the bossbabe podcast - 86. This One Thing Can Double Your Instagram Sales Overnight

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Whether you’re an entrepreneur looking to boost your business and drive more sales, or a career woman that wants to slay the corporate game, using the power of word-of-mouth marketing can lead to more revenue and career opportunities.   Join us as dive we deep into the three pillars of word-of-mouth marketing: collection, distribution, and monetization. If you’re looking to get the word out for your business or cultivate credibility in the corporate world, we’re sharing our secret sauce and best practices (even if you have zero testimonials!).   Get two free months of Skillshare premium membership and receive access to unlimited to over 1000+ classes: www.skillshare.com/bossbabe

Whether you're in corporate or an entrepreneur, having people who recommend you, it will pay off in so many ways that you can't even expect. Where you're starting to feel a little bit down and not sure if what you're doing is worth it, check out those testimonials and it will give you such a huge boost of motivation. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance and learning how to balance it all. I'm Kaye Snells, head of marketing at Boss Babe and your host for this week's mini episode. These mini episodes are designed with

you in mind. Each episode, a member of Team Boss Babe will dive into one topic, whether that's product, sales, marketing, community, or leadership. So consider this your weekly mini training that's super actionable so you can implement it right away. In today's episode, we interview Ellen Kuhl. Ellen's back on. She's our head of sales at Boss Babe. And as always, we're diving into all things sales, content strategy, user experience, basically anything. So today we'll chat about how to boost word of mouth marketing to drive more sales. As always, screenshot yourself listening to this podcast and share it on your stories along with your biggest takeaway tagging at bosswave.inc at ellen cool and at case nels a boss babe is

unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise keep going and fighting on she is on a mission to be her best self in all areas it's just believing in yourself confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own vision of success. So let's dive in. Welcome back to the podcast, Ellen. Hey, Kay. Thanks for having me. Okay, so today we're going to chat about word of mouth marketing and how it can drive more

sales for you. So in your own words, before we get started, what is word of mouth marketing to you? Word of mouth marketing is when you have such loyal followers, clients, customers, or people who are really supportive of your brand. It could even be family members and friends who then spread the word about how amazing your business, service, or products are to other people. And this has been something that has been crucial over my career, both working for brands and also when I used to be a freelancer. You can only be in so many places at once, but when you have people who love and support your

brand, they end up talking about it to their friends or their colleagues or people in their network. And it becomes this expanded army that you have spreading the word about your brand without you even having to do a single thing. I love that. And I'm really excited to tap into that today and how word of mouth marketing can then really make the know, make the numbers go up in your bank account because ultimately that's what we all want, right? For sure. So let's chat a little bit about word of mouth marketing. What are different ways that you can

do word of mouth marketing for your business? Yeah. So we really want to find the people who are great brand advocates of our brand and then tap into those people and support them and encourage them to share the word even more. So if you are a new business owner, you might have just a few clients or customers who have purchased your product or service and you have some very early testimonials from them, that can be used in different ways on your social media, in your email marketing, on your website to create social proof and also to encourage other people to leave testimonials which you can continue to use in the future. Another thing that I love to recommend for people is to ask for testimonials. That's a really great way to get that amazing content that you can use

and then encourage them to share the word with their friends. So for example, at the bottom of every email or newsletter that we send, we include a little link that says, do you know somebody who would love this email? Share it with a friend, forward it on. And that encourages people to spread the word. It's something that doesn't require any extra effort on you as a brand. Another thing that you can do to encourage people to help you spread the word about your brand is to offer some kind of incentive or promotion, such as a friend discount or some

kind of unique affiliate link that people can get some reward or discount or something in return. A lot of people have loyalty programs for their business. So for example, I have so many different products that I love that have a discount code that you can share that's unique to you. And when you share it, you'll get some cash incentive or discount on a future purchase. And your friends also get some kind of discount or incentive. I know you used to work at Uber. And that is one thing that I think Uber does really well is when people share their code, they get a discount and their friend gets a discount. And it's a really cool way for people to recommend that service or product and have something that they get in return for doing so. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one

platform, Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention, our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place so it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business you know. Get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible. I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students. So if you're listening

and haven't checked out Kajabi yet, now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial. Go to kajabi.com slash Boss Babe to claim your 30-day free trial. That's Kajabi.com slash Boss Babe. I think that's a great tip. And I think that we have a lot of entrepreneurs listening to our podcast, of course. But I also think there's a lot of ambitious women in corporate roles listening to this. And I wanted to do a quick plug for you. So testimonials in the corporate world

are basically LinkedIn recommendations, right? So if you're listening to this and you don't have a business yet and you're trying to either find a new job, you can start collecting testimonials about yourself, about your personal brand. So you can ask your network or people that you have worked with before to write a recommendation for you. So one of the ways to do that is LinkedIn. And that's how I've been able to build my personal testimonials, even when I didn't have a business that people could say, okay, she's legit. Because then if you don't have any testimonials and you're interested in starting a business, at least you have that to point to, right? So to build a little bit of credibility. So I want to then bring it back to the entrepreneurial

side. What are some tips that you have, Ellen, for someone who has zero testimonials right now? Well, first of all, that is such a great tip. And with the LinkedIn testimonials, I did the same thing before I ended my previous corporate career. I made sure that I was both giving a ton of recommendations and also asking for a ton of recommendations from people who I had worked with. So really awesome tip for people to know whether you're in corporate or an entrepreneur, having people who recommend you is it will pay off in so many ways that you can't even expect. But for entrepreneurs and business owners who don't have any testimonials yet, there are a few things you can do to encourage people so you can get those first few testimonials.

