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B2B Website Best Practices And Marketing Strategy (Detailed Walkthrough)

May 10, 2020

If you’re a B2B business owner looking for website best practices and overall marketing strategy to get more paying clients, this case study will show you what steps to take!

Welcome to our series called Growing Through It where we makeover a member of our community’s business (and you get to follow along and learn tips and strategies for your own business).

Growing Through It by Wandering Aimfully

We’re going to offer suggestions of how you can take advantage of this collective slow down that we’re all going through and come back even more strategic and even better when this is all over. If you’re a business owner trying to figure out what the heck to work on right now, we want to help you strengthen the foundation of your business with this series.

In this third installment of Growing Through It, you’ll meet Andrew. Andrew left his corporate marketing career to start his own marketing agency (Hotcano šŸŒ‹). Andrew needed help getting clarity on his website copy and figuring out how to position his marketing services to sound less generic to his potential clients.

For some reason, I (Jason) just started yelling HOTCANOOOO every time we worked on Andrew’s case study. Feel free to shout it out loud in your mind too! šŸ˜‚šŸ¤·šŸ»ā€ā™‚ļø

Here’s what we’ll go through specifically in this case study:

Meet Andrew, from Hotcano

šŸŽ¬ Watch us reimagine Andrew’s (HOTCANOOO šŸŒ‹) business using our 5-step checklist

If you’re a video fan, watch the entire case study unfold in the embedded video below. Otherwise, you can keep scrolling and we’ve written everything out for you. šŸ‘šŸ‘

 

 


Introduction: We’re Going To Give B2B Website Best Practices To A Digital Marketer Looking To Get More Clients

Andrew is the owner of Hotcano šŸŒ‹, a digital marketing agency helping small and mid-sized businesses increase their profits and run their businesses more efficiently.

Andrew left the corporate marketing world to start his own version of a marketing agency where he can help local businesses use modern marketing solutions to grow their sales and profitability. Andrew doesn’t just want to get paid to do marketing for these folks, he wants to be seen as a true strategic partner and is willing to put his money where his mouth is.

Andrew’s biggest struggle right now is that his web presence isn’t helping him get leads and new clients. He knows the digital marketing landscape so well and trusts his own expertise, but he’s not sure how to clearly explain that to prospective customers through copy, content, and his service packages.

Whether you run a B2B business (like HOTCANOOO) or not, can you relate to the feeling of KNOWING you do great work but struggling to articulate that through your website and messaging?

We hope the recommendations we make for Andrew throughout this case study are steps that can help YOU more clearly explain what you do and how you do it to the right people.

 

 


Step 1: Establishing The Brand Foundation (Who Why What How)

Establishing The Brand Foundation

When it comes to your brand foundation, your brand isn’t just your logo and your colors. It’s about having clarity on who you help, why you want to help those people, what you do to help them, and how you help them.

Note: We WILL get to some simple branding and design tweaks in Step #5.

One of the first things we did with Andrew’s business šŸŒ‹ was to try to answer these questions and then share the tweaks we’d make to build a more compelling and clear brand foundation.

Answering the 4 Brand Foundation questions: Who? Why? What? How?

1. Who do you help? (Audience)

Front and center on Andrew’s website, he’s speaking directly to his ideal audience (small and mid-sized businesses).

But… one of the challenges when you use a generic customer-bucket like “small and mid-sized businesses” is that it’s hard for potential customers to know if they are the RIGHT small/mid-size biz you help.

We’re sure many of you can relate to Andrew in this regard. He CAN help different types of businesses and he wants to have diversity in his client roster. For Andrew, we decided to have him hone in as much as possible on the problems these folks have and use that as the connective thread, instead of niching down specifically on what type of business they might run.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ If you are just starting out with your business or you really want to serve a wide variety of customers, instead of niching down on the type of customer, try to get more specific on the exact problems they have that you can solve and use that as your common denominator.

We further defined Andrew’s potential clients’ problems by saying: They work hard but donā€™t have the time or bandwidth to invest in marketing strategy even though they want to grow.

Andrew's ideal customer and their problems

2. Why do you help those people? (Mission/Differentiator)

We like to think about the “why” question in two ways:

  1. Why does your business exist? (This is your mission)
  2. Why would someone choose your business over another? (This is your differentiator)

One of the things we noticed right away when chatting with Andrew was how much he cared. His integrity and honesty really shine through. He’s not just trying to sell companies marketing services, he genuinely wants to help them (+1000 brownie points to HOTCANOOO!)

We have to give Andrew credit, he was already clearly displaying his why statement on the homepage of his website.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ If you’re finding it hard to write a mission statement for your company it might be worth asking yourself the honest question, is this really the business I want to be running and the people I want to be serving? #realtalk

The Hotcano mission statement is: Our mission is to disrupt the traditional agency model by bringing accountability and transparency to marketing services and becoming the true partner small businesses are looking for to help grow their businesses.

Why do you help exercise

3. What benefit does your help provide? (Benefit)

Most people get this question wrong by listing out all the features of the service they offer (it’s a common mistake we’ve made in the past too!) The better version of the what question at this point is: What specific outcome does your business provide your customer?

For Andrew, he had a really great section on the homepage of website where he listed out these problem/solution tables:

Hotcano Problem Solutions

This is great, but the focus is much more on Hotcano and less on the client and what outcome Hotcano is going to get them. (more on that in a bit!)

Buried within some paragraph text of the website we finally found the core benefit: Hotcano helps businesses grow their company sales and increase long-term profitability.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ If you’re having trouble writing out a clear benefit statement about your business take a step back and ask yourself what the end result of your work will provide to someone. How does your product or service ultimately make their life better?

What do you do exercise

4. How do you help people? (Offering)

Alright folks, now, you may be thinking, “Andrew’s nailing these foundation questions, does he even need you Zooks??”

You’d be totally right. Andrew has nailed all the foundation questions up until… now.

Sinister Sideshow Bob

One of the biggest areas of improvement we saw for Andrew was in how he was explaining his service offerings. The truth is, it was hard to clearly summarize what Andrew offers because the messaging vacillated between being too broad (marketing plans) and too scattered (marketing, creative, music production, website, analytics, social…)

We’ll go much deeper on how we helped Andrew improve his offering in a second, but to really get crystal clear on this part of his business foundation, we suggested this statement: Hotcano offers custom digital marketing strategy, specifically in the areas of marketing technology, content and creative.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Are you having a hard time writing your Services or Product page? It might be that you don’t have clarity on exactly what you offer (too many things). Give yourself permission to CHOOSE HARD and experiment with different offerings for a month at a time. What resonated most with potential customers (and you)?

How do you help exercise

To recap the Brand Foundation…

šŸ‘„ WHO: Andrew’s audience is small and mid-sized *local* businesses that work hard but donā€™t have the time or bandwidth to invest in marketing strategy.

šŸ§­ WHY: His mission is to promote transparency and accountability within the marketing agency world.

āš”ļø WHAT: His benefit is increased sales and long-term profitability for his clients.

šŸ“ HOW: His offering is a custom digital marketing strategy around a specific business goal (or multiple goals).

These four questions now clearly define Andrew’s business foundation, and they give him clarifying messaging points to move forward with. We can use this information to go through the next four steps on our 5-step checklist!

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Answer the Who, Why, What, and How questions for your own business. Keep these answers in a Google Doc, Note, or PDF you can reference often. You’ll want to have them handy as we move forward in our 5-step process.

 


Step 2: Product or Service Offering

Step 2 Your Offerings

The product or service you sell is your castle. And this castle of yours sits on an island in the middle of the ocean. As much as you may want to tell people your castle exists, your product or service offering must be in tip-top shape before you start leading people to it.

Your castle is your “how” from Step 1. It’s the thing you do that people can pay you for. The door to that castle will most likely be a specific Services page for all you B2B owners reading this (or anyone trying to get clients).

The question to ask yourself with your Services page is:

Does your castle confuse your potential customer and is it unlikely someone will buy right away?

As we dug into Andrew’s castle and tried to figure out exactly what “digital marketing services” meant for Hotcano šŸŒ‹, we stumbled upon this section of his website:

Hotcano service offering circles

Now, design and readability aside, it’s A LOT.

That’s eight different services, all with 3-5 “sub-services” underneath each one.

Like Andrew, we consider ourselves good at a lot of things too. šŸ˜ But… your customers don’t need to know you do ALL. THE. THINGS., especially right out of the gate. If anything, you should tell them you do fewer things because too many options will only cause analysis paralysis for them and narrowing it down actually projects a sense of confidence and expertise.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ When you show a potential customer/client everything you CAN do, you end up coming off like you donā€™t have an expertise in any one thing. Don’t be afraid to be a specialist, you’ll likely find yourself getting way more work than if you’re a generalist (without a clear problem you can solve for someone).

Andrew’s ideal customer, a busy small/mid-sized business owner is likely going to be overwhelmed by all those options. So, we decided to pull them all out of the circles and take a longer look at them. We also asked Andrew out of all the things listed, which services does he actually find that his past clients ask for most?

Hotcano service offerings

Great, that’s actually a bit more visually manageable, but honestly, we didn’t solve the problem of too many options. What we decided would be more helpful would be to organize these different marketing offerings into buckets:

  • TECH
  • CONTENT
  • CREATIVE
  • OTHER

Hotcano service offerings organized

Now, the visualization of this isn’t that much less confusing, but again we’re not really at the design phase yet (ahem, Step #5). The point of this part of the journey we were on with Andrew was to organize his offerings in more concise buckets that his potential customers could identify with.

The three main new marketing buckets (Tech, Content, Creative) are soooo much more understandable for a small biz owner. Each bucket relates to a different area of how they run their business that they never may have thought was called “marketing” before.

Then, we decided to help Andrew identify his KEY service offerings. These will be highlighted big and bold on his home page and new Services page (which, of course, we redesigned).

Hotcano Key Services

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Remember that the lingo you use about the industry you’re in may not be how your customers think about things. Try to avoid grouping every problem a customer might have into one LARGE category, and instead, create smaller categories that speak to different problems that you can offer solutions for.

Are you treating your SERVICES too much like purchasing a PRODUCT?

One of the “truths of the B2B world” (a phrase I just made up) is that purchasing services is not the same as purchasing products. While we applaud Andrew’s creativity on his Services page and his idea of making marketing services pricing as transparent as buying a subscription to Netflix, it was simply very unlikely that anyone was going to click a BUY button on any of these packages and add a $10,000 marketing plan “to their cart.” (We also verified with Andrew that all his clients had closed via other channels, not just purchasing a plan cold on the site).

Hotcano Services Page

What we thought about and talked over quite a bit was, how do people buy B2B services? And, for Andrew’s business specifically, if we know he’s going after local businesses, we’re going to have to go a more standard sales funnel route.

It’s really important to ask the question, how is my potential customer used to buying the service I’m offering? If you’re trying something completely new or unique to your industry, are your customers going to get it? Or, should you use a sales strategy that you know works?

Give your customers a logical next step to start working with you (this might not be a buy button).

For Andrew, that meant we needed to focus on convincing a customer that Hotcano was the right fit for them but then give them an action they could take that would make the most logical sense.

We’ll go over more of this in the next section (Step #3) but the two important customer types and actions to identify were:

  1. šŸ¤© Warm Lead: A potential customer might be ready to hop on a call or submit a contact form after reading the Hotcano website. Let’s give them a form to take that action!
  2. šŸ„¶ Cold Lead: A potential customer just found out about Hotcano and they like what they’ve seen so far but they need more convincing to even fill out a contact form. How can we keep these leads engaged and take them from cold to warm?

Just by having this thought exercise, it was pretty clear that Andrew’s current offering had some big holes in it. Not a big deal for us though, we have big shovels around here! And we’re going to use them in Step #3.

To recap Your Product or Service Offering…

Ensure your offering makes complete sense to your potential customer. You don’t want to run the risk of overwhelming someone to the point of them throwing up their hands and (virtually) walking away from your website.

Especially for B2B biz owners, think about how services are being purchased right now. Is the way you’re positioning your offering going to make sense to them? Or are you applying the sales strategies of a completely different industry?

Don’t forget to focus on the specific needs of your ideal customer and the outcomes your offerings deliver to them. Avoid as many vague industry buzzwords, and instead, explain exactly how your expertise in a few specific areas is going to help them reach their desired outcomes.

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Take a look at your current Services/Product page. Do you currently have too many options or a disjointed offering experience that’s confusing? Simplify your offerings and provide a next logical step that makes sense for the type of customer who is likely to buy from you (which may NOT be a buy button at all). Make sure you’re speaking to your ideal customer’s problems the entire time.

 


Step 3: Marketing Strategy and Customer Journey

Step 3 Marketing Strategy and Customer Journey

Anyone trying to get clients knows the customer journey from STRANGER āž”ļø CUSTOMER can be a long one. For B2B businesses like Hotcano, the steps to go from the “Mainland” to the “Castle” are a lot more high-touch than a digital product (like an online course, etc).

B2B businesses especially have to invest time in creating a natural progression through the “sales cycle.” For someone like Andrew, and maybe someone like you reading this, that means we need solid marketing bridges.

To get more paying clients, you need to build “marketing bridges”

Marketing bridges are what allow people from the Mainland (aka where everyone is hanging out online: social media, searching Google, reading blogs, listening to podcasts, etc) to discover your business and usher them over to your castle (to pay you!)

We can best sum this up in this fun little GIF:

Marketing Bridges connect your customer with your product

A marketing bridge’s job is to lead people on a journey from stranger to customer.

The current marketing bridge that Andrew was using… was… well, there really wasn’t one. And, Andrew, you are NOT ALONE in not having a solid marketing bridge. Many B2B and client-based biz owners think their Services page will do the job for them.

Hotcano current marketing bridge

Because we’ve already identified that the customer sales cycle is going to be a bit longer, we need to extend the marketing bridge a bit further (can you see the bridge getting longer in your mind and more “guideposts” being added along the way?)

Our recommendation for Andrew was to use a Survey to Consultation Call Marketing Bridge. This marketing bridge would work something like this:

  • Someone lands on the Hotcano website ā†’
  • They read through the site and click to the Services page ā†’
  • They are interested and see an offer to get a free custom list of 3 marketing tips for their biz ā†’
  • They fill out a quick survey to identify their needs and submit their website ā†’
  • They get emailed a list of 3 marketing tips (“Hot List”) custom-tailored to them ā†’
  • Andrew follows-up with them manually to deliver their one-page marketing plan ā†’
  • Andrew encourages them to sign up for a Consulation Call to talk about implementation ā†’
  • They become a paying client of Hotcano šŸŒ‹šŸŽ‰ (party volcano!)

