Nurture Marketing with Tamika Auwai

Tamika Auwai 0:00
What what is the message that you’re actually communicating? And for me, and from my experience and perspective, it’s really like your ability to help your people think about their problem differently, like, either identify it and or also think about that problem differently. Like, that’s what creates the leaning factor that we’ll have them move from being like, Oh, they’re an interesting person. I’m on their list to like, oh, yeah, I want to pay cash money and purchase whatever solution like right now, yesterday,

Meg Casebolt 0:30
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 to cold DMS, run ads or be available 24/7. Let’s get started. Hello, my friends, welcome to the social slowdown. I’m your host, Meg Casebolt. And I am here with Tamika ry, to talk specifically about how you guys know me, I don’t talk specifically about anything, but to have a conversation generally about all things websites and content marketing and social media. So thank you to mica for being here with me today.

Tamika Auwai 1:37
Thank you so much mag, I’m super excited to be here. I think we’re gonna have a really fun conversation.

Meg Casebolt 1:43
Well, what before we get started, why don’t you just give folks the, you know, quick overview of your origin story, you know, how did you get into this wild online marketing world?

Tamika Auwai 1:54
Yeah, it was a crazy interesting entry. I spent a good decade or so in corporate marketing, and I was laid off in Oh, eight, laid off and found out I was pregnant a couple days later. So that was fun. But I’m a Canadian, so it was okay, because I’ve met socialized medicine, socialized medicine, so it’s Huzzah. However, you know, oh, wait, if anyone remembers, that was the time that the economy kind of dipped? And marketers are always the first to kind of go on the chopping block. So I had that big decision do I go work for someone else? Do I maybe start at the bottom with not as much seniority? You know, marketing salaries are already looking pretty, you know, slim because of the budget. So that was my like, Alright, now we’re never Let’s start our own business. And yeah, had a wild an interesting journey, figuring out kind of what my thing is always stayed in the vein of marketing. But my very first business was actually it was doing them event marketing for fashion brands, like, cool. Fun before a pop ups were a thing. I was like, among the first in, you know, my neck of the woods and just outside of Toronto, it was downtown Toronto and asking, you know, realtors, like, Hey, can I borrow your space to host an event and they were looking at me like I was crazy. So started there, because I really love fashion also quickly found out that that was not a niche that was going to sustain my financial desires and requirements. Because they, you know, everyone wants Beyonce to wear their thing. And that’s how they get famous, right when you when you’re a new young brand. So slowly got a little bit more focused and started to really lean into the consulting side of things, consulting first with, you know, small business owners and, you know, still have a huge love for them, but then specialize even further to consult, kind of primarily with coaches, amongst various coaching verticals, so health coaches, wealth coaches, spirituality, coaches, all of that good stuff. And through that, eventually, I started an agency that is called Orisha, creative and so been running Orisha, for the past five and a half years, really started as a full service, you know, kind of the content marketing department for coaches, and have over time really niche down even further, you’ll hear kind of the theme of like burning abroad and then really focusing in, but today, we are the creators of the nurture matrix. We run a various number of programs to support people and implementing the nurture matrix. And the nurture matrix is a evergreen nurture marketing framework that rolls across email to turn more new leads into new clients. So they kind of again, you’re speaking really focused and yeah, really all about how do we take leads and turn them into, you know, clients, right? And how do you know that otherwise, what are we really doing here? And I love

Meg Casebolt 4:48
that recognition of yours to have like, you started as an all encompassing all content marketing agency. And then over time, you kind of went Oh, would you These do I like the best, which of these media channels works the best? Which of them? Like, do I want to be spending my time in? And it sounds like you went from content marketing and went down to email sort of just like, let social go to the side? Yep.

Tamika Auwai 5:13
Yeah. You know, I mean, folks always will ask about the social, everyone wants to know, like, cuz everyone’s looking for this secret, how are you going to make social work. And for me, you know, like, I do believe very strongly organic content. You know, you can share, you can play with paid, but you really need a strong organic base. First, the challenge for me personally, with social instead of just changing all the darn time, and I just like, I don’t have the capacity for that, I’m not going to pay attention to the algorithm every five minutes and you know, move from, you know, short captions, so long captions to videos, to not videos to, you know, pointing, dancing, and

Meg Casebolt 5:54
we’re recording audio right now. So I was like, people can’t see me rolling my eyes and dropping my head back and frustration, but it’s there. And like, it’s not just the algorithm, it’s like, six different algorithms, because every platform has a different algorithm. And, yeah, and so it’s like, what works on tick tock, you know, in like, tick tock came up, and that was why Instagram added reels. So then you have to think about, like, even when I’m creating so I can repurpose across multiple channels, I still have to worry about two different algorithms or three, if you count YouTube shorts. Hmm,

Tamika Auwai 6:24
exactly. It was too much. And I really, you know, I had this sort of vision for the business that, you know, I wouldn’t just have some sort of consulting or, you know, done for you services in the mix, I really wanted to have, you know, framework that could be applied to businesses, regardless of the stage of growth that they were in, you know, because the agency really was designed for, you know, coaches that were super successful already, like high multi six

Meg Casebolt 6:54
figure businesses, in order to hire an agency, you need

Tamika Auwai 6:57
to be right, you need to be an enterprise. And it just, you know, for me, like the journey that I went on, it’s just kind of like, a, you know, some of the things that I know, now, if I knew back then, you know, I was able to help my clients back then, like, it would have been so powerful. And so I just really wanted to have a way to use my expertise and support a wider range of businesses. And so I was really thinking, Okay, well, what’s something that every business I know, is going to really benefit from and again, like in that creation process, I’m like, Well, I also don’t want to be creating something that I’m gonna have to be recreating all the time because the six different algorithms change, or we got a brand new baby, who was birthed yesterday, you know, clubhouse Hello, whisk? Are we still using clubhouse? I don’t know. But, you know, is it a non term, I’m not sure.

