062: Heidi Thompson – How to Clone Your Best Clients & Create a Marketing Plan That Actually Works!

May 20, 2022

“Don’t ever forget just how much control you have over what you do, over the way you work & over the structure of your business, “

HEIDI THOMPSON

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about Heidi Thompson.

Check out some of the biggest points from Heidi’s interview below:

How do we think of ourselves as the CEO of our business?

So something super simple you can do is set yourself a CEO date once a week. It can be 15 minutes. Make sure it’s on your calendar every week. And in it, you’re going to just press pause on everything and look at, “Okay, what am I doing this week? What’s working? What’s not working?” Look at your numbers. Get a big picture of what’s going on. And then use that time to sit down and plan out your week. A lot of people don’t plan out their day, their week, and it causes that frenetic energy of having to buzz all over the place and do a million things. But if you get into the habit of setting this date for yourself and you say, “Okay, Tuesday, all day Tuesday, uninterrupted editing, I’m not going to go into my email. I’m not going to do anything. I’m just working on editing,” you are going to be able to do that more efficiently. You’re going to be able to make more progress because of the momentum you really create by having uninterrupted time to work on something. So creating batches like that in your schedule is really, really helpful.

So creating a batch is really simply just grouping like things together. So what batches do you have in your business? It’s probably editing. It could be marketing tasks. You’re going to have admin and follow-up things. You’re going to have client meetings. Can we group these things together so that you’re doing all of those things in one place on your schedule. Like Monday afternoon, that’s when you do all your social media. That’s when you do all your marketing tasks, and then it’s done and you don’t have to worry about it. And I can’t tell you how much space it gives you in your schedule and how freeing it is and how much more control you have over your time when you really give the blocks on your schedule roles. Like, “Tuesday’s my editing day. Nope, I don’t do meetings on Tuesday. I don’t do anything else on Tuesday. It’s my editing day. CEO me told me it’s editing day. It’s editing day.”

What is a marketing plan? How can we implement one?

So the way I teach creating a marketing plan is five parts. So first we set a goal. What do you want to accomplish specifically? It has to have a number. Do you want a certain increase of profit percentage wise? Do you want a certain number of bookings? Whatever it is, we have to have a number so we know if we’re moving toward it or if we’re stagnant. Then I take people through a segment that I call your research. And this is the foundation of everything. This gives you the answers to where do I market? How do I market? What do I say? What do I post? And in it, I have people look at the best clients you’ve ever had that you’ve worked with and you’ve adored and you wish you could clone and you wish you could work with over and over and over again.

And what you’re going to do is you’re going to go to them and you’re going to ask them some questions to get in their head to understand what is it that is really important to them. Where did they look when they were searching for their wedding vendors? We have access to the perfect data source in our clients, but too often we don’t use it. We don’t ask them anything. And as a result, we’re just guessing at what’s important.

So for instance, there’s a planner inside my membership and her marketing was entirely centered around saving people time and relieving stress, the normal things a planner would talk about. And she went through this process, and she realized when singling out who her favorite people were, okay, all of them are either Indian couples or one person in the couple is Indian. And when she talked to them and figured out, “Okay, why did you book me as opposed to another planner? What drew you to me? What made me stand out?” she got told over and over again, “I want to have an Indian wedding, but I don’t want to have the Indian wedding. I don’t want to have my sister’s wedding. I don’t want to have my brother’s wedding, my cousin’s, my friend’s. I want to do it my way. So I wanted to work with somebody that I knew knew Indian weddings well enough that they could take my personality and take my partner’s personality and make it our own.”

And once she turned all of her marketing messaging into that, people started booking her like crazy, because she was the go-to person for her ideal client. She was the only person who was offering to solve the problem that these people wanted solved. They didn’t really care about saving time. They didn’t really care about the stress that was number 10 on the list. But she would have never known that if she wouldn’t have had conversations with them and found out, “Oh, no. I hired you for a completely different reason than you think.” So that is the gold nugget that we mine in this process.

And then as a result, we know what to talk about. We know what to post on social media. We know what to write blog posts about. We know what the copy on our website needs to be and the types of images that we need to use. And we can find out where should we be marketing by, again, asking our clients. And if you see that, “Huh. Okay. I was going to put an ad on this particular website, and not a single one of my ideal clients said that they looked there. Maybe that’s not the best use of my money.” If all of them said they got referrals from a venue, all right. You need to focus on building relationships with venues. It really gives you that north star of what you’re supposed to be focused on. And I think more than anything in business, that’s what we all want.

If you could add one final piece of advice, something that’s made a difference in your personal life or your business life, what would that piece of advice be?

You have more control than you realise. We created businesses. We built something from nothing, and we still treat ourselves as if we’re in a corporate job a lot of times. If you want a business where you’re done by 2:00, so by the time your kids get home from school you’re totally available to them, you can build that. If you want a business, at a certain point, if you’re like, “I am over spending my weekends at weddings. I want to have other people going and doing weddings,” you can build that.

And I just don’t want people to forget just how much control you have over what you do, over the way you work, over the structure of your business, because you can seriously … It sounds cheesy and inspirational, but you can build anything you want to support the lifestyle that you want to have as opposed to just accepting, “Well, this is going to be my life,” because this is the way that your business is currently.

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Heidi for joining us on the show!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally