Bree Pair: Hello friends. Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here with you guys and to be talking to you about marketing strategy and to everybody watching, thanks for choosing to be here and for choosing to watch and for taking the time out to learn to better your business. Um, oftentimes we can get so caught up in our to-do lists and things that we just need to check off our plate, that we forget that we actually need to pause and learn some things and better ourselves and educate ourselves. So that way we can make our business even better. So thanks for taking the time to be here and for choosing to watch, um, this presentation, I am really excited. So we're going to just dive right in. So I am going to share my screen with you guys and make this nice and big so everybody can see it.

Bree Pair: Oh, let me go back. We're talking today about, are your marketing strategies working for you? So if you're over on Instagram, I would love for you to tag me with a picture of you watching the session so I can repost you and also start a conversation with you and hang out over there. So what we're going to cover today is the strategies that aren't working in your marketing plan and why we're going to cover the marketing secrets, secrets that so many are missing in their strategy and how to create a marketing plan that ensures success. Now you're in the right place. If your marketing strategies aren't working as well as you want them to, or maybe you don't have a marketing strategy and don't know where to begin in making one, you're totally fine. You're in the right place. And you're also in the right place if your marketing strategies used to work, but now they're a little bit outdated and you aren't quite sure how to update them.

Bree Pair: Hello. Like I said, my name is Bree. I am so excited to be here. And so excited to meet you guys and talk about marketing strategies. I want to tell you a little bit really quick about who I am, and then we're going to dive in to all the goodness in this presentation. So any Hamilton fans here, who's this kid what's she going to do? Well, I am the founder and CEO of Thrive. Um, you can find us over on Instagram at Thrive Together blog. So Thrive is a conference community and we are educator for bloggers and influencers. I love my job. I love what I get to do. And it's so much fun. We also have a podcast. So I'm a podcast host at the Thrive Blogger podcast where you'll learn marketing strategies as well as things geared yes, more towards bloggers and social media.

Bree Pair: But I think so much of what we teach over there encompasses any type of marketing strategy. Go head out. If you're looking for a podcast to listen to, I'd love to see you over there. Um, I'm also a marketing strategist for a couple of clients and I am an advocate for self-care and mental health. It is so important to me, especially for us as I mean for everyone, but I love to speak to entrepreneurs and small business owners because oftentimes we can face burnout so quickly in our business with it just all being on our shoulders. And it's so important that we prioritize mental health just as much as we would drinking water every day or going for a walk or moving our body and getting out of our chair and behind from behind our laptops. Right. So that is, um, a little bit about me.

Bree Pair: And so what we're going to dive in and talk about, I am all about getting to the point and giving you guys, um, great information that you can apply. So that is why I am just diving in. Um, so we're going to talk about what marketing strategies are holding you back. Now. I do have, um, this audit here for you guys, let me make sure my video is completely out of the way. So if you want to head over to breepair.com/audit, this is a free marketing strategy audit that I made specifically for you guys. So you can find out what is working in your marketing strategy and where the holes are and where you're just falling a little bit short. So freebie over there for you guys, go and download it. Um, fill it out after this session, after you've kind of learned some of the things that you need to change and adapt in your marketing strategy to make it the best that it can be.

Bree Pair: All right, let's go dive in. So I'm going to cover a couple of little, oops. Maybe we shouldn't do this first. I've got three of them for you guys and oops, number one is prioritizing Instagram. So what I mean here is spending a lot of time on Instagram by maybe overposting or over scrolling and wondering where did my time go? Um, maybe making the mistake of focusing so much here, that it is our number one priority. And as a result, perhaps we've undervalued our email list a little bit and you know what? Maybe even our engagement has plummeted. Maybe we're spending time there, but we're just burnt out and tired. And so we're not actually being constructive and strategic with the time that we're spending there. The other thing that happens with Instagram, with focusing so much there is we don't have control over so many different aspects of it.