Meg Casebolt 7:41
I never even made an account I just gave up before I started. I was like, my audio only. And I have no ability to record and all of this just seems a little sketchy and inaccessible. And when I got the when I get the cookies, and I haven’t even like logged onto the platform, I’m like, maybe

Tamika Auwai 8:00
that’s how it helps me in tick tock, you know, that’s mean, tick tock, and like, I got past the first screen, not the first screen, the screen will be the opening thing. We’re all the TIC TOCs or tick talking and I was like, I might pass out. I’m feeling ill. So it’s not for me, but I haven’t even

Meg Casebolt 8:14
I don’t have a tick tock account, people will send me tic TOCs. And I’ll be like, No, can you just tell me like Justin, what’s happening here? Like, I understand that tell me what happened to me. But like, not just give me a book, man. I think I just get so overstimulated by showing exactly what it is that like my brain, I understand why people want to binge it. But it’s almost like I know that if I it’s like, it’s like eating an m&m. Right, if I had one of them, I’m gonna eat one.

Tamika Auwai 8:37
Exactly. Yeah. Like, the Cheetos, you know, evidence, you know, in the kitchen. Cheetos are there. But yeah, so I just knew as I was creating this thing that I’m like, I don’t I want something that’s tried and true. That really, you know, leverages my expertise. And my expertise is not in the figuring out of all these different platforms, just really in smart messaging that does the job of moving ideal clients along their buyers journey and towards the place of like, saying, Yeah, I’m ready to work with you and taking that action. Right. So you know, and of course, we can argue, oh, email is not a brand new platform either. But if we go back to direct mail like that, when I was in corporate, that’s where I play it, as well as direct mail, direct messaging, right. So that I mean,

Meg Casebolt 9:19
there are trends that change in email, and there are deliverability issues, but like a well written email is a well written email, and then you just need to think about how do I get people to open it? You know, exactly.

Tamika Auwai 9:31
Yeah, exactly. And they’re there that we can use and that for me, like the marketing nerd in me is like, I want data attached so that I can make decisions, right? Because it’s like, oh, they’re not opening the email. Okay, great. So we can look at deliverability Is that Is that a thing? We can look at list health, you know, do we need to do a list cleanse? You know, okay, do we need to play with some different lengths of message, you know, do we need to have something that’s little more activating? Like I have next steps I can take when I look at email data, and we’ll Social data, I don’t know if it’s like me or the algorithm or like you don’t I mean, it’s just too amorphous, I need it to be a little bit more of an equation that I can solve versus a puzzle that has no box. And a lot of pieces.

Meg Casebolt 10:18
Yeah, I don’t even think it’s a puzzle, because I don’t think that there’s like, a complete picture that you’re supposed to be using. It’s almost like a puzzle would make sense if even if you don’t have an idea of where it’s going to end. But this feels more just like, I don’t know, I’m trying to come up with a metaphor and it’s

Tamika Auwai 10:35
not landing. While

Meg Casebolt 10:38
painting. It’s like Jack’s, like, a Yeah, it’s pretty, but like, what is it?

Tamika Auwai 10:45
What have we created here? Yeah, you know, I think the other piece for me, and email is just again, it’s also an asset that you own. Whereas social, you don’t. And so again, I’m going to just like thinking from a, you know, marketing department standpoint, if you’re going to invest resources, time, energy, attention, money into building something like you want to have an output that you can own. At the end of the day, you know, that you have an asset that you’re building. And, you know, folks could argue that, like your social media following is an asset. However, you know, remember the great, you know, Facebook out there outage of 2020 was 2021, when everyone was losing their darn minds, right? So it can be like, it’s really clear that no, and I’m sure somewhere in the fine print, if we all go read, like nothing that you put on that platform, you really own own.

Meg Casebolt 11:38
So yeah, same with anything you create with Chet GPD.

Tamika Auwai 11:40
Right, exactly. There’s

Meg Casebolt 11:41
another story for a different day. I remember that great Facebook outage. A couple of my friends who are content marketers started commenting about like, look how every single content marketer is emailing me right now, because Facebook’s down and be like, do you notice that Facebook’s down book look? And then I did it. They were like, No, that actually tracks like that. She’s been talking about this more than just today. She gets it, she gets it. So how do you how do your clients find you? That’s one of the big things that I like to bring up here is, you know, everyone seems to think when they first get into this digital marketing space, like oh, well, if I just have 100,000 Instagram followers, or people follow my tweets, then like, I will have all these clients, and then they build these audiences on these platforms and go, Oh, wait, where did the clients go? These are just people who follow me. And so that’s a question that I like to ask everyone who comes on is like, okay, whether or not you’re using social media, where do you get the people who are handing money to you?