Hotcano Survey Marketing Bridge

āœ‹ HEADS-UP āœ‹ If you’re a B2B biz owner (or anyone trying to get clients) we highly recommend trying the Survey to Consulation Call Marketing Bridge tactic. You can read more about this tactic here and learn about other marketing bridges.

Even B2B companies should be using the Email Newsletter Marketing Bridge! (Buzzword/phrase: Nurture those leads)

As we’ve touched on a few times now, the sales cycle from stranger to customer is a bit longer for a client-services company. Knowing this, we also recommended to Andrew that he use the Email Newsletter Marketing Bridge.

This bridge will really capture those leads that are colder and need more nurturing before they’re ready to sign up for a consultation call.

Andrew could send out a bi-weekly email newsletter where he shares specific marketing tactics for local small/mid-sized business owners. If someone isn’t ready to buy after the Survey Marketing Bridge, guess what happens? They get added onto the Email Newsletter Bridge and continue their journey toward the HOTCANOOOOO castle!

Hotcano Email Newsletter Marketing Bridge

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Whether you’re selling products to customers or services to businesses, someone will likely need 4-7 touchpoints with you before making a purchase. Know this. Embrace this. Understand that multiple marketing bridges might be necessary AND that the time to go from stranger to customer could take weeks/months.

To recap Marketing Strategy and Customer Journey…

Marketing bridges are a must-have for any business owner but especially for B2B folks who have a longer natural sales cycle and higher-priced offerings. If you don’t currently have any marketing bridges or you need some ideas, we put together 13 marketing bridge examples to find one that feels right to you.

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø If you don’t have a marketing bridge in place at all right now, you need one. If you currently have a marketing bridge but it isn’t helping get you more customers, consider trying a new marketing bridge or linking one bridge to another.

 


Step 4: Content Strategy and Audience Building

Step 4 Audience Building

Say it three times with us: šŸ‘‰Content. šŸ‘‰Content. šŸ‘‰Content. We believe content marketing is the #1 strategy to growing an audience and becoming a trusted source around your specific area of expertise. We’ve been using content to build audiences for our various businesses for over a decade, so we have the data to back us up here!

Andrew, admittedly, knows that his content marketing game needs a boost. And hey, you may know you need the same thing. The trick though is to make sure you’re doing content marketing in the right ORDER and using the right MINDSET when it comes to content marketing.

You can’t just write one article, send one email, and post a couple of times on Facebook. Ugh, we wish it was that easy.

We believe in a 3-pronged approach to building an audience, and it comes in the form of a salad metaphor. (Yep, salads. Let’s get healthy with our content, folks!)

3-pronged approach to growing an audience

Build the right audience through foundation articles, a consistent email newsletter, and social media content

Content marketing is probably the biggest area for improvement for Andrew. Now, Andrew’s business is also a young šŸŒ‹, so we’re not trying to beat him up about this. But, we’d be remiss if we didn’t take him through each step of this process and point a few items out.

It’s also important to understand the goal of content marketing for a B2B company: You’re not writing articles, newsletters, and creating social posts for the vanity metrics (the Likes, RTs, etc), you’re doing it to increase leads and sales. Focus on that as your measure of success with content marketing and it’ll be easier to avoid the mindset traps we fall into when posting and sharing content.

šŸ„¬ Salad Lettuce: Foundation articles need to solve problems for your ideal customer AND help promote your offerings.

The first place Andrew needs to start is getting from two current published articles to 8-10 published articles. And, as much as we’d love for him to just write articles about volcanoes and volcano facts šŸ˜‚šŸ¤ž, we actually need him to focus on helping that local small/mid-sized biz owner who is strapped for time and needs help increasing revenue and running a smoother business.

šŸ‘ØšŸ»ā€šŸ¦² Editor’s note: We know Andrew wasn’t going to write articles about volcanoes, that was just a bad joke. OR WAS IT?? (Yeah, it probably was.)

There’s no doubt in our minds that Andrew has PLENTY of marketing knowledge to share. Heck, if he can talk about half of the things in our reorganized marketing list of topics, then he has a plethora of ideas to choose from…

Hotcano service offerings

Looking for article topics to write? Think about the questions people are searching Google for.

The most important piece of advice we can give to Andrew (and you) as he embarks on writing 8-10 foundation articles is to focus the article content on answering questions his ideal customer might be searching for. It’s a waste of time to pontificate and share articles about marketing trends if your ideal customer isn’t searching for those things.

There are a few SEO best practices we’d recommend to Andrew and anyone reading this case study. B2B folks definitely need to think long-term strategy with their articles and basic SEO does matter.

IMPROVEMENT: Andrew needs to crank out 8-10 super-helpful articles that will attract his ideal customer. We recommend improving the readability of his articles AND ensuring each article has at least one marketing bridge added to it for a next action step.

Hotcano foundation article improvments

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ When youā€™re writing your content, reverse engineer the title by imaging what your ideal client or customer might Google. Your article should be an answer to a question they have.

Also, keep in mind that even if it takes a while for these articles to turn into real consistent traffic to his website, it only serves to reinforce trust and authority for any prospective clients that come to his website through referrals or other avenues.

šŸ… Salad Fixins: Client-based business owners NEED to have an email newsletter and should be sending out consistent newsletters to their subscribers.

When we asked Andrew what his current email newsletter strategy was, his exact words were: “I know my current email newsletter strategy is trash.”

J-Law Spit Take

Legit, we did a spit-take when we heard that from Andrew.

We love a moment of self-awareness when it comes to improving your own business.

Email newsletters can be really daunting, especially when you’re just getting started. As a point of reference for Andrew (and you the person reading this) Caroline and I both started email newsletters with 0 subscribers. Super-fun-fact, Caroline’s first email newsletter went out to just FOUR people (two of which were… us šŸ˜‚šŸ˜­).

WHAT’S GREAT: There IS an email signup form on the HOTCANOOOO šŸŒ‹ site. Hey, you gotta start somewhere.

IMPROVEMENT: We recommended to Andrew that he start slow and send a two-paragraph newsletter every other week that introduces a marketing technology tool his subscribers (potential clients) didnā€™t know about. He could also share a short case study with any clients he’s currently working with. The goal is to provide ongoing value and to build trust.

Email newsletter strategy for Hotcano

šŸ„— Salad Dressing: When it comes to social media, give value where people are and create a cohesive branded experience.

If we could only give Andrew (and you) two CRITICAL pieces of advice when it comes to social media content strategy, it would be this:

šŸ¤— Give value where people are: We’d love to see Andrew sharing a “Monday Marketing Tip” directly on his Facebook page, Linkedin, etc. Don’t force someone to leave to read the tip elsewhere. Give the value where they are.

šŸŽØ Create a cohesive branded experience: For Andrew, he’s already leaning heavily into the šŸŒ‹ theme and we love that! Add more volcano imagery, puns, etc into social content to stand out and have people remember his brand (HOTCANOOOO).

IMPROVEMENT: Once the foundation articles and email newsletter are up and running, Andrew should start investing in delivering immense value to local businesses on the social media platforms he thinks are most relevant to them. Then, pepper in posts that link to marketing bridges, foundation articles, and case studies for his existing clients. No more TRASH! šŸ¤£

Hotcano social media content marketing improvements

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Don’t be afraid to put social media content marketing on the backburner. If you don’t have foundation articles and a consistent email newsletter in place, make social media wait in the corner until YOU are ready to invest time on it.

To recap Audience Building…

Think of building an audience like building a salad (a charred wedge salad with EXTRA croutons, obviously). The key to constructing a salad you actually want to eat and an audience that actually grows is assembling things in the right order.

  1. You start with the lettuce (Foundation Articles)
  2. You add your fixins (Email Newsletter)
  3. Then you pour on your dressing (Social Media)

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Your audience is not going to build itself. Focus less on perfection and more on consistency. Make sure you have 8-10 foundational articles based on what your potential clients are searching for. Send out a helpful consistent email newsletter. THEN, create ongoing branded social media content for your ideal customer.

 


Step 5: Website Evaluation (with Before and After Designs!)

Step 5 Optimizing Your Website

Now that we’re on our third one of these Growing Through It case studies, we know many of you repeat visitors jump right to this section (who doesn’t love a good BEFORE and AFTER??)

We want to give Andrew some credit here, the Hotcano website was already doing a few things well:

  • He WAS speaking to his customer’s problems with traditional agencies
  • He DID have a fairly clean, simple design with memorable branding
  • There weren’t too many calls to action to distract you
  • The branding elements and color palette were solid šŸ‘

We took what Andrew was already doing well with his Home page and added in some of our own WAIM-spice, along with a wayyyy more robust and thorough redesign of his Services page.

Two exercises we use to evaluate B2B website best practices

Home Page Exercise #1: The 4Q’s Clarity Test

Right off the bat, within 30 seconds or less, your website’s home page needs to answer four simple questions your ideal customer is thinking. Yes, we’re going to help you (and Andrew) read minds. šŸ‘‰šŸ”®šŸ§ 

The four questions your home page needs to answer right away:

  • What do you do?
  • Are you for me?
  • How can you help me?
  • What’s my next step?

4Qs Clarity Test

Now, how you go about answering those questions leads us into the second website evaluation exercise!

Home Page Exercise #2: APSOSA Framework

If you can’t tell, we love metaphors and acronyms around here. APSOSA stands for:

  • Audience (who are they?)
  • Problem (what is the problem they have?)
  • Solution (how does your offering solve the problem?)
  • Outcome (what is the outcome they’ll have?)
  • Sauce (what is your differentiator?)
  • Action (what should they do next?)

The Hotcano šŸŒ‹ home page was doing an alright job of answering the 4Q’s, but there was definite room for improvement.

The biggest opportunity we saw was in changing some of the messaging points from having it all about Hotcano and what makes them different to really playing up the potential client’s problems and pain points. Make them the hero!

Our goal was to help Andrew convey to his ideal local small/mid-sized business owners that he has the marketing chops they NEED to reach their goals.

So, we filled out the APSOSA Framework for HOTCANOOOO:

APSOSA Framework

Writing out the “answers” to APSOSA helps with the four mind-reading questions. The next step is to take the APSOSA and 4Q’s answers and fit them into a journey a customer can take on a website’s home page. Things like bold headlines, section headers, callouts, etc, become the perfect places to use APSOSA answers!

Without further ado, let’s take a look at Andrew’s redesigned šŸŒ‹ home page!

Hotcano website recommendations

Hotcano home page before and after

āœ‹ HEADS UP āœ‹ We realize not everyone is a designer or has a solid grasp of web design. If that’s you and you know your website needs work, it’s absolutely worth the investment to pay a designer. Especially if you run an online business, your site needs to be a reflection of the amazing work you do!

For a B2B website, Andrew had a solid foundation to work with. The color palette, the brand elements, the typography choices, we didn’t have to do a big overhaul (and we can’t say that’s the case for a lot of B2B websites!)

The thing you’ll notice the most is how much the copy has changed and has been laser-focused around those specific problems Andrew has identified that his ideal customers have.

So often when doing a redesign of an existing website you see people completely overhaul everything. And while we love a fresh coat of paint, we also know that complete design overhauls are not the right answer for everyone.

Remember who the audience is you’re designing your website for!

Andrew is targeting local business owners. Small to mid-sized businesses that may not really care about flashy design trends, parallax scrolling, yadda yadda. While these things are a nice sprinkle of character on a website, if the site itself isn’t speaking DIRECTLY to your ideal audience and persuading them that you have the answers they’re looking for, there’s no amount of website-glitter you can sprinkle to hit your goals!

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Too many people want to start their website home page’s with their personal story. Even for personal-brand-based sites, we always recommend starting with the PROBLEM your ideal customer has. Then share your story alongside that. Put the customer/client first.

If you work with clients, your Services page should leave no stone left unturned in a potential client’s mind

We aren’t going to sugarcoat it, we went HAM on the Hotcano šŸŒ‹ Services page. The page nearly doubled in overall length and we’re not afraid to make changes like that if it helps with business objectives.

Andrew was making a mistake that many biz owners make, his Services page was assuming everyone already knew everything they needed to know and were ready to purchase.

Unfortunately, a verrrrry small percentage of your clients/customers are going to be ready to buy when they click to a Services page (especially for B2B folks, as we’ve discussed).

Take your customers on a journey with your Services page (from their problem to your solution)

Imagine the home page of your website doesn’t exist for a minute. OR imagine a potential customer clicks straight to your Services page and never sees your home page at all. It’s not a great experience if your Services page isn’t telling a compelling story as well.

For Andrew, we wanted to highlight his ideal customer’s problem and then walk them through the Hotcano solutions to that problem.

When a customer finishes reading the Services page and is ready to take the next step, we bring back our decisions made in Steps #2 + #3 of this case study:

  1. šŸ¤© Warm Lead: A potential client is ready to take the next step, they can fill out the contact form to chat with Andrew about which marketing package is right for them.
  2. šŸ„¶ Cold Lead: A potential client is interested but not quite ready to reach out, they can start the Survey to Consultation Call Marketing Bridge.

We feel confident this new Services page for HOTCANOOOO is going to work on Andrew’s behalf, instead of leaving potential customers confused and unsure if he’s the right fit for their biz.

Hotcano Services Page before and after

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ When you’re writing and designing a Services (or Products) page, imagine the person reading the page hasn’t read any other page of your website. Take them through the journey of their problem to your solution and give them the appropriate action to take.

To recap Website Evaluation…

It might surprise you to know we spent the same amount of time in Step #5 for Andrew as we did with our first two Growing Through It case studies. There’s isn’t quite as much design work and that’s because the bulk of our time was spent on strategy and copywriting.

When you’re evaluating your own website, ensure your ideal customers are getting the experience they need. If you know your customer/client could be overwhelmed with extra design and website-glitter, simplify things, and focus more on copy and speaking clearly and concisely.

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Go through our 4Q’s Clarity Test and APSOSA Framework for your home page right now! Do you pass the 4Q’s test? Does your home page hit on all aspects of APSOSA?

 


Conclusion: Let’s Wrap This Sucker Up!

Recapping the Hotcano case study

WE DID IT! Huzzah! We made it to the end of this case study. Every step along the way we focused on helping a B2B marketing company get more clients.

Whether you own a B2B company or not, our hope is that this case study has shown you how to create more clarity in your messaging, how to hone in your offerings, and how to ensure you’re putting the right steps in place to speak directly to your ideal customers.

