Make Marketing Suck Less

Hey rebel. Are you over nurturing your audience?

Now over nurturing is the act of continually giving more value to your audience while only on rare occasions asking for the sale. So you are creating amazing podcast episodes or blog posts, you send out these epic value field emails, you teach valuable lessons on the Instagram story, all to help your audience, all to nurture your audience. And while your audience loves them, they are beginning to wonder, what the heck do you do to make money? Because you've only told them once in the past three months. And maybe it's been longer, since you've made the ask and you do this because you don't want to ask too much. You don't want to talk about your work too much because you don't want to be too salesy or too permed self-promotional. 

Now, does this sound familiar to you? 

If it does, you are giving too much value, and you’re over nurturing your audience. And I see this as an epidemic in the online space where we have been taught to always be giving value, but we're not taught actually how to sell and to make the ask.

So today I want to make the case to you using data from my own business, so this is a bit of a behind the curtain episode. But I wanted to show you data about why you should stop over nurturing and make more asks. 

In the online space, there is something that I call the over nurturing binary and it's binary thinking where it's either you're selling something or you're nurturing your audience, you're creating value. And in the past, I've heard things like, you need to have a five to one ratio of, you know, five pieces of nurturing content to everyone ask. And I don't think that that advice is helpful. And I don't think that ratio is actually real because this is a false dichotomy. I want you to know that you can both create value while selling and making the ask at the same time. So here's an example from my own business of how I did this.

So I created an email about what I call the client decision journey, and it's a substantial piece of messaging that I create for my clients. And it's all about the journey of what are the conversations we need to have in order to move people from being unaware of us, unaware of the problem they have, to realizing they have a problem, to wanting to know about how to work with you. And I'll link this email into the show notes because it's publicly available. 

So I walk people through my own client decision journey based on when somebody discovers me through a podcast, what are, you know, like what were the topics that I'm talking about, what could be the calls to action, what are the decisions they're making along the way?

And from that email, I had people who emailed me back and tell me, oh my gosh, this was so incredibly helpful. Like I see what I need to do now. And I also got consultation requests because of that email, because at the end of the email, I made the ask. I said, Hey, if this is something you want for your business, this is exactly what we do in the 3 Word Rebellion Messaging Intensive, go here to book your consultation.

So look what I did there. Like I created something that was highly valuable that gave people ahas and breakthroughs, but also was selling them on working with me. So you can do both because there is a high cost to over nurturing your audience. So let's talk a little bit about that before I go into the numbers of what I discovered in my own business.

So what happens when you don't make an offer? Any time you are not selling or not talking about, because, really selling, generating leads, it's really just about talking about how you work with people. Yes, you aren't going to be able to sell your awesome thing because you're not telling people how you work with them or what it's like to work with you.

And you're not out there marketing with an intent to sell. So yes, your business loses out. It loses out on potential revenue. It loses out on new, amazing clients, new, amazing opportunities to talk about your expertise.

And you're not the only one losing out on your potential clients, people in your audience are also losing out because some of them have problems you could help them with, but they don't know that that's what you do. So they go out and seek solutions and some of those solutions, let's face it, there is a lot of shady crap that happens in online business. Some of those solutions, I know aren't as good as what you do. They don't produce the same kind of results. So if you're not making that offer, if you're not letting people know on a regular basis, how you can work with them, there you're losing out and they're losing out too. If you're stuck in this constant cycle of over nurturing, providing even more value to your audience without ever asking them to work with you, it's time to stop nurturing so much and start asking more. 

Now, a couple of podcasts ago, I talked about companies like Nordstrom, Universal Standard, Old Navy, Brooks, and how they're not very concerned when they send an email about nurturing you, they pop into your inbox to tell you about a sale or they tell you about like...I love universal standards, so they're always popping in my inbox, telling me about like, a cozy new sweater that he need. And sometimes I do end up buying that cozy new sweater. They're not concerned about nurturing me, they're concerned about selling and letting me know what's available to me. And it doesn't really annoy me at all. In fact, I kind of like it when there is a sweater that I might want to buy in my inbox. 

It's time to stop over nurturing and create marketing that actually results in new clients for you, new sales, and more money. And if you still don't believe me, here's the data from my own business. 

So there's a backstory to this. A few weeks ago, I had a bed of an email temper tantrum. I told my sales coach, Heidi Taylor, that I didn't believe that my clients were actually on my email list. And she's like, great, that's something we can actually test and look into. So I made a list of my past 17 clients and whether or not they were on my email list and how long it took from them to buy from. And here's what I found. So first 18% of my clients were not on my email list at all. They read the book, they listened to this podcast, they go ahead and they request a consult and they become clients.

So I was nurturing them and telling them about my work, but they weren't necessarily on my email community. So clearly my temper, my temper tantrum, I'm about nobody's on my email list or my clients, was Incorrect because 82% of the people who worked with me are on my email list. Now, this is where it gets interesting. 59% of the people who work with me had been on my email list for three months or less, 59%. three months or less before deciding to work with me. 18% had been on my list for four months to a year and 5% had been on my email list for more than a year.

So what do all these numbers mean? Well, I want to focus on the 59% that have purchased for me, decided to work with me one-on-one, within three months of joining my email community. This means that I need to be telling people how to work with me sooner when they get on my email list, that's almost 60 freaking percent of my clients happen in the first three months of being on my email community. Now I can spend that time over nurturing them, giving them all this great value, but knowing that they've probably found me from some other source, which I'm going to talk about in a second, they're ready. So I should be telling people sooner how to work with me.

And I want to be clear that when these people arrive on my email list, the 60%, I am not entirely unknown. Most of them have been listening to the podcast for a while. They read the book, they heard me on somebody else's podcast before joining my email. So I was nurturing them in other ways before they decided to sign up. The bottom line is that we should be asking more and nurturing less.In fact, this was the advice I gave a client when we were reviewing her email nurture sequence, which is one of the things I can help you do as a part of the 3 Word Rebellion Messaging Intensive, it's part of the implementation project that I do with clients.

So, in her email nurturing sequence, she has positioned herself as a friend to her audience instead of the expert that she is. And she's not their friend. She is a business owner who has a process that can benefit people.So more expert, less friend, which translates into ask more, nurture less.

Now in the spirit of asking more and nurturing less, I wanted to let you know that I'm raising my prices of the 3 Word Rebellion Messaging Intensive as of January 1st, 2022.

So if it is time for you to ask more, nurture less, if you've been thinking about working with me at the beginning of the new year, there is never been a better time to go ahead and request a consult with me, because you can lock in this year's prices and still work with me anytime in the first quarter of 2021. So if it is time for you to ask more nurture less, or the way to do that is with a solid message, that strategically moves people from being completely unaware of you to becoming clients.

If this sounds interesting, then you can go apply for a consult now at https://drmichellemazur.com/3wr-application, that's https://drmichellemazur.com/3wr-application.

All right. In the meantime, I want to end the pot with a little challenge for you. Go back through your nurture sequence and identify the places where you're coming across as a friend, instead of an expert, and find the places where you could be asking more and nurturing less.

Links

3 Word Rebellion Messaging Intensive

Do you know what to do with all that attention?