Strategically Operationalize
Marketing Campaigns

Building a Wellness company as a solo founder

Founder: Meet Talia Witherspoon!

Product: Wellness Platform

One of the challenges Talia faced in running a wellness company was finding the right systems to put in place for developing content, tracking leads, and cultivating existing customers. The wellness sector is a heavy content-driven sector, more than other industries. What Talia needed was a process that enabled her to strategically operationalize campaigns to develop content, track leads, and metrics, including cultivate customers. Talia’s customers move through multiple phases from generating interest, to purchasing 1:1 wellness sessions, so I developed a framework to help with implementing a workable, marketing plan that clearly defined a path of actionable, measurable steps.

Here is the framework used:

The Goal for the framework was to facilitate in attracting customers, retaining existing customers, and driving growth, including revenue. I wanted to ensure with this framework, Talia was able to maximize the customer experience at every stage of the process.

First, I needed to understand who Talia’s target audience is, what services she offers, and how the services help her customers.

Mindset Mastery

Mindset Mastery is about helping clients to control their thoughts, emotions, and responses while recognizing triggers that may impact their quality of life. Talia’s SŌL MOON RISING program, helps clients reduce stress and improve their emotional regulation, including self-control.

Spiritual Practices

Spiritual healing is a practice that helps clients restore, harmonize, and balance their spirit or soul. Talia will build a unique plan for each individual to suit their needs.

Practical Tools

Sessions incorporating healing movements and practice
Helping client identify energies, tips for how people’s bodies respond and flow in certain situations
Advising clients on self-care practices

Retreats

Retreats are a more generalized focused, aimed to help groups with alternative forms of healing therapy that also contribute to becoming more spiritually well-balanced, or able to self-regulate their emotions.

Next, I needed to understand the buyer’s journey to create the framework for developing an adoption strategy. The Buyer’s journey is another way for me to look at Talia’s existing marketing and sales funnels. In this case, the persona starts in the awareness stage where the target audience is searching for information on subjects such as meditation practices, and 1:1 sessions.

The Solution

I was able to help Talia create questions for feedback and use her existing content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. This helps Talia understand the true nature of her client’s problems while helping them unpack deeper issues they are dealing with. Once these issues have been identified, Talia will offer customized tools, best practices, and 1:1 sessions.

Streamlining the Adoption Strategy: Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Consideration & Decision.

Mapping out the customer experience

Once I had a thorough understanding of the customer’s expected results, I mapped out the customer experience, starting from the potential leads to paid customers to clearly define the process. Here is the breakdown of the lifecycle:

Customer acquisition channels

Website
Landing Page
Instagram
Tik Tok
Email Subscriber list
Marketing and Sales
Purchasing Products

Focusing on growth

Instead of producing content on a wide variety of topics, we were able to identify Talia’s top performing content, and hone in on specific themes. With this narrow approach to developing content, Talia can better organize themes, educate and nurture the target audience interested in that specific theme.

Organizing and planning content

One of the hardest parts about creating content is what to write and when to post it. With the buyer personas in place, and the list of questions received from existing clients, subscribers and followers Talia could now organize specific themes. To help keep her organized, I recommended project management tools to keep track of her content. This prevents running into issues such as creating similar pieces of content that was already produced.

Formatting content

Instead of constantly thinking of new ways to format content, we discussed best practices to choose from when creating content. It was important to stick with what was working rather than re-creating the wheel. For Talia, the following options for the type of content created:

Emails
Videos
E-books
Interactive content for social media channels

The format was chosen based on the personas, and what content resonated with audiences the most.

The path to growth

For Talia, the path to growth included, growing two of her top acquisition channels on social media, increasing her subscriber email list, and hosting wellness retreats. With the goals in place, Talia narrowed down her metrics and has a system in place for identifying key results.

Extracting metrics from page visits
Subscribers
Number of articles created for the newsletter.
The number of participants for 21-day manifestation challenges

Solution: Talia will track key results for each piece of content to help her understand which content is performing well based on results.