Tamika Auwai 12:48
Yeah, yeah, really? Great question. Really great point. So again, like going back to the tried and true, where do most people get their first clients from? Word of mouth? You’re right, exactly. Folks think that it is, let me go out and create a social media following, but it’s not that way. It’s word of mouth. You know, so first clients came through word of mouth, people that I knew people that I had been in programs with, and, you know, knew from a corporate space, etc, etc, made recommendations. And then moving beyond that, when I knew I wanted to, you know, expand my reach, same deal, like, it was not social, that is the place that created the clients, it was through, you know, leveraging other people’s audiences. I, you know, I guess speak on podcast quite a bit. I, you know, speak in other areas, arenas. And if I do use social to grow my list, it’s really like, again, it’s my list, my money comes from my list. And the way that I might use social to grow my list is really just focusing social content on like, hey, you know, here’s a valuable lead magnet, or here’s a workshop that we’re coming up with, or something like that. So I really view social, like, yes, it is, you know, or it can be used as a place where you’re nurturing your audience, right? nurturing your followers, or fans or whatever they’re called on that particular. What do they call them on tick talkers? Like they are? No, no, I know, you know, no, I don’t know, either. But right, like,

Meg Casebolt 14:08
I love being useless about this. I love my ignorance.

Tamika Auwai 14:14
Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. But yeah, it’s like, you know, those folks are, yeah, they’re on there in your community. But for me until they’re in my list, I won’t say that. They don’t count because that sounds mean, but they kind of don’t, because you kind of don’t know.

Meg Casebolt 14:29
And I also want to, I want to clarify something that you just said, because you said community and I would I would push back on that term. I think it’s audience I don’t think yeah, there’s a unit right happening on social media. I think if you want to generate and build a community, that has to be more, I mean, niched. Yeah, to come back to what you were saying at the very beginning like you just being just broadcasting to people and knowing that they hit a Follow button and sometimes they double tap on things like that is that does not a community make. Yeah, community should be a dialogue. It should be a service. Some of ongoing communication, I think lists can have a sense of community, but even then it still is much more of a monologue or dialogue. But yeah, group conversation. And so yeah, I’m not trying to,

Tamika Auwai 15:15
like I’m not because you’re, you know, words are important. Like I plan words all day long. And I, you’re right, there’s a we’re calling them all the same thing. We’re saying community audience, you know, ideal clients, whatever, but they all have a slightly different meaning. And we’ve got to get really clear on what those meanings are, because your community also may not pay you. Correct. Right.

Meg Casebolt 15:40
So it’s like anything else that we do in marketing, and we think that it’s gonna be the silver bullet, like, Yeah, might have a really thriving community that gives you $0.

Tamika Auwai 15:50
Exactly. Well, again, and there’s models for that, you know, just before we went on, I was saying, Yeah, it’s cool. If you’re like an influencer, to have a lot of followers or have a big community, you know, because folks get really into the vanity metrics of it. All. Right, and we think of something like Patreon, Patreon has a community aspect to it, and some of them are thriving. And some folks are charging, you know, they’ve got their memberships and whatever, and they’re making money through Patreon, but it’s not usually a ton either. So I think also, it depends on you know, whether you’re going to focus on audience or community or a list or, you know, really just depends on business model and goals.

Meg Casebolt 16:29
That’s what I was just gonna say is like, there’s, it really has to be a decision that’s made at the business model of all not at the platform level, you know, Patreon can be incredible, but you need to, because so often Patreon start at like, $1 a week, or $5 a month or whatever, you really need to have already built the audience Exactly. Or have plans to scale the audience quickly, often this in order to scale an audience quickly enough that you can have something like Patreon makes sense where you have, you know, five $10 A month coming in, but you have 50,000 people in your community, you might have to run paid ads to grow that audience, which might have a sort of long term approach. But in order to grow quickly, you have to have the initial output of an investment, or you have to kind of burn out trying to grow your audience organically, which could require like a lot of outreach a lot. Like I’m thinking about a lot of podcast communities. Yeah, like those hosts have to be on everyone else’s pot. Yeah, have to create all sorts of free content in order to get that one five $10 a month from those people? Absolutely. And I think you’re probably very similar to me where it’s like, I don’t, I don’t necessarily want to have, you know, if I’m going to aim for $100,000, I would rather have 10 $10,000 clients than $100,001 supporters.

Tamika Auwai 17:52
Absolutely. And again, like long term strategy, sure, that would be cool. But I just, you know, again, when you know, enough to know that, that sounds like a wonderful idea. And you’ll see though, if you’re hanging out on social, you’ll see those little you know, memes or pictures or whatever, where it’s like, how to make a million dollars one times this and, you know, they do the math thing. And I’m like, so, you know, they’re like, Yeah, so just bottom line, just get, you know, whatever the bottom tier is, and I’m like, No, that’s a lot of work, how are you gonna work you’re gonna go broke, trying, you know, trying to try to get there. So again, we can have our long term vision for our business. But we do need to balance our marketing choices against like, what we want to see you know, in terms of revenue now today, and what we have available in terms of budget to get there, right, and then start to make choices from there.

Meg Casebolt 18:42
Right and I think one of the things that keeps coming up for me, which is ironic for me to say as the SEO person but whatever I like to think about this as a holistic system and not just as you know, my specific your specification and neat is um, people are so concerned about having top of funnel but then they never do any middle of funnel or bottom of funnel and for those of you who aren’t thinking finalized, let me explain that differently. People are really concerned about like being discovered and having new people know them and brand awareness and having all these followers but then like they never take the time to make just to even ask people to give them money or to you know, I got these people on my email list. They downloaded my freebie and they went through my nurture sequence and now they’re just sitting there and I forget to email them because I’m so busy going out and trying to be found by this new audience that have taking advantage of this. I don’t want to say Goldmine because I don’t want it to seem like people are just you know a use for giving you money but you you might be sitting on you know people who are ready to work with you when you haven’t asked them to do it.