As usual, the five steps we went through are just part of the Hotcano šŸŒ‹ journey…

šŸ‘‰ Andrew still has to show up consistently for his audience.
šŸ‘‰ He still has to deliver ongoing and consistent value through content marketing.
šŸ‘‰ He still has to ensure his marketing bridges are working on his behalf to land clients.
šŸŽ‰ But he GETS to do all of these things!

Running your own client-service business is incredibly fulfilling and can provide the life you want but it’s not going to happen just because you dream about it happening.

Our hope with this “Growing Through It” series is that we’ve removed a big chunk of that overwhelm and given you a ton of actionable things you can do in your business RIGHT NOW.

Ready to make a few changes in your business? You can do it, friend!

ps – HOTCANOOOOOOO!

How An Artist Can Start Selling More Online Courses (Full Case Study)

May 3, 2020

If you sell digital products (courses, e-books, online workshops, etc), need to figure out how to connect and consolidate all your offerings, and want to get more paying customers, this case study is for you!

Welcome to our series called Growing Through It where we makeover a member of our community’s business (and you get to follow along and learn tips and strategies for your own business).

Growing Through It by Wandering Aimfully

We’re going to offer suggestions of how you can take advantage of this collective slow down that we’re all going through and come back even more strategic and even better when this is all over. If you’re a business owner trying to figure out what the heck to work on right now, we want to help you strengthen the foundation of your business with this series.

In this second installment of Growing Through It, you’ll meet Lauren. Lauren runs a creative business called Lauren-Likes where she sells multiple offerings (retreats, in-person workshops, online courses). Due to the global pandemic, Lauren is having to shift her entire focus online.

Here’s, specifically, what we’ll go through in this case study:

Meet Lauren, from Lauren-Likes

šŸŽ¬ Watch us reimagine Lauren’s business using our 5-step checklist

If you’re a video fan, watch the entire case study unfold in the embedded video below. Otherwise, you can keep scrolling and we’ve written everything out for you. šŸ‘šŸ‘

 

 


Introduction: We’re Going To Help A Creative Biz Owner Streamline Her Offerings To Sell More Online Courses

Lauren is the owner of Lauren-Likes, an art business offering in-person workshops, retreats, and online creative courses.

Lauren is in the middle of a big transition moving back to the US from the UAE while her in-person offerings (retreats and workshops) have a very uncertain future. Lauren’s goal is to re-organize and streamline her offerings to drive more sales of her online courses.

Lauren’s biggest struggle is feeling overwhelmed with how her website can cohesively come together and lead a customer through a journey to purchase her online courses.

Can you relate to Lauren? Do you have multiple offerings (and maybe even websites) but don’t see a clear way to bring them all together?

We hope the recommendations we make for Lauren throughout this case study are steps that can help YOU rethink and re-evaluate your own situation with a bit less overwhelm.

 

 


Step 1: Establishing The Brand Foundation (Who Why What How)

Establishing The Brand Foundation

When it comes to your brand foundation, your brand isn’t just your logo and your colors. It’s about having clarity on who you help, why you want to help those people, what you do to help them, and how you help them.

Note: We WILL get to some simple branding and design tweaks in Step #5.

One of the first things we did with Lauren’s business was to try to answer these questions and then share the tweaks we’d make to build a more compelling brand foundation.

Answering the 4 Brand Foundation questions: Who? Why? What? How?

Who do you help?

After looking at Lauren’s website home page, her who was actually three different whos: Crafters, Adventurers, and Storytellers. This is wayyyy better than just saying “artists” as that genre is way too vast. But, we thought we could help Lauren dial in her audience description just a bit more.

We decided to find the overlap between all three groups of people. A moniker we identified as: Artful Adventurers.

Lauren's ideal audience member is an Artful Adventurer

If you’re like Lauren and you serve multiple types of people, by naming them in this more succinct way you not only give them an identity to adopt, you also attract a more specific kind of person! (YASSS!)

For Lauren, the people who are most likely to be her raving fans arenā€™t just crafters, theyā€™re crafters who love adventure and storytelling (hence, Artful Adventurers!)

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ If you feel like youā€™re trying to define your audience by separate ā€œbuckets,ā€ consider defining them by the OVERLAP of those buckets.

Who do you help exercise

Why do you help those people?

We like to think about the “why” question in two ways:

  1. Why does your business exist? (This is your mission)
  2. Why would someone choose your business over another? (This is your differentiator)

In our conversations with Lauren, she told us she feels a pull back to social work and having more of a positive impact with her work (awesome!) This idea of also using your creativity to do good in the world should be incorporated in her “why.”

Lauren had a couple of strong why statements on her website already, but we knew we could help her bring it all together in one statement: I love helping women learn to embrace their creativity, tell their stories and then use that creativity to do good in the world. I believe that wherever you are, you can find adventure and that adventure is worth documenting.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Don’t be afraid to share your bigger why with your ideal audience. You might be surprised that people become customers based on the values you hold and are proud to share front-and-center on your website!

Why do you help exercise

What benefit does your help provide?

Most people get this question wrong by listing out all the features of the service they offer (it’s a common mistake we’ve made in the past too!) The better version of the what question at this point is: What specific outcome does your business provide your customer?

For Lauren, one of the “what” phrases we saw a few places was the question, “need a dose of inspiration?” Now, there’s nothing wrong with this question, but it doesn’t GRAB your attention and speak to an outcome you really want.

We came up with two phrases we believe are more powerful:

  • ā¤ļø Connecting to your true creativity
  • šŸ•µšŸ»ā€ā™€ļø Discovering adventure no matter where you are

Is it more impactful to get a dose of creativity or to connect to your TRUE creativity? We don’t know about you, but we want that connection! We want to FEEL like the things we’re doing/creating speak to our souls.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Write out 6-8 outcome statements that your business or offering will create for someone. Which of those outcome statements do YOU feel the most drawn to? Feel free to pass them along to a friend or even your audience to get their feedback too!

To really grab her customer’s attention, Lauren’s what is: Artful adventurers will feel more energized and alive by connecting to their true creativity and others who share that passion. They will experience the richness of life by exploring their world and discovering adventure no matter where they are.

What do you do exercise

How do you help people?

Have you had to make a pivot with your core offerings? You are not alone!

Remember those features we just mentioned in the what question? Now is where the features matter and you want to get clarity on exactly how people can get the outcomes we just talked about.

Lauren is a position many people are currently finding themselves in. The features/offerings she had in the past won’t work in today’s environment. Specifically, Lauren can’t host her art retreat, in-person art workshops, and her travel journal. Moving forward, her focus has to be on her online courses.

Lauren’s sole business goal moving forward is to offer her online art courses.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ The business owners that survive during uncertain times are the ones that are willing to make a pivot or a big shift. The way you’ve always made money and provided value may not be what you do the next 6-12 months.

Our shift for Lauren is one she has to make to continue to generate revenue for her Lauren-Likes business. She’s going to offer her online art courses and in a moment we’re going to show you the exact plan of action to make that a streamlined process!

How do you help exercise

To recap the Brand Foundation…

šŸ‘„ WHO: Lauren’s audience is going to be Artful Adventurers.

šŸ§­ WHY: Her mission is to empower women to tap into their creativity, come alive, and be a force for good in the world.

āš”ļø WHAT: Her benefit is the creative embodiment and experiencing everyday adventure.

šŸ“ HOW: Her offering is online art courses.

These four questions now clearly define Lauren’s business foundation, and they give her some clear messaging points to move forward with. We can use this information to go through the next four steps on our 5-step checklist!

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Answer the Who, Why, What, and How questions for your own business. Keep these answers in a Google Doc, Note, or PDF you can reference often. You’ll want to have them handy as we move forward in our 5-step process.

 


Step 2: Product or Service Offering

Step 2 Your Offerings

The product or service you sell is your castle. And this castle of yours sits on an island in the middle of the ocean. As much as you may want to tell people your castle exists, your product or service offering must be in tip-top shape before you start leading people to it.

Your castle is your “how” from Step 1. It’s the thing you do that people can pay you for. This will most likely be a specific product page for all you digital product biz owners reading this.

Does your castle have too many options?

Lauren is in a position we find many multi-passionate creative business owners in: She has multiple offerings and there isn’t a natural bridge between them. A large portion of Lauren’s revenue comes from her in-person events and since these are on-hold indefinitely, she has to make an important business pivot.

Pivot!

(Thank you, Ross! Also, we’ve all been there.)

One issue for Lauren, which we’ll go much deeper on in Step #5, is that her offerings were strewn about different versions of her site (and on completely separate sites in some cases). Lauren had offerings on:

  • Her main website Lauren-Likes.com with (mostly her in-person offerings)
  • A subdomain of her site where you could find her online art courses
  • Separate individual landing pages, not on her site, for other offerings
  • It was difficult to find all the amazing stuff she had to offer in one place!

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Lauren is not alone in making this “mistake.” As multi-passionate people, we often create new websites and landing pages and ignore that this experience can feel disjointed to a potential customer. If you have offerings across multiple sites, bring them all together in one easy to navigate place.

Lauren-Likes offerings

With the shift Lauren is making to online art courses, she needed to move these off of a separate site (on a subdomain) and make them the PROMINENT offering for folks to know about.

Pivoting your business does NOT have to happen overnight…

We created a two-phased approach for Lauren to re-focus her offerings. There’s an initial 3-6 month plan and then a secondary 6+ month plan that Lauren could follow if in-person offerings were feasible again.

Lauren-Likes offerings after her pivot

Think about the customer’s journey through your multiple product offerings and create an “on-ramp” product

One of our BIGGEST recommendations to Lauren is to have a no-brainer on-ramp product for her Artful Adventurers.

Lauren currently has three separate courses and our idea is to have her use one of those courses as an extremely low-priced offering that can get someone into her online art courses (someone who is at least willing to pay $1).

Her Art of Inspiration course will go from $29 to just $1.

šŸ¤” Why not just offer the on-ramp course for free?

Great question! If a customer is willing to pay any amount of money, they are WAY more likely to purchase additional products from you in the future. People who only sign up for free offerings are much harder to convert to a paying customer later on.

Create an on-ramp product from an evergreen product that isn't selling well

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Do you currently have a lower-priced product that isn’t selling that well? Consider changing it to a no-brainer price (like $1) to get someone into an email sequence (marketing bridge) to buy your next higher-priced product.

From multiple disjointed offerings to a more seamless “passive income* sales funnel.”

For Lauren, and maybe for you if you have multiple digital products around a similar topic, our goal was to help her create a seamless journey for her customers.

Her current customer journey is disjointed and customers are likely going off in all different directions.

Disjointed customer experience

We’d like to see Lauren create a more seamless customer journey where each of her products leads down a path to another product (while giving loads of value along the way, obviously):

  • Get someone to purchase her on-ramp $1 course (Art of Inspiration) ā†’
  • Send a series of emails about Art of Inspiration ā†’
  • Send a sales sequence of emails about her next course (Capture + Create $29) ā†’
  • Send a series of emails about Capture + Create ā†’
  • Send a sales sequence of emails about her highest-priced course (Stories From Here $159) ā†’
  • This is a much smoother experience and creates the largest passive potential of revenue for Lauren!

Seamless customer journey experience

Now, this is the journey we (and Lauren) HOPE to create for her customers! You can see how each of her online courses becomes a lead-in to her next online course. If her customer loves what Lauren has to offer, she has a system in place to deliver more value to them!

One thing we know for sure: This new journey between Lauren’s products gives her a lot more opportunity to get customers to purchase (and purchase multiple products) instead of a handful of disparate websites not cohesively working together.

*There is a lot of trial and error that goes into creating a passive “sales funnel” like this for digital products. It’s incredibly easy to summarize the journey in bullet points but it will take experimentation and tweaking to see how her customer’s respond.

Pro-tip: Ask someone to go through the process of buying your offering and watch for where they get stuck.

It is absolutely critical that you don’t make it difficult for your customers to buy from you. The worst thing you can do is have a highly-engaged customer get frustrated and abandon the buying process because it’s convoluted.

And hey, don’t beat yourself if you find your product buying experience needs work. That’s all part of the process, friend!

To recap Your Product or Service Offering…

Streamline your offering(s) as much as you possibly can. Consider creating a no-brainer priced product that becomes an on-ramp product to your other offerings. Think about creating a seamless journey from one offering to the next but make sure getting started on that journey is easy for your customers.

Don’t forget to focus on the specific needs of your ideal customer and the outcomes your offerings deliver to them. It’s not compelling to simply say, “buy my course,” you have to remember to speak to problems your offering solves at every step along the way.

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Take a look at your current product offering page/pages. Do you currently have too many options or a disjointed offering experience that’s confusing? Simplify your offerings into ONE page and ONE seamless customer journey. Make sure you’re speaking to your ideal customer’s problems the entire time.

 


Step 3: Marketing Strategy and Customer Journey

Step 3 Marketing Strategy and Customer Journey

Creative business owners (hello, this is us!) usually all succumb to the same problem: We spend 95% of our time creating our offering and then 5% of the time promoting our offering.

This is why so many creative biz owners struggle to make money from their art and their skills. We’ve been there. Marketing and promotion don’t come naturally to us left-brain folks.

To get more paying customers, you need to build “marketing bridges”

Marketing bridges are what allow people from the Mainland (aka where everyone is hanging out online: social media, searching Google, reading blogs, listening to podcasts, etc) to discover your business and usher them over to your castle (to pay you!)

We can best sum this up in this fun little GIF:

Marketing Bridges connect your customer with your product

A marketing bridge’s job is to lead people on a journey from stranger to customer.

We have a fist-bump for Lauren šŸ¤œšŸ¤› because she DOES have a marketing bridge in place, and it’s the one we šŸ‘©šŸ»ā€šŸ¦°šŸ‘ØšŸ»ā€šŸ¦² use most often for our businesses. That bridge is the “Email Newsletter Bridge.”

  • Someone lands on her website or Instagram profile ā†’
  • They see a call-to-action to get inspiring art-related emails ā†’
  • They get added to her email list ā†’
  • They receive her weekly email newsletter ā†’
  • She does periodic course launches via email ā†’
  • She gets paying customers šŸŽ‰ (example shown for her Capture + Create course)

Example of a good email newsletter marketing bridge

WHAT’S GREAT: We love that Lauren’s getting people on her email list (especially from Instagram where her reach is only 3-5% instead of email where it’s 20-30%). We also give Lauren a lot of credit for sending consistent email content to her subscribers and eventually doing product launches.

IMPROVEMENT: A more seamless journey through her 3 art courses but with only ONE point of promotion. Building a ā€œpassiveā€ sales funnel starting with a $1 on-ramp course to weed out people who only want free content.

