Show Notes
Building a business that is able to scale is one of the hardest things to do. We could argue that starting a business is tough, but taking it to that next level is where true expertise is needed and most never make it. But what do you need to do to take your business to the next level and scale? In today’s episode we talk about the three pillars that are needed to help you bring in a consistent flow of leads and scale WITHOUT working more hours.
- You have to know your audience and you must get your messaging right. Think about your customer avatar, we know the demographics, everyone knows that, but what you really care about are the psychographics. After we have created your customer avatar we need to find out what your CPL, CPA, and LTV are. This allows you to make decisions that are appropriate for your business.
- Content creation + Automation. Those who make the most content are not the most effective, but those who make the most effective content consistently are the most effective. Messaging is hard, but when you figure it out, everything becomes clearer. This is the stage of your business where you are going to need to get out of your comfort zone and create videos. We will discuss the three types of content you need to create and how they work. This stage is also the automation stage, if you do the same tasks over and over again and it can be automated, you should. Time is one of the biggest things holding you back from scaling.
- Numbers; you need to know your numbers. If you don’t know how many leads are coming in, it’s going to be hard for you to find out how to scale. In the same vein, if one area of your business is driving 90% of the revenue, you need to know that.
If you are interested in using the Leads Accelerator system in your business, you can schedule a free strategy session here: https://apply.bitbranding.co/
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Transcript
Aaron [00:00:00] Hey, guys. On today's episode, we're gonna talk about how to scale your business. Arguably probably one of the hardest things to do in business. And we could say that starting a business is really hard, but scaling your business to that next level or making it work without you is the hardest thing. So on today's episode, we're gonna talk about three things that you need to have implemented to help you scale your business so that you can grow your business without working more hours. This is the marketing natives providing actual ways to grow, improve and.
[00:00:31] Succeed in your business.
[00:00:33] And now your host, Christian and Aaron.
Christian [00:00:39] Audience and messaging.
Christian [00:00:42] Yes. Yeah. That's the first thing. Let's move on to the second thing.
Christian [00:00:47] Just kidding so the other first thing is that you need to know your audience.
Christian [00:00:51] You need to know specifically who you're talking to and how to talk to them. And it goes beyond just demographics. Right. So, you know, where they from were what they were. All those kind of things. Age, income, but also what you called psychographics, which is just kind of getting to know them and how they think.
Aaron [00:01:18] Yeah. So it's like their identities, for example, like News Christian, your identity could be your identities could be like I'm a Puerto Rican Volleyball player.
Christian [00:01:27] Yeah. Professional runner. Put him on a card collector.
Aaron [00:01:33] Something like that. I can probably only go a little bit more deeper than that. But like it could be your identity is family. So because you have identity of family, we know to talk to you differently than somebody who doesn't have a family or that you're from Puerto Rico and you're probably very proud about being Puerto Rican. That's an identity. That's something a psychographic. So we can relate to you and be like, hey, you know, for everybody who grew up in the Caribbean, you know, this lifestyle. Well, that's completely different than somebody who is like, oh, yeah. Like, I'm a 30 to 50 year old male who lives in Allen or Plano, Texas. Like you fall into that demographic, but a psychographic is what really your identities are.
Christian [00:02:13] So that is based off of like my actions are based off of my identity.
Aaron [00:02:18] Yes, exactly. So you're going to do things differently. You may go get groceries at the grocery store without using an app because you're like, I don't care about convenience as much and I want to save a little bit of money vs. oh, I have to use the app because my time is very valuable and I want to spend doing something else. Maybe it's spending time with my family. Who knows? But you make decisions based off of those identities and we can't assume or put people into a box, especially if we're like us. People say I want men and women 30 to 50 years old and like such a wide range of people that it's so hard to speak to them because you don't know who they are. There is no Jane.
Christian [00:02:57] There's just everybody. Or even worse than that. And we've had people come to us and we ask them, what's your audience? And they're like, everyone. Yeah, everybody and everybody.
Aaron [00:03:08] Yeah. They want to buy a home. It's like, wait. So not everybody wants to buy homes. Not everybody is able to buy a home. So you want to talk to everybody? Like what about people who don't wanna buy a home for twelve months or people who want to buy a home next month? Are those different? So I think that that's important as figuring out the audience, because then you don't then you can't create a message anyway. For example, like, if I knew that you cared about convenience, then I could tell you, hey, save time by ordering off of our cool new app that will go to every grocery store for you and you only pay 5 percent more and you're like, wow, like that's a great offer versus I. Hey, Christian, I want you to, you know, go to the grocery store and you're gonna have this cool place for your kids to play, which is actually true. Now there's like a Kroger inside a Kroger. There's a place for like kids to, like, hang out and play while the parents go and shop. You may say, hey, that's convenient, but you're like, no, I don't want to go to the grocery store because I don't have kids. And that doesn't help me. So I don't need to do that. I wanted his order for my phone and from my app and I'd rather do it in between meetings. So it's like those that messaging I can't get the right message to because I'm just based on and offer your age or the fact your guy.
Christian [00:04:20] And then within here, audience and the messaging you also have once you figure you're your audience or your customer avatar, then you can figure out things like CPL, CPA, LV, LTV, RAM. And I guess what do you think those are important?
Aaron [00:04:38] So, yes, to let's clarify those acronyms because they may just be kind of confusing or jargon for people as like cost per lead. If you know that I can acquire Christian's information for $5. That's good. Cost per acquisition. It takes Christian. It takes five Christians to make a customer. So it cost me twenty five dollars. So these are strictly for advertising purposes. Yeah. Well it's also it's really it's not necessarily just for your business, it's to be able to scale. I can be. Yes. You're for marketing. You don't have to do it for advertising, but you should know that it costs me $30 to get a client. For example, if you only did networking, you know that you pay three or four hundred dollars per year. So you got that cost. But then you also spend 10 hours a week and you know that you charge. This might seem like, OK, great. It took me 10 meetings to get somebody. I paid $300 a year to get my membership at the chamber, whatever. And then I spent another seven hundred dollars of my time. Try to get this customer. Now it's costing me, you know, to acquire that customer. Cost me eight or a thousand dollars to acquire the customer so it could be for advertising. But you should also know it for how much time you're spending outside of just doing it, like getting that customer to like. Are you meeting with people and how long you're meeting with them for so that you can kind of put a number to being able to scale. So you should know this outside of advertising, too. And then the last thing is lifetime value. So if I spend a thousand dollars seven hundred, it was time and 300 was paying for a membership. But my clients are only worth like lifetime. They only ever spent $10 with me. That doesn't really make sense for me to go and be networking because my my time is not scalable at that point. So what I need to do to figure out what will work or if the lifetime value of a customer to me is worth twenty thousand dollars. I think that most people would say I'd I'd spend a thousand dollars to make twenty thousand all day. But how do I continue to repeat that? And you don't know what that is until you figure out these baseline numbers, which is, you know, the important part, which is why this is step one. You got to figure this out. It's going to take time and it's going to take money to make it to make those work. But they are the first step into succeeding for like a scalable part of your business.
Christian [00:06:54] So going back. Do you think these three steps are geared towards in social media, online marketing advertising campaign is the way that we're saying that we're scaling, right?
Aaron [00:07:07] Yeah. I think to scale, you have to do some kind of advertising. Yeah. Because they're. I mean, you could scale by hiring more people. But what we said in the very beginning is without working more hours. So how can we put a system in place without working more hours to help you scale that business? And advertising has been around forever. It can be television. It could be radio doesn't matter. So this works for anything out there doesn't have to be social media, which I think you alluded to a little bit. So could be social media. But as long as you are the right system in place, you could do it for whatever. I mean, probably not a billboard. I don't know if that's really, you know, maybe that's possible, but it's kind of hard to measure. But digital is a little bit easier to track. So is that clear? Yeah. Cool. All right, number two, content creation and automation and automation just sounds cool because I don't know. To me, that's like a buzz word. At least that's cool for me. But the probably the hardest part for people is that content creation, making things like doing things like a podcast or doing things like video or getting yourself out there, getting type of content creation. It could be a blog. Those could be a podcast, could be a video. You have to put yourself out there, especially on social if we're talking about using social media. But I mean, even if you did something outside of social media, you have to create the content, otherwise people can't find you. So I think that's just the number one thing is creating the content and then automating that. What we're in the process now of like, you know, candidly figuring out how we can create content and then distribute it and automate that part of the process.
Christian [00:08:49] So, you know, I mean, you think about automation. If we're creating a video, something you could potentially automate is the editing. It's the creating the captions. It's creating thumbnails for the videos.
