Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth

Are y’all ready to start hearing Jingle Bells? Well, you need to prepare yourself cause the holiday season is fast approaching even though it felt like we all lived in a time warp this year. Usually, we are not great with planning far in advance, but this year, while the weather is still warm, we thought we would jump ahead and create a holiday master marketing game plan. Q4 has this weird way of flying by in the blink of an eye, so we want to share with you some of our top strategies to make the most of the festive season. Because, while the world is in recovery mode and things uncertain, we know that people are still spending their dollar bills, and the predictions suggest that people will spend more money online this year than they ever have. Whether you are in products, services, coaching, or something else, people are spending their cash on the internet, so let’s capitalize on that and see how we can leverage this fact this coming season. While we do not know what exactly you will be offering these holidays, we can help you work backward (from the end of December to where we are currently) to give you a pretty clear idea of what you need to work on and when. So, fill up your cup and be ready to take down notes, cause this is going to be a goodie!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the show today, we have brand designer Colin Tierney joining us. He owns and runs Tierney Studio where he has grown his branding and started a whole new business before the pandemic hit, which we will get into today. Talking to Colin, we give you another perspective on a Dubsado customer’s experience and how they have used the software and CRM to perfect their client process, land deals faster, offload projects, and more. As a fellow designer, Abagail wishes she knew about Dubsado when she was still in the design business since their software takes the client management side of things off your hands to free you up for doing the design work. There are just too many benefits of signing up for Dubsado, as you will hear from Emylee, Abagail, and Colin. If you’ve had questions about the capabilities of Dubsado or have thought about getting started with the platform, this episode will give you a really good peek behind the curtain. Remember, as a listener of the podcast, you can also get Dubsado for 30% off your first month or year!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Emylee and Abagail get into the topic of building a community that you get paid to run, talking about two of the more popular options in the creator space – Patreon and Mighty Networks. We see musicians, comedians, artists, podcasters, and the like use these platforms to create a network. As you all know, Emylee is always looking toward the next thing and has taken the leap to start her online community for those interested in building clay earring businesses, so she has done some research, signed up (and canceled) subscriptions, and figured out the details so that you don’t have to! We know that you love your Facebook group, but there are serious limitations to it, such as that you can’t get paid for it. However, migrating from one platform to another can be a nasty business since humans are creatures of habit who often resist new paths. You’ve got to have pretty solid reasons for wanting to migrate, and Emylee and Abagail break it all down for you in this episode. Before you get started on a paid community, be sure to tune in for this episode!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we are joined by our wonderful friend and all-round badass, Sarah Peck. Sarah is the founder of Startup Pregnant, a New York City-based company dedicated to documenting women’s leadership. She is a writer, yoga teacher, and hosts Startup Pregnant’s weekly podcast too! Her goal is to amplify women’s voices and promote their business through her work and she definitely has one of our favorite brains in the game! We share a lot of her business philosophy and will be using this episode to geek out on some strategies for listening to your audience as a way to help grow your product or service.This super under-utilized and somewhat simple strategy can help you and your biz so much! By paying closer attention to your audience, you can really improve what you offer and make the direct connection between those paying you and what you provide for them. Quite a straightforward equation, right? This is the second time Sarah is joining us on the Strategy Hour and if you haven’t heard her previous appearance go back and check it out immediately, it’s Episode 185! This episode’s topic was sparked by a conversation a few days prior where we were chatting to Sarah about business philosophies and implementation of these. We really believe in these ideas and they are so in line with our core values that we could not resist having her on to talk all about it!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on The Strategy Hour we’re diving deeper into what exactly we mean when we say that is should be easy and fun to make $100k from your service-based business, within a year. There’s a misconception that money cannot be earned without really hard work, and to an extent, this is true, especially for certain types of businesses. But you also have to be smart about it! Just to reiterate, when we say it’s easy to make six figures, we are talking about offering services like copywriting, designing, and photography. And this is by doing the basic work only, aside from all the other side offerings like podcasts and training courses. In fact, you should keep it as simple as possible, focusing on doing one thing really well instead of doing a bunch of different things. These other ideas are not bad, but until you’ve done the one thing properly, you won’t enjoy its full benefits. We’re also guilty of this and we’ve seen many of our mentees battling with the same thing. Today we’re breaking this down in a way that we hope will help you not to fall into the trap of believing that diversifying will necessarily expand your business and make you more money. Whether you’re thinking of adding on products or offering more services, you think that the single solid service you’re offering will not get you to your financial goals. Today we’re busting that myth, and we’re going to show you have it is totally possible to achieve your goals by sticking to the basics.Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we talk to our good friend Steph Crowder, a business strategist, sales expert, and host of the Courage & Clarity podcast. In her past life, Steph was a director of sales training over at Groupon but now helps entrepreneurs get more customers easily by working with those they already know. Today she is spilling all the beans from her extensive experience in sales, talking about how you can go from crickets to customers by following a three-step formula all about the problem, platform, and people, and we just share hacks from what we have learned here at Boss Project and in our side businesses. Switch on your strategic thinking, and tune in! Remember to leave a five-star rating and review of the show wherever you listen to your podcasts and share it on Instagram, tagging us! When you do this, you stand a chance to win one of two awesome prizes: a free copy of Trello for Business or a month’s access to the Creative Template Shop.Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s get into our July 2020 profit report! This year has just been super satisfying. Around fall last year we had decided and declared out loud to you that we were on this mission to get to 30% reoccurring profit each month, and at the time it felt like climbing a mountain. We were just really struggling and had spent all this time and money trying to figure out who makes up our team, what our products are, and how we are selling them, but something about this year just really clicked for us!We started sharing our profit reports last fall with this goal to hold ourselves accountable. We know you guys like to hear behind the scenes. We also restructured how we did our profit reports. We don’t do it like how a lot of others do it where we don’t share our actual numbers – not that we don’t want to, but we honestly think they are distracting and put you in a space of ‘comparisonitis’, and no-one needs to suffer from that. So we wanted to showcase more of the percentages, breakdowns of our expenses, our profits, and just big picture decisions that we make every month in order to reach our goals.Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we say that today’s episode is going to rock your world, we’re not even joking! If you have a client-based business and use Dusado, maybe you have wanted to set up workflows, but been so overwhelmed that you haven’t started, then stop what you're doing and listen to this show with a notebook because Krystal Clark literally breaks every step down! From lead capture to onboarding to delivering to offboarding, she leaves no stone unturned. Krystal even goes so far as to give us five hacks on how she’s using Dubsado differently than what we have heard before! Krystal's creative brain takes something that already exists in Dusado and then reworks it to be custom for her clients and you guys. If you do not have Dubsado yet, you can get 50% off for the first year by going to the link at the end of the page. It will rock your world when it comes to infusing beautiful brand and designing the workflow process. A lot of what Krystal talks about, we either have a template that will make it simpler or she gave us new ideas for templates that you best believe are coming out. Please share the workflow that you’re going to get set up because you were inspired by this episode, tag us, and then be sure to also tag Krystal on Instagram.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s been a hot minute since we had this conversation and we think we have some fresh takes on this taboo topic that seems to happen in every single niche, every single industry, and that is the conversation about pricing! We have so many thoughts and ideas around this and think there are a lot of very strong opinions about what you should and should not do and so we just want to put a disclaimer at the top of the whole episode to say, “You do whatever you want, and that’s okay!” Nevertheless, we want to have this conversation again because we both have our own businesses on the side of Boss Project. Abagail will share how pricing impacts her marketing and clients, some complexities about pricing, and how she has felt differently about this topic over the years. For Emylee, the maker community is rampant with conversations about pricing, but she believes the questions being asked are often actually about something different to pricing. So, Emylee will pick apart what this means for her, and talk about the different conversations that actually need to be had!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we are talking to JB and Brittany Jacquot, who own their own media company out of San Francisco where they do video and photography for brands, influencers, and high-end weddings. Like so many people our age, they jumped on TikTok at the beginning of quarantine. This has translated into over 100 000 followers and a booked wedding in less than 24 hours! So, you best believe they got some hot tips for us. They break down every single thing they have learned about the platform — How to make the perfect viral video, how to get people to sign up for a freebie or opt-in, and how to get people to follow you or other channels. They also share actual numbers and stats so that you have a better understanding of the kinds of expectations you should set for yourself when you are growing your own or your business’s TikTok following, and you are trying to monetize it. They talk really candidly about how they broke down and thought about who they want to target, what they wanted to share, and how they wanted to get people to move over to different channels so they could actually use it to make money, rather than gaining followers for the sake of having followers. We know you will get a lot of ideas on how to utilize this for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and even video content in general. It's a really great one, and we can’t wait to see what you all come up with on TikTok after this! Before we get started, you’ve been invited to a podcast party. Find us on your favorite podcast platform, leave a five-star review, head over to Instagram, and tag us. You will then be entered into a draw, where you stand the chance to win one of two prizes — A free copy of Trello for Business, or a whole month of The Creative Template Shop for free!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices