Ep. 55: Getting Your First Coaching Clients Through Collaborations & Networking With Rebecca Tracey

Rebecca Tracey 0:00
You don’t need to be creating endless images in Canva. And then spending all this time writing captions and researching hashtags and making 1000 reels and doing the dances and appointing like that whole thing, that whole song literal song and dance doesn’t need to happen. You don’t need to do that. So I do you think there’s a place for social media and you still don’t have to be on it at all. But I think that if you are going to be on it, there’s better ways to use it then for creating content.

Meg Casebolt 0:27
You’re listening to social slowdown, a podcast for entrepreneurs and micro businesses looking for sustainable marketing strategies without being dependent on social media. Social media is a double edged sword. It’s a wonderful way to stay connected. But it also can feel like an addictive obligation. And it’s even more complex for businesses, your audience might be right there, but you’ve got to fight with algorithms to maybe be seen by them. So whether you want to abandon social media altogether, or you just want to take a month off, it’s possible to have a thriving business without being dependent on social media. This podcast is all about finding creative, sustainable ways to engage with your audience without needing to lipsync send a cold DMS, run ads or be available 24/7. Let’s get started. Hello, and welcome to the social slowdown podcast. This is Meg Casebolt. And I am here with Becca Tracy from the uncaged life. Hi, Becca, thank you for being here with me today. Yay,

Rebecca Tracey 1:24
it’s so great to finally connect with you.

Meg Casebolt 1:26
I know it feels like we’ve been in the running in the same circles for years. And finally, we get to have a face to face conversation, which is so much fun. I was actually referred to you by another guest Jordan, who we’re both friends with. She told me about this webinar that you did recently around how to get your business off social media, how not to market your business and social media. So we’re going to talk about that quite a bit how that is a strategy for you to talk about to get new people into your world. But before we get there, I would love to kind of hear from you about the uncaged life about what it is that you do with your clients and how you work.

Rebecca Tracey 2:02
Yes, yeah, so my business is called the uncage. Life. I started it in like 2011. So it’s been a long time. And I work with mostly coaches. So I work with a lot of like life coaches, health coaches, healers, service, basically service based businesses that want to be able to sell services online. And we work on the foundation. So we I feel like I fill the gap that a lot of marketing programs that I took when I was starting didn’t do where they were like, Okay, let’s build an email list. And I was like about what, like, so we really work on niching and hard, creating a really strong message around your point of view and your approach and how it differs, creating packages that actually come from market research that we’ve done, and not just like what we think we should be selling. And just helping people really learn how to talk about what they do, so that they can then go and implement, like whatever marketing strategy they want to and we teach a few of our favorite ones, some most of them, which don’t involve social media stuck with him today. But I mean, you do SEO. So you know, all that foundation stuff is so so important. And I think just too many too many courses, skip over it. So that’s like I focus in hard on all that stuff.

Meg Casebolt 3:07
Right. And I think there are also a lot of courses on there that are like, here’s how to market your business, but they don’t necessarily go into the details of like, here’s how to set up your business. So it’s easy to market.

Rebecca Tracey 3:16
Yeah. So that your marketing actually works like I can teach you list building strategy. But if you don’t have clear messaging for a clear target audience, you haven’t done your market research. It’s not going to work. And it’s like an avatar exercise isn’t enough, or I would argue not helpful at all. But

Meg Casebolt 3:30
I agree. I think the same thing where if you’re like, Oh, I know that my my ideal client avatar, like drinks, pumpkin spice lattes, a whole puff, and she has a dog named Homer like, none of that is relevant. If it’s not about the way that you can serve that person. I actually, lately I’ve been thinking about it. Like if you’re writing a novel, and you’re developing a character, you need to understand not just like, what boots are your character wearing, but like, what are her motivations? And what’s the external conflict? And like, How was she going to grow through the course of this experience? And like, that’s a much more interesting, like, what is the transformation that you’re going to help that person get? Not just like, what is her favorite color?

Rebecca Tracey 4:08
Yeah, irrelevant.

Meg Casebolt 4:11
So tell me a little bit about the thought process behind the not even pivot but the the messaging strategy that you’re trying out right now of how to market your business without needing to be

Rebecca Tracey 4:23
on social media. Yeah, so my so my, the students that come to me are new to business typically. So they and they tend to be like in their 40s and 50s. Their coaches are kind of transitioning often from their other career or maybe they’ve been like raising kids and going back to work. So they don’t want if they don’t have time, they’re not interested in like being up to date on the new tick tock strategy. Like it’s just not that demographic typically. And so the number one thing I hear is like, I don’t want to be on social. So I was doing the launch for my new programs are not my new program. Had the program since 2014. During the launch for my program, and was just trying to, I wanted to do a webinar. I’ve been doing the same training for years now. Like, I need a new angle to this. And one thing that I thought I could talk about was how to how to market your business without social media. And I just thought, oh, I’ll just go on and do a little Facebook Live about it. And I was like, actually, maybe we should get people to sign up. So I turned it into like a proper webinar signup thing. And we had 2500 people sign up, maybe 500, which is not the typical rates. We get for signups for our trainings these days. Like, I think the most we’ve had before this was like 700, or maybe maybe 1000 people, 1500 people, but there’s a lot of people signing up. But when you think so,

