The Ultimate Guide To Creating Your Marketing Plan: Part 1

Brian: This is the six figure home studio podcast episode one 42.

[00:00:19] Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood coming at you from my quarantine cave here in Nashville.

[00:00:28] I am not joined my, my bald beautiful purple shirted clothes. Christopher J. Grant. He is on vacation right now. He'll be, I would say on the next episode, but this is actually going to be a two part episode more on that later. So he'll be back a few episodes from now. So it'll be good to have Chris back with us after this series is done with.

[00:00:44] So before I get in today, this episode, I want to mention that I might've mentioned this in the last intro. I don't remember. But I am burnt out right now. And I'm sure a lot of you can relate with me. This episode should be about overcoming burnout, but I have not overcome this bout of burnout. I hit a sort of burnout just about every summer around June.

[00:01:03] Usually actually I have an app called rescue time that I use that like tracks all the things I do on my computer. And are all amongst all my devices and categorizes that either productive time, neutral time or distracted time. So like YouTube, Reddit, video games, that would all be distracted time. And then things like Google docs or active campaign or pro tools or.

[00:01:25] Email or my CRM, all those things would be counted as productive time. And the things like Google, or I don't know, just there's certain things that are counted as neutral by default and you can recategorize things. So it's accurate. So anyways, all that to say just about every year around summertime, the red line spikes up.

[00:01:40] Meaning my distracted time spikes up on that little graph. They show you, they give you like a weekly report, as well as like how many hours you spent on productive time. What's your productivity score? And it just tanks in the summertime usually. But this is a particularly bad case of burnout for me. I'm probably only working half days right now, if that, and they're not even that productive.

[00:01:57] So as I worked through this bout of burnout, I will hopefully have an episode coming at you in the next month or two kind of going through what I have done to overcome burnout. I'm trying some things out. I'm talking to some friends and some peers. And I don't think there's any easy way to get over it.

[00:02:12] And I think a lot of people that are experiencing burnout right now, a lot of it is just because of being stuck at home with no other inputs. I don't have any stimulus right now from the outside. It's just me and my wife kind of stuck at home. We've already gone through COVID. I think COVID probably had a little bit to do with that for me, because, because it just drained my energy, it drained my motivation.

[00:02:31] And I don't think I fully recovered from that aspect of it, even though I'm fully recovered from COVID at this point. But I think a lot of that had to do with it. So I'm not sure exactly what has caused this burnout is maybe a little bit of just the normal seasonal burnout. For me, part of it is being stuck at home.

[00:02:45] Part of it is the fact that I went through a lot of isolation during, so just hope that I can get out of it relatively soon. So I can be more productive. For example, this episode that you're listening to right now will be coming out tomorrow, less than 24 hours. So I'm recording this on Monday. This episode airs on Tuesday.

[00:03:01] So that's kind of where I'm at. Work wise and mental wise. So I've just hired somebody at the six figure I'm studio to help a little bit more with running my Facebook ad stuff. So that I'll take a little bit off of my plate from day to day and week to week stuff. Yeah. I'll update people with this. So let's get into the episode today about what we're gonna be talking about, because this is going to be valuable to anyone struggling with their business right now.

[00:03:20] And a lot of our future listeners will be referred back to this episode for probably years to come, because I wanted to create kind of an ultimate guide episode on marketing. We talk about marketing all of the time we talk about all of the individual bits and pieces, and we have so much great content on this podcast by now on how to put together a great marketing plan for your studio.

[00:03:40] But it's all separated. It's all different pieces, different episodes, some spanning weeks or months or years apart from each other, things that are really relevant as far as like. Right now I need to implement this. And then next week I need to implement this. But those two episodes, it might be two years apart.

[00:03:56] So you have to go digging around and instead of like trying to make it, you piece it together yourself. I wanted to give you a full overview, like a 20,000, 30,000 foot view of a great marketing plan. I have like a 20 point list here. And this list is actually what I use to train people that I'm working with to help their marketing efforts.

[00:04:12] So right now, One of the things that's kind of contributing to my additional workload. That's caused burnout. As I am working through a pilot program with a few select businesses that I'm helping them implement their own marketing plan. And this is the actual list that I use with these people on this very expensive program to help them implement.

