In today’s episode, I’m going to help you understand what business marketing foundations are.
Not only that, but I’m also going to share with you six signs that your business marketing foundations may be shaky or have massive gaps in them.
It’s going to be a really deep dive episode, and I hope you find it really valuable.
Let’s jump on in!
Your business marketing foundations are the decisions and assets upon which you build and grow your business.
Your business marketing foundations are those important decisions that you make about:
- What you are and are NOT focusing on in your business
- The model that you choose and the model that you do NOT choose
- The core asset base from which your business will grow
If you don’t have that clarity of decisions (you keep it really broad) or you don’t have the strength in the assets, you can tend to find that your business is unstable or growth is destabilising.
Before I dive into some of the signs that your business marketing foundations might be shaky or have some significant gaps, let’s dive into the different elements of those business marketing foundations.
In your business marketing foundations, we have quite a few different areas:
1. Business model
Does your business model inherently suit and fit who you are, what you’re here to do, what your strengths are, and an audience who are hungry for it?
I have my own business model that talks about creating an aligned business – a business in which it is what you are here to do. It’s what you’re here for, it feels aligned to your purpose, strengths and skills, it’s a business that feels easy for you, and it’s a business that people are hungry to buy from. Therefore, it’s a viable business.
Those factors are the core factors that go into your business model.
That business model is a lot of decision making. There’s a lot of decision making around: What is the model of business that you are particularly going to focus on building?
2. Niche
Who are you going to focus on when you are marketing your business?
If you haven’t yet crafted a very specific niche, you’re not confident in that niche, you don’t know how to turn that niche into deeply resonant messaging, then I would suggest you go and watch my free Nail Your Niche training.
You can find it at tashcorbin.com/niche.
3. Value proposition
To what extent do your niche apply value to the transformation that you are offering?
For example, you might think it’s really valuable to help people to go plant-based in their eating because of all the amazing health benefits. But if they think it’s something they could play with, but it’s not particularly important to them right now, then you have a value proposition issue.
We need to make sure that you are speaking to a niche that applies a significant value to the transformation that you are facilitating.
That is another important decision and asset… your value proposition is a deep asset.
4. Offer
Do you have an offer that your audience is hungry for and willing to invest in? Another asset.
That is important in your business marketing foundations.
5. Client attraction process
Do you have a clear, concise and easy marketing process that you know will attract, nurture and convert your niche into clients?
If you do not have a client attraction process that you can clearly articulate and see, and that you’re working on nailing and scaling, then you’re going to find it difficult to grow your business because that foundation is not there.
That’s when you’ll find yourself going into shiny object syndrome when it comes to different ways to market.
You’ll jump from strategy to strategy – running webinars to running 5-day challenges – always believing that the grass is greener on the other side.
If you are that person who is constantly chasing shiny marketing strategies, then chances are your client attraction process is the foundation that needs some work.
6. Brand
Your brand is actually an important asset.
At a foundational level, you need to just simply be clear on: What does your brand stand for?
You don’t necessarily need to have a really sexy brand design or invest thousands of dollars in epic branding. But there are some core brand decisions to be made, and you want to start building those brand assets.
As your business grows, I think it is important to invest in your brand.
7. Intellectual property
Your intellectual property is an asset upon which you can consistently grow your business.
Take a look at: What is the unique model that you are presenting? What is that unique message/change/process that you have developed that is uniquely yours, that you can start to develop as an asset upon which you are generating income?
Intellectual property is an important one.
8. Message
Your message is not a sexy tagline or a one-liner.
It’s an ecosystem of how you speak to your cold, warm and hottest audiences about your work, offers and business.
Your messaging ecosystem is an asset that is foundational to your business.
9. Platform/audience
An audience of people that you can speak to readily.
That is one area where you want to make sure that that asset is consistently growing.
Whether that be your mailing list, your followers on social media, your YouTube subscribers or a combination of different audiences, having a platform that’s consistently growing (and grows on its own!) is important.
Just to recap, the pieces of your business marketing foundations are:
1. Business model
2. Niche
3. Value proposition
4. Offer
5. Client attraction process
6. Brand
7. Intellectual property
8. Message
9. Platform/audience
Those are the nine elements of that business marketing foundations.
Ticking boxes for business marketing foundations in business start-up
For most people, you can tick a few of those boxes, but there are other spaces where you can see that you’ve got some gaps.
The beautiful part of understanding this and having this all mapped out in front of you is that you don’t have to have everything lined up perfectly to create success in your business.
I’m not saying that you have to stop and spend twelve months refining all of these foundations. I think a lot of people get really worried when they can feel that maybe there are some foundations that they need to go back to. They think it automatically means that they’re going to have to go back and start from scratch.
That’s not the case at all.
You can absolutely shore up and fill gaps in your foundations as you go in your business.
Fixing some of these foundations can be really quick!
Niching can be a very quick decision-making process. Articulating your value proposition in a meaningful way can simply be a couple of hours of strategic decision-making, and taking all of the mess of information that you know about your audience and what they want and what you want to do, and actually bringing it into a structured value proposition.
It’s not necessarily something that’s going to take months and months to do for each one. It can be a very fast decision-making process, but it’s important to give them energy and attention.
Now how do you know if you have some foundational issues that need to be addressed?
Here are six signs that you may have gaps in your foundations or those foundations may be a little shaky.
1. You feel like you’re always hustling
You always need to be:
- Switched on
- Working
- Online
- Answering questions
- Thinking of new things
- Creating content
If you feel like your business is not set up in a way where it can maintain its own momentum with spurts of injected energy and attention from you, then chances are it’s a foundational issue.
If you’re always hustling just to keep it going, chances are you have a foundational issue.