Meg Casebolt 5:30
I would say like, over time, you know, two years ago, even getting 1000 People may have felt better. But right now, it’s late, you know, q4 2022. Getting anybody to sign up for m&r feels like an uphill battle? Because, yes, so like burnout on online learning. And we don’t want to show up live for anything. So the fact that this huge influx of registrations is like, Oh, something is hitting a nerve here. Yes, people. Yeah.

Rebecca Tracey 5:55
So I’ll tell you a bit about how I marketed it and how we got that many people because it’s funny. So we I have a Facebook group, social media, I have a Facebook group of about 15,000 people. I’ve been running it for years. And so I posted in there. And then we also ran Facebook ads to the webinar signup page. So the trolls love to come out on Facebook ads, I’m sure you know, and try and point out the fact that you’re teaching a webinar about not using social media. But here you are in social media, you hypocrite. And I respond to all the troll comments, because I kind of love but I just can’t not. So I’m like, Oh, hey, Sally. And so I shared with them, I was like, Yeah, you’re right, I have a business that sells a course I need a lot of numbers, we have funnels, it’s a different business model than if you’re new, you’re selling one on one, you’re trying to get to your first six figures with like some one on one clients. And you don’t need to market through Facebook ads to do that. So come to my training, I’ll show you how to do it. So I was like, Yes, I’m using Facebook ads, you don’t need to, and I didn’t when I started. So it was interesting, being able to kind of clarify that for people too, because they’re like, your hips are great. And in the training, I talked about how we do use social media, and I find what works and what doesn’t. But yeah, so we have a lot of interest in it. And yeah, the training was great.

Meg Casebolt 7:10
And I do want to point out also, like you said, Oh, I have this Facebook group of 15,000 people. But also you started that Facebook group with 15,000 people in two years ago, teen, right. And I think that you probably have had a lot of those people who either have been lingering in the group for a long time, or they have gone through your program and they’ve stuck around, or that’s part of your overall lead generation strategy for new people is they can come join the group and get to know you. But you’re also talking to beginners. Yeah. And beginners, I think are more likely to be active and engaged within a Facebook group than a more advanced client group, because they’re not as jaded

Rebecca Tracey 7:54
like, yeah,

Meg Casebolt 7:56
and I would also say, like, you specifically came out and you’re like, here is my client, my ideal client is in her 40s and 50s. She’s making this transition, like you’re so clear about who that person is. And people in their 40s and 50s are more likely to be on Facebook and people in their 20s. And also their 30s are on Instagram, their 20s are on Tik Tok, right, like, you know who your audience is, you know what their behavior is, and you’re going out and creating the marketing that works for the audience that you want to cultivate? Yeah, you’re not just going well, Becca, Tracy, she has a Facebook group of 15,000 people. So I should start a Facebook group.

Rebecca Tracey 8:35
Well, and I would even argue that like, I don’t think our Facebook group brings us that much business. Like we don’t do it. We don’t do anything in there. It kind of is like self community run. Like, we have a we have a city manager in there who’s just keeping an eye on spam and stuff. But we don’t really like when I’m doing a launch or I’ll post some stuff in there. But you can see how many people see those posts. And it’s like nobody 23 People saw this post. So our Facebook group has never been a really strong source of marketing for us, or like lead generation. It probably could be but I just would rather put my effort into other things. I like it because I keep it I thought about shutting it down many times I keep it because when people email me a question that I don’t want to answer. I’m like, You know what be a great, that’s a great question for the Facebook group. And I send them over to the group. And it’s a way for new new business owners to actually meet other people in network, which is one of the strategies is you and I talked about, for building your business off of Facebook, even though networking is on Facebook. So let’s talk about that when we talk about the strategy because I think that’s such an interesting one. But yeah, our Facebook group is not a major source of lead generation for us.

Meg Casebolt 9:42
One of the things that I find myself saying a lot on this podcast is like social media can be a really great place for middle of funnel conversations for nurturing people. Maybe not necessarily for lead generation for people who are either discovering you at that kind of top of funnel range, and it’s always not always often the best place to convert people. either that should be happening in conversations or email marketing or some way that you can feel a little bit more intimate and be in charge of like, I can’t control, you know, like you said, like 23 people’s on my Facebook posts, but like, I can control my email deliverability, I can control the the time that it lands in people’s inboxes I can track and see if they’re actually opening it and clicking through on it. The metrics are different when you have that sort of when you’re using email marketing than when you’re using social media, which is like all algorithm based, it can be hard to know exactly what’s working. So I’m, like, very intrigued at that. But like, well, we keep someone in there. But really, it’s a holding pattern for you. It sounds