Documentation for Implementation

Documentation

Documenting the development of marketing campaigns is essential to organization and growth. With a documented process in place, Talia can deploy step-by-step on marketing channels, identify what to track, and when, what content was created, what was deployed, and what were the results.

Measure

Measure how the content and any services provided impacted user experience. Are users now more engaged with the brand after the content was posted or attending any sessions? Example, are audiences engaging with the content? How so? Is there an increase in purchases since the content was deployed?

Automating the process

Automating the content development and marketing campaign process will reduce the amount of time spent on creating and deploying content. Talia is currently a solo founder and needs as much of her time back to focus on what matters the most. Recommending project management tools to help with organization is key to helping Talia to prioritize tasks and manage her day-to-day.

Recommend Automated process sequence:

Thank you for your purchase!
A follow up email listing important information regarding services, this includes an FAQ
Send Survey for feedback a few days after purchase
Follow up by requesting an interview with the customer for additional feedback.
Lastly, assess the feedback and insights.

With my help, Talia was able to incorporate existing and new customers into an onboarding process that welcomes and assists customers with familiarizing themselves with her services. By operationalizing the marketing campaign process, Talia can now create campaigns and messaging that speaks to her ideal target audience, qualify leads, develop valuable content to attract, retain and engage with customers effectively. In utilizing the new documented process, Talia can now track events or metrics to determine when to reach out to customers.

Meet Talia, Founder of Wellness platform Sol Moonrising.

At the core of every startup founder’s dream, is the desire to succeed. While many challenges loom for startups in the early stages, developing an effective marketing strategy with limited resources seems impossible. Until it’s not. Marketing traction starts with a strategy. Here’s how we were able to help Talia find the right systems to put in place for developing content, tracking leads, and cultivating existing customers.

Meet Vanessa!

Company: Your Catalysts Vision

Product: Business Coaching Platform

Building a community-driven platform for solo entrepreneurs

Vanessa Zamy knows the power of “hustle”. From transitioning into tech 4 years ago from a career in education, Vanessa was eager to find purpose outside of work, without having to quit her job full time. Vanessa quickly realized how challenging it was to balance a job she loved in tech, to finding a side hustle that fit her lifestyle and financial goals.

That’s when she decided to launch, Your Vision’s Catalyst . A purpose-driven company offering educational workshops and coaching services for its built-in community members. The community consists of a solo entrepreneur network, including employees who work a 9-5 pursuing their entrepreneurial aspirations and side projects.

The Goal

Vanessa envisioned coaching members, by offering a program that facilitates in developing processes that reduced stressed, increased productivity while assisting solo entrepreneurs to grow their businesses.

The problem

How do you build services around the unique needs of “side hustlers” while adding a value to the solo entrepreneur community?

The solution

"Building from the ground up", one member at a time!

The roadmap:

Our first step was to help Vanessa actualize her vision of building a platform for a niche target audience, and a business model that made sense for her goals.

Next, we helped Vanessa to define customer personas.

Creating customer personas enabled Vanessa to build the identities of people who fit the profile of an individual running a side business. We've all heard countless stories about how working more than one job can cause burnout and stress, which may affect productivity in one’s day job. Others find themselves procrastinating on getting started with their side business resulting in no progress. This exercise helped Vanessa develop a clear understanding of who her customer is, to better connect with them, while building products and offering services that best fits their needs.

Customer Acquisition: A simple strategy for acquiring customers.

Running a side business on a tight budget means being resourceful. Instead of spending money on building an app to connect with members, Vanessa opted for using Facebook to find customers. She launched a private Facebook group that reached over 100 members in less than 3 weeks with almost 1,100+ members and growing to date.

Here’s how we were able to create value for members to connect and engage with the brand:

The object here was to find a way to create content that educates entrepreneurs on how Your Vision’s Catalyst services can add value in their day to day lives.

