Title: Getting Started With 1PMP – The Before Phase
Guests: Chris Goldman, Anne Garing
Peter: We’re back with the one page marketing plan, and we are working with Anne Gehring of Anne Gehring Coaching, and we’re taking her through the whole one page marketing process. Her business is a coaching business. This week, we’re joined by Chris Goldman, who is a certified one page marketing plan coach. He’s a marketing messaging expert, and he has done marketing messaging for over 50 companies. Welcome this week, Chris.
Chris: Good to be here.
Peter: Great. Glad to have you. Anne, so good to see you again. Thanks. And last week, we did an audit of Anne’s one page marketing, the nine elements of her one page marketing, and we put it together.
So if you wanna catch that, you can watch the previous episode. It says step one, the audit. Today, we’re going to review her target market with Chris, and we’re going to review her messaging as well with Chris. And Chris, a marketing messaging expert, is going to help clarify the message, not necessarily come up with the finalized language today, but find some opportunities where we can help Anne project a better idea of what she does and how she helps people through the words that she uses on her website. Anne, so how are you feeling after week one?
What’s your thoughts on where we landed last week?
Anne: I I think I said hopeful last time.
Peter: You did?
Anne: And appreciative and hopeful. Yeah. I’m looking forward to being able to be more clear on what I’m offering people so that it’s easier for them to say yes to the right people.
Peter: Chris, last week, we covered the audit. You can see that Anne’s target market is young people 20 and organizational leaders. Anne, why don’t you just describe what we went through last week?
Anne: Chris, last week, I talked with Pete about the two target markets that I think I’m most compelled by are young people, twenties to thirties, are just getting their start. And I think sometimes they’re very overwhelmed by the choices and the next step. I love helping them get clear and then make progress towards what they really want. And the other audience that I just resonate with are organizational leaders. I’ve been one myself, and I’ve spent a lot of my career thinking about leadership.
And one of the reasons that I really love working with leaders is people get promoted into leadership roles because they were excellent individual contributors. I think it can be terrifying. I feel like you’re just waiting to be caught. And I think that having someone to talk through things with is just so incredibly powerful, builds their confidence, and makes them better leaders. One of the things we talked about is that they have reach in terms of creating goodness in the world, if you will.
If the leader is calm and clear, then it makes it better for everyone who works for them. So
Chris: I love that.
Peter: Chris, now that you’ve heard from Anne about her target market, do you have any thoughts you’d like to add or questions about target market, or should we move on to the messaging piece?
Chris: Yeah. Anne, I love your passion, especially when you’re talking about leaders that are in new appointments, and how that can be scary, because we strive to get those promotions that moving ahead, if you will. And sometimes we work and work and work for it. And then we’re put in that position. And the second we’re there, we’re like, what did I just do?
Peter: So the dog chasing the bus, and then the dog catches the bus.
Chris: What do I do now? It’s a great thing, by the way, if you’re a young business leader, if you’re an established business leader, what Anne is saying is the ability to have somebody to talk to, to keep your leadership on point is invaluable. You cannot put a price on it. It is so important. And when you thrive, and you are calm in the right moment, the entire business and company thrives.
So you want to keep that in mind. That’s where coaching comes in. So, Anne, when I look at this and I look at your list of what you have as your values in your messaging, and you think about these dense words like authenticity, structure, support, courageous, and kind, I was looking at that, and I thought I would ask you the question. When you think about the three words, authentic, courageous, and kind, are you wanting those words to describe your coaching or your client?
Anne: I very definitely want them to describe my coaching.
Chris: Okay. Very good. Okay. So here’s one of the things in messaging that we work with with companies all the time. When we’re talking about our message to our target market, we also wanna think in terms of our messaging reflecting what the target audience is going to get from my services, in your case, my coaching, where I want them to read and see on all of my marketing collateral.
If I engage in in the coaching, what am I going to walk away with? Okay, so for example, for what I think about excellence in coaching or coaching excellence, I like that double meaning that you came up with. That’s why I found his coaching excellence and excellence and coaching both. That’s really about you, the coach, and the kind of coaching you wanna provide or the kind of coach you wanna be. Correct?
Mhmm. When you think about those three, clarity around your vision, confidence state, what you want for, the how to do it, What do you think in terms of that for your clients?
Anne: I think what they get is, yes, clarity around their goal, their vision for themselves. I think a lot of times they’re unclear about that or they haven’t thought concretely about it. They so they get clarity around the goal, and then I provide structure and support while they move towards that. And that’s very important for getting traction, which I think a lot of my clients it’s like we’re on top of things, like we’re thinking we know what we have to do, but actually taking steps to move towards it is sometimes daunting.
Chris: Yes. So what I would be looking for, especially on your website, but also your other marketing collateral, is something along the lines of excellent coaching so you can be a clear, confident, structured leader in your company. So that in one brief sentence and usually what I’m after is I’m after five to eight words that tell the client specifically what you’re hoping for them once they engage your services. This is where you’re at. Biz marketing is we help businesses win online.
That’s what we do. Right? So that statement is we often call it a tagline or a one liner in five to eight words clarifies or clearly states with our audience, here’s what I want you to experience. And this is why it’s so important. People are looking for services, in your case, coaches, that are 100% about their success.
And so a lot of times, we can come across in our collateral even accidentally coming across as, hey, this is why you should hire me. I’m really good at this. I’m the top in this region at this. And they’re saying, I get that you’re good at this. What I’m wanting to know is how you’re going to help me be great at what I do.
So we wanna take that message for them and about them, and we want to put it front and center. We even want that statement to be stronger than even our own branding. So for example, when I’m looking at your site, it’s clean. It’s simple. And then I notice that the coaching excellence, because of the color contrast or the lack of it, is a little hard for me to read.
So I looked for it and then found it. But the the thing that we’re putting forward is take the next step, which I like because it’s it’s aspirational. We’re gonna move somewhere. But I would say that you could even be more specific on what that next step or those next steps are. So what I’m hearing from you that excites me, if I’m saying I’m gonna hire in Garen, and you told me, look.
I want to help you get clear, confident, and structured on what’s next. I sit there and I go, that’s what I need. I so often need clarity. I need to keep my confidence because, men, if you’re in any leadership position, your confidence is gonna take daily hits. Right?
And you gotta keep that confidence up because you’ve got troops to engage and get excited about it. But a lot of times, the how to do it is left off. So a lot of coaches I know will they can help you with clarity and confidence, but they don’t take the time to walk through structure and steps on how to do it. And so what you’re offering here is really a trifecta of coaching that a client would want to see. But we want to make sure that that message gets forward in everything that you see.
And really in in about twenty to twenty five seconds on your website, that they see and hear those messages right up front.
Anne: When I think about structure, I think that what I am doing is providing structure for them so that they are not only clear about the goal, but also clear about the next step. And then they can confidently take the next step. Pete, like, as a former client, like, I I’m also wanting you to see if this was resonating for you. My goal is not that they are structured, but that I am providing structure for them to know what to do next and feel confident about chug, chug, chug.
Peter: For me personally, it had a lot to do with first and foremost, trying to figure out what that goal was and and putting it in concrete terms, not I just wanna grow a lot or I just wanna have a bigger impact, but actually being very specific about the goal. In our case, it was reach 10,000 people, And I’m just remembering all this now. And and so we talked about that, and we talked about what does that mean? Not necessarily how do we do it, like what is the tactic that needs to happen? But looking at it more generally as the strategy first, what is the strategy to reach that goal?
And then looking at it from a, okay, so what needs to happen next? And for me as as a leader of an organization and just as an entrepreneur, I get distracted very easily, and it’s easy for me to come up with this idea, but then I have to make it happen, and I need help. For me personally, I needed help just to get some clarity around what was the next step. That’s where Anne really helped out a lot was she’s not telling me what to do. She never told me what to do.
It was me coming up with the next step. But she was the one that said, Okay, what’s the next step? And if I just sat at my desk, I’m not gonna be thinking, Okay, what’s the next step? But working with Anne, I was able to really think through that. And, of course, I had homework.
Anne: The way that I see it, it’s like clarity around the vision is like this kind of this place on the horizon. Once you’re clear about that, we meet every two weeks, is that you’re you are taking steps in that direction. Right? And things can vary, things can happen, but it’s like continual movement towards the thing that you say you want.
Peter: You mentioned a word there. The other word I think of is momentum because you can have an idea or a goal, but unless you actually start taking the next step, it just sits there and it just festers away.
Anne: Creates anxiety.
Peter: Yes. Yes.
Anne: Yeah. For everybody. Think I think having the vision, like, lot of times is anxiety producing because then it feels so overwhelming and big and what am I gonna do? But if you just start breaking it up and taking steps, then it all resolves itself.
Chris: When we’re looking at this stuff, and I’m doing an audit, and I’m listening to great language like that, Anne, my piece, and this is marketing, right? We’re doing this so people can understand the process of marketing an effective built business that can take the next step. What I do is I take those great words, and I often ask owners, why are those great words missing from your primary marketing? Right? When I go to your to your website, I wanna hear that clear vision, confident leaders, next steps.
I coach you towards clear vision, confidence, confident leadership, and next steps so that I understand really fast what makes you different, what sets you apart from other coaches. I don’t just want to have a session with Anne Gehring, I want to know if I’m in this position, and I don’t know how to develop clarity around my vision. How do I do that? So I want those words on there. Now what Anne has done here, Pete, is something we see a lot in marketing.
Has great language from fantastic ideology, but that has somehow escaped being out on the website. So we would typically take in we would take about two and a half to three and a half hours to walk through a process to gain that language, pull that language that’s in your heart and your mind as a business leader, in your case, as a coach, pull that out, get it on paper and workshop it together to get that language so that it’s all in your site and in your marketing collateral. So people see it, they hear it because that compelling language is compelling for customers, and you wanna share it out there. So this is pretty common. See take the next step.
I think that could be completely transformed into a powerful statement five to eight words. And then when you talk about how I can help you, instead of career development, life changes starting out, I would want those three to reflect that language as well. Right? And doesn’t mean we’re not going to mention career development or life changes are starting out. But we’re going to build it into that idea of clear vision, confident leaders, knowing those next steps, so that they’re hearing that because I promise you, that is in your heart, I can see it, I can hear it when you talk about it, you light up.
And so we want your website, your marketing collateral to light up with what’s inside of you for your clients and bring that out. And that’s really what messaging refinement is about in marketing. Well, Pete, when you ask me to audit and do a quick audit of messaging Yeah. That’s what I’d pass on to you and Anne. And, Anne, if you wanna get together and spend a couple of three hours together going through it, I’ll just tell you right now, I’d do that with you in a heartbeat.
So
Anne: Oh, yay. I want that.
Chris: It’d be a lot of fun.
Peter: We covered a lot of ground here in a short time. This is a bit of a mini session, a peek behind the covers of what happens with your one page marketing plan at each stage. So as we’re walking through this, if folks out there, if they wanted to engage with us to have that done, like Chris said, we would spend the time to workshop all of this, and it sounds like we’re gonna do a little bit of that with Anne as well. There are some specific tools that we probably don’t wanna reveal those tools on a YouTube video, but you’ve given us a taste of what those tools are, Chris. And I can already see some opportunities here right away to add language to your site and to your collateral that is going to be helpful.
The next step of the process looking at your website will be examining that with our web designer, Marcel. He is really adept at giving the visual for what you’re trying to portray to the marketplace, both for websites and also for PDFs and other collateral as well. This was very helpful today, and can’t wait to move on to the next step, which is number three. Thanks everybody for watching today. We’ll have the next phase out very soon.
Stay tuned.
Anne: Thank you.
Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.