Rebecca Tracey 10:39
Yeah, I think. Yeah. And when I say and, you know, my premise, when I, when I created this training about build, you know, build your business offs, not without social media was without being a slave to like this content generation that we feel like we have to do on social media. So that to me, I was like I told I, in the webinar, I was like, I use social media, here’s how I use it, I love it, I think it’s great for your business. Here’s what you don’t need to do. So like networking connections, like I have tons of business colleagues and friends that I like, chat with on Instagram, or that, you know, it’s good for those types of networking things. But you don’t need to be creating endless images in Canva. And then spending all this time writing captions and reshares and hashtags, and making 1000 reels and doing the dances and appointing like that whole thing, that whole song literal song and dance doesn’t need to happen. You don’t need to do that. So I do think there’s a place for social media, and you still don’t have to be on it at all. But if I think that if you are going to be on it, there’s better ways to use it then for creating content,

Meg Casebolt 11:40
right? It’s like, you don’t have to be broadcasting, you can be engaging. Yeah, you don’t have to be leading the conversation on social media, you could spend your time, you know, going through other people’s posts and commenting and DMing them and starting those conversations that you can then, you know, either keep them on social and like you said, Stay in touch with people and see what’s going on in their lives. Or take that conversation offline to, you know, like, Oh, I’m gonna DM you about this. But then maybe we could have a coffee chat. Maybe we could have a chance for this relationship to go deeper. Can you come on my podcast and talk about, you know, those kinds of conversations can sometimes it can be easier to introduce yourself on social but that doesn’t mean that the only way to do that, or the even the best way to do

Rebecca Tracey 12:22
yeah, I’ve just had I’ve had students come to me and be like, Hey, I’m doing like I’m doing all the things. Look at my social and I look at it, and I’m like, it’s beautiful is way nicer than mine. They’ve got you know, the images look really good. But when I look through it, I’m like, how much time are you this is content every day? And they’re like, Yeah, it’s like a full time job. And when I look at it, I’m like, I don’t know what you sell. So this is really pretty. I have no idea what this is about. Yeah. So that the whole content creation thing, I think is just no matter where you’re creating content, you have to have all those clear foundations. But yeah, I just think we don’t need to be doing it on social.

Meg Casebolt 12:56
So how are you using social for promoting your business your program. So currently,

Rebecca Tracey 13:02
so we have, so we have a group program, it’s on an evergreen funnel, it’s a you know, once you get into funnels, you need a lot of people coming into it. And so so we have a scaled business, I’m not a one on one coach, just to make that clear. I work with one on one coaches, but I do not have a one on one business. So I think that’s a really, really important distinction when I talked about this, because what I do is not what I think my clients should do. And it’s not how I grew my business, to the first like six figures at least. So the strategies change as you scale. So currently, we do run Facebook ads, I’m kind of considering stopping, they’re not great. But the heyday is the heyday is over, for sure. But we do still run Facebook ads. We have our Facebook group where again, people join, we are doing very minimal things in there. We I have I have paid groups. So like my program has a group and that’s the one that I engage in for my paid students. And then we have a full time marketing person on our team. And so her role is part of her role. Hers her whole role is organic marketing. So like all of the things lead gen that aren’t paid paid ads. And part of that is social media. So she’s on there. And we’ve had this for years kind of playing with different strategies that we had some lady doing our Instagram, so like writing the captions, writing the post posting the stories, like doing all of that stuff. And she’s lovely, she does an amazing job, her strategy is great. It’s still a slow build, like I think we have 4000 people following us on Instagram, and we’re like, we have quite a big, big stage business otherwise. And I still am not convinced that it’s like the best use of where our marketing teams time should be. So it’s growing. And it’s nice to have and we can afford to have a full time team member who’s working on that strategy. But I’m still I’m still like maybe we actually what if we stopped Instagram? What do we put that effort into? Like some of these other strategies? Because I think I think also I was eager to hire it out when I was new. When I started my business. I was eager to be like I need someone doing my social and for sure that would not have been the best use of my money at that

Meg Casebolt 14:57
it’s been really interesting which If we can afford to have somebody doing our social media, like we can afford to do that, but not everyone can afford to do that. So if you don’t want to outsource it, and you can’t afford to, and you don’t want to do it yourself, like, you can kind of make the decision of do I want to delegate do I want to eliminate? Do I want to streamline? And I’m sure with having somebody whose full time job is marketing this business, like there are ways that social media is a part of it without it being the driving force, or it’s like, Oh, you were just on a podcast episode, you wrote a blog post, you’re creating some sort of content, you’re using these collaborative relationships, you have these emails that are going out, and hey, let’s repurpose that, and throw it up with a picture and add a caption. Like, it’s actually saying socials leading it.