Developing business programming for entrepreneurs

Vanessa decided to launch a business curriculum for members. We designed the curriculum for Vanessa’s free 8-week program. The program provided people with a variety of tools for starting side projects. Vanessa led the instruction teaching members best practices to improve efficiency and effectiveness in their side businesses. Participants of the program learned how to effectively execute their projects while meeting deadlines which helped them accomplish their goals.

Designing Services for community members

While the narrative around starting a business encourages people to quit their jobs to pursue their entrepreneurial aspirations, Your Vision’s Catalyst motto is the complete opposite. In an effort to connect and engage with the community, we facilitated in developing strategies for busy professionals. The company’s services currently assists members with refining their products/services, ideas for formulating member’s value proposition, and how to attract their first customer.

Defined personas

Identification of personas and their desires for utilizing Your Vision’s Catalyst’s services, helped drive brand messaging and strategy, increase membership in the Facebook private community, including monetization.

Research indicated which personas met the target audience criteria, offer solutions to pain points, and develop services and programs that facilitated in solo-entrepreneurs achieving their goals. Conducting these exercises helped identify several tasks the solo-entrepreneur wanted to accomplish. For instance, learning when and how to collaborate to increase efficiency, including cross-promote services to new audiences.

Final outcomes

Vanessa was able to launch her business idea from conceptualization to MVP.

By using Facebook as a customer acquisition and community space for solo entrepreneurs to convene, Vanessa was able to acquire new enthusiastic individuals to join the group, while converting people to eventually book1:1 sessions or sign up for the business courses. So far this method has resulted in lower customer acquisition costs establishing a growth loop.
As of today, Vanessa has been able to retain members, with the long term goal of increasing retention, improving the lifetime value over time.
What makes the solo entrepreneur community unique, are the members who support one another. By establishing an effective onboarding strategy, Vanessa can better direct members to resources, create high-value products, services and content.

Enhanced member experiences

So far, Vanessa has offered the entrepreneur program 6 times. The entrepreneur boot camp has helped people who were once struggling in their businesses to generate revenue. 1,100+ solo entrepreneurs reached 4-5 figures in their business.

As of today, Vanessa has a scalable business model that provides solo-entrepreneurs the tools they need to grow their businesses without quitting their jobs.

From conceptualization
to MVP

Onboarding New Hires

The keys to building a winning sales team

Defining the process

"It took us a while but I think we found our niche. We have a rhythm going with our sales. We just need to narrow down a repeatable process to help us continue this momentum.” –Co-Founder JG

The Project

We were hired to help a SaaS client build their sales team starting with a sales playbook.

The Problem

The founders launched a SaaS company about a year and half ago. What most Founders struggle with in the early stages of their companies is juggling multiple tasks, including sales. Of course, every company has their own unique challenges however, with SaaS companies the most common issues are:

·Pricing

·Content Marketing

·Education

·Competition

·Acquisition channels

·Churn rate

Finding the right formula that works for you is a challenge in itself, however as things start to fall in place, you’ll start to see the results of your hard work pay off. With the two co-founders, the company was growing pretty quickly, users were signing up at a rapid pace, however both founders decided it was time to hire someone to take over the sales portion to give themselves more time to focus on other tasks. Things were falling through the cracks and both founders wanted to get ahead of things before it was too late.

Developing the playbook

The purpose on an onboarding process is to provide new hires with the right tools, support, and training to fully acclimate into their roles seamlessly. With a sales playbook, the founders can better communicate what they want from their team, analyze performance, set goals, assess the qualities and skills needed for the sales role, how to measure performance and the expectation around productivity.

The framework

The framework to building a successful sales team

A good sales team starts with a sales playbook. The sales playbook contains everything the team needs to successfully close deals. The playbook includes:

·Target prospects

·Buyer personas, their common pain points

·Call scripts

·Email templates

·Discovery questions

·Sample presentations

·Competitor info

Teams use the sales playbooks to understand best practices, strategies, tactics and tools needed to close deals. It is vital to get your sales teams up and running quickly, however this can only be accomplished if you provide them with the necessary tools to be successful.