[00:04:28] A really effective marketing campaign for the businesses. And it's not just studios, by the way, in that pilot program, there are e-commerce, there is like training people. There's a wide variety of people, plus obviously studios, but I want to talk about this because this is a plan that works. It's worked in six-figure I'm studio.

[00:04:44] It's worked in my studio four or five, six recordings. I'm implementing this plan in my own software business file pass. We're implementing it across e-commerce like this works. Across the board. So really, if you have a friend that's a business owner, you can refer them to this episode. If you have another type of business or another type of side hustle, you can probably utilize it episode for that type of business.

[00:05:03] Obviously, if you run a recording studio or a mastering business or a mixing studio, something like that, you can utilize this episode for your business. So I think this is going to be a valuable episode for. Pretty much anyone listening at this point, if you are a fan of this podcast, and I'm going to go from top to bottom in the order that I think you should be implementing these things.

[00:05:19] And again, when I'm analyzing somebody's business, I don't just have absolute beginners coming to me. If I had an absolute beginner coming to me, this is literally the order we would go in. But instead, usually I have people that come to me with things in place. They already have a working business in place.

[00:05:31] Like the eCommerce business that I'm working with, they are already. You know, at the six figure Mark a year in income. So there's a lot of things on this list that they've already have in place. And so for you, I want you to do exactly what I do for those businesses. People that already have these things in place.

[00:05:43] You're just going to listen to this episode and I want you to go through and cherry pick the parts that you think are your weakest links and actually rate every business on a one to three scale. If you have nothing in place, give it a one in your brain, like rate yourself one. And those are the things you need to tackle.

[00:05:57] First. If you have something in place that's good enough. It's passable rent yourself a two. That's something that, yeah, we can come back and fix this later, but if you have something in place that's perfect. It works flawlessly. You don't think it needs to be changed or altered at all. Rate yourself a three and that's something you can altogether skip.

[00:06:12] So in your head, as I'm going down this list of a 20 point checklist here, if you will, I'm going to be talking about each point. I'm going to be recommending past podcast episodes. We really dig into this topic, because again, this is the 30,000 foot view. If you want to really zoom in and into a subject, go back to one of these episodes that I refer you to.

[00:06:28] But I just want you to rate yourself one to three in your brain or on paper, if you're somewhere where you can write this stuff down, okay. And then you can dig into each one of these as you need. But this is relatively in the order that do you need to be implementing them, assuming that you have none of the things in place, but again, you can skip things.

[00:06:43] This is an advice buffet episode must like all of our other episodes, but this is. Kind of the ultimate guide to marketing plan for your business. And this is probably going to be split into two parts. I believe this is going to be longer than my normal solo episodes, and I can only talk for so long. The reason our episodes are so long, usually without problem is because Chris and I can trade off talking.

[00:07:02] I can't talk for an hour straight. So this is probably going to be like a 30, 45 minute episode tops. And we're probably still going to split it into two parts because there's a lot of foundational aspects of marketing before we even start talking about the top of the funnel or bringing people to your business, the actual fun parts of marketing.

[00:07:17] So this is likely going to be kind of foundational first. And then next week's episode will be kind of the fun parts of marketing when it comes to lead generation and traffic generation, all that sort of stuff. So if that sounds good to you. This episode is absolutely for you.

[00:07:33] So, number one on our list, the first thing on this marketing checklist is creating your customer avatar. The reason this is first is because if you don't know your customer or who you're targeting, how do you expect to have an effective marketing plan? How can you reach your target customer if you don't know that person, if there's no avatar for that person.

[00:07:54] So if you're not sure what an avatar is, I'll just sum it up as briefly as possible. And avatar is just the personification of your ideal customer. It's taking the average of all of your customers and trying to create what I consider a single individual you're targeting and all of your marketing from this point on.

[00:08:11] And so when I'm working with people on this and this pilot program, we're generally working with one main avatar and then possibly one side avatar in an area that we think there's a lot of potential growth. So there's usually an avatar of that. We look back on your past customers and say, this is the person we're going to target.

[00:08:28] And then we see a lot of potential growth with this other type of avatar. So we're going to create this one and start leaning towards that in the future marketing attempts that we do, but we need to focus on what works now and then have another foot in the area of what could work in the future. So again, this is not about specifics, but make sure you have first and foremost.