Rebecca Tracey 15:46
One interesting thing that we did with this webinar, which again, people call this out for what? I love that shit on your strategy. Um, so we, during the training, I said on the on the webinar and everyone watching the replay, so it also I was like, if you’re not sure, because I really harped on the point that you need your foundations first. I was like, I don’t care if you’re on or off social, but with the strategies we’re going to teach you, you have to be really niched in you have to have that messaging, you have to have all of that, like completely dialed in before you do any of this or it’s not going to work. And so I said, if you’re not sure if you have that, or you want me to take a quick peek, DM me on Instagram, DM me your page, your website, or I said, or you can email me, email me or DM me, or message me on Facebook, whatever, just get in touch with me. And send me your send me if you have social media, send me your page. If you have your website, send it to me. And I will let you know if I think you have those foundations dialed. And so we had a ton of people doing that, of course, some people were like, Why would I send you a message on Instagram? If you said no to social media? I’m like, because this is what social media is good for. Right? Yeah. And so we had, so we got into, I don’t know how many tons of personal conversations now with people who otherwise would have just watched the training and then be like, Oh, that was helpful. But now they’re in my inbox or in my DMs, I’m able to look at their page and say, Actually, you don’t have these foundations. Have you thought about joining my program? And they’re like, actually, yeah, and then you get into sales conversations from it. So it was a it was a great strategy, it took a lot of time. But that’s, that’s an example how I think social can work really, really well. Without me going on and going like, Okay, let me dance and point around on reels for all day,

Meg Casebolt 17:20
or, or give away everything from the training and turn it into content that people can consume for free without any sort of reciprocity or engagement. You know, yes, you gave this away for free in a webinar, and people can go download the replay, and they can watch it and they can engage with you that way. But like they have to give you that email address. And depending on where you’re hosting the webinar and all that, like you know, now they’re in your funnel. Yeah, right now, yeah, follow up with them. Now you can you can segment them now you can figure out ways to engage with them or, and then once they’re in that, once they’re watching, then you can engage with them on social and you have a deeper one to one conversation because I do I agree with you that like saying shoot me a message on Instagram that has linked to your profile, it’s a lesser commitment, than send me an email even though the content in it can probably be exactly the same. Like there’s there’s a informality around social media, where you can just be like, Hey, I saw your webinar, like here, can you check out my website versus an email? You have to be like, hello, Rebecca. Dear sir. My concern right, you don’t. And like what’s weird is you don’t know who’s gonna be on the other end either way, but like you’re sort of seeing someone’s face when you’re thinking of social media versus Yeah, like an inbox. There’s just a different kind of level of awareness or for or intimacy.

Rebecca Tracey 18:38
I love the voice message on Instagram. It’s so easy for me. I was like, if you just send it to me on Instagram, I can reply and just go, Hey, I’m looking at your page right now. Here’s everything good. It’s not clear, blah, blah, join my program.

Meg Casebolt 18:50
I hate it when people send me an unsolicited voice message. And I’m like, no, no,

Rebecca Tracey 18:54
no. Yeah. Are you? Okay, no, but this, but I feel like my they wrote to me, because I said, Send me your page. And I’ll give you feedback. So my voice message was then giving them the feedback. So I think that people actually like it. Ya know, if I just get a message, if I see a message from some white dude, and it’s just a voice message is better.

Meg Casebolt 19:14
And sometimes, four minutes long, and you’re like, you don’t know me? Can you? Can you like, at least be a little bit brief wipe? Delete.

Rebecca Tracey 19:21
Yeah, wipe it and delete it. Yeah, that’s yes. Not so much. But people love it when because they’re like, Oh, great. You’re gonna give me free feedback. Amazing. And so they love the voice message. Because they’re like, holy shit. It’s actually you might get me Yes, I think it might recognize my team member. Sometimes it’s my team member, but for the launch, it was me. And I think they’re just like, oh, you actually looked at myself? Oh, you’re actually being helpful, like, so then I think the voice messages can come in really handy. And it’s so much easier for me than trying to type out feedback for someone. Yeah.

Meg Casebolt 19:50
Is that really time consuming for you?

Rebecca Tracey 19:52
Um, I didn’t mind because during the launch, it’s like, I’m just launching and that’s just my full time job. Um, otherwise I do have A team member that does like our sales and has those conversations and is in the DMS. And so she does all of that usually. So not time consuming for me.

Meg Casebolt 20:10
Yeah. And that’s also worth noting is it’s going to be time consuming for you when you’re in active sales mode when you’re when you have a program that you’re launching. And you’ve it’s on evergreen, but you launch it big. What, twice a year.