Good and bad of email newsletter bridge

When you have multiple products to sell, try to find ONE entry point into buying all of them.

While we applaud Lauren for her current email newsletter marketing bridge, she isn’t doing herself any favors at the moment. With multiple different products, there’s no natural journey between them. The only way people on her email list hear about her three separate art courses is when she does a launch.

Instead, as we outlined in Step #2, we want Lauren to create a seamless journey starting with her one of her smaller evergreen courses that we’re advocating she turns into a $1 on-ramp course.

Why an on-ramp course helps

Having this one low-price-point product is going to help Lauren FOCUS on promoting and marketing one compelling offer that can lead to her three individual courses.

Instead of her email subscribers only hearing about her Capture + Create course when she does a launch, she now has a system in place that sells her course automatically.

Creating a seamless online course sales funnel

Awesome! That’s the first step to improving Lauren’s marketing bridge and creating a more seamless experience for her customers to buy from her.

The fun doesn’t have to stop there, though. As we talked about in Step #2, there’s a natural fit to have another marketing bridge between Capture + Create and Lauren’s larger course Stories From Here.

In an ideal world, Lauren would put together a nice long, helpful, email sequence that leads people from the on-ramp courses all the way through to her higher-priced course.

Using email sales funnel to sell multiple courses

To recap Marketing Strategy and Customer Journey…

Marketing bridges are a must-have for any online business owner but especially us creative-types who get stuck focusing only on our art. Do yourself a favor and read our 13 marketing bridge examples to find one that feels right to you.

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø If you don’t have a marketing bridge in place at all right now, you need one. If you currently have a marketing bridge but it isn’t helping get you more customers, consider trying a new marketing bridge.

 


Step 4: Content Strategy and Audience Building

Step 4 Audience Building

We have over a decade of experience building audiences and cranking out content (just like this article) and we’re here to tell you that email lists and helpful articles STILL WORK.

When it comes to building an audience and getting paying customers, you can’t just write one article, send one email, and start an Instagram account. Ugh, we wish it was that easy.

We believe in a 3-pronged approach to building an audience, and it comes in the form of a salad metaphor. (Yep, salads. Everyone’s favorite!)

3-pronged approach to growing an audience

Build the right audience through foundation articles, a consistent email newsletter, and social media content

We gave Lauren a fist-bump earlier and now she gets three claps šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘. Lauren is already using our 3-pronged approach to content and audience strategy. There are just a few tweaks we can help her make to ensure her efforts are paying off.

šŸ„¬ Salad Lettuce: Foundation articles need to solve problems for your ideal customer AND help promote your offerings.

Lauren has been writing articles for years and her personality shines through in her words and photography. Like many people who’ve been writing articles for a long time, Lauren’s blog is due for some updates.

There are three important tweaks Lauren needs to make to her blog/articles:

  1. She needs to connect the blog to her main site and make sure on every article itā€™s easy to opt-in to the on-ramp course
  2. She needs to do a major content audit + retitle blog articles to be more searchable
  3. She needs to make her blog easier to navigate

How to improve an older blog

Now, the good news for Lauren is that she already told us she’s moving her blog site from WordPress to Squarespace. We’ve moved website platforms like this ourselves. It’s no small feat but it is ABSOLUTELY worth doing every couple of years because technology improves so much.

We also see a clear opportunity during the article improvement task to make sure a marketing bridge exists in every article. We recommend an inline callout to Lauren’s on-ramp product offering AND an exit-intent popup to join her email newsletter.

Add an inline product callout and exit intent to all articles on your site

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Doing a content audit of older articles is a GREAT way to improve your organic traffic and make sure your existing content is optimized and working on your behalf. We wrote an article about our content audit experience, whittling 400 articles down to just 100.

šŸ… Salad Fixins Part 1: Digital product business owners NEED to have an email newsletter and should be sending out consistent newsletters to their subscribers.

Another bit of praise for Lauren, she’s been sending an email newsletter out for years! Great work, Lauren!

WHAT’S GREAT: Lauren sends emails out consistently (huzzah!). Her email newsletter is colorful, joyful and inspiring. This is great for her target audience!

IMPROVEMENT: We want Lauren to narrow down the calls-to-action (CTAs) in the newsletter to make her ONE action more clear and obvious.

Write a consistent email newsletter to grow your audience

šŸ„’ Salad Fixins Part 2: A podcast is a great way for creative business owners to build a connection and give value to their audience (while also promoting their offerings).

Producing and publishing a podcast is no simple task. While it may seem easy to flip on a microphone and hit record, it’s a lot of work to make a podcast worth listening to on an ongoing basis.

WHAT’S GREAT: Lauren’s podcast, How She Creates, is designed to attract ideal audience which we are stoked about. Her podcast is released on a consistent schedule and Lauren creates an article on her blog for every episode. Great minds think alike!

IMPROVEMENT: We want to see Lauren using the podcast as a vehicle to promote her art courses more! Especially her new on-ramp course which should be a no-brainer for her highly-engaged listeners.

Starting a podcast is easy, continuing to publish new episodes is the hard part

āœ‹ HEADS-UP āœ‹ None of us creative biz owners are going to create the next Serial or Tim Ferriss podcast – and that’s OKAY. The only thing we need to do is ensure our podcast adds value to the lives of our ideal customers and helps promote and sell our offerings (even if it’s really hard to track the effectiveness of a podcast).

šŸ„— Salad Dressing: When it comes to social media, give value where people are and create a cohesive branded experience.

We are excited to say this… Lauren’s approach to social media only has a WHAT’S GREAT section! Nicely done, Lauren.

WHAT’S GREAT: Lauren’s Instagram account is vibrant, has visually cohesive photos, but nothing feels overly posed or curated. Her posts and stories offer value and tips instead of just pointing her audience to her blog. She also does a great job creating a sense of community and engages with her audience. Three gold stars! ā­ļøā­ļøā­ļø

Give value where people are on social media

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ When it comes to social media, don’t be afraid to pick ONE platform and go all-in on it. The days of wondering which platform is best are long gone. The platform YOU can deliver consistent value you and enjoy using is the perfect platform to choose.

To recap Audience Building…

Think of building an audience like building a (scrumptious, crouton-filled) salad. The key to constructing a salad you actually want to eat and an audience that actually grows is assembling things in the right order.

  1. You start with the lettuce (Foundation Articles)
  2. You add your fixins (Email Newsletter)
  3. Then you pour on your dressing (Social Media)

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Your audience is not going to build itself. Focus less on perfection and more on consistency. Make sure you have 8-10 foundational articles (or do a content audit if you have a large archive). Send out a helpful weekly email newsletter. THEN, create a consistent promotion schedule on the social media platform that makes the most sense for you and your ideal customer.

 


Step 5: Website Evaluation (with Before and After Designs!)

Step 5 Optimizing Your Website

One of the biggest improvements for Lauren’s website was consolidation. As we mentioned a few times previously, Lauren had multiple different sites using different URLs to try to accomplish the goals of her Lauren-Likes biz.

We took it upon ourselves to reimagine her separate sites (blog site, courses site, podcast site, landing pages) into one glorious virtual home!

Two exercises we use to evaluate a website’s home page and ensure it’s doing its job

Home Page Exercise #1: The 4Q’s Clarity Test

Right off the bat, within 30 seconds or less, your website’s home page needs to answer four simple questions your ideal customer is thinking. Yes, we’re going to help you (and Lauren) read minds. šŸ‘‰šŸ”®šŸ§ 

The four questions your home page needs to answer right away:

  • What do you do?
  • Are you for me?
  • How can you help me?
  • What’s my next step?

4Qs Clarity Test

Now, how you go about answering those questions leads us into the second website evaluation exercise!

Home Page Exercise #2: APSOSA Framework

If you can’t tell, we love metaphors and acronyms around here. APSOSA stands for:

  • Audience (who are they?)
  • Problem (what is the problem they have?)
  • Solution (how does your offering solve the problem?)
  • Outcome (what is the outcome they’ll have?)
  • Sauce (what is your differentiator?)
  • Action (what should they do next?)

Lauren’s website(s) were doing an okay job of answering the 4Q’s, but we’re not about okay jobs around these parts. We want Lauren’s ideal audience (Artful Adventures) to quickly know they are in the right place when visiting Lauren-Likes. Here’s the APSOSA Framework filled out for the new Lauren-Likes home page:

APSOSA Framework

Writing out the “answers” to APSOSA helps with the four mind-reading questions. The next step is to take the APSOSA and 4Q’s answers and fit them into a journey a customer can take on a website’s home page. Things like bold headlines, section headers, callouts, etc, become the perfect places to use APSOSA answers!

Without further ado, let’s take a look at Lauren’s redesigned home page!

Lauren-Likes website recommendations

Lauren-Likes home page before and after

āœ‹ HEADS UP āœ‹ We realize not everyone is a designer or has a solid grasp of web design. If that’s you and you know your website needs work, it’s absolutely worth the investment to pay a designer. Especially if you run an online business, your site needs to be a reflection of the amazing work you do!

We loved that you could see Lauren’s art, creativity, and bright color choices in her existing website, but the standard Squarespace template she was using for this homepage wasn’t giving her site any OOMPH.

Lauren was a smart cookie and purchased our Squarespace Thicket Template and had already told us she’d planned to use it in the future. That was a fun part of the redesign process for us because it created some constraints and limitations in how we’d reimagine her homepage.

Obviously we’re biased, but we really feel the new version of Lauren-Likes speaks to your creative soul. It pulls you in, keeps your visual interest, and lets you know you’re in the right place if you’re looking to boost your creativity through art.

Icons, photos, and design flourishes are great, but don’t forget that your website visitor is going to read your copy to make informed decisions.

We definitely upped the design-ante on Lauren’s site compared to our first Growing Through It case study with Eman. However, we still spent plenty of time working on the copy to ensure we hit the 4Q’s and our APSOSA framework.

Of course, because #overachievers, we also redesigned Lauren’s blog page. Most blog pages (maybe yours?) just list a bunch of posts and forget to have a call-to-action for your biz goal. We added a lead magnet (PDF download) on this page and Lauren could experiment with different ones, maybe even that $1 on-ramp product šŸ˜‰šŸ‘Œ.

Lauren-Likes Blog Page before and after

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ One of the BIGGEST opportunities for audience growth on your website right now is your Blog page and your individual Article page template. If you do not currently have a marketing bridge on these pages, add one today!

To recap Website Evaluation…

We’re STOKED for Lauren to bring all of her independent websites into ONE site. Not only is this going to save Lauren from future headaches but her website visitors are going to have a much more cohesive and friendly experience.

Just having a beautiful website design isn’t enough though (ugh, if only!) Your website needs to be working toward your goals and delivering the value your ideal audience is looking for.

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Go through our 4Q’s Clarity Test and APSOSA Framework for your home page right now! Do you pass the 4Q’s test? Does your home page hit on all aspects of APSOSA?

 


Conclusion: Let’s Wrap This Sucker Up!

Recapping the Lauren-Likes case study

WE DID IT! Huzzah! We made it to the end of this case study. Every step along the way we focused on helping a creative biz owner sell more online courses.

If you’re in a similar position to Lauren, especially if you’re having to pivot your business offerings right now, we hope this case study gave you a ton of food for thought.

This part of Lauren’s journey is just the beginning…

šŸ‘‰ Lauren still has to show up consistently for her audience.
šŸ‘‰ She still has to deliver value to her existing customers and future potential customers.
šŸ‘‰ She still has to continue to tweak and test various parts of her marketing and content strategy along the way.
šŸŽ‰ But she GETS to do all of these things!

Running your own creative business is incredibly fulfilling and can provide the life you want but it’s not going to happen just because you dream about it happening.

Our hope with this “Growing Through It” series is we’ve removed a big chunk of that overwhelm and given you a ton of actionable things you can do in your business RIGHT NOW.

Ready to make a few changes in your business? You can do it, friend!

Watch Us Help A Business Owner Get More Clients (In-Depth Case Study)

April 26, 2020

If you run a service-based business and your goal is to get more clients, this case study is for you!

Welcome to our series called Growing Through It where we makeover a member of our community’s business (and you get to follow along and learn tips and strategies for your own business).

Growing Through It by Wandering Aimfully

We’re going to offer suggestions of how you can take advantage of this collective slow down that we’re all going through and come back even more strategic and even better when this is all over. If you’re a business owner trying to figure out what the heck to work on right now, we want to help you strengthen the foundation of your business with this series.

In this first installment of Growing Through It, you’ll meet Eman. Eman runs a copywriting business called InkHouse and is currently trying to transition her business to focus on helping online course creators with their sales copy and sales emails.

Here’s, specifically, what we’ll go through in this case study:

Meet Eman, from InkHouse

šŸŽ¬ Watch us reimagine Eman’s business using our 5-step checklist

If you’re a video fan, watch the entire case study unfold in the embedded video below. Otherwise, you can keep scrolling and we’ve written everything out for you. šŸ‘šŸ‘

 

 


Introduction: We’re Going To Help A Copywriter Get More Clients

Eman is the owner of InkHouse, a copywriting client business.

Eman has a number of existing services right now, but she plans to pivot her business and streamline her services to exclusively offer sales page and sales email copywriting. That’s where we step in!

Eman’s biggest struggle is that she’s feeling overwhelmed with all there is to do as she’s making a transition with her business focus.

Can you relate to Eman? Are your current client-service offerings no longer working? Or do you want to make a jump in a different direction with your business?

We hope the recommendations we make for Eman throughout this case study are steps that can help YOU rethink and re-evaluate your own situation with a bit less overwhelm.

 

 


Step 1: Establishing The Brand Foundation (Who Why What How)

Establishing The Brand Foundation

When it comes to your brand foundation, your brand isn’t just your logo and your colors. It’s about having clarity on who you help, why you want to help those people, what you do to help them, and how you help them.

Note: We WILL get to some simple branding and design tweaks in Step #5.

One of the first things we did with Eman’s business was to try to answer these questions and then share the tweaks we’d make to build a more compelling brand foundation.

Answering the 4 Brand Foundation questions: Who? Why? What? How?

Who do you help?

After looking at Eman’s website home page, there was a headline that read, “helping you grow your brand.” It wasn’t immediately clear who the who (hah!) was on the first page of her site. We moved on to the about page, and found a section mentioning a startup owner, an owner of an established business, a nonprofit or a marketing professional.

Eman was falling into the “who” trap that we see so many business owners fall into, trying to serve too many different customers.

