In the previous blog post, I talked about the work before the work.
Up until this point, I think it would be fair to say that everything that I’ve written is about getting ready to start doing the work that I need to do to build the main brand.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about how to differentiate both of my websites — TegaDiegbe.com and TegaDoesBusiness.com. I will admit, it hasn’t been easy.
But thankfully, I’ve been getting clarity on the direction that I want to take for both brands.
For this brand, Tega Does Business, the goal is to share with you what we’re doing to build the main brand, Tega Diegbe. The behind the scenes if you will, or what I like to call the work before the work.
A lot of the work before the work has been going on in the background. And I’m excited to share with all of you some of the things the team and I have been putting together.
But before we get to that part, let’s talk about what the plan is.
The current plan will revolve around coming up with the strategy in building the main brand. This plan is not final, because I know it’s going to be ever-evolving and ever-changing, depending on what needs to be done. That’s the beauty of documenting everything.
At the end of the day, I am documenting everything for past Tega. This means this is going to be for people who were in my shoes 5 years ago. People who are still trying to figure this stuff out.
We are all still trying to figure stuff out, including myself. Hopefully this documentary of some sort will guide you in where you want to take your business.
I want the things I document to act as a guide so that people like you(dear reader) can take action based on what I’m saying in order to achieve the results that they are trying to achieve.
In the following sections of this blog post, I will be introducing to you some of the frameworks that I am using to help in the building of my main brand.
IDENTIFYING MY CUSTOMER AVATAR
When it comes to the main brand, we need to figure out who we are serving and what we’re selling.
As part of the work before the work, this bit was quite challenging for me.
Whenever I sit down to create my customer avatar, I have this weird feeling of leaving people out. When someone says that I need to niche down, my brain starts freaking out because I want to help as many people as I can.
In the spirit of honesty, I’m letting you know how I feel about this. That way, if ever I decide to change my plans in the future, you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
In terms of who we are serving for the main brand, we are still deciding as to who that person is going to be. But one thing that is clear. The service that we’re selling is not something that will be of value to somebody who is just starting out in their business.
It could be useful to them but would be more relevant for someone who is in the middle of their journey. This is because people in the middle of their journey, as opposed to someone who has just started, will have a completely different set of problems to handle.
For people who just started, they either don’t have the volume to justify or to need what we’re offering. Or if they have the volume, they haven’t got the infrastructure in place to maintain that volume.
In terms of who we are serving, it needs to be people who have been in business for 2-5 years and are consistently making 5,000-10,000 pounds/euros/dollars every month, AND they want to grow that revenue without sacrificing MORE of their time.
Why do they need to be making money?
It is primarily because that money can then be leveraged to take advantage of the service that we are offering to them. Which means as a result, they will exponentially increase the revenue they’re making in the business while working less and making more.
You will understand what I am talking about in this next section.
WHAT WE ARE SELLING
The core offer that we’re going to market is to help freelancers and solopreneurs who are running on that marketing/fulfilment hamster wheel.
Whereby if they are doing the marketing, they’re not able to fulfill any other duties in the business to make money. Or on the other side of the spectrum, if they are focusing on making money, they’re not doing any marketing and their lead flow dries up as a result.
The service that we are going to offer them is to help them find, hire and train reliable virtual team members.
That way they can reduce the number of hats that they are wearing in their business.
This service will help them focus on growing the business rather than being trapped inside the marketing/fulfilment hamster wheel.
WHERE TO FIND MY IDEAL CLIENTS
At this point in time, I am very fortunate to be in a whole bunch of Facebook groups where my ideal clients hang out.
So it would just be a case of becoming more active in those groups.
I actually started the process of doing this a couple of weeks ago through holding guest expert sessions in groups that have my ideal clients.
The other avenue that we’ll use to find people is through social advertising. And as we build and grow, we will involve more advertising platforms like Google, YouTube, and maybe even LinkedIn (I’ve had mixed results with LinkedIn, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there).
In terms of how we are going to speak to our people, we’re going to do that through content. This includes written, audio, and video content.
Content will be the foundation on which we build everything else.
There are a few things we have to figure out before we go full force into creating content:
- The type of content we’re going to put out
- How we move people through the five stages of awareness
- How we create the content that speaks to those five stages
- How we amplify that content in terms of where we’re going to find our people and how we get our message in front of them.
For now, we’ll keep things simple and say that we will speak to our people by creating content that exposes the gap in their knowledge or experience.
MY WORKFLOW FRAMEWORKS
As part of showing you the work before the work, this section will talk about all the planning that has been going on behind the scenes.
This includes figuring out our customer journey and the transformation that we are going to be selling to our customers. We are working on how we are going to take our clients from their hell island to their heaven island.
