106. Go From Familiar To Favorite: Building a Trust-Based Business

Ready to break free from the noise and build a high-ticket business based on trust?

This week I’m flipping the script on conventional online marketing wisdom and revealing how to become an in-demand company without getting lost in the chaos.

The big problem that most high-ticket coaches and consultants face when it comes to their marketing is that they’re trying to reach the largest audience possible to drive traffic to their offer.

But there’s an alternate route.

Listen up because I’m sharing the three essential steps to create a business that thrives on trust, rather than traffic.

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Transcript

Welcome to the standout business show.

I’m Brad Powell, and today we’re talking all about how you can go from familiar to favorite.

Can you build a business that is completely in demand, that’s actually overbooked full like your calendar is full and do this without all the noisy, busy way that most people are marketing themselves?

If you’re doing anything online and you’ve been following all the conventional wisdom and the advice of how to market yourself online, there’s this thing where you basically are being told that you have to show up everywhere and you practically have to live on social media.

What if, instead, you focused on relationships and relationship building and did that with exactly the right people? rather than trying to reach the largest crowd

And here’s the thing.

We’re all being taught that the very best way to succeed is to reach as many people as possible and become known and respected by huge numbers of people.

And people are chasing the numbers of views, the number of likes, the number of comments, the number of responses, of everything they’re doing with all of their content.

There are posts on social media, the emails they send, the podcasts that they produce, and it’s just this ever-increasing, never-ending gerbil wheel of effort. That is to what end? to what end? This is the question, right?

So this is the thing that I want to challenge today.

Most small businesses can be broken into two different categories.

You have category number one, which is the business that is, it doesn’t matter whether it’s online or offline, but mainly what they have in terms of their product or their main offer is that it’s small price, small ticket.

So they could be selling books, they could be selling any kind of digital product, they could be selling retail items, but these items have a small price range anything from $10, $29, $199, $299, things like in this range.

And that could be you. If you are in that world, then yes, what you need to do in order to be a profitable business is that you actually do need to reach out to a very high volume of people and build some kind of intake funnel system that will convert enough of those people to buy enough of your small ticket items to make your business run and be profitable.

And this is the engine that most online marketers are saying yeah, this is what you need to build.

But if you’re a business, let’s say, you’re an agency and you are serving B2B to other companies or you have any kind of service which is high ticket.

You could be a coach or a consultant.

If that’s you, then your service is offering some form of radical transformation for the people who you work with, like you’re really helping them grow and change in some very significant way, and it has extremely high value and it has a high price. You’re being compensated really well for that service.

Well, if you have that kind of business, you don’t need high volume. You don’t need to have a huge amount of traffic to have enough of the right people the people who are completely fit for the thing that you offer to come in and meet you and work with you and still have you can be fully booked and have an extremely profitable business without the high volume and the high traffic.

The thing that you do need the most if you have this kind of business – and this is the kind of business that I have and this is the kind of business that I’m speaking to primarily with this show is people who have this high ticket, high value service that they’re offering.

And the thing that you need the most is you need to establish a deeper relationship and a high level of trust with exactly these right fit people.

So how do you accomplish this?

And especially in our increasingly noisy, busy online world like there’s so much content, so much static, so much stuff How do you reach through to get to these people that you would like to serve?

Here’s the big problem that I see: High ticket businesses have been focused on the wrong thing.

They’ve been focused on high traffic rather than high trust and relationship building, and so what I’m gonna talk about today is something that I’m gonna refer to as relationship marketing.

I have three steps that I’m going to cover on how you do this.

So buckle up, stay tuned. We’re really gonna take a deep dive on how you build a business that’s based on building trust rather than traffic.

Here’s the three steps:

Step number one, How do you become the familiar face?

The first basic step in establishing a trust relationship is just simply becoming familiar. The reason that this is so important is that most people in the online world and the offline world they’re drawn to people and things and places where they hang out that are familiar.

If people are searching around online and they land on a place that is unfamiliar, mostly what they do there is they just click right off, they go oh, i don’t know this, i’m gone.

The thing is that most people think that becoming a familiar face is very difficult and it takes a long time, and I just wanna bust that belief system wide open, because it doesn’t necessarily have to take a long time and it’s not very hard to become a familiar face to exactly the people who you would like to be familiar to, and I wanna illustrate this with a story that happened to me not too long ago.

I was traveling to a conference, a three day event, and so I was taking a flight from Boston down to North Carolina.

When I got on the plane, i sat down and next to me on the plane was this young woman, and she was typical young person.

She had earbuds in and she had an iPad out in front of her and during the whole flight she was focused, completely engrossed, in her iPad.

And this is kind of this is the world we live in these days. You’re gonna bump into people who pay no attention to you and for the whole flight, we didn’t talk, we didn’t say hello, she completely ignored me.

This is what happens to all of us, especially both in the real world and in the online world.

We go places and we have an interaction or sort of almost interaction, we bump into people and they completely ignore us.

