Episode 175: Where are you making the "connection"?
How am I stopping in my week to drive a connection? In today's episode, Fiona talks about the importance of connection and how it takes only two seconds of your time, but people don't do it enough. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
The buyer's cycle
Connecting is a huge part of marketing
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Do you love your business? You should, right? Well, sometimes we just don't, it's my hope that this the my daily business coach podcast helps you regain a little of that lost love by providing tips and tactics, tools, insights, inspiration, all the good stuff to help you actually enjoy running your business. In addition to actionable tips and tactics that you'll be able to execute immediately, you'll also hear from creative small business owners around the world. Who've been able to sidestep the hustle and, and build a business that merges their passion with their purpose and provides a profit. I'm your host Fiona Killackey, founder of my daily business coach. Let's get going.
Hello and welcome to episode 175 of the my daily business coach podcast. I've only got 25 episodes and I'm at 200 episodes. My goodness, if you're listening to this and you have ever thought of starting a podcast, this is your sign to just start it to start it. I cannot believe we are at 175 episodes already. This has been probably, it's a hard one. It's a hard one between this and another marketing channel. But God, this has been an incredible tool for my business for myself for just connection. So, if you're listening and you're like, “I really wanna have my own podcast, or maybe I could do that.” Do it. I am telling you, you will not regret it. It's so good. And on that note, if you are like, I really wanna do it. I have no idea where to start but man, I have a podcast, of course, it's called how to start a podcast and you can find it over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast, but it is episode 175.
It is a tip episode that is a quick 10 minutes or less. And I am going to dive into that in a second. But before I do, I just want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the beautiful land in which I'm looking out, recording this podcast, I'm recording it from my home office. You don't need all the fancy bells and whistles that they say, but I want to pay my respects to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. They are the traditional custodians and landowners on this beautiful place that I call home and pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. So it is a quick tip episode. And as it's quick, let's get into it.
So today it is a tactic. I'd say it's a tip and a tactic. So really these episodes are tip tactic or tool, but this one is a tip and a tactic, and or it leads to tactics, I should say. Anyway, the question that I wanna pose to you today is where are you making the connection? So what do I mean by this? Well, I talk a lot about brand and marketing. It is a huge part of what I work with people on building brands, building, scaling their brands, looking at the brand message, looking at the way they market looking at marketing that aligns with who they are and their beliefs and not feeling like I have to do it this way because that is the way that everyone in my industry does it. And one of the tools that we use when we look at that is the buyer cycle.
So that is really a cycle of five stages that people walk through, whether they are or go through, whether they're looking for a synagogue or a pair of earrings. So it starts with awareness. They then go into research from research. They dive into evaluation from evaluation. If the path is there and clear, they will go to purchase and then post-purchase, which becomes advocacy. If you do a good job. And then the whole thing starts again, because those people are out being advocates of your brand and telling people who are now aware, and then they start the cycle. So most people, when I walk them through that, will realize, we spend way too much time in our brand marketing talking just about awareness or we are not spending enough time with the evaluation, or we're not spending enough time, you know, trying to get repeat business, which is the post-purchase advocacy stage.
And one question that I'll always ask people is where are you making connections? Because connecting is a huge part of marketing, a good marketing message connects. That's what it does. If nothing else connects, it may not necessarily make you buy something. It may not necessarily change your life, but it will connect. It'll connect in some way. And sometimes that will be an emotional connection quite often. It is. I mean, we really do buy through emotion. It's been studied that 90% of our purchase decisions are non-rational, they are emotional decisions. And so it's something though that we, we may know deep down, like, I need to connect, but we're not doing so with connection. Firstly, you don't want it to just be a kind of, I know, buzzword or a piece of jargon that you're using in relation to your marketing or your brand.
You want it to be genuine. I mean, we can all feel when people are just trying to connect in a way that just feels really sales and lame and gross. I mean, we all get those DMS, we all get LinkedIn messages. We all get these emails that are like, Hey, and then they call you by the wrong name and go on and on and on about themselves. That's not what I mean when I'm talking about connection. When I'm talking about connection, I am looking at your kind of business as usual marketing the, the business as usual kind of way that you run your business and thinking where are the points of which I am genuinely trying to connect with people. So these can be small things like, if you have a buyer, at a bigger stock, that's taking your product.
And so it's like, “Okay, let me make sure that I've connected with them on LinkedIn”, that I've connected with them on social media. That I'm generally engaging with them. Like I do with other people, not on a stalker level, but also not on a, I just connected with you and now I'm not gonna, interact or engage with you or any of your posts ever. So that's kind of smaller ones just like connecting with them on social media, but in bigger ways. So say you have a stock that is, is really great for you. Then perhaps you have a questionnaire. So when they start stocking your product, you have actually asked them a couple of questions and that might include what's your star sign. So that's always a fun one when you don't actually want to ask somebody, when is your birthday?
Because then there's the perception that, you might wanna know how old they are or any kind of ageism or anything else, but you could put in, I'd just love to know what your star sign is. So then you know that any time in that particular star sign time, so say, for instance, my star sign is cancer. So you know that from the 22nd of June to the 22nd of July, I think it is maybe 21st that you might send them something and be like, “Hey, another year older,” or, “Hey, I saw this in the thought of you” or, “Hey, I know it's your birthday coming up.” So, I wanted to send you a cupcake or something that is actually a lovely way to connect and a way also of keeping you in mind. Now, after, when we talk about these things, people can get really into like, that's so strategic and sales and gross.
What I'm talking about is not that it's about finding the ways to humanize your business and drive real connection. Another thing that might happen is, you are a fashion brand and you are all about ethical, sustainable fashion. You might decide that, yes, we talk about our brand a lot and we have products. But what we'd love to do is to give back to our audience. So what we'd love to do is to invite 10 of them, drive a competition, or something to come to a special dinner where we have three incredible guests that are talking about ethical manufacturing or sustainability in a different way. So maybe you've got like a food waste person, or maybe you just bring the food waste person on and do like an Instagram live. It's a different way of connecting with your audience and driving home, your brand values as well.
Another way of looking at how often I connect is purely time. I know that sounds so cheesy and cliche, and everyone's not good enough of it. Or so they feel that having the time. So quite often people will say things quickly in an email. Like if you're like, “Hey, how are you going?” It's like, “yeah, good.” It's been a bit hectic. And, they'll go onto whatever it is that they're applying to. And just having the time to be like,” I'm really sorry, it's been hectic.” Is there anything I can help you with? Or, “Hey, it's also been super hectic for me.” I've actually found reading this good book has helped, or I was actually watching Netflix and there was this really funny comedy show. And, I found it a bit of a relief from all the hecticness going on right now.
That is, it takes two seconds of your time, but people don't do it enough. We see all of these if we could read into them a little bit more, these chances and these opportunities for connection, but we are not making them, we are just getting onto the next thing. And the next thing, and I'm not saying that every single email somebody sends you, you should like decipher it for the code of like, how are they really feeling and what, how can I help, but allowing yourself a little bit of time to build actual connections where, whether it's with your stockers and suppliers and manufacturers, whether it's with your audience. So maybe you got a bit of customer feedback and maybe there was just something in there that you're like, “you know what? I should reply to that and send them this.” Recently I had somebody send me a DM and they were sort of saying how they've just been really stressed and the podcast helped and everything else.
And I always love hearing from people about that. And I replied, but what I also did was actually drop a link to this YouTube video that I have watched every single year since it came out for the last 13 years. I've watched it at least a few times a year and it just makes me feel so happy. It is called Where the hell is Matt. You can find it from 2008 and every single time I've watched it, It's the music, it's uplifting, it's travel. It's just, you cannot help, but watch that and be in a bad mood afterward. And so that little extra bit doesn't take me a sec. It doesn't take me any longer than if I just replied and said, thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate your feedback. I'm tuning into how can I connect with this person?
And it's often those small things that we think are really small that actually leave a lasting impression on people. And again, this is not to be like, I'm gonna nurture them into a sequence to buy something from me. It's about where are we making connections? We are small business owners. We are the majority of businesses, at least, especially here in Australia, small businesses, I think to equate for like, I can't remember what the exact figure is, but a huge amount of business, a huge amount of the people who employ people, a huge amount of the people that people are interacting with every single day from the shop through to the petrol station, through to the bakery, to a service provider. So I want you to think if nothing else from this, this quick tip episode, how am I making the connection?
How am I stopping in my week to drive a connection? Whether it is with somebody who's buying from me or somebody who is stalking me or whether it is with my own staff, whether it is with somebody I worked with years ago and just sort of making that connection, like taking a second, being human and reaching out or sending something or remembering people and being human. And so that is it for today's quick tip episode, it's really thinking about where am I making the connection? Where am I making the connection happen? Because after all, that's what we're all in business for. We're here to connect with other people to improve their life, hopefully through our product or our service. And the more that we can do that, I just think, especially now, when people have had so much isolation, the better it'll be for everyone.
So that is it for today's quick tip episode. If you wanna go through this in text format, you can find it over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/175. And as I said at the start, if you're interested in creating your own podcast, we have a short course on that. Many people have done it now and they've launched podcasts. And it's so exciting when they launch. It's like, “Oh my gosh.” So it doesn't just go through how to actually create your podcast and which platforms to use and recording stuff. It also goes through, which I think is even more important, the processes, how are you going to create a process so that you can get a podcast out every single week, if that's your frequency, and do so in a way that aligns with the other parts of your life. And doesn't become really stressful and really overwhelming. So you can find that at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Bye. Thanks for listening to the my daily business coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