Rebecca Tracey 20:25
Yeah, we used to actually stopped launching, and then sales were slow through the funnel. So I was like, Okay, we need launches work. We need a launch. Yeah, this was just once once this year that we launched. Yeah, and that’s

Meg Casebolt 20:34
nice. Because you’re like, Okay, we’re gonna launch we’re gonna go big, we’re going to have this 2500 person list. We’re going to do the live webinar, we’re going to do the follow up. And that’s your only thing that you’re focusing on. Yeah. I think a lot of times people who are scaling are like, Oh, I’m going to be continuing to run my one to one services. And then I’m also going to sell this program that I’m developing, but I don’t have time to develop the program, because I’m also trying to get these one to one sales, and then, and then they feel stretched really thin across multiple things when it’s yeah, no, this needs to be your full time. Like when you start to leverage your program, then your your job becomes a marketing machine versus delivery.

Rebecca Tracey 21:10
Yes, yeah. And this is a lazy launch, because I last year was like no more launches. I’ve loved launches. I’m good at them. But it’s just not a sustainable strategy. I’ve been doing it for years. So I was like, no more launches. And then this year, I was like, Okay, we need a launch sales. And that’s where I was like, Okay, we need a new like, you need a new interesting training to bring to the people. But it was still, like, we were running Facebook ads. We had all our emails scheduled, all of that was happening, but I wasn’t doing like previously on lunches. I’d be like, on Instagram Live, I’d be on Facebook Live, we’d be doing all this live, live live stuff. This time, all I was doing was answering client questions like I wasn’t really doing anything else. And it was a great launch. I wasn’t expecting much. I was like, I made me make like 10 or 15 sales. That’ll be great. I think we made like 55. So yeah, so it, it still felt good. And I think the reason it worked so well, because the last launch is a felt like pulling teeth like literally, I was like dying. And this felt easy. And I think it’s because the trading I did was really good. I think it showed people the gap in why their marketing is not working. If you look at like our conversion rates, they weren’t good. So like 2500 people, what do they say like 1%, Jubei, or something like that. That wasn’t what happened? Which is fine. Because I think with the topic, like not using social media, you get somebody who’s like, I make dog collars, and I was like, okay, cool. You can come I don’t think this training is going to help you. But sure. So we had a ton of people from so many industries. But the ones who were coaches, who saw the training, were helped like hell onboard with my messaging and what I was what I was saying, so I think that’s where like, yeah, launching one that this is just a rant about launching, but launch, it gets crazy, because people are like, Oh, conversion with all the numbers. And how many people showed up like, oh, like the show great was really, really low. Like not that many people showed up live 2500 people signed up and I went and I like upgraded zoom webinar, it’s cost me $1,000 To upgrade zoom webinar to fit 1000 people,

Meg Casebolt 23:04
and so many people.

Rebecca Tracey 23:09
But people watch the replay. So like the conversion numbers weren’t good, according to

Meg Casebolt 23:14
well, so let’s let’s talk about that, like the conversion numbers, if your conversion rate that you are calculating is number of sales divided by number of registrations. But if you’re looking at number of sales divided by number of people who finished watching the replay, or number of sales divided by people who reached out and had a personalized conversation with you, every single one of those conversion rates is going to be different. I’m guessing that if there were people that made, you know, that registered and then showed up or watched the replay, and then reached out to you and then had a conversation with you, you’re gonna have a conversion rate that’s more like 30%, I would

Rebecca Tracey 23:47
say. So here’s my, here’s my sticky note. So those are all the people who signed up, I write their names on my wall. And I think I talked to almost every one of like, at least 80% of those names, through DMS through email, like because they wrote in saying, here’s, here’s my site, what do you think? Is it clear enough? And so that, yeah, like that personal outreach strategy, which is where I think social does really shine. It’s so important for launches, you can’t just gone are the days where you just do a webinar and just wait for people to sign up and sit back and roll in the money coming in. It just doesn’t. It’s just not happening these days. And so that, like personal connection is so important. Yeah, I

Meg Casebolt 24:24
think that’s absolutely what I’m finding. And what I keep hearing from people as we’re having these conversations is like, the initial point of contact can be a broadcast. But then when it comes to follow up, it can’t just be Oh, come in my Facebook group, and I’m gonna go on Facebook Live and maybe I’ll acknowledge you in the comments and be like, hey, Sandra, good to see you today. And then you’re gonna buy for me because I said your name. Yeah. The goal of the broadcast the goal of those, you know, casting the wide net is drawing in the people who are the most likely to have a conversation with you and then by providing that personalized support, providing that feedback, giving those Voice Memos where it’s like, oh my gosh, that’s actually Becca’s voice. Like, that’s not someone on her team that’s not like, and she’s looking at my site. And I can tell whether that’s something that you’re doing in voice memos, or like, we just did this for my business. And I was like sending five minute 10 minute loom videos of just walking through people’s websites, or Bon juros, where you’re actually welcoming people to the program and making them feel like even in a leveraged offer, even in a group program, you still see them, you still know them, and you can use their business as an example. That’s something that like, it’s not, quote unquote, scalable, but it is if you make the time for it, and it’s part of your strategy.