Tamika Auwai 19:43
Absolutely. Oh yeah. That I mean that really like that’s what burns my brain bridges. That’s how that’s how

Meg Casebolt 19:50
hang on marketing people I’m like giving the middle stuff

Tamika Auwai 19:54
like that. That’s what got me to where you know, the niching down that I continued to do was really because cuz I just couldn’t take another client saying to me like, hey, yeah, we’ve gotta like, we I want to get, you know, grow the list by whatever crazy percentage or I want to get this many more followers and just this constant drive for, for lead generation. And I’m like, Well, we have like, what’s what’s gonna, what’s gonna happen next right? I call it a giant leaky bucket, you know, in your funnel, right, because you’re spending all this time, money, energy attention, again, trying to call in all these new leads, and then you don’t have a pathway for them to follow into what’s going to create the ROI for you. And you’re sort of running around, like, we spent, you know, you know, and spend 20, you know, $200,000 in marketing, or $20,000, in marketing, or whatever the number is, and I’m not really seeing an ROI. And I’m like, Well, what was set up in place to have set ROI, right. And then sometimes it really is a symbol, like, often, you know, the folks that I’ll work with, like, often, the big issue is middle funnel, and there’s no nurture setup, and there’s no strategy if there is nurture, there’s no strategy around it. Like folks, a newsletter is not a nurture strategy. You know, that’s another story, right? But like, sometimes, story too, we’ll

Meg Casebolt 21:08
just put a pin in it, we’ll

Tamika Auwai 21:10
take a pin in it, so they can depend on it. So

Meg Casebolt 21:13
tock of AI right now, but I will gladly talk about nurture sequences. I mean, we can whatever the board’s

Tamika Auwai 21:19
Why are you talking about all the things, but really, you’re right, like, sometimes it is just as simple as like, there was no plan to ask them, you know, when to buy or even, you know, another one that like, gets me it’s like, no way of discerning are the people on my list actually the right people, right. So like talking about actually doing segmentation and, you know, having some decision based, you know, campaigns running to like, help you know, that you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time. But that’s how a sale happens. Right. So that’s got to be in the mix, too.

Meg Casebolt 21:50
Yeah. And that was one of the things when I like, first heard about you went to your website, read it through and you’re like, you need to get your most valuable pieces of content in front of your audience. This isn’t just like, like you said, sending a newsletter every week, or hoping that they see you when they’re interested in buying. So talk to me a little bit about that, like, how, how do you decide what the most valuable things are that you’ve created? Yeah, well, it’s

Tamika Auwai 22:11
getting really superduper clear on your like buyer persona, or ideal client, whatever language that you’d like to use, like, who is that person? You know, and not just a demographic psychographic. So it’s not like they’re a mom, and they’ve got two kids, and they like coffee and Cheetos, right?

Meg Casebolt 22:30
Sometimes I joke like, I don’t care how much of your audience is Hufflepuffs. Right? You don’t even know. All you’re buying is Hufflepuff sweatshirts, if

Tamika Auwai 22:39
there you go, right? Because then you

Meg Casebolt 22:41
have a puff.com. It’s all good. All

Tamika Auwai 22:45
good. Otherwise, we need to go a little bit deeper, we need to specifically understand what what the problems are that your folks are fakes facing and not just be able to name them like at a high level, but really get into sort of the behind the scenes the day to day like on a day to day moment by moment basis, like what are the symptoms that are showing up in their experience that are indicators that they have a problem that you could solve, you need to know that like the back of your hand, and you need to not just know it like the back of your hand, you need to know like the back of their hand because actually, it needs to be in their language and the way that they would say it right, as opposed to how you would prescribe it or diagnose it.

Meg Casebolt 23:24
And you know what you need to you need to know it better than they do. Yeah, absolutely. Especially if they’re less aware on that customer awareness spectrum. Yeah. You know, sometimes people don’t know what the problem is that they’re having. And you need to know it better that like, I was just talking to somebody yesterday, who is a Reiki Master. And she was talking about how great Reiki is for people who are highly sensitive, or empaths. Like they take on other people’s energy, and she’s like, but a lot of times people don’t know that they’re a highly sensitive person until they come in, and they’re like, I just feel so drained after our conversation. It’s like, oh, so she has to, if she’s going to try to be found by those people, she has to know the symptoms instead of just the people who are like, Hi, I’m an HSP. I mean, those two, but yeah, there’s always so many more steps that are that we need to know better than our clients.

Tamika Auwai 24:20
Exactly. We and we need to know them better that we need to know all of those symptoms, and how they are like, how they are aligned to the problem that they have. So that you’re right, like we can do that piece of educating them, or what I like to say is like helping them shift their perspective around what’s going on for them so that they can understand like, Oh, I do have a problem. Or if they already know that they have a problem. It’s like, oh, this is why I haven’t been able to solve the problem, right? So getting that really deep level of awareness allows us to be able to come up with a messages that can do that job of like shifting their perspective. And you know, we spend a lot of time where we can spend a lot of time or a lot of times in the content marketing space. We’re talking About being educating and entertaining. And let’s see there when inspiring or something like that, right? Those content can remember content marketing, pillar. Awareness. Interesting desire and action. Right? Yeah. So we can Yeah, one of those. I mean, everyone’s got their own little, everyone’s got

Meg Casebolt 25:15
their, their acronyms.