Christian [00:09:04] The actual scheduling process, all those things, even engaging with their audience. Right. You could have virtual assistants or other staff that are just. Their task is just to engage and comment and try to get people to watch your videos or consume your content and engage. And I think something that's important is that it's not about how much content you create, but how effective it is as far as engagement. Mm hmm. Right. So it's not about you posting seven times a week. A lot of business owners, I think, ask that question as I often should. I post. Yes.
Christian [00:09:46] However, often you're comfortable with right now and you can handle whatever your audience is resonating with. I mean, if you have 10000 people on your Facebook page and you never post anything out of the blue, you're posting seven times a week.
Christian [00:10:00] They might be overwhelmed about the facts.
Christian [00:10:02] Where did this person came out of nowhere and started posting seven times a week. So it's just whatever you're comfortable with and whatever makes sense were for your business and your audience, whatever your audience is used to.
Christian [00:10:13] I would always say crawl, walk, run. So start small and build your way up to something bigger and then use automation to just fuel that expansion. Mm hmm.
Aaron [00:10:28] Yeah. And it's also I guess for that content side, it's. Yeah. You're better off creating less content that's more effective than a bunch of content. We went down the rabbit hole before a bunch of content. That's not as effective.
Aaron [00:10:40] But if your audience is engaging like crazy, if you're like you, you may ask what's good engagement. I would say anything that's above 10 percent for depending on the platform. If it's supersaturated like Facebook or Instagram, then above 10 percent is really good. So if you have a thousand followers and you get 200 people who like a post, that's really good. So that wouldn't give you a good indication. Like, Hey, I should probably create more things like this. But if you have a thousand followers and you get five people to like it, there's probably something or disconnect or something there. So you may want to stop posting content like that. But if they're engaging like crazy, then you may need to figure out a strategy to to make more content happen because they're looking for it. But the automation part of it is not only a guest, the content part of the automating, but also like how your customers come to you. So specifically, since we're talking about service based businesses, if you can talk to everybody, that's great. But we do want to talk to everybody. Remember the messaging. Remember the audience. We want to talk to the right people. But now we should qualify them. So there should be ways or hoops or something that you should have people go through to talk to you because your time is valuable. So it's for you to scale and is something that we're doing ourselves. It's like you have to schedule time on a calendar, but then you should apply because we want to see all you know, we want to know about your business before we just sit down and waste thirty or forty five minutes talking to you. And we're like, oh, yeah, it's like, you know, you make a hundred dollars a month. It's not we're more than a hundred dollars per month. We don't want to waste your time. And then you just wasted all that time talking to them and everything. So you want to figure out some way to automate that process and qualify people before you ever sat down with them. So whether you're a termite inspection company or whether you're a professional service, like a lawyer or anything like that, you want to make sure that they're qualified customer and that will help you automate that. Part of the process is to eliminate people who are not the best people for you to be talking to.
Christian [00:12:31] Yes. I think something the also business owners get wrong with automation is spreading their message through the same the same message through all platforms.
Christian [00:12:42] Just carpet bombing, everything at the same time with the same.
Christian [00:12:47] Same thing when you had to pay attention and go back to number one, which is the right audience, the right messaging. Right. So each platform does have different audiences to some extent. Right. And it's also different could be the same message, but it could be tweaked differently or done differently. Right. So on Facebook, you might have a very highly successful live stream where, you know, you're communicating to your audience, but then you try to do a livestream on Instagram stories and your audience is just not there. Right. You know, engaging with you throughout the whole video so that something doesn't take into consideration. We think about content strategy in automating our business. Owners want to do that. They want to just do it everywhere at the same time, the same message, the same content. Well, that's not the right strategy.
Aaron [00:13:38] Right. And it's better for you to start. Like we say, crosswalk run, focus on one platform and then then you can expand. Because when you think you have to be everywhere, that's when you start to run into a lot of problems. Because, I mean, we started out and I think we were just only on Facebook and we had some on Instagram and then slowly expanded to other things. But yeah, it's a lot it's hard. I mean, that's a full time job. There's a reason that social media managers are a position that people need in a company. It's because it's like, yeah, that's a 40 hour a week job for you to be able to post that much. So if you have a dedicated person, probably possible if it's you, the business owner, maybe two other people who are not social media managers, probably going to be harder. So.
Christian [00:14:22] So we're going to take a pause real quick here. And I'm gonna tell you about the latest letter celebrator System for your business.