The playbook

We made it simple and plain

Here’s a breakdown of how we created an easy-to-navigate playbook which included elements that drives adoption while enabling sales to win repeatable business:

Know your customer-Focus on the following three areas:

·Stages in the buyer’s journey

·Buyer personas

·Best around sales opportunities

Buyer Personas

We used this section to illustrate who the clients are. We detailed who the sales rep is selling to, what are their pain points and how the company’s products help customers.

Target Account Profile: The ideal target- for example “North American Pharma companies with at least $150M in revenue”. Job Titles and Roles: Additionally we included the following into this section:

The roles of the decision makers the company sales to the most

The name of the decision makers and the influencers

We detailed Role-based priorities, pain points, solutions defined by the customer. This section listed the needs and challenges from the customer’s point of view, while matching with corresponding solutions or product characteristics that the company offers.

We added a few sample customer profiles in this section here, along with the following

The clients: Property Management Companies

Talking points

Features

Product info

Client needs: an efficient, easily integrated payments system

Company Product and customer solution

The company’s current payment solution product helps track HOA, rent and utility payments

CRM for vendors (landscaping, roofing, independent contractor, garbage removal, pool services) and homeowners, schedule maintenance and upkeep for repairs.

Customers can easily make HOA, rental, utility payments, can track budget, HOA meeting minutes, send out letters to keeps residents updated on changes.

HOA’s or small team property management company’s priorities are:

The client’s priorities are to find a technology enabled product that compliments their existing infrastructure. It's very important that the technology is user friendly, easy to use/navigate for non tech savvy users.

The benefit: for customers to spend less time chasing payments and more time on other important business activities.

Talking points about the software

Billing software

Clients can start billing customers. Customers can build recurring payment plans, add manual payments and automatically send invoices with the selected payment options to clients. The SAAS software is also designed for schools, associations, memberships, agencies, services.

Invoice Monthly

Generate and send automatic invoices to clients by email, text or mail.

Payments

Let clients pay for the invoice in the way they want. Use automatic charging.

Client Portal

Clients can access their data and invoices from their domain.

Workspace builder

You can build different workspaces for different clients in a SAAS model.

Smart Reminders

Send reminders to clients about upcoming payments.

Best Practices

Sales best practices reps should know:

Messaging

Make sure that your messaging is consistent with the company’s value propositions and culture. This includes: Inbound email templates by inquiry type, outbound emails, outbound voicemails, post-meeting templates, nurturing templates, cold call scripts.

Activity Metrics

This section clearly outlines what is expected of the sales team based on the role of each team member. This includes information such as Target number of conversions per day, target number of meetings per week/month, outcome goals, follow-up on leads and opportunities.

Technology (Tools)

Each person on the sales team should have knowledge of how to use the company’s technology. Add procedures for accessing technology, including CRMs. Set clear guidelines for how each team member uses the technology based on their specific roles.

Plays

Plays are typically identified as best practices. They’re designed for role-specific activities, this includes outbound messaging: when emailing a lead how many times does the rep follow up? How many phone calls should be made and what messaging should be used based on the action?

Best Practices

Sales best practices reps should know

Social

Are reps allowed to engage on social media? What are the rules of engagement?

Marketing

Keep the marketing department in the loop. Define a communication strategy for discussing leads with marketing.

Content

What collateral is available and at what stage does the reps use the info?

Pricing Negotiations

Are price negotiations allowed and if so, under what circumstances?

Objections

How do sales reps handle rejection? Do you discuss common objections and how is it documented?

Results

Our SAAS client now have a playbook that is complementary to their existing sales process. The sales playbook can be used to effectively onboard new hires, measure employee performance, including metrics and develop sales strategies.

Let's Work Together

Interested in working with me? Let's work!

Strategically Operationalize Marketing Campaigns

From conceptualization to MVP

Onboarding New Hires

Let's Work Together

Strategically Operationalize
Marketing Campaigns

From conceptualization
to MVP