Tamika Auwai 25:17
And that’s all good and cool. Yes. But when we get beyond that, it’s like, what, what is the message that you’re actually communicating? And for me, and from my experience, and perspective, it’s really like your ability to help your people think about their problem differently, like, either identify it and or also think about that problem differently. Like, that’s what creates the leaning factor that will have them move from being like, Oh, they’re an interesting person, I’m on their list to like, oh, yeah, I want to pay cash money, and, you know, purchase whatever solution is out there, right? Like, that is what like, you know, that’s the gap that we that we have to establish as marketers, that creates a space that they can like, step into, and be like, oh, yeah, I need this. Not just I want this. I need this, like right now. Yesterday. Yeah.

Meg Casebolt 26:05
That’s what creates the urgency that was that’s exactly connection. I think, you know, I’ve been, I don’t want to even say like fiddling around with us. I’ve been researching this for a long time. I’m currently in the process of writing a book called Search, empathy optimization, about how the like the role of empathy in our keyword research and how the ways that we understand our ideal clients is going to be what helps them connect with us, and the ways that the robots and the AI, like, cannot replicate our human emotions and our understanding of our ideal clients and what it is that they’re going through and cannot, like, articulate that in a way that actually causes you to feel the emotion of connection. So everything that you’re saying, I’m like, I’ll be digging right back into this. Yeah. Because, because we, we as marketers, like, we can hit pain points all day. And you know, like copywriting formula, pain, agitate solution, pain, agitate solution, we can, we can give all of that information. But unless we truly understand, like, why somebody needs this badly, and why they need it now. Yeah, then they can just keep kicking the can down the road. Exactly. Never come around to actually giving us the money.

Tamika Auwai 27:19
Exactly, exactly. And even you know why they like, why they haven’t been able to solve it up until now, I think there’s another piece that, you know, we forget, because often, our clients have tried things in some way, shape, or form. And it’s even speaking to those and again, presenting that perspective of like, Oh, you’ve tried X, Y, and Z, let me explain to you why that hasn’t worked. So they don’t keep trying the same darn thing. Right? Like, you know, it’s there’s so many so many

Meg Casebolt 27:43
of my health coaches are here. Yes, of like, well, why can I lose weight? And it’s like, I tried eating only grapefruit, right? Why didn’t that work? And then you as the creator, you as the content marketer can say, like, did the grapefruit diet not work for you surprise, there’s nothing in a great

Tamika Auwai 28:01
food. Here’s why. Right? The example that I often will give, like, I love I love to help coach folks to. And I’ll teach a lot. And I’ll talk about like, you know, imagine you’re a health coach, who doesn’t believe that diets work? Right. So there were some like specific, you know, sort of perspective shifts that you have to speak to, because all of your people, your best clients are probably going to be the ones who’ve tried, like, every diet under the sun. However, there’s a belief gap that you have to kind of close for them. Because until they understand why all the diets haven’t worked, they’re just gonna be looking for another diet, like, you know, they think still have that that’s a problem. Right? So again, it’s like really understanding, you know, yeah, what, what’s been going on for them what their experience has been, what the symptoms look like, what the possible solutions that they’ve tried look like. And again, really speaking to that, but also doing it from that way of like, Sure, you can do that, you know, the added agitate formula. But also it’s that piece of like, here’s what the problem was, or here’s what the scenario is. And here’s what you need to know, instead, like, for me, that’s like the simplest little formula for starting to create, nurture messages that do that piece of shifting perspective. It’s like you think it’s this? Actually, it’s this, you know, here’s how we can get you the results, right?

Meg Casebolt 29:19
And is that when you’re working with your clients on like, what email needs to come in which order in order to allow people to have that transformative effect, with the recognition that like, people don’t read everything, and they don’t open every email in a sequence and share you can write the best seven part email sequence, but they might only open three and six. Like, what’s your strategy and how do you teach people that kind of?

Tamika Auwai 29:48
Yeah, well, first is your right, they don’t open anything. They don’t read anything. And it takes them a lot longer than you think it does to actually, you know, start reading and start nodding so my first approach pieces like You want to think about any new lead that comes to your world, like, there’s probably going to be at least 90 days before they’re ready to step in, because by the time they finally start to read some emails here and there, right, the seven days sequences, like not going to do much, there’s a small percentage, right? Like, you know, maybe one or 2% of your, of your new leads might be loose, fast action takers, you can look at different personality types. And if you’re a Colby person, you’ll think the Quickstart school, you know, they’ll make

Meg Casebolt 30:27
a quick start, and I still take forever to make

Tamika Auwai 30:30
some things or some things I’ll make that I’ll make that decision real quick.

Meg Casebolt 30:34
I’m an impulse buyer, but mostly that’s about like chocolate at the grocery.

Tamika Auwai 30:39
Not a big program. Exactly, exactly. Right. So, you know, throw, I mean, don’t throw out but almost throw out the seven day sequence expect that you’re going to need need to be nurturing for like 60 to 90 days, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re never making a call to action in those 60 to 90 days, it just means that you want to have the view of like, this person is moving along the buyers journey and so kind of to answer your questions like how do you determine the message is really I try to help folks imagine and we can’t do this perfectly. We’re not like, yes, we’re doing our best to get into our people’s heads, but we’re not really, really inside there. Nor do we know at what stage of the buyers journey someone is when they join our list. But really, we’re trying to think about, okay, if we’re thinking about the buyers journey, moving that that process from awareness, you know, to exploration, to actually, you know, being ready to make a decision, like what symptoms, things? Are they trying? Like, how aware or unaware of the problem? Are they at that phase versus the exploration phase, when they’ve probably started trying some things or probably, you know, banging their head against the wall a little bit? Can’t figure it out? Like, what’s that conversation like? And then finally, when they’re at the place of like, okay, I got it gotta make a decision, like, what’s that conversation? So it’s really just kind of like matching up the conversation that’s happening along the writers journey and coming up with, you know, again, your best guess of what those messages could be like, and what perspective needs to be shifted at that point. And then, you know, rolling out I love automated sequences, rolling out automated sequences that new leads get, so every new lead gets, you know, the specific automated sequence that runs over, you know, 60 to 90 days, does the job of nurturing, and then looking at the data to see, you know, how are like, how’s it doing? Are people opening certain messages? Do we notice that, like, you know, after they receive a certain message that suddenly we see, you know, more folks book, a discovery call after that particular message or not, or, and also like, looking from a qualitative perspective, when a lead or prospect finds their way into a sales conversation? Are they more ready to buy or less ready to buy depending on kind of like, what their last, like, what the last email was that they opened. So there’s all kinds of like, cool little data, you know, things that I’d love to dive into, to figure out if it worked. But that’s really the process that we’re trying to engage in here, like,

