fishing photographer I don't know what but I mean something that you think resonates with your public and I say something that's transportable particularly if you're currently working a job while you're also trying to start a freelance business or whatever don't say that you are the creative director for this ad agency or whatever because they could fire you could quit and either those make that obsolete instead say what you are figure out your unique differentiating position and make that as you're positioning line, don't think of it as a title think of it is your positioning line, and I think we should all have one versus owner or author or whatever. No, what are you delivering? You can usually tell by somebody's humility except what they call themselves or what's on their cars, and that actually makes you warmer to that person. I've known so many people who are one man organizational system being called ceo think get over yourself really it's not the sort of business you want to deal with that reason we have come to the end of this section, just take off attention there by resorting, touching it, we're going to talk about the nitty gritty and assembling and using your business spending the next section and the I want to say bring questions because this next session is really about planning what goes into your business plan. First of all, it's about completing your business planning, understanding what you need to do just to know that you have done the planning you need to do, and then what you need to do to assemble it into a plan that meets the audience that you're trying to target, I want to hear is many questions as I can, not just about business plans, but about steps along the way we got ninety minutes left is that right? So let's, use them well, I'm really I'm here to answer questions, and I will convey the information I want to convey. But it's, more important to know what you all want to hear. So please. Online around the world in studio b, ready, tow, hit me one more time with questions, way, taking our last fifteen minute break off the day, and indeed, of course, david del sacramento's, saying, thanks, barbara, I'm learning so much with this course. Sally sutherland, or, I guess, is doing some sort of sewing she's, saying, barbara is a great speaker. I'm learning, learning so much as I so away and create, and, yes, I know well, good night, yes, and go, she said. Good night, everyone, I thought the package, so I'm abandoning you.