Marketing is – as defined by Alex Hormozi – the process of letting know. At least, that is the quote I remember, and how I’m now in the process of building out FLO Coaching. By letting others know about our business and making an offer that “they would feel stupid saying no to”.
In this mini-update, I’m documenting our plan – and the framework behind it – for letting people know about FLO Coaching.
The Four Ways One Person Can Tell Others About Anything
(all image inspiration/frameworks taken from here).
There are two types of audiences: warm and cold.
The warm audience is the people you already have some connection with. This could be your close friends, a person who follows you (or your business) on Instagram (i.e. you don’t need to know them personally), or that long-lost connection you have on Facebook. In other words, anyone you already have some connection with.
The cold audience is people who don’t know you. Not your audience, but the audience of someone/something else. Everyone on Instagram (you can advertise to), email lists, or more broadly, people who haven’t permitted you to contact them.
There are two types of communication: one-to-one and one-to-many.
One-to-one communication is, well, when you reach out directly to one person. This could be a WhatsApp message, email, call, voice mail. Usually, this is really one-to-one, but with email and messages, you could theoretically send out a template to multiple people at once (but it’s still private).
One-to-many communication is reaching out to many people in one go. Examples are billboards, ads, podcasts, and blog posts. This isn’t private, it’s public. Many people can see the message at once. This can reach more people for the same effort but has the extra step of (unless you’re selling products) needing one-to-one communication afterwards.
Another way of defining both is that one-to-one is ‘outbound’ and one-to-many is ‘inbound’.
How We’re Doing the Core Four
Currently, we’re doing ‘warm outreach’ and ‘post free content’ only.
The plan is to do this for the foreseeable future, because (this is something I’ll come back to later) we believe the ROI (return on investment) is higher (and more sustainable) than giving away our money to Meta (Facebook, Instagram) or doing something we don’t have any experience with like buying a list of emails (cold outreach).
Warm Outreach
In the training by Hormozi, there is about 50 minutes more of detail, but here are the basics.
Talk to friends and acquaintances -> ask how they are doing -> let them know about FLO Coaching.
I feel awkward about pitching my friends as much as the next person. And in a way, that is what I’m doing, but there is a twist. The offer that we’re making has two un-awkward-ing features: 1) the coaching for the first four to five clients is free, 2) I’m asking if they know someone who would be interested (so not them directly – though of course they’re welcome to take me up on the offer themselves).
Put differently, I’m talking to my friends (on WhatsApp, phone, in-person, etc.) and letting them know about the new business if they ask about it (and so far, almost everyone who has replied has also asked what I’m up to).
I’m adding all this to a Google Sheet, where I can keep track of who has replied and if there are any next steps I should take (e.g. if someone has said they want to have a call, I note that down, or if they said they would refer a friend that goes into the sheet).
Here is a free template of the Google Sheet you can use.
Letting People Know We Exist
I’m splitting the intersection of ‘1-to-many’ and ‘post free content’ into two sections. This one is about letting many people know we exist at once (see the next for the free content).
Next to sending one-to-one messages, I’ve shared that we’ve started (or technically re-started in a new location) on the social platforms that I’m on (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).
This is the message I’ve shared:
Good news! I've started coaching again, with a specific focus on personal development and growth through psychedelics. No longer in Rotterdam, but in the beautiful village of Anna Paulowna, just an hour's drive from Amsterdam.
We've now welcomed the first client here who is getting great help with the coaching and guided session. I'd like to give more people the chance to experience what coaching with psychedelics can do for them. That's why I'm offering the first 5 sign-ups a free coaching journey!
The goal of my coaching is to work together on creativity, self-development and personal growth. Are you, or do you know someone, who could benefit from such a process? Send me a message!
For everyone reading this message I have one more gift: a free 50-page step-by-step guide to preparing for your first psychedelic trip (see link below).Some components of the message are:
- Sharing what we do: coaching with the help of a psychedelic session
- Sharing some proof of competence (in our case, we already had someone we’d booked earlier when we were in Rotterdam, but this could be anything else, like your specific training or life experience)
- Making the offer – free coaching
- Providing more details on who it’s for (ideally, this could be more specific if you’re working with a certain audience)
- Sharing our lead magnet (I’ll go deeper on this later) as a free gift for everyone
Posting Free Content
Over the last four years, I’ve built up a huge stack of knowledge about psychedelics. I know the research front to back, and have some experience guiding people. I’ve personally taken several in a variety of settings, and have personally experienced the benefits of expanding my horizons.
Lotte has been a therapist for nearly ten years. She coaches people for multiple hours a day, and she’s well trained in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) (among other modalities).
We’re now sharing the knowledge we have here on the blog.
We’re starting with some ‘basic’ knowledge about psychedelics and coaching. The things I want to be able to send people to if they have a question and I want to give them more than two sentences in a conversation. Or the information someone else is googling and that we can genuinely help them with.
We’re posting one blog daily, seven days a week.
(we write the blogs in English or Dutch and then translate them into the other language – I have no idea yet whether our main audience will be Dutch people or people travelling here – so I’m now taking an extra 5-10 minutes to translate the blog).
Yes, this is a lot of work. But it’s also knowledge we already have, which we think should be available. And information we can share uniquely from our perspective.
I have much more to say about content, but this is a peek behind the curtain of our current strategy. Stay tuned for more on the lead magnet (which at the time of this writing should also appear to the right of the blog – or below the blog if you’re on your phone).
Results So Far
In a month or so I’ll do a bigger update, but for context, this has been the response in the last 2-3 days:
- 1 person referring a partner via LinkedIn
- 1 person emailing in response to the LinkedIn post
- 1 interested person from a Facebook post
- Lots of fun conversations with friends (of which 1 is personally interested so far)