Meg Casebolt 32:59
Okay, I’m geeking out, you just saw me like, grab a pen, because I’m like, I have these three questions. And I don’t want to forget what I’m gonna say. And then I’m gonna have all these, like, spin off questions where things get awesome. So when you have that 60 to 90 day sequence? Are you also doing any sort of triggered segmentation within that sequence? So that way, you can figure out how, how fast you are? Or where people want to be in there? Or is it consistent through all new leads that you just expect them to kind of guide through this process?

Tamika Auwai 33:28
So we start with the basics, and then we start to play? Right? So yeah, so and again, it’s gonna depend on growth growth stage, like, where are you in terms of your business, because a younger business is not going to have enough experience with their, you know, clients to know, okay, this is where like to start to map that stuff out. Right? The more established folks that I work with, yeah, absolutely. As we start to look at, okay, like, let’s take them down, and then we’re gonna look at the offerings that they have as well. Right. So it kind of depends. But yeah, you know, base level is let’s get this nurture sequence in place. You know, everybody gets it. Cool, cool, cool. And then we start to play and we’re like, okay, so yeah, like, what happens if we do X, he becomes a great big, like, science experiment, right? I’m, like always walking around telling people that they need to be marketing scientists. And he just, you know, have this desire to, like, ask a question and be like, what happens if you know, and then start to play, but the foundation is really just having this basic sequence in place, because, you know, trying to build out all those pathways upfront, like it’s crazy making, and if you do it yourself, obviously, it’s crazy making and if you hire someone to do it, too, you’re hiring them to make a bunch of guesses. And you’re probably going to pay them a significant amount of money to make all those guesses but you’re not making any of those decisions based on data. So that’s kind of a dangerous place to be in. So I’d much rather see people especially if they haven’t been doing any, you know, strategic nurture upfront, like start with the basics and then start to use the data to make like little extra Erin’s to make these little additional sequences and sedimentation points. Yeah,

Meg Casebolt 35:04
I love that approach. And I don’t know if that’s, you know, the optimizer in me or just the ADHD brain. People will often come to me and expect us, you know, especially those who we do Done For You services, or, you know, done with you where we’re coming up with these strategies, where it’s like, you know, okay, well, what am I going to create for the next six months, and I’m like, Let’s do like 10 things, and then exactly the data because the data will tell us what the next 10 Things are to do. And then the data will tell us what the next time things are to do. And then when we get that data, we can make an informed decision, we can take a look at what your competitors are doing, we can look at the trends, but like, I don’t like to make any plans longer than six months, because everything could change in six months. And anybody who tells you that they can predict what’s going to happen in five years, clearly has not been in this business for five years.

Tamika Auwai 35:53
That’s funny.

Meg Casebolt 35:55
First thing to do when people come to me, and they’re like, I don’t even have a website. Yeah, what should I do for all my SEO? I’m like, put up a website.

Tamika Auwai 36:04
Step zero.

Meg Casebolt 36:06
Step one, put something out. Step two, look at how people react to it. You know, this is, I think a lot of marketing is just like testing and pivoting and it show yeah, you know, determine your hypothesis, gather the data to figure out whether or not your hypothesis was verified, and then go do find a new hypothesis. And like, if you think of it in terms of experimentation, versus like, success or failure, it feels a whole lot less stressful and more like, does curious. Can you be curious about that, instead of feeling like, you’re gonna, like, be a bad person? If something?

Tamika Auwai 36:42
Yeah, and I think, you know, really, it also helps you hire marketers with a different perspective, right? Because, again, we’re talking about two different, you know, sort of different sides of the spectrum, right? We’ve got the people who are like doing it themselves. And so yeah, there’s very much like, I it’s not working, I’m doing it wrong, I’m a failure, so on and so forth. But then eventually, you get to the place where you’re outsourcing your marketing. And I’ve, you know, gave me $1. For every time I had a conversation with someone who’s like, well, I invested $25,000 on a funnel, and it didn’t work. And I’m like, Well, maybe they didn’t do the right thing. But also, did you Did they let you know that that was a $25,000 experiment? Because I think that if they did that, then you would have made a different decision.

Meg Casebolt 37:26
Yes, you cannot

Tamika Auwai 37:28
predict the ROI. Exactly.

Meg Casebolt 37:31
Anything. You know, even if you do have previous experience with something, even if you can have a you’re gonna have a consultant come in and say like, you know, I had a 1.5x return on adspend. But even if they do that, that doesn’t mean they’re gonna get that same result for you.

