Make Marketing Suck Less

Have you ever done that marketing exercise where you go to your three best clients and ask them what it is they think you do? And then you've gotten three different answers to that question or you hear things like, “Oh, you're so magical. I couldn't live without you. You know, people just need to experience working with you.”

Now, if you've had that experience and you rely on word of mouth marketing, all of this means that you have clients who love you and are seeing great results from working with you, but they don't have any clue how to refer you to other people. Even if they know you could really, really, really help their friend or colleague, they don't know how to talk about your work in a way that would make that friend or colleague actually respond to check you out and consider working with you.

Now, there's a reason for that, and there is something you can do to make word of mouth marketing wildly effective for you, and that's what we're talking about on this episode of the rebel uprising podcast. 

Most of my clients come to me because they want to free themselves from relying solely on word of mouth marketing. There is something that feels out of control when you need clients and you're not getting any referrals and you really don't have a marketing system or a messaging system set up.

But every once in a while, I do get clients who have very high touch businesses, where they can't serve a ton of clients in a year. So they do a lot of word of mouth marketing. Now, one of these clients, he and I were working on his 3 Word Rebellion and he sent me an email and asked me about the 3 Word Rebellion book. Hey said, “You talk about part of the power of having a great 3 Word Rebellion is that clients can say it back to you.

You mentioned that you love the fact when clients say, ‘Oh, Michelle helped me develop this great 3 Word Rebellion.’ I want my clients to do the same, but my clients don't say my 3 Word Rebellion back to me at all.”

So now mind you, we were still very much in the process of creating his message at this point. We had not rolled it out yet. So I wrote him back and said, do you think my clients talked about a 3 Word Rebellion before I gave them the language for it? One thing marketing does is educate and train people on how to talk about your work.

If you've never used your 3 Word Rebellion or any of your messaging with a client, you can't expect them to say it back to you and you definitely can't expect them to say it to other people, so we have to build awareness of the language of our work before a client can actually begin to use that language. 

He simply wrote me back and said, “Oh, touché Michelle.” Here's the rebel truth: Yes. You have to train your clients about how to talk about the work you do. If you want them to refer you to other people, to recommend you to their organizations they work for. You've got to tell them how to talk about your work. 

Now, I don't want you to think that you have to have a training session with them where you take them through the language of your work. But when clients work with you, they pick up on the language you incorporate, the message you're using, just by going through the process of working with you, just by the experience of working with you.

What I've seen again and again in online businesses and businesses that aren't even online, is that successful businesses really have created a simple, yet specialized language that is unique to their message for the work they do. Then they give this language to their clients and now their clients can easily refer them to other people.

So the bottom line. You have to train your clients how to talk about your business, otherwise, they're going to keep describing you as a magical unicorn that you've just got to experience. You don't want your clients to feel like, oh gosh, she is so amazing and you should totally work, work with her, but I don't know exactly what we do in sessions together or how to describe the work or the results. That's why the training is so important.

One of my own colleagues tells me how wildly referrable my business is because to her, if someone says that they're struggling with their message and  their marketing isn't all that effective, she recommends my book. She's like, “Hey, you should check out the 3 Word Rebellion, because this is the way to distill your core message into three words and then base all of your other messaging around it and that's what you want for your business too.”

You want to make it easy for people to recognize your work, you want your clients to have a very simple template so when they hear an opportunity to refer you, they can say something like, “Oh, you should check out so and so. She's got this great way of working with people and when I worked with her, this is what I've accomplished, or this is what I've seen.” It's a very simple sentence to make yourself referrable.

No more magic. No more she's helped me so much. Specific and actionable language messaging matters, not just in your marketing and sales, but it helps the people who love your work, connect you with other people who need exactly what you do. Referrals are so meaningful. It's the highest compliment a colleague, a client can pay to you.

Now, if you're ready to get help with your messaging to make your business wildly referrable, or if you're like a lot of my clients and you're sick of relying solely on word of mouth marketing and want to take control of your marketing and sales process, I can help give you the language of your business, give you the language that you can use in your marketing, your sales and on social media in the 3 Word Rebellion messaging intensive. This is a high touch,  one-on-one work, where you leave with a brand message guide that has your positioning, your 3 Word Rebellion, your audience deep dive, and the key messages that get people to act.

If that sounds like something you want to make your business more memorable, more referable, then to get more information, you can get drmichellemazur.com/guide and get the service and pricing guide. It talks about the options, obviously the pricing thing, and the next step to booking a conversation with me.

Remember. To be effective with word of mouth marketing. You have to train your clients, give them the language of your work so they can be truly effective in referring you to the people who need you most.