Tweak Your Messaging to Serve Clients Right Now with Courtney Chaal
Episode 521: Show Notes
Today on the podcast we have Courtney Chaal, the founder of The Rule Breaker’s Club where she teaches women to package and sell with brilliance and offers awesome products, and her work has been featured in Inc., Creative Live, and The Huffpost to name only a few. She is crazy-talented when it comes to messaging specifically, so this interview is right on time. We get that we shouldn’t necessarily be changing our offers or postpone our launches, but how do we talk differently about our services, so that it appeals to people at this moment?
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What messaging do we need to tweak to make it relevant, and where is the balance between being empathetic and helpful versus making sales because we’ve got businesses to run? Courtney shares the top tips that she herself is implementing in her business, from getting your mindset right and brainstorming ideas, to asking your audience what they need and putting it all together in a project plan, so strap in and let’s dive in!
How Courtney Transformed From Caterpillar to Butterfly In The Pandemic
While this has been a horrible time for many people, some have been able to double down big time and who have made this crazy season work for them somehow. Courtney is one such person. For the past two years, she has felt like a caterpillar who was just waiting and preparing for that moment to break free, and that time came during the pandemic! Call it what you will—divine intervention, perfect timing, a stroke of luck—she has just been flying since the COVID-19 outbreak and had one of her best months ever. But how did she do it? She paid attention to the three P’s of selling: packaging, positioning, and promoting, paying special attention to the middle P. No one can deny the importance of the right packaging: presenting your offer in a way that draws people in, makes them curious, and sparks their desire to have it. But what matters more is positioning—how you talk about your offer—and then promoting just means talking about it a lot, everywhere. Sometimes we know what we want to say but we don’t because we fear other people’s opinions. Other times we don’t know what language to use because we don’t want to be inappropriate, annoying, or take advantage of people in any way, so we just keep quiet. Courtney believes that the positioning piece is the most crucial: if you want to have your best month ever, get your positioning right. Marketing is not just about sales and promotion, it’s about everything you do in between. It’s also about building relationships and gaining trust.
Advice For Getting Into The Best Position Thinkable
First things first: begin to train your empathy muscle. When we go into panic mode and start fretting over all our responsibilities like paying rent and other bills, we quickly become very egocentric and the focus is only on ourselves and our problems. This causes us to create things and shove them down people’s throats, and this, of course, comes from a place of need and desperation—and that hardly ever succeeds in marketing. Instead, you should be asking what you can do to serve your audience and then do some empathy-building exercises. The first one involves picking a few people from your audience and embodying them. Try to put yourself in their shoes, imagine yourself to be them, and then write a journal entry from their perspective. This allows you to get away from your own problems and focus instead on what they are going through. If you can get into their ego and what they want, you’ve struck gold. Now you can identify what their concerns are and provide a solution that speaks to that. Another thing that is holding people back is their frustrations about failed plans and their difficulty adjusting to the unknown, so we recommend that you loosen up your expectations around what you hoped the year would be. After you thought about how you can serve, ask yourself whether that sounds like fun to you? Is that something you want to be doing? If you focus on serving while also doing something that you enjoy, you will win every time.
Ask Your Audience What They Want Straight Up
Here is a practical way that you can start discovering what to say to your audience: put up an Instagram story and ask a question with a poll, for example, “Are you worried about X?” or “Do you guys need help with Y?” or “Are you feeling overwhelmed by Z?” So, the best way to know whether an idea is good or not is to ask your audience what they need or like. While you might be tempted to get on a soapbox, just remember that everyone else is on a soapbox too right now! People are feeling overwhelmed with all the thoughts and opinions of others, so think carefully before doing that. Courtney says that her audience loves her positivity in particular. It’s not that she is dismissing what is happening and glossing over people’s troubles, but getting down and cynical is not going to serve anybody either. She can also serve best when she feels good and it bumps up her creativity, so she makes a point of keeping herself on the positive side of the unfolding drama. The trick is to keep engaging your audience and asking them questions and then coming up with ways to meet their needs.