Tamika Auwai 37:46
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think we just we forget it, you know? Yeah, I just had, I’ve had a lot of experience in the process of, you know, determining who’s a good fit for a client for for us and who’s not. And the ones who don’t make the cut, again, are the ones who are like, well, I need to know an ROI today, I need to I need to, you know, tell me what the ROI is going to be and what can you promise me and I’m like, I can’t promise you much, I can promise you that we’re going to use the data and make really smart decisions. And this is what we’re going to, I can promise you that we can come up with a really clear goal and a pathway to reaching that goal. And that will use intelligent data to or data to make intelligent decisions. You know that that is what I can I can tell you, but I’m not going to promise you something that is not possible to promise. And I think there are a lot of folks who will who will make the promises that they probably shouldn’t. But I just I prefer to have the conversation of helping business owners at whatever level just be smarter marketers, even if they’re not doing it for themselves, just understanding how marketing works, is beneficial. You know, and I think also

Meg Casebolt 38:49
recognizing that it’s an ecosystem and one Yeah, one variable is that’s exactly like if I were to hire you for email marketing. But you know, you aren’t in charge of my website, copy, you aren’t in charge of my social media, you aren’t in charge of my podcast outreach. And so like, you can operate in your sphere of exactly your zone of genius. But if I’m getting all the wrong leads onto my email list, because my messaging is off, then just not going to convert exactly right, the world’s best email sequence, and it wouldn’t convert it for the wrong people are going through it. So there’s always so many different factors at play that are completely out of our control if we are unless we take over all marketing, which like most people can’t afford to do that,

Tamika Auwai 39:29
right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Alright, so

Meg Casebolt 39:32
people are just getting started with email marketing. I want to come back to my my list of questions. I feel like some people are, they’ve been told that they need to have this email list. You know, like there’s always money in the email list. There’s always money in the banana stand. If they’re afraid of sending out they have a list, but they’re like, Oh, I haven’t emailed them in a year. Like, what’s your pep talk for starting email marketing? Well,

Tamika Auwai 40:01
it’s probably not a good pep talk. Yeah. It’s a tough love. Yeah. If you haven’t mailed books in a year, you can certainly attempt to reengage. Do not do the piece of hay. You haven’t heard me from a year for a year. Let me insert my entire life story and synopsis please don’t do that just jump in and get started. Right. So there the be the peptide if you feel like it is

Meg Casebolt 40:29
one of the top ways to get me to unsubscribe. Apologize for being on your list in the first place.

Tamika Auwai 40:34
Yeah, so presumptuous, so presumptuous, I was not paying attention. Now you’ve made me open the email, to pay attention to that the fact that you weren’t paying attention, there’s, it’s not working, it’s not working. So if you have a list that you haven’t given any love, and you want to give it a shot, for sure, jump in, send a message, see what happens look at the data, what is possibly going to happen hinging on probably going to happen is that you’re not going to see really great results, response, right, your open rates are gonna probably be pretty low, click through rates even lower. So don’t let that discourage you, though, that there’s the pep talk for you. Don’t let that discourage you, what it means likely is that you want to focus on growing an active list and possibly scrubbing the not so active list. So meaning Go ahead, email those folks, the folks that pay attention, keep them on the list, and then slowly, you know, maybe faster than you want to consider removing the folks that are non responsive, because you’re it’s really difficult to revive a quote unquote, dead email list. That’s challenging. Instead, what you want to do is be really prepared to nurture folks. And then start new Legion activities, right. So get your nurture plan in place, have some emails ready to go. That’s where automation and sequences can really help because it kind of takes the edge off of having to come up with something brand new every single week or day or whatever it is that your frequency is going to be. So get that plan in place and then go back at it. But yeah, don’t you know, just don’t just don’t tell us don’t tell us about what happened. Okay, so

Meg Casebolt 42:13
I was like devil’s advocate about the list, scrub, because why wouldn’t people just want to? If you say that there’s a long sales cycle, why wouldn’t you want to just keep people on the list forever?

Tamika Auwai 42:26
Yeah, because people check out. So you can have them on your list. But if it’s going into spam, if it’s going into the dreaded promotions folder, and they’re not opening it, you aren’t getting data, that’s not actually telling you anything, because that’s counting as an unopened email. But you don’t know if you’re looking looking, it’s a percentage, right? So we’re looking at the entire list. And if we have like 50% of the list, who they haven’t been on, they haven’t been sent an email for a year, they haven’t engaged, they’re still not engaging. But you’re looking at the total, like you don’t know, if you actually have 60% on opens, or if you really only have, you know, 20% and open because we’ve got all of this sort of, like deadweight I don’t know if that’s coming through clear or not, but you’re paying for it, right? Like paying for right? So like, yes, a long lead cycle. But again, it’s like when people just think about it for yourself, right? When you stopped opening an email, like the likelihood of you going back, you know, to, to remember who that person is, or you know, reengage it’s like, it’s really slim. Anything can happen. And when I talk about a long lead cycle, that’s not quite what I’m talking about, right? I’m talking about like the active people who’ve been like opening, maybe it’ll open every time but they opened maybe once a month or every you know, those people cool. I’m talking about the people that kind of were just left there, and you’re expecting them to remember who you are, you’re expecting them to have the exact same problem, but there’s just way too much expectation on folks that have not been nurtured, right. Like if you, you know, plant some roses, and you leave them in the garden and you don’t water them for an entire year, like you can try to revive them.

Meg Casebolt 44:03
But you’re gonna have a lot of thorns.