2. A consistent need to reinvent
If you’re swapping and changing what you’re promoting or selling or building and you constantly feel this need to reinvent, then chances are there’s a foundational issue going on. And that’s not solid, so you feel like you’re not clear on what you’re building from here.
If you think about the building foundations metaphor, it’s almost like you’ve started building some foundations, and then you’ve decided that you want to live on the other side of the hill. You go and build foundations over there, and then change your mind and go somewhere else.
What you’re doing is you’re partially building foundations in multiple spaces, but nothing is coming together as a solid foundation on which it’s finished and you can start really seeing that momentum and that consistent growth without a need to be consistently hustling.
If you find yourself consistently reinventing, it can be a sign of a foundational issue.
3. You are constantly drawn into fads, shiny objects and new marketing things
When you heard about Clubhouse and the success that people were having on that new social media channel, did you immediately think that it was the exact thing that you needed, so you went and got it and then three weeks later got totally burnt out and decided that you needed Instagram reels instead?
I talked about this example before… If you’re jumping from marketing idea to marketing idea, from strategy to strategy, from platform to platform, from social media to social media, if you are constantly jumping around, and you get sucked into those fads and shiny objects, then chances are, you’ve actually got a foundational issue and you’re trying to fix it with a marketing solution.
That’s not necessarily the answer. It’s not going to solve your problem. You’re going to still have that need to reinvent or hustle, or it just won’t get the traction that you think it’s going to get for you.
4. You’re struggling to overcome an income limit
You can get to $4,000 a month or you can get to $8,000 a month, but once you’re there, that’s it, there’s just no growth from there. It’s generally a sign that there are some shaky foundations there.
It requires you to consistently be working on it, and it just doesn’t grow from there.
If you are struggling to overcome an income limit, then chances are you’ve got a foundational issue.
This can actually happen at multiple levels.
I discovered a foundational issue in my business when I was stuck at $30,000 a month income.
It’s not necessarily just the lower income levels that this is a foundational issue. I had a customer service foundational issue – a business model issue – in my foundations that only revealed itself when I was hitting $30,000 months consistently.
I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t growing further than that.
It was a capacity issue on my part. It was a foundational issue that needed to be addressed. And when I broke it down into how I could address it, and then addressed it, I had a $75,000 month.
It was a foundational issue.
You can build a three-story house on certain types of foundations, but if you want to build a high rise, your foundations have to go way deeper and be way stronger.
That’s why I’m saying that you don’t necessarily need to do all of the foundation’s work at the very start of your business. But if you’ve got some of the signs that you’ve got a foundational issue, take the time to go back, revisit and review, and get those foundational issues sorted.
5. You’re seeing a lack of consistent audience growth
Your list doesn’t seem to be growing or your social media audience isn’t consistently growing. Sure, you get some spurts of growth when you’re launching something or you put in a really big effort to get people in, but it’s not growing on its own. It’s not growing consistently.
The views on your YouTube videos just always cap out at a certain number. You’ve been consistently doing it for a while now, but it’s just not creating its own momentum.
That can be a niching issue, it could be a messaging issue, etc. – there’s a range of different issues that it could be. But if you’re not getting that consistent audience growth, it’s a foundational issue, and it’s something that we want to be addressing.
6. It’s always the same ratio of energy in to result out
What I mean by this, is when you work 20 hours in your business, you make a certain amount of money. When you work 40 hours in your business, you make twice that amount. When you work 10 hours in your business, you make half of the original amount.
It’s energy in equals money out, and that ratio never changes.
If that’s the case, your foundations are shaky, and you haven’t got a strong enough foundation for leverage.
That’s something we want to make sure that we address as well.
I know that this has been a very in-depth episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, but I wanted to go through all of that in detail for you because I think it can be very easy when you’re working with a brand specialist, for them to say that brand is the number one foundation that you need to be working on. You get very blinkered to that being the answer, and you work on it, and it doesn’t really create that momentum you thought it was going to make. Or you work with a messaging specialist, and you weigh all this stuff on your messaging.
But actually, the issue that you have is you didn’t niche specifically enough, or the issue is not JUST your message, it’s how you apply that message in your client attraction process.
These things work together.
I wanted to address this in a more in-depth podcast episode just to show how much these different pieces are interrelated and intertwined.
I also wanted to give you all of the areas so that you can really self assess: Which of these do I feel really strongly about that I’ve got nailed? And which of these errors should I be giving a little bit of attention to and reinforcing as I move forward in my business?
Again, I just want to say that it can be a really quick fix to go back in when you know which of those foundations need some work.
It doesn’t need to derail your current progress in your business. It’s not going all the way back to the start, it’s simply shoring up some foundations, as with the example I gave when I was capping out at $30,000 a month.
I was also capping out at 30 people joining the Take Off program at once. I have since welcomed more than 50 people to the Take Off program in a single launch.
For my next launch, the goal is to welcome 100 people into the Take Off program at once.
I’ve done some foundation reviews to ensure that that can happen and that I’m I’ve got that solid grounding.
It’s not something that’s about doing it once at the start of your business. It’s something that I’m consistently reviewing for myself.
I just want to make sure that if there’s a foundation that’s a bit wobbly, I really reinforce that and make sure that it’s really clear.
As one of those business marketing foundations, your niche is a really critical one.
This is why I have a free hour-long training called Nail Your Niche.
This training actually touches on not just niche, but also how you translate that into value proposition and deeply resonant messaging (your message) as well.
It’s a really powerful one for that kind of area of the foundations of your business.
Make sure you check that out at tashcorbin.com/niche.
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Thank you so much for joining me for this deep dive episode!
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