Recommendations For Letting Your Audience In On Your Offering
After you have asked the questions and shared the opinions, how do you go about telling your audience about your product or service? Courtney says she has not had the mental capacity to keep secret from anyone, so while she doesn’t divulge all the details, she does let them know about upcoming offerings. She also packages the offer attractively, perhaps by its low price point or by the added value customers can gain. When you present smaller offers, you also potentially hook your audience to your bigger products and get them asking more questions and wanting to learn more from you. But don’t just create a bunch of random offers; make sure that it feeds into your core business model. What we want you to know is that it’s not a science experiment whereby you determine beforehand how all the smaller parts will fit into the larger scheme of things. Rather, when you have rolled out the smaller offers, you should be able to see how they slot into the bigger picture—but only after the fact. You can’t necessarily construct that beforehand. So, don’t wait until it all makes sense. Rather than obsessing over plans, keep an openness, and see the magic happen!
Don’t Wait Around—Roll Out That Last-Minute Offer
We reckon there is a lot of sitting and waiting right now, which makes us want to kicks some people in the butts! There are so many opportunities at the moment! Even if you do a micro offer as we talked about just to give you some time to figure stuff out, that could keep things rolling over. What we are seeing is how well the last-minute offers people put out are faring! It goes to show that not everything needs to be planned and prepped for months— sometimes you’ve just got to do it and hand it over like it is. When you put out an offer based on people’s immediate needs, it also feels more organic and accessible than when you planned it all out months in advance.
Thinking about Your Evergreen Content
So, what now about your old faithful evergreen content? Does it all have to be reviewed and adjusted? No way! Courtney has simply been going through her content to see if there is something inappropriate for the moment and rescheduled it for posting at a later date. But that doesn’t mean your content has to be perfect; give yourself some grace too. It’s most likely that your core content is still relevant unless it’s all about in-person stuff. If you happen to be a masseuse who touches people’s bodies for a living, why not teach them how to self-massage. Just think of what Amber McCue offers at the moment: a photoshoot via Skype or Zoom where they show you how to set everything up, and then they take pictures with the camera of their computer! In all industries, people are finding ways to make it work. You don’t have to have all the answers right now, but trust yourself to figure it out. And connect with the people around you; make contact with people in your industry and come up with new ways together. Here are the steps to getting started: get your mindset right, brainstorm ideas, identify the necessary steps, put together a plan, and execute with positivity!
Quote This
You can plan all you want, anything can happen, so obsessing over what things are going to look like, even in normal time, is not serving you.
Highlights
How Courtney Transformed From Caterpillar to Butterfly In The Pandemic. [0:05:31.1]
Advice For Getting Into The Best Position Thinkable. [0:09:48.1]
Ask Your Audience What They Want Straight Up. [0:14:20.1]
Recommendations For Letting Your Audience In On Your Offering. [0:18:52.1]
Don’t Wait Around—Roll Out That Last-Minute Offer. [0:26:21.1]
Thinking about Your Evergreen Content. [0:29:20.1]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:37:58.1]
Do the empathy journal exercise.
Create polls and/or a survey.
Get your ego out of the way.
Schedule calls with people.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Courtney Chaal
Website | Instagram | YouTube | Twitter
Hi, I’m Courtney Chaal and it is not my life’s goal to become famous on the internet. Call me crazy, but I honestly just like helping people make enough money to live the happiest, freest, funnest life they can. Let's forget about million-dollar dreams for a second and focus on making enough money to support your life with your business. Maybe you want to travel like a nomad or become a minimalist or have enough revenue to stay home with your kids. Maybe you just want to feel free and creative and do whatever the h-e-double hockey sticks you feel like every day. That's what I'm about: the real, honest, what it takes-ness of building a business to support your happiest life.
KEY TOPICS
Tweaking content, Packaging, Positioning, Promoting, Empathy, Ego, Selling, Questions/polls, Last-minute offers, Content