Bree Pair: Like the algorithm, like new advertising roles or heaven forbid you get hacked, right? There's some control we have over these things, but not a whole whole lot. So what we want to do instead of prioritizing Instagram, so, so much is we want to focus our strategy across multiple different things. So you can see I've got number here. Um, number B, number B, letter B as social media here. And so we do want Instagram to play a part if that is where your audience is hanging out. But we also want to make sure that we are putting strategy into content, into SEO research, business growth, email marketing. We don't want to just put all of our eggs in one basket, which is what I see so many people do when it comes to marketing strategy. And I talked to them like, Hey, what are you doing for marketing?

Bree Pair: How is it working for you? And they immediately bring up Instagram and Oh, well, I'm not really getting the engagement that I want over there. And dah, dah, dah, dah, and there's multiple reasons for it. And one of the problems is just spending so much time over on it that we get burnt out and we're not producing great content, or maybe we're not even connecting with our audience. Maybe we're connecting with other entrepreneurs and small business owners who aren't even our target audience. Those all sound familiar. Maybe a little bit. Right? Okay. Oops. Number two. Lack of consistency. So like I said, I'm going to cover three things that we shouldn't probably be doing in our marketing strategy, lack of consistency, Hello burnout. Like I said, I'm an advocate for self care and mental health because I have experienced burnout more times than I thought possible.

Bree Pair: It happens over and over and over again. Right. If we're not careful, so what can happen and what can cause a lack of consistency is us posting a ton burning out ghosting because we're burnt out and we just want to hide. And then we repeat this nasty cycle. And so because of this, our audience touchpoints are inconsistent. Is this sound familiar to anybody? Just like, Oh yeah, I do like go in waves where I post a lot and it's great. And then I'm tired. And I ghost and our audience as a result, suffers from it. And because of that, we're not getting the results that we should, um, because you should be getting great results. So here's what we want to do instead to make sure that we are creating consistency with our marketing. We want to first look at everything in general, let's analyze our goals.

Bree Pair: And then from those goals, we're going to create a three month plan. And then after we've got our plan, we are going to batch. I am obsessed with batching. This is something that I teach to our mentorship program to anybody that follows me with Thrive or just on my Instagram or anything. I talk about batching all the time because I'm obsessed with it because it is going to save you so much time. So we start from a high level, analyzing our goals, creating our plan, which is what we're going to talk about today and what we're going to dive really deep into. And then once we've got that plan, we're going to batch. So that means you sit down and you do multiple of one specific thing at a time. So instead of if, so, let's say you want to put out an email newsletter to your list every single week, which is fantastic.

Bree Pair: And I highly recommend you getting to that point. Um, instead of week by week sitting down and writing an email newsletter. What I want you to do is sit down and brainstorm what you're going to do in each of those newsletters for the next four weeks. What are you going to talk about? What are you going to promote? What links do you need to include and craft a little bit of an outline for each of those. Okay, you're going to do that in one sitting, maybe you do your brainstorming in one sitting and then maybe you come back later and do your outlines for all four in the same time, set a timer and go, and then you're going to come back and you're going to write all four of those. And I'm telling you, it's going to go so much faster because you already have the outline for all four.

Bree Pair: You already know exactly what's going to go in it. And so when you batch things that you're doing like this into chunks of time, that are focused instead of you, um, sitting down and doing one every single week, you're going to be able to cut your time in half, if not more, because you're super focused on one exact thing. That's what batching is. Now. I will tell you, I will apply batching to everything in my business. Um, batch, editing, batch, writing content. If you're like feeling it in the flow, that's the best time to just crank everything out. Right. And so, right. Like we all like have those moments where we're like, yes, we're excited. We want to like, just go, go, go. And I could write content for hours, stay in it when you're in those zones. And by spending time where you're, hyper-focused like this, it's going to allow you to create more of that space.