Rebecca Tracey 25:41
Yeah. And it’s just what, it’s just what has to happen. Like if we hadn’t done that thing, where we said, DMS, your thing, and we’ll take a look or like, we hadn’t been actively reaching out to people, and just waiting for them to like, Okay, let us know, if you have any questions about program like that, I’d have a quarter of those sticky notes on my wall guaranteed, like, I am sure that you need

Meg Casebolt 26:01
to ask people to raise their hands. And then when they raise their hands, you have to call on them.

Rebecca Tracey 26:05
Yeah. Yeah. My second

Meg Casebolt 26:09
grader would tell you, like, when you raise your hand, and the teacher doesn’t call on you, it makes you very frustrated. We have that conversation earlier this week. You know, so like, this is the way that marketing is going now it has, you can still have those big conversations, but they have to be personalized. Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of what you were kind of teaching on the webinar, I would love to hear a little bit about that, too. Once you have those foundations in place. Know your ideal client, you have your marketing locked in, you know, you have your your offers locked in, you know, who it is that you want to be reaching. What are some of the strategies that you are recommending to people? Yeah, training.

Rebecca Tracey 26:46
So yeah, so half the training was that half the training was me giving examples of like, Here’s what I mean, like clear, this clear messaging clear, whatever, because people, okay, I have all that, but they don’t. So a lot of it was like hammering that point home, to the point where I was like, okay, these people are gonna start dropping off if I don’t start giving them other strategies, but it’s so important. So I really hammer that home with lots of examples. And then I give three key strategies. So one, being networking. So just straight up, like get to know other people adjacent to your industry, not networking for clients, like not going into a Facebook group and fishing for clients. But again, this and I said, this is where social media comes in really handy, like getting into Facebook groups with other business owners, because other business owners are going to know your people, even if your people aren’t business owners, just building those networks in various ways. Number one, so whether I don’t, and this is not like in person networking, obviously. I mean, it could be, it could be but for most people, they’re like, I don’t want to leave my house, I don’t want to go do things. Yes, it definitely could be. But just getting to getting to build those connections with other people who serve a similar audience to you who, you know, can become referral sources, just like who can become business friends who might, you know, finally, you clients along the way, because that’s just important for your mental health to new, like, my clients are new, right? So they are sitting at home, they don’t know anyone, they don’t have a network of other online business friends, their friends and family think they’re crazy for doing this. And so like you need a group of BFFs like business BFFs. So yeah. And that might

Meg Casebolt 28:17
also be the benefit of having a Facebook group is that those people who are thinking about this building up this network might be able to go into your Facebook group, and not necessarily have an engaging conversation with you or with your team. But they’re talking to other people in that space, who are in a similar boat, who

Rebecca Tracey 28:32
that’s my services, I started to hear when I was a one on one coach. And I was like, all of you need to know each other, like all my clients as like, you all need to just be friends. Because you’re all struggling with the same things. You’re all in the same boat. Like you all don’t know anyone who’s doing this. And so that’s why I started the Facebook group back in 2013. So more of like a networking thing not to sell themselves, but just to like, meet other business owners. So that was one. The second one kind of stems from that which is getting in front of other people’s audiences. This is hands down. I still, this is how I grew my business, like into the six figures and more, I still use this strategy. Like we’re doing it right now. But getting Yeah, cuz here’s the thing with social media, right? You’re like spending all this time and even blogging, like writing on your own blog. Great, you know, you want to talk about SEO, it’s great, but it’s like a long game. Nobody’s you write a blog post and you’re sending out to your email list. They already follow you. Like, there’s not it’s not a quick way to get new people into your world. But if I, let’s say come on a podcast and you have an audience of however many people and now Hey, friends like now you all know about me, that’s like huge bang for my buck. All I had to do was like, curl my hair a little bit and like, show up for an hour and chat about things I know about. And so it’s such a such a good strategy, because now it’s like you’re vouching for me because you’ve had me on your podcast. I’m getting exposure to all these people who might not have known me before. And you can do that when you’re new to business. I think that’s the biggest thing I hear from my clients. I’m like, oh, but like I don’t have any. I don’t have a big odd Insta shares, why would somebody have me on there on their show? I’m like, because you have an expertise on a topic that they are very interested in, and they need content. So it’s a, it’s a win win, you don’t have to have a massive audience to, like get on someone’s podcast or go do a training for their group or whatever. So and then the next question is like, but how do I find those people and then it right to the networking. That’s why building those connections is so important, because then it’s so easy to pitch yourself to be like, Hey, I’ve you know, I’ve noticed you talk about this, I’d love to do a free thing for your for your audience. And so

Meg Casebolt 30:33
it doesn’t have to be a huge group that you’re pitching into. It doesn’t have to be a public. You know, you and I are having this podcast conversation, hopefully, like hundreds of people listen to it, maybe just one, right like hi, listener. But I did a I had a friend invite me into her mentorship program, we had five people on the call, two of them bought a $2,500 package each. So it was like, Oh, hey, I just made $5,000 on our call. Yeah, that was a what, like 40% conversion rate from that. Yeah. And it doesn’t always have to be these huge audiences. It can just be a guest expert in a coaching program.

