Welcome to part two of How We Unclucked Our Messaging.

​Last week we looked at all of our unhappy icky ugh symptoms and determined we had a marketing problem.​

We needed to get out there more!

Promote!

Do outreach!

Build a funnel!

(… and I also did a little foreshadowing of how “that was absolutely the wrong conclusion” oooooo suspense)

So, we got to work.

Here’s how we tackled our marketing problem.

🤔 First things first, we took a look at our outreach channels.

Where were people learning about us?

The list was distressingly small.

1. Referrals
2. LinkedIn
3. In-person

Ya. That was it.

The problem with so few channels meant the people becoming aware of Strange Birds was small.

Which meant we had a much smaller chance of closing a client.

The top of our funnel, the awareness bit, was a wee little funnel meant for like, I don’t know, refilling your salt shaker?

Certainly not big enough to grow the business at the pace we wanted to.

Great!

We clearly had an awareness-building problem.

🤔 How do we increase brand awareness?

Enter Janel’s kudzu brain.

Janel and I brainstorm very differently.

I tend to sit and stare off into the distance for awhile, maybe go for a walk, talk out loud, and then come up with a couple ideas. Then I choose one and build it.

Pro: it’s efficient.

Con: it doesn’t really push us outside of our comfort zone. Ever?

Janel sits down, opens one million tabs, does research, finds ideas, looks up examples of said ideas, writes down good ideas, builds MVP products out of ideas, creates the funnel behind them, and maps it all out in a MIRO board with lots of sticky notes.

Pro: it’s incredibly thorough.

Con: it’s a lotttttttt.

We call Janel’s process her kudzu brain. (with deep deep love and affection)

We sicced Janel onto the WE NEED TO BUILD BRAND AWARENESS problem. I went off to take on the majority of our client work while she attacked this bit with a vengence.

A week later, Janel had built out a giant catalog of ideas and handed it off to me with a typical “there’s a lottttt and I’m not attached to any of it please make this simple now?” request.

(y’all, this is seriously why we work so well together - Janel is SO GOOD at ideating and I’m good at delineating it’s dream dream dreamy)

Inside the kudzu brand awareness packet was

• lead magnet ideas
• upsell post-lead magnet download, including a pay-for-access portal of templates and tools
• quarterly workshops
• podcast promotional ideas
• newsletter strategies
• LinkedIn content buckets
• LinkedIn profile updates
• update the website copy because it’s outdated
• write more case studies

I took a couple days to download all of the kudzu into my brain, took my walks, thought about it a ton, and then suggested three things:

• LinkedIn: Let’s take this more seriously! Our current strategy of “idk just post something k thnx bye” wasn’t working.
  • Why it's a good idea: We can more easily cast a much bigger net
• Lead magnet + upsell idea: Instead of a complicated Notion portal with templates we’d have to create, what if this was a mini podcast series that lead to a custom working session?
  • Why it's a good idea: We can reel people in from the big net we cast on LinkedIn
• Case studies + website: Obviously YES to this let’s go!
  • Why it's a good idea: We can more easily convert people we reeled in from our big net

(please note that this was… not three things but at the time it felt like three things)

Great.

Plan established.

👉 Here’s what we did next:

LinkedIn

• Janel signed us up for a 4-week LinkedIn bootcamp to force us to focus on this

Lead magnet + upsell idea

• We immediately shelved this because we realized we should focus on our podcast instead, but the ‘ticket’ was still open and it stayed on our to-do lists

Case studies + website, aka ‘content’

• Janel got to work writing up case studies from interviews we had already completed with past client.
• Anna got to work collecting sexy data points to include in said case studies.
• We both started on a website rewrite, focusing on our super cool subscription model (< this is important, remember this for the email next week)

Yeah.

It was a lot.

But we were determined to GROW.

So we had to MARKET.

Next week, we’ll walk through all the ways marketing ourselves went so very wrong. And yes, we'll be getting to why we were so very wrong on the 'marketing is our problem' conclusion.

Cheers,

Anna (they/them)

🏳️‍⚧️✊🏳️‍🌈✊🇵🇸

How We Unclucked Our Messaging series

1. ​We have a marketing problem​
2. (this week) Determine outreach and brand awareness activities
3. (next week) Do the outreach

What I'm about to read

​All Fours by Miranda July​

Janel told me to read this so I'm reading it. Because I do what they say. Also they have yet to steer me wrong.