When you cast your net too wide it becomes hard for people to see you as the expert they need to hire to solve their problems. People want to know definitively that YOU are the answer they’ve been looking for.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ If you offer a broad service like copywriting or design, try to narrow down your audience to just ONE specific type of client. It may feel limiting at first but trust us, the more focused you can get on who you help, the easier it will be to get more paying clients.

To stop casting that wide net and to attract more of her ideal customers (and knowing that she plans to streamline her services to sales page and email campaign copy), we recommend Eman narrow her focus to online course creators moving forward. This gives her a specific type of business owner to attractā€”one that she knows has a need for her specific copywriting services.

Who do you help exercise

Why do you help those people?

We like to think about the “why” question in two ways:

  1. Why does your business exist? (This is your mission)
  2. Why would someone choose your business over another? (This is your differentiator)

As we looked at Eman’s website, there wasn’t a crystal clear why being shared. We found a section that said, “You’re doing something amazing and your audience deserves to know about it.” This is OKAY but we know Eman could go deeper and really hook her potential customer in.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ If you can connect your brand’s existence to something that’s bigger than just you, you can forge a stronger connection with customers who feel your mission aligns with their values.

For Eman’s mission, we believe a strong why would be something like: My mission is to help you get your course into the hands of more people to amplify your impact and improve the lives of as many people as possible.

By thinking about her target audience and what their mission would be, Eman can make her mission about being a facilitator for what her target wants. If she knows they crave impacting more students, aligning with that makes her a compelling collaborator.

Why do you help exercise

What benefit does your help provide?

Most people get this question wrong by listing out all the features of the service they offer (it’s a common mistake we’ve made in the past too!) The better version of the what question at this point is: What specific outcome does your business provide your customer?

For Eman, the closest “what” answer we could find was the, “helps you grow your brand through my copy” line. But what exactly does that mean if you think about it from the customer’s perspective? How can you put that in terms way more tangible and specific?

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Paint the picture of the life you want your customer/client to have after they hire you. What specifically will happen in their lives that your product or service is going to provide to them?

To really grab her customer’s attention, we would say Eman’s what is: With clearer, more compelling copy, my clients are able to grab the limited attention of their audience to forge a stronger connection and increase their sales.

What do you do exercise

How do you help people?

Remember those features we just mentioned in the what question? Now is the time to bring those puppies in! Your how refers to how you deliver on the benefit you’re promising. It’s your offering.

On Eman’s website, we found a few different ways she delivers the benefit. There was web copy, email writing, blog post creation, and writing workshops, to name a few. Having this variety on your website might seem appealing but to your potential client it’s just too many options and Eman already told us that with this pivot, what she really wanted was to narrow down to writing conversion-boosting sales and landing pages as well as click-worthy email campaigns.

And while that was one step closer, we thought she could still get more specific with her offerings.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Your potential client/customer shouldn’t have to fill in the blanks of exactly what you can do to help them. They are searching for an answer to a specific problem, so make sure what you do is that answer and display it clearly.

Our shift for Eman is going to focus on writing sales pages and sales emails. Every course creator needs these copywriting tasks (and most loathe doing them!)

How do you help exercise

To recap the Brand Foundation…

šŸ‘„WHO: Eman’s audience is going to be online course creators.

šŸ§­WHY: Her mission is to amplify the impact of passionate course creators.

āš”ļøWHAT: Her benefit is to increase audience engagement and boost course sales.

šŸ“HOW: Her offering is copywriting services in the form of sales page copy and sales email campaign copy.

These four questions now clearly define Eman’s business foundation, and they give her some clear messaging points to move forward with. We can use this information to go through the next four steps on our 5-step checklist!

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Answer the Who, Why, What, and How questions for your own business. Keep these answers in a Google Doc, Note, or PDF you can reference often. You’ll want to have them handy as we move forward in our 5-step process.

 


Step 2: Product or Service Offering

Step 2 Your Offerings

The product or service you sell is your castle. And this castle of yours sits on an island in the middle of the ocean. As much as you may want to tell people your castle exists, your product or service offering must be in tip-top shape before you start leading people to it.

Your castle is your “how” from Step 1. It’s the thing you do that people can pay you for. This will most likely be a Services page for all you client-based biz owners reading this.

Does your castle have too many options?

On Eman’s website, we ventured to her Services page and were quickly met with a dropdown full of options (six of them, in fact). Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with having multiple service offerings and Eman may be able to offer all these services, but when you have too many options your potential customer will have analysis paralysis.

Too many service offerings

With the shift Eman is making in her offering to help online course creators write better sales pages and email sales campaigns to sell their courses, there is no reason she needs all these options. Additionally, we recommend having ONE singular overview page of your services so a potential client can quickly understand what you offer at a glance.

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Dropdown menus in navigation aren’t the friendliest experience on mobile. Your website is likely to get 50% of its traffic from a mobile device which is also why we highly recommend a single Services page.

Create one Services page and streamline your offerings to lead into one another if possible

Our recommendation for Eman is to create three simple copywriting packages for online course creators. These packages are closely related and could be a natural upsell between them (which is awesome!)

The three new offering packages we came up with are as follows:

  • Sales Page Copy That Converts (sales page copywriting)
  • Click-Worthy Email Campaigns (sales email copywriting)
  • Website + Email Campaign (combo of the two!)

Example offerings

Need to weed out the tire-kickers? Put a starting price next to your offerings.

One additional tip after streamlining the offerings is to use a phrase like “Starting Investment…” listed next to the packages. This starting price will help weed out the customers who can’t afford to work with you (or Eman in this case!).

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and go through your purchasing process

Eman’s previous way of landing clients included a “Discovery Call.” We are all for this strategy and we’ll talk more about this marketing bridge in a moment. But, if she were to put herself in her customer’s shoes she might find that a discovery call is a big commitment that someone may not be ready to make, even if they are interested in working with her.

We see this often on people’s websites where the buying process has a point of friction that is slowing down the flow of new inquiries.

When it comes to increasing client/customer conversions, you want to reduce friction as much as humanly possible.

Our recommendation is to add a simple contact form to the bottom of the Services page. If people aren’t ready to hop on a discovery call but might have a question they need answered before becoming a customer, this makes that process easy for THEM.

Add a contact form to reduce buying friction

To recap Your Product or Service Offering…

Streamline your offering(s) as much as you possibly can. Consider creating one Services page and put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Is their ability to start working with you frictionless? Could you give them an option to contact you if they’re not quite ready to buy (or just have questions)?

Make sure your offering is clear, focuses on the specific needs of your ideal customer, and doesn’t require too much effort on their part to make a decision.

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Take a look at your current Services (or Products) page/pages. Do you currently have too many options that might be causing analysis paralysis? Simplify your offerings into ONE page and make them extremely specific for your ideal customer’s problems.

 


Step 3: Marketing Strategy and Customer Journey

Step 3 Marketing Strategy and Customer Journey

There’s a crucial mistake we’ve made many times in business, and it’s one we see people making all the time: We spend 95% of our time creating our offering (or doing our work) and then 5% of the time promoting our offering.

Unfortunately, this is why so many client-based business owners have trouble getting consistent clients. All their time is spent doing the work, and not enough time is spent creating what we call “marketing bridges.”

To get more clients, you need “marketing bridges”

Marketing bridges are what allow people from the Mainland (aka where everyone is hanging out online: social media, searching Google, reading blogs, listening to podcasts, etc) to discover your business and usher them over to your castle (to pay you!)

We can best sum this up in this fun little GIF:

Marketing Bridges connect your customer with your product

A marketing bridge’s job is to lead people on a journey from stranger to customer.

We want to give Eman a LOT of credit here! Most people don’t have a solid marketing bridge in place. After a quick peruse of her website, we discovered Eman’s method of converting strangers to customers was already in place šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘ (yay Eman!)

  • Someone lands on her website ā†’
  • They download a helpful e-book ā†’
  • They get added to her automated welcome email series ā†’
  • They receive her weekly email newsletter ā†’
  • They book a discovery call ā†’
  • She lands a client! šŸŽ‰

Example of a good cold marketing bridge

WHAT’S GREAT: We call this the “lead magnet marketing bridge” and when done right (you GIVE a ton of value in the lead magnet itself) you can build trust and authority with your potential customer.

IMPROVEMENT: Ensure your lead magnet is speaking to your ideal customer and can help them immediately. Also, if you can create custom-tailored lead magnets on different parts of your site, that’s a bonus! (Example: creating a specific lead magnet related to a specific article.)

Good and bad of lead magnets

When creating lead magnets make sure to get specific

Additional note about lead magnets and email signup forms: Please please please don’t only use pop-ups on your site. If a website visitor uses a pop-up blocker or closes the pop-up quickly and you don’t have a lead magnet (or email signup form) embedded on your website somewhere else, they may never find your marketing bridge!

Don’t be afraid to experiment with multiple marketing bridges on your site!

Having one good marketing bridge, especially for your more cold/passive potential customers is important. But there’s no reason not to try multiple marketing bridges and see which one converts the highest.

We put our heads together and whipped up a second marketing bridge idea for Eman. The idea behind the second marketing bridge is to target online course creators who know they lack clarity in communicating about their course but aren’t quite ready to take that step to book a discovery call. They want to see the value of good copywriting demonstrated. They want to “try before they buy!”

Instead of making the main call to action on her home page to book a discovery call, we developed a compelling low-investment (on Eman’s time) but high-value offer. A potential client would fill out a short survey to submit and Eman would email them with their free “Elevator Course Pitch” and try to then get them booked on a discovery call. This marketing bridge will put Eman in the driver’s seat to directly show her skillset by replying to each person that submits this short survey.

Create a high-touch offering to land more clients

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Too often, client-based biz owners want to create a “set it and forget it” marketing bridge only to realize they’d land WAY MORE clients if they used a more high-touch bridge. If you aren’t getting clients right now, give a more direct connection as a marketing bridge a try and see how it goes.

To recap Marketing Strategy and Customer Journey…

First of all, you MUST have a marketing bridge of some type in place. We have 13 marketing bridge examples we wrote out for you if you don’t know where to start.

To make the most of your marketing bridges and have a high-converting customer journey from the Mainland to your castle:

  1. Create a specific, compelling lead magnet and make it easy for someone to sign up
  2. Add an intermediary step before a discovery call to deliver value to warm leads
  3. Make sure any email signup forms you use are not just in pop-ups

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø If you don’t have a marketing bridge in place at all right now, you need one. If you currently have a marketing bridge but it isn’t helping get you more clients/customers, consider trying a new marketing bridge (maybe even a high-touch one!)

 


Step 4: Content Strategy and Audience Building

Step 4 Audience Building

When it comes to getting more paying clients, they aren’t going to appear out of nowhere AND not every person that visits your website is going to pay you money right away. This probably isn’t breaking news to you.

We believe in a 3-pronged approach to building an audience, and it comes in the form of a salad metaphor. (Yep, salads. We keep it weird around here!)

3-pronged approach to growing an audience

Build the right audience through foundation articles, a consistent email newsletter, and social media content

The great thing about Eman, she was already using our 3-pronged salad metaphor!

As her Brand Foundation focus changes to helping online course creators with sales copywriting, she’s going to need to adjust the first part of her salad.

Foundation articles need to solve problems for your ideal customer.

It was great to find that Eman had written some solid articles. Her speaking voice comes through in her writing and she definitely knows her stuff. But, as she makes the pivot to focus on helping online course creators, we know she has some work ahead of her to optimize existing articles.

We took a look at a couple of article headlines on her blog and rewrote them to be A) more search-friendly and B) more laser-focused to online course creators.

Write foundation articles to help your idea customer

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Foundation articles are NOT etched onto stone tablets. You should check-in on your articles every 6 months and see if there’s room to improve or optimize them.

One of the MOST IMPORTANT things you can do for your business is to send out a consistent helpful email newsletter.

For copywriters like Eman, this is a no-brainer and a must-do. Good thing for us, Eman was already on top of this task too! She forwarded us a bunch of her automated emails and some of her newsletter examples.

However, if you’re not a copywriter, we still believe having a consistent email newsletter is a must-have to grow an audience.

WHAT’S GREAT: Eman already had an automated series of emails that get sent out after someone downloads her lead magnet. She also writes consistently every week to her subscribers. A+++ Eman!

IMPROVEMENT: Shifting the audience to be THE go-to newsletter for online course creators who want tips to communicate their offers better will greatly help her convert subscribers to customers. The more specific the email content, the better!

Write foundation articles to help your idea customer

When it comes to social media, give value where people are and create a cohesive branded experience.

Social media is a giant topic and the advice we’d give varies on the channel, but we primarily focus our efforts on Instagram. Since Eman was on Instagram, we took a look at her feed and found some immediate things she could improve.

WHAT’S GREAT: She’s sharing micro-content to point back to her other articles, e-book, etc and she’s posting consistently.

IMPROVEMENT: Making sure each post delivers value in the app, not just promoting something else. Creating brand consistency would help her posts stand out in people’s feeds and build recognizability.

Give value where your subscribers and followers are on social media

šŸ”„ HOT TIP šŸ”„ Especially on Instagram, don’t simply create a post with the title of an article you recently wrote. Pluck out ONE AMAZING NUGGET that could help someone if they saw that post in their feed. Then, write in the caption that they can read more at the full post (#linkinbio).

To recap Audience Building…

Think of building an audience like building a (delicious… if that’s possible) salad. The key to constructing a salad you actually want to eat and an audience that actually grows is assembling things in the right order.

  1. You start with the lettuce (Foundation Articles)
  2. You add your fixins (Email Newsletter)
  3. Then you pour on your dressing (Social Media)

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Your audience is not going to build itself. Focus less on perfection and more on consistency. Make sure you have 8-10 foundational articles. Then start sending out a helpful weekly email newsletter. THEN, create a consistent promotion schedule on the social media platform that makes the most sense for you and your ideal customer.

 


Step 5: Website Evaluation (with Before and After Designs!)

Step 5 Optimizing Your Website

When Eman submitted our initial Growing Through It survey she wrote something we hear often from online biz owners. We’re paraphrasing, but it goes something like this:

“I know I need to redo my website but I feel completely overwhelmed by the process and don’t know where to start.”

Raise your hand if you’ve been there? šŸ™‹šŸ»ā€ā™€ļøšŸ™‹šŸ»ā€ā™‚ļø

Eman’s website had a great foundation before she reached out to us. But after going through the previous four steps, there are now some immediate improvements we could help her make.