[00:08:46] A customer avatar that you have created. And we have an episode that has gone into depth about this episode 82, how to create a customer avatar that will skyrocket your marketing efforts. That's a great episode that if you don't have an avatar or really even know what an avatar is, start there episode 82, and that will help a lot when it comes to getting the rest of these things down.

[00:09:05] Because if you don't take time to do this, you can put the rest of this stuff into place that I talk about today and next week. But you're still going to struggle because all of your targeting, all of your language, all of your messaging, all your portfolio, everything that your website, any ads you create, any content you create, all of it's going to be wrong because it's not targeting the correct avatar or the correct person.

[00:09:24] So this is the top of the list. The first thing I tackled with people is creating a customer avatar. So episode 82 is a great resource for that. Now number two, we've got our customer avatar down. Now, what do we need to do in all the grand scheme of things? Most businesses at this point, I make sure they have a bad ass website.

[00:09:41] Now, this seems a little weird because if you're like brand new, this may not be the lowest hanging fruit for you. But now. It makes more sense than ever it should for you, at least, because in the era of COVID, your website is basically your business card. It's the only hub, the only interaction people are going to have, it's almost undoubtedly, the first taste people are going to have of your business.

[00:10:01] And if you don't have a bad ass website, that is well thought out and well put together and really speaks to your avatar really well, you're going to struggle. So I really want to make sure that anyone I'm working with on their marketing has the website down. If not amazing, at least passable so that we can focus on some of these other higher leverage areas.

[00:10:19] But your website again, is more important now than it has ever been in the past. Especially for those of you who want to do online mixing or online mastering or anything that requires money to be exchanging hands without ever meeting face to face. Your website is going to be a huge part. Of your business.

[00:10:36] So there's a couple of episodes that we talk about this stuff in depth, episode, 80, how to get more customers through your website. That episode is exactly what it sounds like, how to get more customers to your website. That's going to have a lot of tidbits for you to pick out and improve your website.

[00:10:49] We also have an older episode, episode number 19 newb website, mistakes that will choke out your business oldie, but a goodie over two years old at this point. But those are things you want to avoid doing your website. If you have your website. So listen to about those episodes. If you think your website is a point of friction for your customers, when people find you, is your website helping improve that relationship that people have with you, or is it adding that relationship people have with you or people having to second guess?

[00:11:13] Oh, I don't know if this is the person for me. So make sure your website is badass. And there's like five things that I really focused on with people's websites. I focus on what you present. So what you actually put on your website, how you present it. So it's one thing to have a great portfolio, but if you present it in a terrible way, like a SoundCloud player, you're not doing yourself a good job there.

[00:11:31] Or if you have great photos of your studio, but you bury it deep, deep, deep in your site where no one can see it. Again, that's not presented well. So what you present and how you present are very important. And the third thing is what are you really offering? What is the transformation you're promising someone that they're going to go through?

[00:11:46] And if you're not sure what I'm talking about here, we have an episode on this specific thing, episode 137, how to deep fuck your marketing message with a before and after transformation in that we really dig into not only how to create that transformation for people, but how to actually portray that to people.

[00:12:02] Because if you think about it, think about it with like just a mixing engineer. Somebody spends a lot of time, effort, energy, crafting these songs that they love, and they're spending a lot of money to have you mix those songs. So what they're after is this massive transformation of these raw shitty tracks that contain so much potential.

[00:12:19] And then what that potential realized and what that transformation to be made. Of this huge sounding mix that blows people away when they hear their eyes light up. That's kind of the transformation they're trying to go through. That's a really simplified version of what I'm talking about, but that episode episode one 37 is a great part of making sure you are presenting this on your website correctly.

[00:12:37] And then the fourth thing about a good website is. Building and showing social proof there. And if you're not sure how to do that, we actually have an episode of how to get reviews for your studio and also how to collect testimonials. So this can be utilized for reviews and or testimonials or both. You can use your reviews as testimonials way back in episode four.

[00:12:56] How to get more online reviews for your studio and stand out from your competitors. That's going to be a good area. If you are lacking on testimonials or reviews for your studio. And then the final thing on creating a badass website was just the second part of our overarching episode here, which is creating a bad ass website.

[00:13:11] The fifth part of this is analyzing how people use your site. There's a tool called Hotjar H O T J a R. It'll be in our show notes. If you want to know more about this. And they have a free version, but essentially if you put this on your website, you can see what people do when they hit your website. And this is incredibly valuable.

[00:13:27] It sounds kind of creepy, but it's all anonymous. You don't know who the person is. You just know that you can see what they do, what kind of records their session on your website. And you'll see that they come to your site and they don't do any of the things that you think they're actually doing.

[00:13:38] They're not playing a portfolio or God forbid you have a before and after play on your website and you do it incorrectly playing the before track and not the after track. And now they think portfolio stocks cause all the Harriet is the, before they never heard the after I've seen this with multiple, multiple people, but hot jars are really good way to just make sure people are using the site the way you think they do.

[00:13:55] They may be getting stuck on the contact form because they realize, Oh, I don't really want to put a budget in, or I don't want to put my phone number in and they just bail. So Hotjar is a great way to make sure people are utilizing your site in the way that you think they that's all part of the second step of our 20 point checklist.

[00:14:09] You can see how this episode's going to get long is creating a bad ass website. There's five sub points in there, and I give you a lot of episodes to digest. If that's an area that you think you need to improve. So next on our marketing checklist. Is a short and sweet one. This is setting up a quote based business.

[00:14:24] Number three here. I know we've talked about this in the past, on the podcast, but I don't know what exact episodes we have cause we didn't name the episode, whatever this is. But if you're familiar with our podcast, you've been listening since the beginning or for a while. Now you probably know this by now, but I always recommend people do not put their rates publicly on their website.

[00:14:41] Instead do a quote based business meeting for pricing, contact us. That's how the most successful studios that I know have worked since day one. And I'm going to try to keep this possible, but the reason this is is because the sooner you can get that person's contact information, the better off you're going to be.

[00:14:57] If you put your rates on your website, Someone comes to your website. That's interested in working with you, but three or four months away from actually hiring anybody for what the service that they need. They see the rates on your website. They're interested. Great. That's how much it's going to be. It's gonna be a thousand dollars to work with this person.

[00:15:12] And then they leave. They never contact you because they didn't have to. They never reach out. You didn't even know interested. They're just a little blip on Google analytics, a little one added to your sessions at the end of the month, you never knew they needed you. So at the end of the three months, hiring someone else because that person.

[00:15:27] Required someone to fill out a contact form to get rates, the other person, your competitor, that they were actually interested in working with. So the reason this, this, this works so much better, if you can get the quote request is because you can find out when someone is interested at the earliest possible time.

[00:15:41] As soon as people are really looking to get their shit together, whether they have just finished writing or they're working on new songs and they want to kind of get the ball rolling on choosing the studio they're going to work with and choosing the mixing engineer and the mastering engineer. All of these things are done months and months in advance.

[00:15:55] So if someone is genuinely interested in working with you, they will fill out a contact form in order to get your rates. And once they, I filled out that contact form, you now have their email address or their phone number or their, if you have them do it through social media, you have. A message that you can follow up with on social media.

[00:16:10] Although I don't recommend that being the case, direct message, but now you're in control of the followup. You can consistently follow up over the next three, six, nine months, however long it takes for them to get there shit together and get the songs written. And the songs produced in the songs recorded and edited.

[00:16:22] And now you can mix or whatever you offer. The later you are in the chain of events. Meaning like a mashing engineer is one of the last things you do. The later you are in this chain of events, from songwriting to preproduction, to recording, to editing, to mixing, to mastering and so on and so forth. The later you are in that chain, the more important this sort of business model is because you want to be in control of the followup instead of relying on them, to remember you, when it's actually time for them to record, you want to show up in their inbox.

[00:16:49] And that is a huge part of it. So setting up a quote based business is the third part. Of an effective marketing plan. And again, this is optional for people that are like in e-commerce that doesn't really make sense, but the principle remains you want to get the person's contact information is early in the process as possible, so that you are in control of the followup for when they're actually ready to hire you or to buy your services or buy your product.

[00:17:12] Or to subscribe to your thing. So for example, if you're the type of person where maybe a court request doesn't make sense, maybe you have some sort of lead magnet that you're giving away a PDF or an ebook or something that is interesting and relevant and highly valuable to someone that is early on in the process long before they need to actually hire you.

[00:17:28] But the type of person that needs whatever lead magnet is, is basically raising their hand saying I am a potential customer for you in the future. That's a good, good example of an alternative to this. If your business is you don't want to be quote based or you just can't be because of your business model, that's a good alternative.

[00:17:43] So just try to get that lead as early as possible. So that's the third part. The fourth part of our marketing plan here is creating your sales process. Well, really, it's not just creating, but optimizing your sales process, how can we make every single lead count? So we're turning as many leads into customers as possible.

[00:17:59] Now, if you're leading cell percentage in the studio world, at least is above 20 to 25%, meaning one out of every four court requests you get, it turns into a customer or one out of five. This likely isn't the highest priority for you. But if you think that you really struggle with sales and you're not turning leads into customers, we have two episodes on this that I think are going to be relevant to you.

[00:18:17] Episode 115, how to get more sales using the Socratic method. That's a good deep dive around the psychology of sales in general of actual the sales conversations and that episode 121. How to double your conversion rates by turning more into customers, this actually gets into another psychological aspect, but it's more of the full picture of sales things like scarcity.

[00:18:40] It's like psychological triggers that cause people to want to buy. That's a really good episode, no matter what niche you're in. I've utilized this amongst so many different business models from Airbnb to my software business, to education and training to my recording studio. The things in the episode are dangerous if used incorrectly, but really, really, really valuable if used correctly.

[00:18:59] So that's a must listen to anyone that is interested in helping improve their sales conversions. It's the forced part of our marketing plan. And now we're on to our fifth part of our marketing plan. And that is creating your high class proposal. This is really more for service based businesses. I don't obviously do this.

[00:19:17] If it's an eCommerce business or a training type thing, like a coaching or a although coaching with this would actually work, but maybe on the side of like courses or membership sites, it doesn't make sense, but you know, your business well enough to know if this is relevant to you, but a high class proposal is just something that is visually appealing.

[00:19:33] That explains the entire process of what they can expect from you for hiring you. In most cases, studios do this thing where they're just like, they get a quote request. Hey, how much is it for mixing? And then the studio just sends back a block of text. That's like, Hey, it's this much. And here's the info on it.

[00:19:47] That's what I call white trash proposal. It's rough. It's dirty. It's gross. It doesn't, it's not beautiful. It's not very informative. It doesn't make the person feel special. It's like buying a plastic ring at a quarter vending machine thing. And then trying to propose to a girl with that. It's not going to make her feel special, a high class.

[00:20:01] Proposal's the opposite of that. You're taking time, effort, energy to build something beautiful. That's. Custom built for that specific lead or that customer potential customer. And you're sending it to them and it's much more impressive. It's much more persuasive. It makes them want to actually work with you because there's so much detail involved.

[00:20:18] You don't realize this, but if someone's willing to spend, you know, hundreds or thousands of dollars with your studio, they want as much information as possible. They'll read blocks of texts. They'll read long mounts of stuff. For example, if you go to the profitable producer.com. Which is my main flagship course, the profitable producer course that sales page is like, I want to say 10 to 15,000 words long.

[00:20:40] It's really long. But if people are going to spend a lot of money on a course, they're going to drop $1,500 on a course. They don't want just bullet points of information. They want to know the entire process and it for them, what are they going to get out of it? What are all the nitty gritty details? So treat your customers the same way, give them all of the details.

[00:20:58] And a high class proposal is the way to do this. So if you think you struggle with this, I have a page set up. It's better proposals.studio. This page has a video on it, going over my proposal template. And also it gives you a link to some software that I use that helps with this. And if you listen to this podcast for a while, you know what the software is, but it'll help with a lot of the things.

[00:21:17] And it kind of shows you an overview of the high class proposal method. So if this is an area you think you struggled with absolutely go in and. Go to that URL. It will be in our show notes page as well. All these links well, and step up your game and stop doing the white trash proposal. Okay, so now we're on number six of our marketing plan, step six, because these are steps and that is creating your short term follow up process.

[00:21:39] Again, this is only relevant. If you already have quotes coming in or quote requests coming in. So if you don't have quote requests coming in in your studio, then obviously the last process where we're talking about better proposals is not really relevant to you. And this one, talking about short term followups, this isn't relevant for you.

[00:21:53] So you can skip ahead, but if you have quote requests coming in and you don't have at least a 60 day followup guide in place, this is something you absolutely must do. And this goes hand in hand with step three, where we talked about setting up your quote based business. Once you get that quote request.