Tamika Auwai 44:05
They, you know, they mean like good luck. You know, there’s a plant in the front. I can’t remember what it was I was trying to, or gardens or like doing its thing and I’m like trying to remember what I don’t even remember what this truck was, but it was like a failure to thrive situation. Am I going to try to revive it? Probably not. I’m probably gonna yank it up and buy another little bush. You know, and I’ll water the things that are coming back nicely. Hello, peony. Thank you for coming through. Do you really good painting. Right.

Meg Casebolt 44:30
By the season you just made my day like just be like, anticipate anticipatory excitement of peonies coming up?

Tamika Auwai 44:38
That’s all I know. No way.

Meg Casebolt 44:39
There are no way Spring is coming.

Tamika Auwai 44:43
Thank you. For those of us on the Great Lakes

Meg Casebolt 44:45
region. It just takes Yeah, yeah,

Tamika Auwai 44:47
that’s right. You’ve got some great lakes. You know, it’s just it’s cold. I still got my lawn clean. You got your sweatshirt. It’s

Meg Casebolt 44:53
I’m wearing a hoodie. It’s just right

Tamika Auwai 44:55
like I’m over it.

Meg Casebolt 45:00
My husband’s also a great lakes er, he’s from Wisconsin. So the two of us are like, Why do we do this to ourselves? Wow. Okay, so we’re gonna scrub that list too, because it’s better to have. And I mean, I think this also goes back to what you were saying about business models, it’s like, it’s better to have fewer people in your audience, I’m gonna go with audience and our community, audiences who love you, and who open your emails, which will help with your email deliverability to other places, and who are you know, you’re paying for them to stay on your list, but they’re active on your list, it’s better to have, you know, 1000 or 100 really engaged, minimum viable audience than to have 100,000, who you’re paying, you know, hundreds of dollars a month to have a list of 100,000 people and nobody’s opening it, and nobody’s buying from you. Exactly. Okay, so in our 60 to 90 day nurture window, how often are you emailing them? I’ve heard of people doing like, this is like, such a nerdy thing that I geeked out on is I have a client who does a Fibonacci sequence. like day one, day two, day one, day, five, day, eight day 13, like she has a full and I’m like, that’s just, that’s just brilliant golden record or golden spiral. But like, not all people need to be that dirty.

Tamika Auwai 46:15
So that again, this becomes this isn’t yet another experiment. I want to say, again, if we’re like talking to the folks who are just getting started, minimum, you know, once a week minimum, bare minimum?

Meg Casebolt 46:28
Well, if you’re talking about 90 days, then

Tamika Auwai 46:30
that’s 12 emails. Exactly, exactly. Which is really doable for just about anyone, especially, you know, consider, it might not be the only email you’re sending, if you’ve got a podcast, you might have an additional touchpoint that you’re sending out, you know, once a week or once a month or whatever, you might still choose to include some sort of a sales focused, you know, promotion, or you get what I mean. So that might not be the only email

Meg Casebolt 46:53
you’re send, I think also something if we’re talking on the noobs. You don’t have to have all 12 emails written in order to set it up, you can write one email a week and tack it on to the end. Oh, totally wins every time. So like this, this, again, comes back to that, like publish before you’re ready. And like, yeah, Done is better than perfect feeling. Yeah,

Tamika Auwai 47:11
yeah, exactly, exactly. For my folks who are more established, like, then we want to start to look at the data, we want to start to look at what makes sense for your audience and offering and all of those things. So could be as often as like three or four times a week, you know, but again, that’s probably going to be a mix of messages. Like for those folks, usually, there’s like a podcast that they have, or there’s like, you know, there’s some other touch points that we’re using that are not just not like it’s nurture, but it’s I’m when I’m talking about the once a week, I’m talking about specifically those messages I talked about, that are speaking to the various stages of the, of the buyers journey. Now I’m just here as a podcast that I put out, right exact not a newsletter be exactly might be in a more established community, you might be having those kinds of messages paired with, you know, those folks usually have tons of content, right? Like, those are the blogs and the blogs and the all the things right. So it might be those buyers journey focused messages, along with some supporting like blogs that maybe were resharing again, or like, you know, or you know, a video or a podcast, or hey, I was on somebody else’s, you know, thing, or hey, I’m like promoting, you know, my friend, because we’re affiliate buddies or whatever, right? So generally, with a more established list, we’re having more touch points, but still not usually more than like two of those buyers journey focus messages, kind of going out per week at like, 24. Yeah. Well, if

Meg Casebolt 48:42
people want to hear more about you about a reach creative about your your framework about how to set up these emails, what’s the best way for them to find you and connect with you? Yeah, I

Tamika Auwai 48:52
think, you know, if you’re curious about the nurture matrix, the best place is to check out nurture matrix.com forward slash scorecard. There’s a little scorecard you can take it does talk a little bit about social as well. But know that like, that’s just because I’m satisfying the folks who feel like, if they’re not taking action on social, they can’t take any action. Because there is a really cool way that those buyers journey messages can be repurposed over into the sum total here. Right. So like, if you’re doing there, if you’re hanging in there, then cool. So yeah, nurture matrix.com forward slash scorecard is a cool place. I do connect with folks on on Instagram. We use that as like a place where it’s just easy to message back and forth. Yeah, yeah. So and that’s an Orisha, creative.

Meg Casebolt 49:38
All right, we’ll make sure to include those in the show notes. Thank you so much for everything for all the transparency and ideas and everything that goes along with that. I love this conversation, and I appreciate your

Tamika Auwai 49:47
time. Yeah, this was great. Thank you so much for having me.

Meg Casebolt 49:52
Thank you so much for listening to the social slowdown podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or come on over to social slow roundup comm and sign up for our email list so 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