Rebecca Tracey 31:07
Yeah, my guest expert, I did a I did a video in someone’s coaching program, like years ago, like probably, I would probably watch it now and cringe at old and like, people still come to me, they’re like I saw I watched your bonus training in this program. Like, I would love to work with you. And so it’s people need and this is why the foundations piece is so important. Because if you don’t have a really clear niche, and like a really, really clear point of view that you can offer that’s maybe different, or that is like strong enough that people like it has to be very, very clear. So you can’t just go pitch yourself and be like, I love to talk about building a business you love to be on your show. It’s like no, you can’t, because it’s not a thing that like, it needs to be clear and specific. And it needs to be a little bit different. And so it needs to have that like unique point of view in there. And so that’s why those foundations pieces become so important. But once you have those, I think you should just be pitching yourself all over the place to get in front of other audience because that’s like one piece of content. Now it’s seen in front of hundreds or 1000s of people instead of just your own email list with like 10 people on it. Right? That’s my favorite. you’re leveraging those

Meg Casebolt 32:08
relationships and those collaborations, but you’re also doing a service to the person who is like, cultivating that audience and curating those people for you. It’s very much a win win situation.

Rebecca Tracey 32:20
Yeah, it’s because they look good by bringing in someone who has a cool expertise and something that they don’t teach about right, but that their audience still needs. Yeah, so it’s definitely a win win. And then the third thing that I talked about was just leveraging pillar content to like really like evergreen pillar content. So I have one blog post that I wrote, It was like a rant blog post, it was about life coaches, I think it’s the life coaches, life coaches, don’t quit your day job. I love it.

Meg Casebolt 32:44
I have done keyword research for other clients where they’re like, my competitors, Becca, Tracy, and I’m like, let’s do this, right like that blog post put you on the moon, in terms of your SEO, and then the podcast interviews that you’ve done since that point have helped drive more backlinks to it, which helps it gets the more I’m not going to get all SEO. Like that, that one post. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be like this creation hamster wheel of you know, you create two YouTube videos a week. And then you convert them into mobile mobile blog and send them out to all the places, sometimes one blog post that you wrote 10 years ago,

Rebecca Tracey 33:17
can carry a long time. I didn’t write it with SEO in mind at all. I wrote it because I was like, here’s what the people need to hear. It’s all point of view. It’s all like my opinions about here’s what’s happening in the coaching industry. And here’s what’s not working, and here’s what you need to know. And yeah, and it got attention. And now we’re like, oh, we should go in like SEO that up, we should go and add an opt in. So now we’d like to optimize the post. But it didn’t start that way got a ton of traffic. The coach that works with me in my Onkyo business program, Erin, she’s our mindset coach. She was also one of my students, she has a whole other separate one to one coaching business where she coaches women who are in a new job or a new role who are having a confidence crisis. And she doesn’t do any marketing for her business. She she’s got a near six figure one on one coaching business with non business owners with real people. And she has one YouTube video that she made that was just super, super nice in language, it was like, why you’re not confident in your new role. And I use this one as an example on the training and I was going to the video, it was like a five minute video. It’s like not an hour long training. It was a five minute video with her sharing, like, here’s what is going on when you get into that new job and you are just thinking holy shit. And next 100 comments, all of them going like holy shit, this lady’s reading my mind, oh my god, this is me. Here’s what’s happening at my new job. And she told me that that video gets her 80% of her consults now. So when people come to her and sign up for a consultant, she says, How do you find me they say that YouTube video. And she again, she didn’t create it because she was like, I’m gonna put a strategy on YouTube. She just was like, here’s the thing. She did market research. Here’s the biggest problem my clients are having. Because a five minute video telling them why it’s happening and solving their problem. And that one thing has done really, really well. So you know, obviously like you don’t know what content is going to hit the mark but that’s why Being somewhat consistent with content can be really helpful. And it’s why I think it’s a good strategy, even though it’s a little bit of a longer game than like pitching yourself to other people’s audiences thing.

Meg Casebolt 35:08
And I think, you know, even though I’m the SEO person in the room, like, not all of your content needs to be optimized for search, sometimes you just need to strike a nerve. And if you strike a nerve, then people will share it. And if you hit a very particular moment in time, both the moment in your client’s life where they have that kind of external crisis, and they’re like, Oh, holy shit, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I don’t know anybody who I know that can help you with this, then they go to Google, but also, like you hit a moment in time of this is what’s happening in the coaching industry right now. And I have a front row seat to it. And I’m going to call the bullshit on it. And no one else is saying this. But I’m seeing it and I want you to know, I’m seeing it and you’re not alone. And there’s a certain like, Call to Arms, that converts really well, that isn’t always going to be like, well, let me go do the keyword research and what people have been searching for for the past three years on. It’s not sometimes you just have to, like, say something that’s important. And let it ride and let it go.