Christian [00:14:29] Everything that we're talking about here in this podcast is part of our Litas Later program, lead accelerator program, where we take you a business owner that is struggling to get leads online and we just give you a full working, well oiled automated system where we just take care of everything for you. Right. We will walk you through all the steps that you need to do in order to be successful online and how to generate the right leads. Talking to the right audience, having the right messaging. We talk about content creation, automation. And lastly, we have a lot of numbers and analytics and reports where you can see where you were at and where we're going and what we have been able to do for you. If you're interested in applying for this lead to celebrator program, you can schedule a frank strategy session.
Christian [00:15:27] All you have to do is go to apply dot bitbranding dot com.
Aaron [00:15:35] All right, we're back. And the last step here for your service based businesses to succeed and scale your business is knowing your numbers. This is not earth shattering, so I don't want to make it seem like it is. But we talked to a lot of business, even some very successful business. I was talking to one very recently where you was a seven figure business, but he hadn't done his PNL. He hasn't done his numbers in two or three months. He doesn't know what is going on in 2020. So we're recording this in March of 2020. And he did it. Now he's like, well, yeah, we made X thousands of dollars per month. And but I don't know much else other than that. So I was like, OK. So we do. You do need to know your numbers because you don't know how much you can spend, because if he's a seven figure business, he should be able to afford a certain level of product or a certain level of service button. He doesn't know how much money he has because he hasn't been looking at his numbers. So that's does it really for that part of it is like no matter how big or how small you are, the more you know your numbers, the more successful you're gonna be in your business because your numbers are going to predicate or drive the decisions you're going to make in their business. So if you don't know if you can make rent this month, you probably shouldn't go out and buy, you know, new equipment or you probably shouldn't go out and buy a new car or something like that for the company. If you're like, oh, wait, I didn't see that were about to spend, you know, this X amount of money per month. And we don't know how much it costs to get a new client or we don't know how much it how long. Clients stay around. It's gonna be hard for you to scale your business past that certain level. So knowing your numbers each month is crucial.
Christian [00:17:10] Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of business owners, us included, relied on just looking at that checking account and just saying like, oh, we have X amount of money there. We'll go, we're doing good. Oh, it's actually go up, moving down. That's bad. All right. But it goes beyond that. And actually, the system in a book that we highly recommend is profit first. Yeah. This a accounting system that helps entrepreneurs and business owners and service based businesses scale really by being able to control, you know, your numbers and see where you're going. And it kind of uses that mentality of looking at your bank account as a proper offer, as it's just you distributing your money within different bank accounts.
Christian [00:17:53] So you're kind of at a visual, you're doing the same thing just maybe a little bit better organized, right?
Aaron [00:18:00] Allocated correctly versus like I have this much money in the bank and I know I'm spending this much. So that means I'm good. I mean, when we talk to a business owner once in his life, sometimes I write myself a check for seven thousand and sometimes I write myself a check for two thousand. That's a big discrepancy there. Like where's the consistency? Is Ecologist depends on how the month of the business doesn't like. Oh, that's like I don't know.
Aaron [00:18:24] I think that's it becomes more stressful for you as a business owner because you don't know what you're going to. You can't prepare for something each month. So using that profit first is important. But really knowing your numbers about your customer lead your cost per acquisition and costs per lifetime customer that we talked about previously and looking at those, whether it's weekly or monthly, I mean, even if you do it daily, that's even a good option, too. But just. Okay, how much is it costing me to get these leads? So you know that, hey, if I get home for more than $5, it's not profitable. And you go a whole week without being profitable. That starts to really affect you. And you have to make decisions really quickly. So it's almost better for you to look monthly eventually. But knowing your numbers is absolutely crucial. All right. So if you guys loved this episode, please make sure you hit the subscribe button, especially if you're new, if you are thinking, OK. Dang, I am a service based business. I have been consistent. Low-quality leads coming in and I want a steady stream of high quality leads coming in. You should apply for the leads accelerator. As Grinchy Christian mentioned, it's applied a bit branding dot CO. You'll be able to schedule a free strategy session. We'll find out if it's a good fit for you guys. Really help you answer those questions about how to scale your business so that you can work less or the same amount and scale your business to the next level and be like one of the few top percentage business owners around. And if you guys found a lot of value in this, please again, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any episode. Whatever platform you're listening on and if you've been listening for a while, please make sure to leave an honest rating in review. This really helps us figure out how to continue to make the content better for you and help us grow and scale the podcast. All right. We'll talk to you guys next week.
[00:20:09] The marketing native's podcast is a production of BitBranding.