I will also follow up with a little bit of a breakdown of the product and how I see us taking that to market together with the assets we need to build to make that happen.
Let’s start by walking you through some of the frameworks or “canvases” as I’d like to call them.
The Customer Journey Map
The first thing we’re going to look at is the customer journey map, which is part of the pre-work.
The idea of the customer journey map is that as you take your customer from one stage to another, they will be experiencing a new set of problems. And your goal is to provide solutions to those problems.
To put things into perspective, think about having a baby, and when that baby learns to crawl, you have a problem of making sure that the baby does not go around touching dangerous things. And when that baby learns how to walk and learn how to open doors, you need to find a way to child-proof more things.
That’s how it works with the customer journey. Your customers will have different problems as they progress in their journey. And as they solve one problem, another one appears.
This is what the team and I were able to come up with:
The purpose of the customer journey map is to allow you to plan as broadly as you can. This includes how you’re going to build your business and the different stages that you’re going to take your customers through and the assets you have to create to help them on the journey.
There are eight stages in this journey:
- Awareness
- Engagement
- Subscribe
- Convert
- Excite
- Ascend
- Advocate
- Promote
Taking some time to sit down and go through this process has allowed the team and myself to actually break down what we need to do to build the business. This is useful because it gives us an idea of where to start creating stuff, especially for the awareness stage.
Now you may be tempted to think that where you start creating stuff is in the awareness stage. However, note that it’s generally accepted advice that you don’t start with the awareness stage.
The reason being that you need to know where to send your people after the awareness stage. If you start with awareness, but don’t work on the next stages, you won’t have anywhere to send them to.
It’s like inviting LOADS of people to a BBQ, but then not having anything to eat when they show up.
So figuring out how you are going to generate awareness for your thing is important, but you need to be mindful that awareness is not usually going to be the starting point.
For me/us and the main brand, we are starting with engagement.
The Engagement Stage
This phase includes the blog posts and other content I mentioned earlier.
We’re currently creating content for both the main brand and this brand, which are parallel to each other. This means that while we write blog posts for TegaDiegbe.com, we then break that down to show the work before the work here in TegaDoesBusiness.com.
We will have videos and podcasts which will be common for both websites. I consider podcasts as a form of engagement because we’re going to be using these to leverage other people’s audience.
How this works is by doing podcast outreach so that we can appear on other shows which share some of the knowledge that we have. We are still refining our podcast outreach process, but things are starting to progress.
We are slowly establishing engagement, and once that is done, we will proceed to the subscribe stage.
The Subscribe Stage
The subscribe stage is where you will be engaging with people via email marketing. This is figuring out how to get them onto your email list so that you can actually communicate with them.
To get people to subscribe, we’re going to have lead magnet and reverse squeeze pages. We have content upgrades on our blog posts which offer people tools, templates and resources to complement what they’re reading.
In order for them to get these content upgrades, they will need to provide us with their email addresses. This is how we add them to our email list.
I will also be working on different free trainings that move people from unaware to problem aware and then solution aware.
The Convert Stage
This is where things start to get interesting because this is where you start monetizing. The convert stage is where you get your customers to move from being subscribers to actual customers.
The idea to convert these customers through creating loss leaders or self-liquidating offers (SLO). By using these loss leaders and self liquidating offers, you start to build an audience of buyers
What they do is they solve a problem at a price point that people are willing to actually pay to have that problem solved. A good example is people that give away things like email swipe files or email templates.
And the reason why I personally don’t recommend pitching the core offer here is because you haven’t built that level of trust yet with your audience to get them to actually make a big commitment with you.
This is why we need to build that relationship through excitement.
The Excite Stage
This stage includes engaging with your customers through the emails that they get after they convert from the first purchase (your loss leaders or SLOs).
You slowly build up excitement in these emails by sharing customer stories and customer case studies. These testimonials further encourage your customers to use your products because of these real-life stories. That way, after that first purchase, they become more convinced to buy your other products.
The Ascend Stage
The Ascend Stage is where you move people from one time customers to repeat customers. This is where our primary offer is going to be and where the business is really built.
In our case, the primary offer is going to be a combination of hiring and training our client’s VA. With all the people that we have worked with, they seem to get the most value from what we do when we combine these two. That is why we chose this as our primary offer.
Combining both hiring and training of the VA makes the process hassle-free for the clients that we’re hiring for.
At the minute, I’m helping somebody train one of their assistants so that they can do podcast outreach for them.
This is where leverage comes in.
Because we have been systemising and documenting the stuff we are doing for our own podcast, we are able to teach this system to our client’s VA.
The Advocate Stage
This stage is where you take the people who have ascended and make them advocates for your service or product. They basically become fans of your product and would eagerly promote your business to people they know just because they genuinely believe in it.