Rebecca Tracey 36:11
Yeah, happens? Yeah, I definitely think there’s like, it takes some courage to go in that like that direction, that I have no problem going in saying, like, here’s the bullshit I’m seeing. But a lot of times my students will come to me and say, okay, but I don’t want to, like I don’t want to be polarizing or like I don’t, that’s just not me. Like, I don’t have this whole like dissenting opinion about the industry. And I’m like, great look at Aaron’s example, why you’re not confident in your new role. Like there’s nothing like polarizing, nothing polarizing about what she said, it wasn’t this big, like hot topic, it was just like, women who were struggling, because they get a new job and think, Oh, my God, like, I have no idea what I’m doing. And she just spoke directly to their fears and what was going on with them. And she gave her point of view about why and like, normalized it and empathize with it. And they were like, Oh, thank you. So it doesn’t have Yes, like I love a good rant post and a good like, here’s what’s fucked up about the industry. Here’s the you know, you can do it with the health industry, you can do it with the business industry, for sure. But it doesn’t have to be that it just has to be coming from things that you actually know, your clients are

Meg Casebolt 37:09
from a place of empathy. You know, I think of some of my clients are in the health and wellness space. And what they’re always hearing from people is like, I need to lose weight. But what they recognize and they know as health professionals is like, even if you were to lose the weight, and I’m not saying you need to, it’s not actually going to change your life as much as you think it is. Because the work needs to happen in your head before your body’s actually going to like, you know, just losing the weight is not going to make you feel better about yourself, it’s not going to make you happier, it’s not going to make you wealthier, it’s not going to change any of those things unless you also have these other things in place. And then like you might just feel better in your body. And that might help you lose weight, but weight loss is no longer the objective. Right? So sometimes just like educating, educating, educating people about like, what are the changes? What what did the change actually look like? Yep, can be really powerful?

Rebecca Tracey 38:03
Yeah. And it can be, you know, I blog for a long I built my business with blogging, because it was I think, blogging coming back into style, though, I gotta say,

Meg Casebolt 38:11
I think people are getting really tired of, you know, you are limited to 15 to 60 seconds. And there, there’s a time and a place for a 15 second video, but there’s also like, I think people want the opportunity to go deeper.

Rebecca Tracey 38:24
Yeah. And like not learning anything from watching someone dance around on a reel and point at the four reasons why I don’t have whatever, like it’s not it’s not exactly the style. But I built my business blogging and like guest blogging for other people’s sites was a thing then. But it’s, you know, and I think that that can that consistency over the years, I’ve stopped blogging for a long time, but I’m

Meg Casebolt 38:43
fundation. Like, it’s the same is what you’re saying to your clients, like you establish the foundation, and then you can grow out of the foundations and try things, different strategies, but the foundations are you establish what who you’re working with and how you can help them whatever platform you choose. Yeah, so social media, or blogging, or podcasts or whatever.

Rebecca Tracey 39:02
Yeah, like you need a way to get content in front of people. And I would say, I guess, yeah, if you’re really good at what you do, and you’re really, really, really nice, Jane, and you have a very wide network, you could build a business just through referrals. But for most people, it’s just not the case. Like for most people, they need to actually be putting out some content to at least start to build up enough of a reputation to get that networking piece in place. So like I do know, Erin gets a lot of her clients from referrals now, but she’s already said she sort of built up that foundational network first. But yeah, blogging, make a YouTube video, like just a podcast, you just need some way of putting out evergreen content. So stuff that’s actually going to stick around like you can, how much time goes into making a frickin reel and then who sees you know, like, once people see it, it’s like, okay, well, that’s done and now I gotta make another one. I just I was actually on the webinar was like, okay, for all of you making reals. Like, I’d love for you to do the math of how much what’s your hourly rate?

Meg Casebolt 40:00
Alright, so Becca, thank you so much for being with us today. If people want to find out about you and hear about you and not Damn you information about their websites because we’re not in the active launch mode, what’s the best way for them to sort of get to know your program and get to know your business?

Rebecca Tracey 40:17
My Facebook group, you want to be on social come on into the group like the new business owners for sure. Looking to just like, you know, ask all the questions about starting business. We are over on Instagram at the uncage life. I’m on Instagram separately, where it’s mostly just pictures of me hiking mountains with my dogs. If you’re into that I’m at Rebecca Tracy. The best place

Meg Casebolt 40:38
do you thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.

Rebecca Tracey 40:40
Thanks, Meg.

Meg Casebolt 40:43
Thank you so much for listening to the social slowdown podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or come on over to social slowdown.com and sign up for our email list. You never miss an episode. We’d also love if you could write a review to help other small business owners find the show you can head over to social slowdown.com/review Or grab that link in our show notes for easy access. We’ll be back soon with more tips to help you market your business without being beholden to social media Talk to you then.

Please forgive any typos as this transcript was automatically generated by otter.ai.