Two exercises we use to evaluate a website’s home page and ensure it’s doing its job

Home Page Exercise #1: The 4Q’s Clarity Test

Right off the bat, within 30 seconds or less, your website’s home page needs to answer four simple questions your ideal customer is thinking. Yes, we’re going to help you (and Eman) read minds. šŸ‘‰šŸ”®šŸ§ 

The four questions your home page needs to answer right away:

  • What do you do?
  • Are you for me?
  • How can you help me?
  • What’s my next step?

4Qs Clarity Test

Now, how you go about answering those questions leads us into the second website evaluation exercise!

Home Page Exercise #2: APSOSA Framework

If you can’t tell, we love metaphors and acronyms around here. APSOSA stands for:

  • Audience (who are they?)
  • Problem (what is the problem they have?)
  • Solution (how does your offering solve the problem?)
  • Outcome (what is the outcome they’ll have?)
  • Sauce (what is your differentiator?)
  • Action (what should they do next?)

Eman’s current website was doing a good job of answering most of the 4Q’s, but we can lend a hand to make sure the messaging aligns with her new specific audience and really sells her copywriting services as the solution to their problem. Here’s the APSOSA Framework filled out for the new InkHouse home page:

APSOSA Framework

Writing out the “answers” to APSOSA helps with the four mind-reading questions. The next step is to take the APSOSA and 4Q’s answers and fit them into a journey a customer can take on a website’s home page. Things like bold headlines, section headers, callouts, etc, become the perfect places to use APSOSA answers!

Without further ado, let’s take a look at Eman’s redesigned home page!

InkHouse website recommendations

InkHouse home page before and after

āœ‹ HEADS UP āœ‹ We realize not everyone is a designer or has a solid grasp of web design. If that’s you and you know your website needs work, it’s absolutely worth the investment to pay a designer. Especially if you run an online business, your site needs to be a reflection of the amazing work you do!

As you can see, the new InkHouse homepage feels a lot more inviting. It feels more friendly and moves a visitors eye down the page rather than needing to read long bits of copy. It aligns more with Eman’s super-fun copywriting style and her personality.

We also took some of the work in the 4Q’s and APSOSA to add a big bold headline, section headers, and organize the elements that matter on her home page in an order that leads the potential customer through a journey to hire Eman.

If you haven’t noticed, we’re over-achievers around here so we also whipped together a new Services page for Eman as well. šŸ¤—šŸ¤—šŸ¤—

We took her new offerings, put them all in one place, added the simple contact form we mentioned earlier, and grabbed a few helpful social proof items (since those are great on Services/Sales pages).

InkHouse Services Page before and after

To recap Website Evaluation…

While design and branding are an important part of the website evaluation process, if you aren’t answering questions your ideal audience is thinking, you’re going to have a beautiful website that does nothing for you.

Our goal for Eman (and for you!) is to feel like her website is now working on her behalf! That the copy, images, calls to action, etc, are setting her up for success in the future.

āš”ļø ACTION STEP FOR YOU āš”ļø Go through our 4Q’s Clarity Test and APSOSA Framework for your home page right now! Do you pass the 4Q’s test? Does your home page hit on all aspects of APSOSA?

 


Conclusion: Let’s Wrap This Sucker Up!

Recapping the InkHouse case study

We made it to the finish line, friends! And while we know this case study touched on a ton of elements of Eman’s business (and hopefully yours), it’s just one piece of the bigger online business puzzle.

šŸ‘‰ Eman still has to deliver on her offering.
šŸ‘‰ She still has to show up for her clients and help them reach the outcomes she’s promising them.
šŸ‘‰ She still has to continue to tweak and test various parts of her marketing and content strategy along the way.
šŸŽ‰ But she GETS to do all of these things!

Running your own business gives you a ton of freedom but it can also be incredibly overwhelming.

Our hope with this “Growing Through It” series is we’ve removed a big chunk of that overwhelm and given you a ton of actionable things you can do in your business RIGHT NOW.

Ready to make a few changes in your business? Go get after it, friend!

A Simple Guide to Naming Your Business

July 28, 2019

The idea of naming your business or product can feel daunting and overwhelming.

The whole thing feels soā€¦ permanent, doesnā€™t it?

Believe me, Iā€™ve been there. But the goal of this guide is to lead you through a simple step-by-step process that will eliminate that pressure as much as possible.

If you invest the time in each section of this guide, it will provide you with the prompts necessary to come up with a name that offers a meaningful, clever and timeless foundation for your brand.

Let’s look at four tips for making the most of this naming process…

Naming Your Business Tip #1: Set The Mood

Make sure that youā€™re in a motivated, energized state when you sit down to begin. We want those creative juices to be flowing like crazy, and if youā€™re trying to tackle this guide after a 12-hour workday when your mind feels fried, you may not be in the best frame of mind to reap its benefits.

Naming Your Business Tip #2: Go Easy On Yourself

In order for ideas to thrive, they need to feel free to roam. As you dive in, try to limit the pressure you put on yourself to come up with the Best Business Name Of All Time – at least at first. This open-minded approach will give your brain the safe space it needs to form connections and set fire to sparks of inspiration.

Naming Your Business Tip #3: Give Ideas The Time They Need To Marinate

There may be times during this guide that you feel youā€™ve hit a creative wall. Thatā€™s okay. Donā€™t try to force it. If you find yourself stuck, walk away for a bit and let your ideas marinate. You want to build in the necessary time to let your mind mull things over and to sit with your ideas so that you feel youā€™re making the best decision for your business.

Naming Your Business Tip #4: HAVE FUN!

This is YOUR business after all. Itā€™s your idea that youā€™re ushering into existence and this should be an exciting part of that process, so enjoy it!

Before we dive in and start brainstorming, letā€™s briefly review WHY coming up with a great name is so vital to your business and your brand.

Why coming up with an effective name for your business is important

Your business name is the foundation of your brand. Itā€™s one of the most important ways you can make a first impression on your potential clients or customers.

When people hear or see the name of your business, theyā€™ll begin forming an immediate perception of your company.

  • Are you trendy and cool, or trusted and professional?
  • Is it easy for someone to understand right away what you sell or what service you provide?
  • Is your name memorable and something they can recall (or Google) later?

A great name can also contribute to the marketing of your business.

Is it catchy? Easy to remember?

A name is important because itā€™s the foundation that you lay everything else in your brand over top of. In fact, itā€™s likely the single most defining element of your brand because it informs all other parts.

Once youā€™ve decided on a name, it can be extremely difficult to change down the road, and if you do, you run the risk of losing any brand equity that you might have built up over time. Thatā€™s all the more reason to come up with the right name right off the bat – one that not only feels aligned with the business you want to build, but one that can grow and adapt to your various business goals in the future.

The good news is, this guide will walk you through these important considerations, and many more. The result will be a name that provides you that excellent foundation and first impression youā€™re looking for.

 


Naming Your Business Part One: Brainstorm Bonanza

In order to arrive at that perfect name – whether it be for your business, your product, or your latest e-course – you want to start with as much relevant inspiration as you can.

To provide you with that inspiration, weā€™re going to come up with as many words as possible as potential jumping-off points. Think of these words as little seedlings that will hopefully grow into one fully mature, grand oak of a name.

The important part here in allowing your brain to get its creative juices flowing is to take the pressure off.

You want to create an environment without criticism or judgment. So, as you move through this phase, donā€™t worry about which words you like or dislike right now or what sounds like a great business name and what doesnā€™t. This stage is one of those rare instances when quantity outweighs quality.

At this stage, there is no such thing as a bad idea.

We don’t mind ā€œbad ideasā€ at this stage of the process (brainstorming). Bad ideas can often spark the inspiration necessary for good ideas, so try to keep an open mind with yourself!

To get this brainstorm party started, write down a list of words based on the following prompts. If you can, try to come up with at least 20-30 per list!

A. List words that come to mind when you think of the products you want to sell, the service you want to provide, or WHAT your business does. As many as you can! (Example: Are you a coffee shop? Some words that come to mind: beans, hot, brew, pour, mug, foam, grounds, roast, cup, etc.)

B. List adjectives and attributes that you want people to associate with your business. (Example: Is your coffee shop all about quality coffee sourced from around the globe and giving back to those farm communities? In that case, your words might be: caring, kind, good, giving, helpful, grateful, delicious, global, quality, craft, etc.)

C. (Optional): Is your business personal to you? Maybe itā€™s a personal brand or a family business? Also write down words that have personal meaning to you. (ie. names, nicknames, street names you grew up on, areas of your hometown, words that have significance from your childhood, etc.)

Warning! If you choose to incorporate a personal name or place into your business name, be careful. Do you plan to sell your company in the future or transfer ownership? What happens to Uncle Bertā€™s Bistro when Uncle Bert wants to retire? If youā€™re a video production company in Michigan and want to go by ā€œMichigan Media Houseā€ are you limiting your potential customer base? If you decide youā€™re willing to travel for projects, will customers think you only service the Michigan area? These are things you want to be mindful of if you decide to include these personal elements in your name.

D. Now go one step further and think of metaphors or related words for some of the words you wrote in A + B above. Think of what other words come to mind when you think of those words (eg. quick >> rabbit; jewel >> precious; cute >> button.) Let your brain run wild! (Based on my coffee shop example: craft >> maker, blacksmith, apprentice. Giving >> hands, heart. etc.)

Pro tip! Donā€™t be afraid to use Thesaurus.com or The Free Dictionaryā€™s Idiom Search tool. They can lead you to unexpected words and phrases you may not have thought of!

 


Naming Your Business Part Two: Playing Favorites

Remember how in Part One there were no bad ideas and everyone was welcome at the party? Well, Part Two is when we hire a bouncer to work the door and bad ideas start being asked to leave. This stage is when we take your list of words and narrow it down.

Revisit your list of words from Part One and pick out the ones that stand out to you.

Pay attention to the gut reaction you have when you hear a word or read it.

  • Does it feel interesting or familiar to you?
  • Does it give you a good feeling when you say it out loud?
  • Does it have positive images and connotations that immediately come to mind?

If so, circle those words on your list, and re-write them down!

 


Naming Your Business Part Three: Creative Combinations

Once you have a solid list of words that you feel good about, then itā€™s time to take those seeds and finagle/arrange/combine/transform them into a business name.

Imagine that your words from Part Two are your Legos — theyā€™re the building blocks of your name. Now itā€™s time for us to put them together in different ways and see what we can create.

Explore each of the following prompts using your ā€œbuilding blockā€ words and write down potential names that you can form:

  1. Combine two separate words to make a compound business name. (Ex. SkillShare; Salesforce;)
  2. Take just parts from two separate words to make a one-word business name (Ex. Groupon [group+coupon])
  3. Adjoin two words with a ā€œ+ā€ or ā€œ&ā€ to come up with something more unique. (Ex. Wit & Delight; Crate + Barrel;)
  4. Combine one or two of your words with a more descriptive, business-related word to give people an idea of what you do. (Ex. Rifle Paper Co.; 9th Letterpress;)

Heads-up! Make sure that if you go this route, your business name is conceptually sound and not overly trendy. (For instance, even though Iā€™m a coffee shop that sells high-quality coffee, ā€œQualiCofā€ is probably not the most timeless brand name.) Put yourself in the shoes of your consumer and ask, would I scoff or roll my eyes at this name? If the answer is yes, then donā€™t choose it!

 


Naming Your Business Part Four: Picking ā€œThe Oneā€

Once you have some different potential names written down from Part Three, go through each one using the following questions to narrow down your list even further:

A. Does this name sound good to me when I say it out loud?

B. Does this name align with the mission of my business and how I want people to perceive it?

C. If I told people this name in passing, would they find it easy to remember/easy to spell?

D. Do I plan to expand my business to include other products or services in the future, and if so, does this name give me the flexibility to do so?

As you go through your list, prioritize your favorite names by writing a 1, 2, 3, and so on next to them. Youā€™ll want multiple options in case your nameā€™s domain isnā€™t available or your social media handles are taken. These are important factors that weā€™ll go through in Part Five.

But first, take a moment to look back at your list.

Do you still feel like you havenā€™t found ā€œthe one?ā€ when it comes to naming your business?

Do you have a few good leads but nothing that feels completely right? Thatā€™s okay! Sometimes these things need a little bit of time to marinate.

Try walking away for a while and letting your subconscious stew on your list from Part Three. Play a game, do some exercise or tackle an art project. Allowing your mind to activate different areas will give your creative muscles a rest, and itā€™s likely that when you come back to this guide, youā€™ll have a renewed perspective on things.

Avoid mental roadblocks

Tip: We recommend getting out in nature if you’re hitting a mental roadblock. It ALWAYS helps us!

You may even want to go back to Part One and start the process over again.

Try adding new words to your list. Are there words that continue to come back up over and over again?

As I mentioned in the beginning of this guide, your name is the foundation for your brand so you want to make sure it feels right. Have patience and keep the ideas flowing until you reach a conclusion that feels like it fits.

If you DO feel like youā€™ve found the right fit, continue to on!

 


Naming Your Business Part Five: The Final Checklist

Now that you have a name you feel confident about, you want to make sure that itā€™s viable in terms of intellectual property, marketing, and social media. Here is an important list of factors to consider when making sure your business name is available for marketing purposes:

Is your domain name available?

You can use a free tool like Lean Domain Search to search for your business name and several other domains including your desired name.

Is your business name available on social media?

Is your new name or a version of it available across popular social media platforms in case you want to use them to promote? You can use Namech_k to easily check ALL social media sites in one spot (pretty neat, huh?)

Does your business name already have a trademark?

Search in the federal database if you’re in the US to check the trademark database (wow that website is awful!) You can also Google your business name to make sure that another popular business isnā€™t using it even if they donā€™t have a trademark.

Lastly, does this name differentiate you from your competition?

Is it memorable and different enough that you will stand out? Does it feel like it can stand on its own above anything similar? For us, there are other sites that use the phrase “Wandering Aimfully” but it’s verrrry far and few between.

And guess what, if you make it through all those questions unscathed?

Congratulations, you’ve succeeded in naming your business or product!

Youā€™ve put in the work necessary to create the best possible foundation for your business and brand. Now itā€™s time to buy your domain, grab your social media handles and launch your business!

If this guide was helpful, consider sharing it using the “T’it” or “F’it” buttons below šŸ‘

Building A Brand From Start to Finish

June 29, 2019


Oh hello there šŸ‘‹! The blind auction to purchase our first brand and website has completed! But GUESS WHAT? We’re making more Squarespace Templates… Enter your email below to make sure you don’t miss out on the next one!

 


Introduction: What Is This Project And Why Are We Doing It?

We’re building a brand and Squarespace site from start to finish and sharing everything along the way.

We’ll be creating a fictional brand (complete with a logo and custom brand elements) and then selling the entire thing in a fun way.

We love branding, design, building Squarespace websites, sharing our processes, documenting the journey, making money in unique ways, and THIS experiment is bringing all of those elements together!

What started as a simple comment I made to Jason (ā€œI think I want to get back into doing some design workā€) has turned into the in-depth post you are currently reading. Jason and I knew we didn’t want to actually take on a client and deal with the back-and-forth nature of that relationship, as we did that for years and it’s not what we’re focusing on now. So instead, we asked ourselves, how could we get creative with this idea and do something different with brand and website design?

Watch the introduction video Jason and I recorded about what we’re calling Building A Squarespace Site from Start to Finish (or BASSSF, as Jason loooves to say):

 


What can you expect from Building A Squarespace Site from Start to Finish (BASSSF)?

In the next couple sections of this post, you’ll get to watch me break down every step as IF I were working with a client. I’ll be walking you through the processes I’ve honed over the years, which include:

  • BRANDING: Doing the initial branding exploration (a mood board and tone words)
  • BRANDING: Creating the brand assets themselves (colors, logo, and graphic elements)
  • SQUARESPACE SITE: Setting up the Squarespace site (initial setup and style page)
  • SQUARESPACE SITE: Building the layout of each Squarespace page and completing the branded design of the site (home, about, services, product, etc)
  • CUSTOMIZATION: * All the ways someone could customize the brand and Squarespace site to fit their needs!

Building A Squarespace Site from Start to Finish aka BASSSF

Once the brand and Squarespace site are completed, you’ll be able to buy them in a unique way!

We love doing things differently around Wandering Aimfully. We believe thinking outside the proverbial box can not only help you stand out but it can help you generate revenue. Well, we’re putting that belief to the test with this project.

At the end of this post, ONE person (or company) will be able to purchase the completed brand and Squarespace site. But, we aren’t just slapping a price tag on things, we have something fun up our sleeves.

If you enjoy projects like this, jump our email list so you don’t miss when we announce the next one:

BASSSF Part Two: Branding

Creating The Brand from Scratch: Mood Board, Logo, Colors, and Brand Elements

Hello friends and welcome to the Week One update of BASSSF! šŸ‘‹ If you were wondering, yes, Jason is constantly saying “BASSSSSSFahhh” around the house (not just in these videos).

Starting with color palette inspiration to create a mood board

As youā€™ll see in the mood board video below, I deviated from my normal branding process just a bit by starting with color palette inspiration and building out the mood board from that starting point.

If I was working with a client to build this brand, I would go through the steps that I layout inside Better Branding Course (our in-depth branding course included in our Wandering Aimfully membership #shamelessplug) to uncover the clientā€™s Brand Story. This would include things like:

  • Identifying their ideal client/customer,
  • defining their brand mission,
  • and ultimately arriving at five brand tone words that would connect their unique brand personality to their ideal customer.

However, since I didnā€™t really have a business or person to inform my tone words, I was left to my own devices to come up with my own. Rather than pull five random words out of thin air, I let creative inspiration guide me to a color palette I thought was interesting and I assembled my tone words as I found each of my mood board images.

What began as a simple four-swatch color palette, evolved into a mood board that I felt represented these five tone words: creative, organic, quirky, bold, and refined.

Mood Board Sneak Peek

Why even build a mood board in the first place?

I know this project is supposed to focus on building a Squarespace website, but in my experience designing something just to ā€œlook goodā€ isnā€™t fulfilling or challenging. In order to end up with a site that I felt could translate to a real business out there, I needed to know what ā€œbrandā€ my final website would be promoting.

Even if youā€™re a business with an existing brand youā€™re happy with, I recommend putting together a new mood board if youā€™re planning on refreshing your website. You may just find new details and design inspiration that elevates your final site that much more.

 
Once I had my mood board finalized, it was time to turn that into a brand that would inform the design of my website.

Many of our members inside Wandering Aimfully and those of you who read our content primarily fall into the category of ā€œfreelancer looking to also sell digital products.ā€ I knew I wanted my final site to be able to serve an ultimate business owner who would need a way to both promote their services AND their products. So, I decided my placeholder brand is a ā€œcreative studioā€ who offers marketing consulting packages and an online marketing course. This, of course, could easily be swapped out for any kind of freelancer. A copywriter who offers writing services and a copywriting course, or a designer who offers design services and a design course. You get the idea.

Once I had that general avatar in mind, it was time to build a logo, choose my typography styles, and come up with some additional graphic elements that would make this feel like a well-rounded brand.

For those of you who arenā€™t full-time designers, making the leap from a mood board of random images to suddenly picking out fonts and designing a logo is daunting. Thatā€™s why in this video I walk you through a process I go over extensively inside Better Branding Course called ā€œbuilding your visual vocabulary.ā€

What does it mean to build a visual vocabulary?

Building a visual vocabulary simply means accumulating an understanding of how certain visual details translate to an emotion, tone, or feeling.

Why does a dark indigo watercolor painting evoke a sense of moodiness? Why does a skinny serif font feel traditional and delicate while a thick sans-serif font feels bold and modern? These are the connections you want to pay attention to and use them to build a rolodex of design decisions.

This will make it much easier to turn your mood board and tone words into a brand identity design (logo, color palette, typography, graphic elements, etc.)

In the Brand Styles video (below), youā€™ll see me speak to each of the tone words and what visual details in my mood board connect to those tone words. Then, youā€™ll see me take that detective work and turn it into a list of graphic elements or ā€œbuilding blocksā€ to formulate my brand.

Youā€™ll see my tricks for testing out custom fonts and graphics before you buy them, and youā€™ll see me experiment with creating my own graphic elements based on the inspiration found in my mood board.

 

Without further ado, here’s the finished fictional brand: āœØ Galactic Creative Studio šŸ›ø

Hereā€™s a look at the final brand board. Now that we have this completed, we’re ready to START the Squarespace website build next week!

Finished brand board for BASSSF

BASSSF Part Three: Squarespace

Building A Squarespace Site: Initial Setup, Adding The Brand, Designing The Pages

Alright, we are back with another exciting installment of BASSSSF! Whoā€™s ready to actually jump into Squarespace?!

Now that we have solidified the brand, itā€™s time to bring that brand to life by creating a unique and custom website design. The first step in the process for me is to pick a Squarespace template and set up the basic pages in the site. Lately, Iā€™ve been using the Brine Squarespace template because it has all the features and flexibility any small business could need and plenty of design options to choose from.

Squarespace Brine Template

I took a few minutes to plan out what pages I wanted this basic site to have, as well as to brainstorm some ideas about what content would live on each page so I could make sure this site had the basic necessities a future owner would need to run their business. I also sketched out a VERY basic site map just to figure out what pages I wanted to have in my navigation. For a more complicated site, I would advise spending more time to think through the architecture of the site, but in this case, every page is basically accessible from the home page so itā€™s pretty straightforward. I did decide that I wanted to separate my pages into a primary and secondary navigation, just to keep the main options in the navigation as streamlined as possible and really lead users to the two money-making pages on the site, being ā€œWork With Usā€ and ā€œCourse.ā€

Site Map for BASSSF

With my site architecture decided, I easily add these various pages to my Squarespace site in the corresponding navigation sections. Before I add any content to those pages, though, thereā€™s a very important step in the process I have to tackle: my brand styles page!

Creating a Brand Styles page in Squarespace

A very important step in the process that youā€™ll watch me complete in the first video below is creating a ā€œBrand Stylesā€ page in my Squarespace site. I do this before I ever layout any content on my pages.

A Brand Styles page is one page where you can add basic content blocks you know youā€™ll be using throughout your site and style them to your liking using the site styles settings in Squarespace.

For my Brand Styles page, I add all my headings and paragraph text (in index sections with a background banner and without), all the various image block style designs, and a few blog summary blocks. This way, I can take a half-hour or so to decide on which brand fonts to apply to my headings, how I want to apply my brand colors to various elements on the site, and I can install my custom brand font before I even lay out my pages.

Isn’t the Brand Styles page super fun??

Brand Styles Page in Squarespace for BASSSF

Adding the creation of a Brand Styles page as a step in my Squarespace design process has been a GAME CHANGER. It allows me to apply my brand identity elements (fonts, colors, etc.) and style some basic content blocks before I ever start adding content to my pages. This does two things: 1) It saves me time from having to adjust my site styles every time I add a content block during my layout phase and 2) it reduces decision fatigue during my layout process because Iā€™ve already decided on most of the visual styling. Plus, after the end of laying out the content on my pages and inserting all my content blocks, my site already looks incredibly ā€œbrandedā€ and then all I have to worry about is final customizations and design details.

 

How to decide on the Squarespace page layouts?

Once the Brand Styles page is created, the next step in the process is to actually add content to each page and decide on the overall layoutā€”the order and arrangement of elements on the page. Again, before I ever hop into Squarespace I like to sketch things out just a bit on a loose wireframe. This allows me to see at a glance whether Iā€™ll need text vs. images or any other visual components in order to communicate the basic things I want to include.

For the more complex pages that might require more information, Iā€™ll turn those into ā€œindexā€ pages in Squarespace, which just gives you the ability to stack multiple sections on top of one another.

I start with my home page, sectioning out the content I want to include as needed and then adding the basic content blocks that I need. For example, if I know I want an image in a particular section, Iā€™ll add an image block and play around with the design settings to utilize the different image styles that Squarespace offers. (This is also when itā€™s nice to have pre-branded elements thanks to our Brand Styles page stage of the process.)

Squarespace Homepage Design Setup for BASSSF

I DON’T obsess over the final layout at this point in the site creation process. My only concerns are that a) all the content I want on the page has been added via content blocks, b) itā€™s in the order I want it scrolling down the page, and c) Iā€™ve thought about arranging the position of elements in a visually pleasing way.

I do this for every single page of the site, adding text, images, buttons, and galleries where I see fit and making sure to include filler text and images so I can start to see the visual design of each page emerge.

Watch as I lay out the home page and about pages, and share some of my basic tips for this layout stage of the process…

 

Finalizing the Squarespace website design with customizations and details

Okay, once I had each pageā€™s basic layout and content solidified, it was time to crank up the magic! This last phase of the process is where the design really starts to feel custom and one-of-a-kind.

I start with the home page and ask myself how I can incorporate design details and customizations to bring more life and visual interest to my basic layout.

These details basically fall into one of these three categories:

  1. Customizing my section background banners
  2. Adding graphic embellishments to my images
  3. Sprinkling in design details and content separators

I use custom background banners to layer in my branded graphic elements and break up the recognizable ā€œstripedā€ look of a Squarespace template index page. Then, for my image blocks, I embellish my photos with things like borders or shapes to create a more custom and finished effect that goes beyond the standard website photo. And lastly, I pepper in small graphics and content separators to add unexpected moments between more standard layout elements like photos and text blocks.

Watch as I go through each of these design additions to customize the home page:

 

Pro-tip: I use the home page as a sort of sandbox to test out different design executions before jumping into any other pages.

Once Iā€™m happy with the final home page design, thatā€™s when I repeat those design executions in similar ways throughout the rest of my pages to make the whole site more custom. After all my pages are designed, thatā€™s when I head back into my Squarespace settings and finalize every last detail like my favicon, styling the different add-ons like an announcement bar or email pop-up and optimize my designs for mobile.

BASSSF Part Four: The Big Reveal

The Big Reveal of the Finished Brand and Website!

Sound the trumpets, itā€™s time for the big reeeeveeeeeal! We are so excited to share the finished website for BASSSF and showcase the brand in action…

 

In that reveal video (not an HGTV show, sorry Jason) we talked in detail about the finished website, but hereā€™s a list of everything that was completed in the final week:

  • Finished the Home Page layout and design
  • Finished the About Page layout and design
  • Finished the Services Page layout and design
  • Finished the Course Page layout and design
  • Finished the Blog Page layout and design
  • Finished the Blog Post layout and design
  • Finished the FAQ Page layout and design
  • Finished the Contact Page layout and design
  • Added a custom 404 Page
  • Added a custom Email Popup
  • Added a Locked Page
  • Added a Cookies banner
  • Made sure everything was responsive for tablet and mobile!

WHEW! Thatā€™s quite the list of stuff to accomplish and make sure was branded and looking sharp.

Hereā€™s a quick look at the ā€œbeforeā€ (Squarespaceā€™s Brine Template) and the ā€œafterā€…

BASSSF Before and After


šŸ˜ Check out the completed site! šŸ˜

Head on over to the Galactic Creative Studio website and click around!

You can also click this fancy image too…

Galactic Creative Studio - BASSSF Finished

How To Build A Squarespace Site from Start To Finish

BASSSF Part Five: Buy the Brand and Site

[SOLD] How We Sold the Brand and Site…

If you watched the reveal video then you know we sold the entire BASSSF brand and Squarespace site using a blind auction. But if you didn’t watch the video, we simply held a blind auction where people submitted bids to buy the brand and site over a 5-day period.

Once the auction ended, we contacted the high bidder and started the process of payment and transferring all the goodies. And a friendly reminder: This was NOT a template or kit that will be sold again! Only ONE person/company now owns the Galactic Creative Studio brand and site šŸ‘

Thanks for checking out our BASSSF project and we hope you enjoyed it! If you want to see more projects like this from us in the future, hop on our email list and stay tuned!

Develop a Kickass Personal Brand and Ignite Your Pilot Light of Weirdness

November 9, 2015

For as long as I can remember, thereā€™s been a constant feeling inside me that I can only best describe as a pilot light of weirdness. This “pilot light of weirdness” could also beĀ called your personal brand.

My pilot light comes in the form of my unwillingness to let the boundaries set by other people stop me from doing things differently. Your pilot light might be your creativity, the way you write, how you see the world, something unique that sets you apart.

Itā€™s time you started to embrace your own inner pilot light and stop letting other people hold you back.

 


We Control Our Personal Brands, Not Other People

As Iā€™ve grown older Iā€™ve learned that people and society try to snuff out our pilot lights. People have experienced things in their lives that have caused them harm, stress, or anguish. Due to their own experiences, they project these feelings on anyone within reach.

Often times, people donā€™t even realize theyā€™re projecting their fears on others. But at the same time, they donā€™t have the self-awareness to take a step back and realize people need to experience things for themselves.

The fears and hesitations of other people shouldn’t hold you back.

Once I came to this realization about my inner pilot light and decided I no longer wanted the fears and hesitations of other people to hold me back, I started actually adding fuel to my pilot light, effectively creating a roaring blaze of weirdness. Little by little I started giving myself permission to chase my big ideas and in ways that felt 100% authentic to me.