Do note that an advocate is different from an affiliate in a sense that the latter is paid to promote your product while the former is not.
The Promote Stage
In this stage, you need to figure out how to get others, including your advocates, to promote your business. Your advocates can become affiliates and can then refer people to you. You can also get strategic partners to help.
If you noticed in the map above, I placed affiliate marketing in the bottom so it’s part of all the stages. This is because affiliate marketing is actually something that you should pay attention to at every stage of the journey. We can work with affiliates and get them to promote something of ours with a view of driving people to either convert or ascend.
Keep an eye on your network, because there are people you could probably reach out to who will be able to promote you. This can then take care of the awareness, engagement, and subscribe stage.
A good example of this is like the 5-day challenge that I ran last year. I managed to get 250 people, because I reached out to just two people who had my ideal audience and asked them to promote the challenge. If I only relied on promoting it from my wall, I wouldn’t have had as many participants.
And that is the customer journey map in a nutshell. Let’s proceed to the next framework.
Before and After Grid
This is an interesting canvas because it allows you to map out the transformation that you are going to move people through as they experience your product or service.
As of writing this, nothing has been done on this grid yet. When I was looking into the canvas, I wanted to sit down and have a think about how we would fill this up.
And what I’ve decided is that it’s far better for us to fill this in based on the clients we have gotten actual results for and changed their business, rather than creating hypotheticals. That is the reason why I haven’t worked on this grid yet.
There’s a client who we helped hire an executive assistant for. Currently, we are training that EA to do some podcast outreach so that the client gets to appear on more podcasts.
He has agreed to be interviewed for this customer canvas so that he can be our ideal avatar. So every time we craft a marketing message and create content, we’re going to speak to him directly. That way, we increase the effectiveness of our message.
The goal of our message is that when other people see it, interact with it, and read it, they get to envision themselves in that position we drew for them.
This is because their worries, fears, and transformation are based on results that we have already gotten from an actual client rather than from hypotheticals.
And those are the two key frameworks that I have been working on during the work before the work. Through this process, it’s been getting clear as to how the team and I can make the customer journey as succinct and concise as possible.
We are also doing the necessary steps so that we can fill in the before and after grid based on real life human beings who had a problem that we solved.
The next thing to talk about is the product.
THE PRODUCT
Earlier, I quickly mentioned what my product is. I will be talking about it in further detail in this section.
The products that we have to create are going to be the loss leaders or the self liquidating offers for the convert stage of the customer journey. We then have to put together the main programs in the ascend stage of the customer journey.
We can’t work on both at the same time, so naturally, we’re going to be working on one first.
The general idea is to come up with a minimum viable product (MVP). An MVP is predicated on taking your idea, that people are willing to pay for, to the market as quickly as possible. This is something we actually already have been doing for the past 3 years.
This product is what we have used to hire people for about 15 to 20 businesses. It is something that is relevant to the people who are experiencing the pain that we want to solve.
And once we finalise our SLO, we then go to the main product.
THE CORE OFFERING
The next part is coming up with the core offering. This is actually part of the work that I’m doing right now together with a business coach to help me figure this stuff out.
We need to take the MVP I mentioned earlier and build out the core offer around that. This core offer then becomes the foundation of everything else. This is because everything in the journey leads to the core offer as the end goal.
The core offer can be found in either the convert stage or in the ascend stage.
I personally think that it will be better if it is in the convert stage because that will be a far easier sell than in the ascend stage. The reason being once you are in the convert stage, you would already have built relationships with people, established that trust, and showed them that you know what you’re talking about.
The idea is still being finalised, so things may be a bit confusing at the moment. But that’s the beauty of documenting this journey. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
CONCLUSION
This blog post broke down the current plan for what we are going to do for the main brand.
Everything that we do from this point going forward will be based off of the customer journey map and the before and after bridge.
The before and after bridge is there to make sure that the messages that we create and put out are speaking to our ideal clients.
The customer journey map, on the other hand, is to make sure that whenever things get quiet or busy, it serves as the waypoint for us to look at what we’re doing, and figure out if we’re on the right track, and going the right way. In a way, it serves as a map for the business as well since all our plans are based on this framework.
The next write up is going to focus more on the product and the route that we’re taking with the product. For now, I only spoke about the product briefly to give you an idea of what it looks like, how it works and all that good stuff.
We will take a deep dive into the product or the product suite as I currently envisioned it to be. And following that, you’ll start to see assets that you can actually check out and hopefully interact with and see how they’re built. That way, you will be able to visualise the journey to the end product in a more concrete manner.
As we go through all this, we will definitely create the content showing the behind the scenes of what we are doing to build the product. I hope you are looking forward to it as much as I am.
See you in the next blog post.