1848 – The Most Effective Marketing Strategies for Coaches with Jennifer Tamborski

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey, thoughtful listener, before we get going. Did you know that my company up my influence. Com has launched more than 200 business podcasts. The host of our shows are amazing leaders and collaborators. Folks I want to connect you with. Maybe you deserve your moment in the spotlight as a guest of one of these amazing shows. Just go to up my influence. Com where you can see more than 50 shows that are actively seeking business leader guests like you to celebrate right now in front of their high caliber audiences. Just click on the podcast tab and up my influence. Com where you'll see shows like Experience Focused Leaders Podcast. If you're seeking insights on transforming customer experiences, you can't miss the Experience Focused Leaders podcast with your host, Alex Kovalenko. Alex, the CEO and founder of relay two, brings his rich background from Stanford MBA, Wharton BSc and the University of Pennsylvania B.A.. He's a smart dude, along with his real world experiences of building organizations across global hubs to the forefront of this engaging podcast.

Josh (00:01:19) - Now, each episode is a deep dive into the world of customer centric strategies, where Alex and his guests, seasoned business owners and industry veterans, share their invaluable insights. They discuss the latest trends, offer practical advice, and reveal the secrets behind exceptional customer experiences and business growth. Are you a business owner who values customer experience above all? Then this podcast is your go to resource. Better yet, if you've got unique insights and strategies that have helped you stand out in your industry, we'd love to have you as a guest on the show. Share your story with a community that's as passionate about customer experience excellence as you are. Tune in to the Experience Focused Leaders podcast for your weekly dose of inspiration and practical tips. Let's push the boundaries of customer experience together. With us right now. Jennifer Tamborski Jennifer, you are the founder of Virtual Marketing Expert. You are found on the web at Virtual Marketing Expert. Com Jennifer, thank you for joining us.

Jennifer (00:02:29) - Thanks so much for having me. Josh, I'm super excited to chat with you today.

Josh (00:02:33) - Well, I'd listen I'd love to hear it from you. Tell me what you do and what virtual marketing expert is.

Jennifer (00:02:39) - Yeah. So I actually founded virtual marketing expert,, probably about a decade ago. And it was an agency. We were a full service digital marketing agency. And there came a point in my life, in my business where I kind of hit that wall of burnout and had to step back and decide what I really enjoyed about my business. And the thing that I loved most was really helping coaches and consultants and entrepreneurs that are looking to scale, but they're not quite ready to hire an agency. I love coming in at that point and really helping them make huge impacts in how they market their business and how they shift their business so they can create consistency in leads and sales within their business., so I took a pivot in virtual marketing experts and became virtual marketing expert, which just allows me to really focus in on that interaction with that business owner who's struggling to get past that revenue wall.

Jennifer (00:03:45) - They just keep they're doing all of the things that people tell them to do, and they're just not getting where they want to go.

Josh (00:03:55) - Yeah, yeah. Well it can be really frustrating. And there's a lot of voices. You know, people are saying you need to start a group, you need to be doing TikTok dances. You need to be using using AI bots. I mean, there's just a there's an endless buffet of hack decks out there. And and naturally, every guru claims you know, that theirs is the silver bullet that it is. So I have a lot of empathy for, you know, someone new coming into business today. You know, I think the the luxury that those of us have been in business for some length of time is we start to find our bearings and we start to find our lane and we start to find things that work. And hopefully, you know, when we find a winner, you know, we just I'm a big believer of like find your lane and stay in that lane and rock it if it needs iterative improvement, great.

Josh (00:04:48) - , but generally as long as it's performing keep at it like. Yeah, absolutely., but and imagine your, your take on it. Yeah.

Jennifer (00:04:56) - Imagine what your business could have looked like had you had someone come alongside you and started rather than testing and, and throwing spaghetti at the wall, had someone come alongside and go, hey, this is a strategy given your goals and your personality that could work for you. This is what we want to work through and really helped you to make those small pivots. Because oftentimes what I see is business owners picking this guru strategy. They try it for 30 days and don't see that million dollars immediately and they give up. It may have been working, it may have been working, but they didn't give it enough time. They didn't look at the data. They didn't look at what was working. They go based on this feeling of success or failure of it, rather than really looking at it from a strategic from a an analytic point of view and really assessing what's working for them.