So one thing I recommend, if you're just starting out and you have zero testimonials and you've never had a client or customer before, you might want to consider giving away a few products for free or at a really big discount. Or same thing with your service, doing it for free or giving a really great discount. first few people to provide you with great testimonials and great honest feedback, which will help you to refine your processes, your service, or your product. Once you get those first few testimonials, you'll be able to share them in all different places and it will help you create more sales by showing people the proof in the pudding that you have customers or clients who are super satisfied with your product or service. Another thing you can do once you have your business set up and you're getting customers or clients is to have a process in place, preferably an automatic process where you are following up with people who purchased your product or service

and asking them for their review. There are different services that you can sign up for that will help you automate this, but you can also do it very simply through your email provider or by sending a personal email to somebody one-on-one and just saying, hey, what did you love about this? Was there anything that you'd like us to know so that we can continue to improve in the future? That's great. And I think that's a great summary of the first pillar, which is basically collect, right? You want to collect as many testimonials as you can. I think the second pillar is distribute. How would you distribute this content that you've been collecting? So what are your tips for that? Yeah, I would recommend putting these testimonials everywhere that you can.

You can use them on your Instagram stories. You can use them on your product page or sales page. You can use them throughout your website. You can even use them in email marketing. So for example, let's say you have a product-based business and you have a ton of really great reviews coming in on a certain product. When you're creating some kind of campaign or promotion around that product, you can dig up those old reviews and use them to help you

sell more of this product by showing people who have loved it and what they love about it. I do recommend during that collection process to ask very specific pointed questions so that you get really good specific feedback that you know you can use. That's great. Let's double click on some ways to distribute this content, right? So let's talk about Instagram highlights. There are so many people who have a specific Instagram highlight that says client reviews or testimonials or whatever they want to name it. If someone wants to hop off this podcast right now and get started on that, how would you create that highlight? Yeah, I would definitely recommend making an Instagram highlight specific to that product

or service. Or if you have a product line, you could just keep it to one Instagram highlight specific to that product or service. Or if you have a product line, you could just keep it to one Instagram highlight. The really cool way to use this is to share those testimonials on your Instagram stories, save them to your highlights so that people can see them at any point, and then name that highlight something very specific. For example, it might say work with us or see our products or client reviews or why people love us or something like that that makes people want to click. You do have a very limited amount of characters that you can use in the text part of the Instagram highlight name. But if you take a look at our Instagram account, you'll see that in the cover image for a highlight, it's a little circle and you can choose to do an image or

something else. So we have decided to use that space as really valuable real estate to put something that's a little bit more text heavy that wouldn't fit in that title part below. So definitely go to the bossbabe.inc Instagram to check that out. I love that plug. That's really, really great. All right. And so let's bring it full circle then. So you collect, you distribute, you make money, then you collect more testimonials, you distribute those again, and you make more money. Is that pretty much how it works? Exactly. Always remember to take screenshots of the testimonials that you have, and then organize them into folders so that you can use them in the future. You do want to save them to places like the Instagram story highlights, but you also want to make sure that you have some kind of backup file so that you can pull these out. And as you grow your company and you

hire more people, they can also choose testimonials that are relevant to the campaigns that they're creating. And another really cool thing about collecting testimonials is if you're ever at a point in your career or business where you're starting to feel a little bit down and not sure if what you're doing is worth it, check out those testimonials and it will give you such a huge boost of motivation. That is so, so key. I feel like everyone listening to this was like, yes, I have so many folders like that, not just with testimonials of the things we did, but just like when someone said something really nice or sent me an email in which they celebrated me. I take screenshots of all of that and I have a big folder on my phone that's called feel good. And I just go in there.

So I love that tip. I love that tip. I love that. Also, for people who are in the corporate world and are advancing their career, it's really great to save emails, as Kay said, from people who have given you praise. Save those to a folder. You can bring them out when it comes time for a performance review or whenever you need that extra boost to remind you that you're totally slaying it. So, so key. I love that. Thank you so much for all the advice today.

And we always love having you on to the podcast. So if you also enjoyed this, feel free to tag us. It's just our full names at Ellen Kuhl and at Kay Snells. Thank you so much, Ellen. Yeah. And don't be afraid to slide into our DMs. Kay and I love to chat. Love that. If you loved this episode, please subscribe,

download a few more, and please leave us a review. I really want to hear what you enjoyed, what your main takeaways were. And I also want to know what you want to hear us talk about next. To say thanks for leaving us a review, we'll send you a copy of The Boss Babe 25. The Boss Babe 25 is the 25 essential resources you need for personal and professional growth. It covers everything from our favorite rituals, books, and hacks.

If you want a copy, just leave us a review, screenshot it, and send to podcastatbossbabe.com. We will then email you a copy ASAP. And since we love Instagram, you can go to the hashtag The Boss Babe Podcast and find our latest post and leave a question in the comments we love reading through the comments and we'll make sure to answer it on our next podcast