I’ve got a very special guest here on the show today!

Meet Lauren Thorsen, founder of Edit Your Brand, a boutique public relations and content marketing agency specializing in defining and promoting our clients' unique brand stories.

Lauren and I met eight months ago when one of her clients, who she’d been working on PR with, was looking for a way to increase conversions for his service offering. 

Lauren began the process of doing a deep dive into the client’s sales workflow to understand how the client was working to convert people visiting the website and what the current sales and marketing strategy was. 

What she discovered was that there was no sales or marketing funnel in place.

And that’s where I came in. 

Let’s dig in.

Biggest Show Takeaways:

• It’s very common for businesses to skip over the foundational marketing work and go to the sexy, paid ads arm of marketing or public relations, but PR isn’t a magic silver bullet.
  • Today with this digital realm that we all live in,  increased competition means consumers often lack trust with ads or media outlets. 

• PR doesn’t take the place of sales. Even with great PR, you need a sales strategy or sales effort.
  • You've got to think beyond the media hit. People are going to read an article or hear about a brand, but what next? Are they going to be inspired to come to your website? And if so, what are they going to see that’s really going to draw them in? It's got to answer their need. 
• PR is a great tool for awareness, credibility and thought leadership, and it's also a great for telling a brand story in a way that's really difficult to do through advertising sometimes. You can share the human side of the business, how you’re different within your industry or things that highlight the personality behind the brand.
• If you’re an expert or a solopreneur and you want to pitch yourself to the media, there are some great tools out there, but you really need to be careful about this because if you're not thinking about why you're pitching yourself to a certain media outlet, or what you're pitching, or what your story is, and how you're going to back that up with your sales and marketing strategy, you can end up damaging your reputation.
• If all of the content you’re sharing, either on your website, social media or media channels doesn’t have a strategy driving it, you’re never going to get the sales call opportunities you’re looking for. 
• In the case of the client we worked together with, they were expanding from a traditional offline business into the online world, so target audience information was lacking. 
  • To be successful, we needed to examine all the questions surrounding who we wanted to target. This foundation is critical to building your sales process. Online business requires a different strategy, which many business owners don’t realize going into it. 
• To find the right target audience, you have to research, research, research.
  • For startups or younger businesses, they may think they don't have a big enough customer base to study. You can address that by looking at competitors to figure out:
    • How do they conduct their ad campaigns? 
    • What stories are they  pitching to the media through their PR efforts? 
    • What does their social content look like? 
    • What pain points are they focused on?
    • Where is their traffic coming from?
    • Where's their topic coming from? 
    • What keywords are they focused on? 
• When identifying your target market, consider the following:
  • What types of businesses do they own?
  • Why would they want to hire out the service?
  • What kind of problems are they trying to address?
• What we discovered was a ton of nuances, and it’s all too easy to make assumptions about what you think you know about your target market. 
  • If you make those assumptions and go down that path thinking “this is my customer avatar” and you're wrong, it's so much time and energy and momentum that you lose. That’s why it's so important to do this research upfront.
• Once you have your customer avatar nailed down, testing your lead magnet and email content should be the next step.
  • This step often gets skipped because marketers make assumptions, but if you're working with a brand that just doesn't have that large of an audience built in yet or doesn't have proof points around that audience, then testing phases need to take place. 
  • Test your emails and evaluate the open rate here, and figure out which ones they love, and which ones they’re not even opening. 
• To be successful with both marketing and PR, you need to put yourself in your prospect or customer's shoes. Understand their pain points and the language they're using around whatever products or services you're offering. 

Create Profit Without Worry – one system at a time. I’ll show you how to attract a steady flow of buyers without all the hustle with this free download →  5 Steps To Profit Without Worry.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Lauren’s website: www.edityourbrand.com 
• Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/EditYourBrand/
• Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/edityourbrand/
• Lauren’s PDF download: http://bit.ly/31HvO25
• Create Profit Without Worry – one system at a time with this free download →  5 Steps To Profit Without Worry.