You’re sharing something online and people are just not paying attention. They’re doing their own thing and they could care less about you and your conversation and your offer. They don’t even wanna talk to you.

Okay, fine, this happened.

Well, the funny thing is that three days later, when I was returning from North Carolina and I was coming back to Boston, I got on my plane, went to my seat, sat down and there next to me, was the same young woman.

Only this time, something happened.

This time, when I got to my seat, she looked up briefly, our eyes met and we both started laughing because, guess what, she recognized me.

And then we started talking.

And I found out that she was a student going to university in Boston and she was studying accounting and she’d been in North Carolina visiting her sister and I said hey, you’re never gonna have to worry about a job, because everybody needs an accountant.

So we had a conversation, but the point is, I was given permission to have a conversation with her because I had become a familiar face.

And it only took two times.

In fact, in the context of being on a plane and in the crowd of people who were on this plane, I was the only familiar face on the plane that was full of strangers.

So it’s not hard to be come familiar.

If you just show up more than once, if you’re just seen more than once, all of a sudden you become familiar.

I get up every morning and I go for a bike ride on the bike trail that I live right next to and I go back and forth around the same time and I see a number of people who are kind of on the same schedule as me and in no time at all we have become familiar to one another, to where it’s relatively easy to to not only say hello, but you know if I bump into them anywhere else.

Now we have permission to have a conversation and to develop our relationship between ourselves that is deeper and more meaningful for both of us, because these are, these are my neighbors, these are the people who live nearby, and now I’m getting to know them in this way, mainly because they see me.

I’m the guy who is always out there on the bike trail riding my bike.

So this is a kind of thing that you can do, and you can do it relatively easily.

My favorite method for becoming the familiar face online is to create video and, in particular, to create short form video.

People will react, “Oh no, short form video, I can’t do that. That means I have to make a new video every day and post it and it’s going to take a lot of work and I just can’t deal with all of that.”

And so to you, I say, Okay, fine, if you’re totally fine with getting on camera, well, you don’t have to do all the other stuff.

Let me help you.

I have this program that I call Mic Drop Moments. You just spend an hour with me and you do that just once a month and in an hour I’m going to interview you, ask you questions and you give me your answers and I’ll take those answers and I’ll edit it down into short form video content for you, so that after just one hour you’ll get a whole month worth of content.

And that’s my Mic Drop Moments thing. If you’re interested in that, just go to mymicdropmoments.com and you can find out all about it.

So that’s step number one becoming a familiar face.

But how do you connect with the right crowd?

Well, the big thing here is you come up with a strong point of view.

What do you believe in? What do you stand for? What is the hill that you’re going to die on? What are the things that you care most about? And who are the people out there who believe the same things that you do, who care about the same things that you do?

These are the things that you want to be looking for.

Now, a lot of people, when they think about picking: who do I want to talk to?

And they’re thinking about their niche. They’re thinking about industry, and that’s fine.

You can say, “I just only want to talk to realtors, or I want to talk to consultants, or I want to talk to lawyers.”

But even within those narrow ranges, like all the lawyers of the world, they don’t all think the same. They don’t have the same belief system. They don’t all necessarily have a worldview that fits with your worldview, which will make them ideal clients for the services and the things that you offer.

And so, in order to connect with the exact right fit people, the people who will be eager and excited to work with you, you have to express your own point of view, and in the world of artificial intelligence, this is increasingly more important.

Everyone needs to stand for something, everyone needs to come forward and say look, these are the things that I believe in. This is the stuff that I care about, and other people will be attracted to that because they share those same things.

And the more emotional content that is wrapped up with the things that you care about, the more people will feel something when they’re hearing you talk, and that will be attractive to them.

And that’s what’s gonna bring them to you.

Here’s one example of this: I was just listening to Louis Grenier, who is a French podcaster.

His podcast is called Everybody Hates Marketers, which I highly recommend. Go listen to Everybody Hates Marketers.

It’s very educational and also very entertaining podcast.

Early in his launch of his podcast, he was aiming at startups and he thought that he was speaking exclusively to people in the startup world who were startup founders, who needed to position themselves in some unique way so that they would stand out in the marketplace.

But what he found, much to his surprise, was that all these people were coming to his show as listeners who had nothing to do with startups.

They were all kinds of people, but what they all had in common was they were all sick and tired of all the marketing BS that’s out there.

And so his message, which really resonated, was that a lot of the marketing that you see is just nonsense. It’s just full of it. And he was saying, “Look, we don’t have to be this way as people who are marketing our business. There’s this other way.”

By planting his flag very firmly in the ground of like, this is how you can stand out. This is how you can do something really different. You don’t have to like stand for all the marketing BS that’s in the world.

That resonated with a whole bunch of people and it didn’t matter whether they were startup founders or not. They were into his point of view, and so they were attracted to his work, and his podcast has become one of the most popular business marketing podcasts that there is.

So there you go. Step one is familiar. Step two is have a strong point of view.

Now step three this is the third and final one is claim your own stage.

A lot of people recommend, when it comes to relationship building, that one of the ways to do this is to reach out to people who are, say, podcasters, or reach out to people who are the organizers of an event and work with them and collaborate with them so that you can speak to their audiences.

So now you’re attracting other people’s audiences, and this is a really good strategy. There’s zero wrong with this, but there’s a couple of things where you know this is can be more difficult than what I’m going to describe:

One is that when you do speak this way, you’re still speaking one to many, and so the audiences that you’re speaking to you may become familiar to them, but you’re not able to necessarily build that deeper relationship with them, because you’re speaking one to many.

And then, of course, you’re also dependent on other people’s stages.

But you can build your own stage and you can start hosting your own event. And this could be anything like a local meetup in the community where you live. In real life, where people actually gather in person. You could do that.

Or you could do, like what I’m doing, where you host a live event like this. This is a live show and I’m doing this every week. So every Thursday I go live and most of these episodes I’m talking with a guest.

So here’s the strategy. Here’s how you build relationships. You can reach out to your top 50 most ideal people who you would like as a client or you would like to work with as a partner and do some kind of collaboration.

You can create a small list of here’s who I would love to work with the most. And now you have something to offer them that is a really easy ask. And it’s also a really easy thing for them to say ‘yes’ to.

You say, “Hey, i love the thing that you did last week on your LinkedIn profile.” That was all about you know, whatever it was they talked about, or “I love the episode that you had where you were a guest on somebody else’s podcast” or whatever it is that you notice that they’ve done.

You flatter them and you say here’s what you said that I thought was really cool. This is why it resonated with me. I would love to have you as a guest at my event.

You invite them on. And most people will say ‘yes’ to this.

This is not very cold outreach. I mean it is cold outreach, but it’s a very warm way to do this, and so people say ‘yes’ and then you can invite them on and then you get a chance to sit down and talk with them. And if you do a really good job, if you give them a really great experience of what it’s like to be a guest at your event and you help them and support them, this is a very supportive role where you are showcasing them and their talent and making them look good and really catering to their expertise.

Great, terrific! You get to spend this quality time with them. You get to spend a time before the show, afterwards and sit there and chat, and part of this is where the relationship building happens.

You’re learning all about them and what they do and what they’re about, and even what their challenges are, and vice versa.

They’re learning about you and, in particular, what you do and what you have to offer.  And to follow up. It’s really easy.

It’s a really easy thing to ask them about ways that you can work together and or collaborate, and the collaboration could be as simple as: “who else do you know who would be a great guest?”

And they’ll open up their Rolodex and say, “oh, i know two or three people and here they are.”

And so what’s happening here is that you’re able to grow your network and really deepen the relationships that you have with your network, and this is probably one of the most powerful things that you can do for your business.

I’ve got clients who I’ve helped establish this kind of series, interview series. What it’s done for them is that it’s built their authority. Now they’re known by some of the top thought leaders in their industry. Many of those people have turned right around and become their clients or they have introduced them to other folks who have become their clients.

And I’ll be completely transparent. This is what I do with my own show, in that I invite people on. I get to know them. I serve them really well. I show them what I do by literally doing it for them.

Every guest gets a Mic Drop Moment, and then bonus, with all this long form content that you create, (in my case, i do this live video, so all I do is I hit record, we go live together and it’s done) but then I can take that same long form footage and I can edit it down into short form content.

So I can show the guests talking for a minute or I can show myself talking for a minute, and so now, just with going live once a week, i have tons of content that I can also put out there which is helping me continue to become the familiar face. So it’s these two things combined.

I’m building deep personal relationships and I’m building trust with the exact right fit crowd that I am personally choosing and inviting into my live event. Then I’m taking that experience that I create and I’m sharing that out there in the world.

Then you build a system of scheduling and distributing all this content, and this is happening week after week after week And it works. It works really well.

I’ve been doing this now for a couple of years and my business is growing and enriching and becoming really healthy and sustainable as a result.

One of the best parts is that I’m no longer worried about reaching a giant audience. If you looked at any of my social media accounts, you’ll see that I have a very modest following on social media.

I’m not spending all my days on social media. I just don’t do it and I don’t need to. And even though I’m not there every day, all time it looks like I’m there and I am showing up and I am becoming familiar.

So this is a really good way for you to build relationships with the exact crowd that you would like to be hanging out with – that you’re familiar to them and now they’re starting to trust you and now they’re starting to support you.

And that will keep your business going.

So that’s it.

I’ll just go over those three steps once again.

Step one is become the familiar face. It’s easier than you think.

Number two in order to get with the right crowd. You have to have a really strong point of view: so you share the things you care about most and the people who care about those same things, they’re the ones who will come knocking on your door.

And then, number three claim your own stage. Don’t wait to be dependent on other people’s stages. You can make your own stage. And in this world right now, it’s probably one of the most pronounced things that you can do if you really wanna stand out and build a truly standout business.

All right, that’s what I have for you today. Thanks so much for joining and we will see you next time.