Josh (00:05:55) - Yeah, well, Jennifer, million dollar question. What do you see working well today in marketing? And again, I'm just curious. Naturally some things are going to be better based on the audience. Not, you know, the ICP. And who says service provider or a coach or consultant or, you know, is looking to do, but are there some areas that when done well, you seem to be pretty. These are pretty solid, you know, practices for specifically for attracting business, which tends to be a pretty common. Yeah, I'd say so.

Jennifer (00:06:31) - There are a million strategies and it's all really going to depend on the person. What works what always works is focusing on your foundations really getting that strong. So your messaging is tight in and you know, your ideal client better than anybody else, and you're able to speak to them in a way they can hear,, the tactics vary based on the person. If you are a person who is very outgoing and you like to be in front of the camera and you like to do TikTok dances, awesome.

Jennifer (00:07:07) - Let's dial that in and make you stand out. If you're not, that's okay too. There are other ways to get yourself out there, to get yourself in front of your audience and your ideal crowd. It's about really being authentic to who you are and finding that strategy that works for you, you know? Are there tactics that work better than others? It all depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to hit millions of people, paid ads is going to help you a whole lot more than organic traffic. If your goal is to create maybe a smaller agency or a smaller business where you have maybe 5 or 10 clients, there are different ways to go about doing that. Then running paid ads or, you know, the organic social media. It just depends on what your ultimate goal is.

Josh (00:08:03) - Yeah. Are there any practices that you see being taught or sold that you're like? I'm not a big fan of that.

Jennifer (00:08:13) - I hate to discount other people's strategies because obviously they did them and it worked.

Jennifer (00:08:20) - And I will say cold DMing people or cold messaging people is not my favorite tactic. I use yours, it can be effective. And that's where I kind of cut off.

Josh (00:08:36) - Yeah, you and I are aligned on that. And I guess, you know, one way to ask that is just tapping into not necessarily who you are as a customer persona necessarily, but just as a human. You know, I don't like getting spammed. I don't like getting, you know, just like right out of the gate. It's just I don't appreciate it. It's like, you know, the equivalent of going to a party or a mixer and just, you know, some robo sales guy just walking up to you and slapping a business card in your hand and saying, oh, what do I got? You know, but we need to get together so we can talk about how I can. And that's all they talk about. It's like, not interesting to me.

Jennifer (00:09:15) - Exactly. I actually correlate marketing a lot to dating.

Jennifer (00:09:18) - For me, it's like walking into a bar and going up to somebody and going, hey, you want to get married? I mean, how often is that going to work for you? You might hit that one person that's like, yes, but it's not something that's going to be effective on a long term basis. It also tends to be exhausting, quite honestly.

Josh (00:09:39) - Yeah, right. And that was the thing I was going to suggest too. It's like, you know, whatever you do, you better have a stomach for it. For me, I just don't have a stomach for selling at people. I don't mind collaborating with people I love having conversations. I love figuring out. But what I don't like is feeling like I got to talk someone into something. Like, I just don't enjoy that., it's the same thing with lead gen, like, so there's just no way I'm going to do that. Okay, so that's off the table. What else could I do? And so I think a lot of this Jennifer what you're talking about, you know again there's the you know the service that they provide.

Josh (00:10:16) - There's the customer. There's you know again the problem that they're solving. And then there's our unique personalities. And that's that's a very important consideration. And and so just thinking that just because some guru says you have to slam DMs and you're like, I'm not comfortable with that, but I guess it's a necessary evil to grow my business. No, no, there are other ways.

Jennifer (00:10:40) - There are a lot of other ways. And if you just this is a very it's a tactic. So this isn't part I'm not suggesting anyone go do this. This should be if you do it, it needs to be within your strategy. But if you like chatting with people in DMs or if you want people to to to if you want to sell in the DMs rather than going in cold messaging, people set up attraction marketing, use ads with DMs in it so that they can message you, and then you're having a conversation with them rather than going, hey, you want to buy my stuff? Like they come to you, they are attracted to who you are.