I didnā€™t know it a few years ago, but I was starting to build my personal brand.

This continually-added ā€œfuelā€ (read: chasing my big ideas and ignoring the fear of others) has led to some of my most successful moves in business. At the same time, I’ve been able to create a name for myself and stand out from people in the same entrepreneurial space. Projects like IWearYourShirt, BuyMyLastName, SponsorMyBook, and BuyMyFuture, are all examples of turning my pilot light way up and embracing who I am and what I stand for.

But letā€™s dive a little deeper. When I say ā€œfuel,ā€ what exactly do I mean?

Letā€™s look at the example of my personal brand and my book, Creativity For Sale

When I made the decision I was going to write a book about my entrepreneurial journey in 2013, I did what any well-intentioned future author would do: I looked at the landscape I was about to play in.

The first step in that process was searching the word ā€œentrepreneurshipā€ in Amazonā€™s books section. I discovered there were over 50,000+ results.

Uh oh.

I was immediately hit with the pilot light dimming question: ā€œWhat do I possibly have to say about entrepreneurship that 50,000+ other authors havenā€™t already said???ā€

But the key word there is ā€œI.ā€

  • I have unique experiences
  • I have my own personal views and opinions
  • I have my own style of writing (and storytelling)

You may not be a writer, but I guarantee that have your own unique experiences and personal views/stories that are different from everyone else. These specific things are your fuel!

I didnā€™t learn to embrace these things on my own when writing my book. Luckily I had a super awesome book authoring coach named Lizzie who helped me realize this. Had I not had her in my corner, I probably would have let imposter syndrome take over and itā€™s likely that I wouldnā€™t have written the most authentic and personal book that I could have.

During that writing process, Lizzie kept telling me to put more ā€œmeā€ into my writing. She kept pushing me to focus on how I would tell a story and how I would handle a situation or issue (that I was writing about). Those notes of encouragement from Lizzie were fuel on my inner fire.

Creativity For SaleĀ (my first book) has been never been a ā€œbest selling book,ā€ but those types of labels donā€™t matter to me.

I care more that I get an email or two per week from people whoā€™ve read my book and how much of an impact itā€™s made on their lives. How much theyā€™ve appreciated my unique outlook and the way that I write. And if numbers matter to you dear reader of this article, Iā€™ve sold over 15,000 copies of my tiny self-published book. Not too shabby, eh?

Out of 50,000+ booksĀ on Amazon, I was able to stand out from all of them for a large number of readers because of who I am and embracing my unique personal brand.

Youā€™re probably not going to create something thatā€™s never been created before

This is OKAY! In fact, creating a product or service thatā€™s already been created shows thereā€™s a market for it. Itā€™s much easier to build a successful business when a market already exists for your product.

Almost everyone knows that Google wasnā€™t the first search engine created. But because the founders of Google had their own stories, technical skills, and personal views, theyā€™ve been able to build one of the most profitable companies in the world (leaving every search engine in the dust, even Dogpile!).

Whether youā€™re writing a book, creating an online course, building a SaaS app, doing coaching/mentoring, are a realtor, marketing consultant, public speaker, or building the next great search engine, there is a clear path to success:

Put as much YOU into your product as possible. No one can compete with you on that.

Here are a few questions you can answer that will help your personal brand stand out from a crowded landscape:

  1. What do you stand for? What are your core values?
  2. What are you not willing to sacrifice for your customers?
  3. What is quirky or weird about you?
  4. What life stories can you share that people can latch onto and relate with?
  5. What do people tell you is different about you?

Those items are your fuel for your pilot light. They are the things that will make up your unique personal brand. And trust me, they are also the same things that will help you make more money if you embrace and share them.

Everyone can compete with you on features.

Everyone can compete with you with knowledge.

No one can compete with you on your personal experiences, stories, and unique outlooks.

Start putting more YOU into what you do and stop letting the fears and hesitations of other people dim your pilot light of weirdness.

Anchor Your Brand In Authenticity

February 3, 2015

Every business owner wants to have a successful business where they get to do what they love without the fear that theyā€™ll have to close up shop and go back to a job they hate, right?Ā For the purposes of this discussion,Ā success = freedom and flexibility. And joy, don’t forget joy!

But how do we get there? How do we make sure we’re building something that will succeed?Ā 

I don’t believe there’s any single blueprint or how-to manual, but there IS one thing I’ve discovered from my own experience that I feel significantly contributes to a successful AND personally fulfilling business (they don’t always go hand-in-hand, even though they should.)

That one thing? Authenticity.

I know the word gets thrown around a lot these days all willy nilly like, so let me be specific.Ā An authentic brand is one that communicates the WHOLE of who you are or who your business is. One that speaks to your contradictions, your personality and – most importantly – your true values.

Authenticity isn’t about putting your best foot forward. Itā€™s putting both of your feet forward and owning those dang feet with all that you are.

The more of yourself, your personality, your values –Ā those intangible and complex things that makes you who you are –Ā the more of THAT STUFF that you can bake that into your business, the better.

Why, you ask? Well, here are just a handful of good reasons:


Why It’s Important To Anchor Your Brand in Authenticity

1. You get to work with people that ā€œget youā€ from the get go.Ā 

When you declare your values, you attract the people you want to attract and you repel those that would be a nightmare for you. Right there on the About page of my website, I communicate clearly and directly what I care about:

 

 

If any of those things don’t make sense to someone or if they get scared off, perfect. They won’t ask me to design their brands and it saves me the risk of possibly working with someone that I don’t jive with.

I can genuinely say that the more I stick to these values and the more I consistently communicate them in everything I put out (including these emails), the more I get emails and project inquiries from people I would consider my dream clients. (And more quality project leads means more stable profit for my business, so that’s a very great thing.)

Driving away clients and customers that will dim your light should be equally as important to you as attracting your dream clients and customers.

ā€œDriving away clients and customers that will dim your light should be equally as important to you as attracting your dream clients and customers.ā€

If youā€™re wasting time on people that donā€™t get you, it will drain your energy and that will negatively affect every aspect of your business.

2. You will build an engaged, passionate community.Ā 

If you have your own business, as I mentioned, your goals are likely two-fold: 1) financial stability and 2) flexibility with your time. I can say confidently that after one year of being in business and clawing my way through the dark, I finally have a strong semblance of both.

But how did I do it?Ā I did it by finding all of you guys.Ā People whose values are aligned with mine. Positive, self-made, driven, creative people. If you signed up for this list it means something I was doing spoke to you. It resonated.

And that’s because I made sure that I had a clear vision of who I was and who I wanted to serve.

To further illustrate how authenticity is the root of a successful business, here’s a handy dandy diagram I drew up (don’t worry, we do diagrams differently around here… it’s a flower!)

The takeaway?

If you want a flourishing, thriving business – one that allows you to bloom at your fullest potential as well – then root it in authenticity.

ā€œIf you want a flourishing, thriving business – one that allows you to bloom at your fullest potential as well – then root it in authenticity.ā€

3. You will stand out from the crowd.Ā 

Here’s what’s hilarious about marketing: everyone is always trying to spy on everyone elseā€™s paper, see whatā€™s popular or what the best practices are for product launches, website strategy, copy-writing…Ā literally everything. (And, listen, I get it, it can be tempting to try and ā€œhackā€ the system by learning from those that have come before you.)

But the funny part is that, in doing so,Ā you blend in with the rest of the herd.Ā But on the other hand, the more you play to who you are and ignore “convention” or marketing to the middle-of-the-road masses, the more you in fact become marketable because you stand out.Ā You become memorable.

A quick aside about this: when I was working on the branding for Made Vibrant way back last January, I intentionally baked in all the things that felt uniquely me: bright colors, lots of black and white, hand drawn elements, big, bold type.

But all the successful, popular blogs and sites I saw were minimal with tons of white space,Ā muted colors, and airy, ethereal photos.

I freaked out.Ā Are people going to stumble on my site and think Iā€™m crazy? Am I doing this wrong?

But you know what,Ā why did the Wall Street Journal reach out to me when they came across one of my blog posts? Why did Hilary Rushford, a busy lady with a successful business in her own right, agree to let me interview her for my self-made guide? BOTH mentioned that my brand and website made an impression on them and that’s why they wanted to speak to me. I spoke clearly to who I was and what I was about and that stands out.

That is what I want for you to remember.

Draw strength from your individuality. Let your authenticity be your anchor in this crazy world of entrepreneurship and marketing.

ā€œDraw strength from your individuality. Let your authenticity be your anchor in this crazy world of entrepreneurship and marketing.ā€

Don’t be afraid to take a stand on who you are, because I’m telling you, THAT is what will guide you to a business that feels fulfilling and true to your soul.

This week your challenge is to write down five words that encompass the AUTHENTICITY of you or your business.Ā 

This exercise is one that I do with all my branding clients so that we can discover five tone words that will guide the visual style of their brand.Ā When youā€™re making decisions in your business, youā€™ll be able to look at these five tone words and use them as your filter, your guidepost, your North Star.

For example,Ā the Made Vibrant brand is supposed to be approachable,Ā vibrant, empowering,Ā creativeĀ and soulful. (Not every brand element has to include elements of all five, but hopefully the full experience of the brand encompasses all five.)

I won’t share all five of last week’s coaching clients, but to give you more of an idea, some of their words included:Ā graceful,Ā free-spirited,Ā quirky, and energetic.

So then,Ā what are your tone words? Where does your authenticity come from?

Let’s encourage each other to be who we are, and let’s build some kick-ass business while we’re at it. What’dya say?

Visual Vocab 02: A Bold, Urban + Graphic Mood Board

February 6, 2014

Cominā€™ atcha with a brand new Visual Vocab today featuring bold, urban and graphic inspiration.

My style tends to bend toward this look a bit anyway ā€“ the high contrast, bright colors, graphic elements ā€“ so itā€™s no surprise to you guys that this week I selfishly chose these words from the word bank.

One subtlety thatā€™s worth pointing out is that word ā€œurban.ā€ Urban might mean different things to different people, but when I picture that word I think of an old downtown concrete-scape. I think of exposed brick and plastered walls. Basically to me it means texture. Thatā€™s why I love the pink brick photo, the abstract art piece behind the neon dipped vases, and the wood that the stag head is on. If you swapped out ā€œurbanā€ with ā€œcleanā€ in this case, it would have been a very different board because I would have steered clear of those imperfect and textured pieces.

 

 

Big JoyĀ /Ā Abstract ArtĀ /Ā Teal DeerĀ /Ā B&W LetteringĀ /Ā Exposed BrickĀ /Ā Stella CabinetĀ /Ā Dipped Vases

While I know the neon trend has kind of run its course, to me this isnā€™t quite that. Itā€™s a really fine line between neon and graphic brights, but hopefully this treads that line. Anyway, Iā€™ll definitely be keeping this one in my back pocket. Hope you guys enjoy!

Visual Vocab 01: Fresh, Feminine + Adventurous Mood Board

January 21, 2014

Throughout the process of taking on more branding projects these past few months, Iā€™ve found that one of my favorite parts of the entire process is collaborating with my clients on their 3-5 brand tone words.

If any of you have been following along from the beginning, you know I have a tendency to be a tad bit long-winded. I canā€™t help it ā€“ I love words! I adore how one word can carry with it SO much below the surface! Moods, perceived meanings, connotationsā€¦ words are so much more than, well, words.

Anyway, thatā€™s probably why I love coming up with these brand tone words. I use these 3-5 words in combination with one another to guide the look and feel of the entire brand Iā€™m creating, and I choose them very, very carefully. I also find it challenging in the best way because itā€™s not the words individually that help form the final vision; itā€™s their collective feeling. For exampleā€¦ ā€œvintageā€ might immediately bring to my mind one image (an eclectic attic of sepia-toned artifacts?), but balance ā€œvintageā€ with ā€œsimpleā€ and it changes that image (scratch the cluttered attic; Iā€™m thinking a plain red hat box with a pair of white gloves resting on top). Once more, throw together ā€œvintage,ā€ ā€œsimple,ā€ AND ā€œyouthfulā€ and now Iā€™m envisioning something completely different (a solid-colored bright orange tin lunchbox.) Kind of a fun game, right?

I have some branding projects in the works that will have mood boards for me to share, but until then I thought it might be fun to choose three random tone words and share a quick mood board inspired by the collective group of those words. Iā€™ll consider it practice, and if there are any aspiring designers out there, hopefully these posts will serve to expand your visual vocab.

Below is a copy of my ā€œVisual Vocabulary Word Bankā€ that I give to my clients when they fill out their Brand Exploration Questionnaire. Iā€™ve found that simply asking someone to come up with their own tone words returns a lot of Ā ā€modern, clean, and professionalā€ which is fine, but it doesnā€™t really offer up a specific direction for me to take things. I think going through each word and then selecting 3-5 helps them determine what they do and donā€™t connect with and what is important to them aesthetically.

 

 

(Iā€™m constantly looking for new additions to the list so if you think I left any out, please leave them in the comments!!)

Todayā€™s three random words are: Fresh, adventurous, and feminine. (Quite fitting for the beginning of a new year, if you ask me.)

To give you some insight on my process, this exercise is a mini-version of what I do for my clients. A lot of times I start out with a gut reaction in my mind (I realize that phrase doesnā€™t make a TON of sense but I think my creative friends will get what I mean) and I sort of meditate on these words as I scour my libraries of saved images. Then, as I go through, I pull out anything that feels like it speaks to my three words and my initial vision. From there I can start to see a pattern emerge, and my original vision starts to evolve and become much clearer and more defined. Thatā€™s when I really narrow down the direction, pick the images that are most representative of that direction, pull together a corresponding color palette, and voila ā€“ a mood board is born!

 

 

SucculentĀ /Ā Do What You LoveĀ /Ā WildflowersĀ /Ā Follow Your GutĀ /Ā Ashley Goldberg AbstractĀ /Ā MountainsĀ /Ā Thrive In Truth

In this board specifically you can see what I mean when I say itā€™s the combination of the words that informs the mood. ā€œFreshā€ by itself might have directed me to some brighter hues, but when combined with ā€œadventurousā€ and ā€œfeminineā€ the palette becomes softer and a bit more earthy for me. The teal and green speak to feminine botanicals and majestic waves. The pink and peach could be fresh wildflowers or the colors of a sunset after a long dayā€™s adventure. So there ya have it ā€“ my interpretation of fresh, feminine and adventurous!

Let me know if this is something you might enjoy seeing here on the blog, or if you would interpret the brand tone words differently!