[00:22:08] Once you have that lead, that email address, that contact information, it is up to you to consistently follow up for the next 30, 60, 90 days or longer. If they've told you that, Hey, we'll be ready in six months from now. You need to be consistently following up and staying in touch with them. So I'm not going to really dive deep into this.

[00:22:23] Again, this is more of an overview, but if you don't have a follow up process in place, There is a really good guide that I created from scratch that is free. All of these resources are free by the way, follow up.guide. That's the URL. It will be in our show notes. If that doesn't work for you for some reason, but call up.guide is the URL.

[00:22:39] And that is my 60 day followup sequence. And you can alter that and change that to be as long or as short as you need, depending on the person you're talking to. But if you don't follow up with people bottom line, if you are not falling over the people you're missing out on about 50% of your income. So this is not something to be taken lightly.

[00:22:55] Step six here. Your short term followup process is a massive part of creating an efficient marketing plan for your business. So we got six steps down. We've got two more to go on this episode here and we'll have the rest of these on the next episode, but the seventh step of your 20 step marketing plan.

[00:23:12] Is implementing a CRM, a customer relationship management software. We have two resources for this one is episode seven, really old episode, over two years old. Now it's titled CRM billion dollar companies use the software. And so should you. And then also there's a CRM software that I recommend, or that I use it's pipe drive.studio is my affiliate link.

[00:23:31] If you use that, you'll get, I think, twice the free trial. You'll get like 30 days instead of 14. And if you were looking for a CRM, I always recommend using that link because they don't require a credit card. You can try it out, see what it's all about, and you're not charged accidentally. If you forget to cancel it or whatever, meaning you'd have to opt in for it and said opt out.

[00:23:47] But a CRM long story short is what makes the rest of this marketing plan work. If you don't use a CRM, you're not gonna be able to follow up consistently with your leads for 30, 60, 90 days. If you don't use a CRM, you're not gonna be able to follow up with those proposals. You're not going to keep track of all the things that you need to keep track of.

[00:24:02] The CRM is the central hub for your sales. It keeps up with your metrics for you. So you know what your sales percentages are, your closing percentages are, it keeps up with all of your past conversations for every single customer. If you have a band with five or six people or one artist with five or six people that are involved with the project, whether it's ANR.

[00:24:20] Bands management, different band members, maybe a mixing engineer or a mastering engineer you're working with on the project. All of these can be associated with one lead or one contact inside of the CRM so that all of these emails are showing up at one place that are related to this one. Project is incredible.

[00:24:36] What you can do with a good CRM, if you set it up correctly. So this is a crucial part. This is a big step that you, you really need to think about implementing. If you want to take your marketing plan to the next level, and this is really relevant, no matter what your business is, even eCommerce businesses have CRMs that are set up specifically for them.

[00:24:50] There's what I call high volume CRM and low volume CRM. A low volume CRM is something like pipe. It's where it's a lot more high touch, more manual things that you're doing as far as. You know, sliding leads between pipelines and actually going in and manually following up with people, sending emails by hand, using templates.

[00:25:07] And that's easy to do if you're average project value is like a thousand or $2,000, but if you're like a mastering engineer or you're an eCommerce business where you're working again with high volume, you're talking like hundreds and hundreds of sales per month or a year, then you need to do a high volume CRM.

[00:25:20] And these are a whole different boat. So I'm not gonna really dive into it. You can dig into it yourself, or you can reach out in our Facebook community. If you want more info on this. The high volume CRMs have more automated features. They send emails automatically. They move people around pipelines automatically.

[00:25:33] And that way you can really keep track of your CRM from a macro level, from a 30,000 foot view, instead of a micro level, which is what the high touch low volume CRMs are. So it's a different animal, a different beast altogether, but either way you need to have a CRM, whether or not you're high volume or low volume business.

[00:25:47] And the last step of this first part of the episode, which is the foundational parts of our marketing plan is simplifying your payment systems. This sounds stupid. And this is really not complicated and it's really easy to talk about, but I see people screw this up all the time. Just in the name of saving 3%.

[00:26:03] I can't tell you how many threads I've seen in our Facebook community in other areas. That don't want to use something that greatly simplifies the process of collecting money from their customers, because they don't want to pay the 2.9%, the PayPal or Stripe, or some of these other payment platforms charge, chalk it up as a business expense that you will always be paying for the rest of your life.

[00:26:21] Yes. I know there are a little clever ways to get around it. Yes. I know that there are apps that do things for cheaper, and I fully support you using those resources. If it doesn't add any additional friction to your customer at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is what is the. Easiest thing for your customer to pay you.

[00:26:38] And that's why I recommend Stripe PayPal or Venmo. There's a three easy ones. There's other ones out there. But the reason I like Stripe is because it integrates with any other software you use. If you use an invoicing software, it integrates with that your customers can pay you through that invoicing software.

[00:26:51] If you use better proposals, which is that proposal software that I recommend it integrates with that. So once they sign their proposal, they can actually pay for their deposit through better proposals because they have integrated with Stripe. If you use file pass, which is my software company, we integrate with Stripe.

[00:27:05] And now we integrate with PayPal as well to actually pay the remaining balances through file pass via Stripe credit card or through PayPal. So it just makes the entire process easier. But yes, you're going to pay the 3% fee that Stripe charges. And no, you're not going to get away from it, but it makes the process so much easier for your clients.

[00:27:20] So the pros greatly outweigh the cons. So simplifying payment systems is a huge part of making sure your customer experience is as great as possible. There's no friction added. You're not just trying to make them jump through hoops so you can avoid a little bit of fees and pay bills. Another great example of something that is used internationally, just about everyone has a PayPal account.

[00:27:37] At this point, it's easy to use. And in most cases you're still gonna pay the 3%. So those are all of the foundational parts of a marketing plan in the first eight. Next week, we're going to have the additional 12 parts, the more fun parts, the top of funnel, parts of your marketing plan, but none of those parts matter until you make sure you have ranked yourself at least a two out of three on these foundational parts.

[00:27:58] Remember, as you went through this episode in your brain or on a sheet of paper, you're ranking yourself. Okay. Of these first eight that I went through, what did I rank myself? Out of one, two or three. One means it's not in place at all. Two means it's in place and passable, but we need to come back to it later and fix it.

[00:28:11] Eventually. Three means it's great. It's perfect. We don't have to worry about this right now. It's not a thing to worry about and I can move on. What did you rank these things in your mind? Again, the first of these is kind of review all this. The first is creating a customer avatar. The second was creating your bad-ass website.

[00:28:27] The third step in this marketing plan, the foundational aspects were setting up a quote based business. The fourth part was creating your sales process or really maximizing your sales process for some of you, the fifth part of this marketing plan is creating your high class proposal instead of the white trash proposal or no proposal at all.

[00:28:46] The six part of this plan is creating your short term followup process. And for me, short term is anything in the 30, 60, 90 day range. When you get further than that, that's more of the longterm followup plan. Which we'll get to next week. And now the seventh part of this marketing plan is implementing your CRM, your customer relationship management system.

[00:29:03] And then the final part of the foundational aspects of the marketing plan is simplifying your payment process or your payment systems. If you get these things down, if you have a two or three in all of these areas, you will be good to go next week on the episode where we start talking about the top of funnel, And we've got lots and lots to cover next week.

[00:29:18] So hopefully this episode was valuable for you. Hopefully you've been mentally rating yourself in each of these first eight foundational aspects of a marketing plan, and hopefully you'll be ready for next week. Brighten early 6:00 AM. When I will be going through the remaining 12 parts. Of this 20 part marketing plan.

[00:29:35] Again, all of the links that I just shared with you, which was a lot, this was a huge information dump, but that's the way it goes. When we zoom out and look at the whole picture of the marketing plan, there's a lot of little individual pieces to put in. It takes us months to implement these things with these people that I'm working with this pilot program, we're trying to implement this in a six month period.

[00:29:52] It's probably going to take longer than this for almost all of those people. But that's the way it goes. It's okay. If things take longer, as long as you are picking the next step, always putting the next step forward, always be working on some part of one of these steps in this marketing plan, you'll be doing yourself a huge favor when it comes to getting out of this COVID mess that we're in right now.

[00:30:11] When it comes to building up your business from scratch. If you're just starting right now, maybe you lost your job and the time you spend doing this will pay dividends for years to come. So that is all I have for you today. Make sure you tune in bright and early next Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM until next time happy hustling.