Jennifer (00:11:24) - It makes that process. So if if something like sales calls make you feel uncomfortable and you're like, I don't really want to get on phone calls with people, that's another option. It's just a different way of using DMs so that you're not knocking on everybody's door. They're knocking on yours.

Josh (00:11:46) - How are you, Jennifer? I'm sure you're getting questions around. And there's a lot of buzz, and rightfully so, around AI enabled tools like ChatGPT and so forth. How are you currently using those tools?

Jennifer (00:11:59) - I love AI tools. When they first came out, I was like, okay, has nobody ever heard of Terminator? And like that was my first thought process. But if you use them effectively, ChatGPT can be incredibly effective for helping you to write copy. I would never suggest pulling directly from ChatGPT and plopping it on your website, or plopping it in your marketing or your emails or whatever, but it can be incredibly useful in coming up with ideas and getting you started on the email. For me, that's always been my downfall is I'll have an idea, but I'm like, how do I start this email, right? ChatGPT can help you do those kind of things.

Jennifer (00:12:46) - And there are a myriad of other tools. What I will tell you, though, is all of those AI tools are helpers. They don't replace people. They don't replace the human interaction or the human way. You go about thinking, and I will guarantee you they will not give you a marketing strategy or a sales strategy or anything else that's actually going to be effective long term for you.

Josh (00:13:15) - Well,, certainly I can add to the copy. It takes a lot of training to get the copyright, like, don't like. And I would never just copy and paste what's given to me and say, that's good enough. No, because generally it's what you're getting is just an average of, you know, everything that it's learned on. And it's usually pretty soulless. And it just to me, like the standard AI language sounds very trite. It's it's like it's like a robot trying to sound like a human is how it sounds to me. And and you're not fooling anybody if you're just copying and pasting without doing some serious editing.

Josh (00:13:53) - So I can thank you for that. Thank, thank you for your warning. So, Jennifer, talk about a lot of people listening to this podcast because they're researching the topic or researching you. And so here we are now. They're, you know, getting to know you tell me a little bit more about how you structure your program, your engagement, like how do you work with your clients.

Jennifer (00:14:14) - So currently, I work one on one with my clients. I actually really love working in that one on one capacity. I am also developing a group program that will launch in June. Right now, the one on one program, we meet three times a month. So for a call in between, you have homework. You have like it's about you taking actions within your business that are actually going to step you into the right direction of creating that revenue flow and that lead generation flow in your business. Most of my clients, their biggest problem is that they don't know what to do first or next. Like they got to a certain point and they just don't know where to go next.

Jennifer (00:15:01) - And realistically, they're not at a point where they're able or willing to hire an agency to do everything for them. So I kind of meet them in that middle space of helping them to get to the point where they're confident in their marketing, their funnel is working, if that's what they decide to do. Everyone has a funnel. It's just how you set it up. But their funnel is working. They're attracting the right people that are converting into sales, and then they can look at, okay, how do I scale that? How do I get that to the next level? That's really what we work on.

Josh (00:15:38) - Oh great. And all right. So your website, Jennifer, is virtual marketing expert, by the way. You're a podcaster. So to our friend that's listening to this podcast do a quick search. You're going to look for marketing matchmaker. And Jennifer that's your podcast. What's your podcast about.

Jennifer (00:15:57) - Obviously all about marketing. It's about attraction marketing. It's about marketing that feels right to you rather than trying to attack everybody else's strategy, creating a strategy that's authentic to who you are.

Josh (00:16:13) - Yeah. Virtual marketing expert. Com Jennifer, when someone goes to your website, what would you recommend that they click on or do?

Jennifer (00:16:20) - So there's two ways. It depends on where you're at in your business. But either way just hop on a call with me. That's the fastest way to get to know whether or not we're a good fit. There's a ton of content on there between blog posts and podcasts that if you just want to get an idea of who I am and what I do and kind of a feel for me, those are great options. And I would suggest your best bet is to just hop on a call with me.

Josh (00:16:47) - Awesome. Jennifer Tamborski again, your website virtual marketing expert. Com Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us.

Jennifer (00:16:56) - Thanks so much for having me, Josh.

Josh (00:17:03) - Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence comment. Guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free.

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