Bree Pair: So then you can have downtime where you can re-energize and be inspired to create and to batch your content. Okay. Oops. Number three is focusing on the email list. Number specifically, the number we put really, we put too much emphasis on the number and we forget to convert our current subscribers as a result. I am all for. And I encourage, and I, I encourage our mentor, our everybody in our mentorship program to make it a goal of theirs, to hit a certain number of subscribers. That's great because I think we should be expanding, but the problem can come down to when we forget to convert our current subscribers, because at the end of the day, if you have people on your email list and they are not purchasing or raving fans that are your ambassadors and that are spreading the word for you, why does that number matter?

Bree Pair: I would rather have an email list of 500 people that are going to buy every single time. I push something for sale, rather than having an email list of 20,000, where 10 people buy, you know what I'm saying? So we forget, you know, we work hard to get them onto our list and to get that number up, but then we forget to nurture them. And as a result, our list feels neglected and bored. Um, or maybe they don't even click and open because they're not used to seeing you in their inbox and it's not even showing up and we're leaving money on the table. So this is what we want to do. We want to nurture our email list. We want to love on them by doing, you know, a welcome sequence and letting them know about you by sending out consistent information by consistently following up and checking with them.

Bree Pair: Um, and we want to turn them into customers and then them for, for them to become raving fans. And that is what we want to do with our email lists, rather than focusing so much of the number we need to make sure we're nurturing our email list. So that was cool. Cool. This chick called me out now what she going to do? So those are three mistakes that I just wanted to cover real quick. And just talk about to make sure that you've got it on your radar. If you're doing any of those, no judgment, we've all been there. I'm, you know, constantly having to make sure I'm not doing those things and reworking strategies to make sure that we're improving. Um, but it is important for us to look at things that we could be doing a lot better. Right? That's why that marketing audit that I talked about, that you guys can go and download is going to help so much with figuring out here's some of the holes and here's what I need to do to fix it.

Bree Pair: So to have success with marketing, there's one thing that we have to do. First message mining you guys. I did this incorrectly for years. And when I finally had that light bulb, like moment of what was missing with my marketing and I started to plug in this strategy. This is the secret. When I started to plug in this strategy, everything changed for my marketing and finally all that work and that hard work of me putting time and effort into my marketing strategy started to click. Let me show you exactly what I mean. Here's the question for you. Do you want to write what you want to write or do you want to grow your business? Raise your hand. If you want to grow your business, we should all be raising our hands, right? Here's that secret? That so many miss, including myself, you aren't creating for yourself, your creating for your audience.

Bree Pair: I'm going to say it again. You aren't creating for yourself. You're creating for your audience. There are three steps that I want you to do in this message. Mining. Number one is your, I want you to write for your audience. I want you to find their pain points and I want you to solve them because when we write for our audience and we speak directly to them and directly to their pain points and use their language, I'm going to show you exactly how to do this. When we use their language, everything changes. That was what it was for me. I knew my audience inside and out. I speak to bloggers and influencers. And I know I've been in this industry for over 10 years. I know what bloggers need. I know what they don't need. Um, I know where they're struggling. What I was missing was using their exact language.

Bree Pair: And instead I was using language. That is sounds, sounds beautiful and sounds great. And is marketed and is, you know, like things that we would use as entrepreneurs and business owners, um, to make things sound great. You know what I mean? Like we're like, Oh yes, you could say it this way, but instead it's a little bit more technical and um, a little bit more, you know, wordy perhaps when really we need to just speak to the bare bones of how our audience speaks. And I'm gonna show you exactly how to do that. So here are some questions to get you started. Here's what I want you to do. You're going to write down these questions and I want you to, this is a challenge, and I know some of you are going to hear this and you're going to be like, Hmm, no, I'm telling you though, this is what was missing in my business.

Bree Pair: And this is what took me to the next level. This is what the baseline of our marketing strategy and our marketing systems are missing. The title, this presentation is, are your marketing systems working for you? If your marketing systems, like I said, asked you if you were in the right place, if you said yes to any of those things, this could be something that you are missing. So here's what I want you to do. I am challenging you to talk to three to five people that are in your target audience. It could be somebody that follows you on Instagram that follows your business. Maybe you're just getting started. And it's some that would be your target audience. What I want you to do. Here's what you're not going to like. But I want you to do is I want you to get on a zoom call with them for 15 minutes.

Bree Pair: And I want you to ask them these four questions. I want you to record your session with them, and then you're going to transcribe it. I've got, um, a very, very unexpected, unexpected, and expensive transcriber that you guys can use. Um, in that marketing audit download. When you do this, you're going to find out the language that they use to describe their pain points. So these are the questions that you should be asking them and their questions to get you started. And you can definitely add to and expand on these. What would change in your scenario if you achieved transformation? So let's give an example. So I'm going to relay it as if I am talking to a blogger. Okay. And so I'm going to ask them what would change in your blogging business or in your life, if you were able to become a full-time blogger, what would that look like for you?

Bree Pair: What stresses you out about blogging? If you could choose one thing about your blog and control it 100%, what would it be? And how does your blog make you feel right now? Here's another example. What would change in your day to day? If your child slept through the night, you see how we can relay it to anything that we're talking about. Um, what would change in your life? I like to use life there, but I mean, use it, how you think is going to be best for your audience. What would change if you were able to achieve that transformation? What does that transformation, what is that end result that they are wanting maybe it's to eat healthier or to lose weight, to be able to run a certain amount of mileage, maybe it's if they were able to knit or crochet, if you have like a crafting business, whatever that transformation may be.

Bree Pair: If they were able to take pictures of their kids, that they want that look beautiful and make them happy that they can share with their family and friends, what is that transformation that they are deeply desiring. And that's what you want to find out all of this information and why we record the session is because we want to use their exact language. So that way we can use that. That's the message, mining. The message is what they're saying, that we can then use in our marketing mistakes happen. When you start to answer these questions for yourself, rather than your audience, because you may be like, you know, I could just, I kind of know what they're going to say. And when I first was given this, um, to do myself, I was like, Oh, well, I already know in my head what they're going to say.

Bree Pair: And I was kind of putting up a roadblock or an excuse for myself, not to do it, but when I did it and I did this, you guys, I got hooked. I did it with like eight people. I became obsessed with doing this. And it's something I want to go and like do even more and continue doing, because I became obsessed with finding out what those pain points for were for them. And what would their dream life look like? If transformation happened, it's going to become addicting. Like once you get through like doing a couple and you get into a rhythm and start to see charge to transcribe and see, Oh my gosh, this is what I am learning. I'm telling you so much is going to change. So don't make the mistake of answering the questions for yourself. Ask your audience. Um, this download is there for you guys and in here as well.

Bree Pair: I have a link to a very inexpensive, inexpensive transcribing tool that you guys can use. So breepair.com/audit to download this. So let's talk about creating your strategy, a marketing system that works for you, right? That is why we're here. That's what we want. We want a strategy that actually works and that we don't just plug in and, um, dollar signs don't come through, right? That's that's gonna waste our time. And we are not about wasting our precious time. We want things to work. So here's, before I dive into the nitty gritty, how to the tool doesn't matter what you use. So you can use Trello, Asana, Google, Monday, Click Up, whatever it is, what matters is that your consistent with what you're using? So I always recommend try it for at least a few months, be consistent with it. If it doesn't work, then, then switch what tool you're using, but be consistent.

Bree Pair: So let's create your own custom marketing strategy. Are you guys ready? I hope you've got your notepad. I hope you've already been taking notes and are really excited. So take even more notes because we're going to dive into how to make it custom for yourself. Okay. So we're going to break it down piece by piece by piece. You're going to see some slides where I'm like, we're going to break it down more. We're going to break it down more. Stay with me. That is where it gets excited, exciting, and also where it makes it so easy because oftentimes creating a marketing strategy can sound extremely overwhelming. And maybe I should've said that at the beginning, I'm going to reduce the overwhelm that you might be feeling about your marketing plan right now. So what we're going to do is we're going to take that strategy.

Bree Pair: So you guys saw this earlier and we're going to focus on strategy to get our content or message out there. So what we're going to do is instead, we're going to put here your message now, in order to get your message out there, there are so many different methods, right? What is important is where can you find your audience? How much time do you have available to work on this stuff? And so then what is realistic for you to work on? So you may use social media, email marketing, public relations, speaking, gigs, collaborations. You need to decide what works for you based on the time that you have available. And that could change quarter to quarter. So what may work for you right now in these first three months may not work for you in the next quarter. Um, so you need to pick what works for you.

Bree Pair: So we're going to focus on social media, email marketing and collaborations. Let's say that those are the three that you've chosen to focus on this quarter and how you want to get your message out there. Okay? You can pick whichever ones you want. This is the example that I'm going to give you guys, okay? And this is how we make it custom for you. Cause you can take from this list. And anything else that you can think of for marketing pick the ones that you want to use, figure out how much time you've got available and strategically pick what you want to use. That way you can be consistent and be effective with your strategy. So we're going to choose that we have the time available and the capacity to work on social media, email marketing and collaborations now. So like I said, let's break it down.

Bree Pair: Marketing strategies that we said, we're prioritizing social media collaborations and email marketing. So breaking it down further. What does that look like for social media? That looks like us focusing on Instagram, on our Facebook group and on Tik TOK for collaborations. That means we're focusing on Instagram lives, clubhouse rooms and partner campaigns. And for email marketing, we're going to focus on funnels and newsletters. We go on to break it down again. All right. Let's talk about the quarterly plan specifically for social media. So we have those three things, but what we're going to do is now we're going to break all of them down even further. So we're going to take, let me go back. We're going to take each of these blocks here. I'm pointing like you guys can see me pointing.

Speaker 2: We're going to take each of these blocks

Bree Pair: And we're going to bring them down further social media, collaborations, and email marketing. For this example, we're going to focus on social media. So your quarterly plan for social media, which is your next three months. So if, if you have not started planning quarterly, I highly recommended. I started doing this a few years back and it changed so much and helped me just figure out my plan so much better instead of being overwhelmed and being like, I've got to do everything this month. I'm like, okay, hold on. Um, let's break the year down into three month increments. So quarters and plan for a quarter. So your quarterly plan for social media could be prioritizing engagement and on Instagram doing a challenge each month in the Facebook group, and then cross posting Instagram reels over to Tik Tok. So maybe for our quarterly plan quarterly plan for social media, these are the things that we're going to work on.

Bree Pair: Break it down again. All right, then. So breaking it down further. What does the next month look like? What is our monthly plan for social media? So breaking that down, how many, what's the number of feed story reel and Instagram TV posts are we going to do per week? What is our Instagram engagement strategy for this month? What are we going to focus on with the DM's, with comments, et cetera. Um, and then for this month, we're going to do a three-day challenge in the Facebook group. That's going to be a focus of ours and how many this month, um, how many per week Tik TOK videos do we want to upload? So we broke it down from here's our overall goals to here's our quarterly goals to here's our monthly goal. Here's our monthly plan. Break it down one last time, setting your schedule for the week.

Bree Pair: So you had your monthly plan of, this is what we're going to focus on, right? Let me go back. This is our monthly plan. So we figured out how many posts per week we're going to do. We figured out what our Instagram strategy is going to be. We figured out the challenge that we're going to do in the Facebook group. And we figured out our Tik Tok video upload. Now, what does that look like? That's the month? What does that look like? On a weekly basis? We have four weeks. How were we going to implement all of these things? So we're going to set our schedule and maybe we decided that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we are going to, um, go live in our Facebook group for this challenge. Or maybe on, um, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we're going to post a reel, whatever it may be.

Bree Pair: You break that down your monthly plan into weeks. So then you know exactly what you have to do then you know how to batch your work and what exactly you're batching. You're going to take this and you're just going to repeat. And it's always, always, always going back to your message, right? We're doing this because we took your message that you've already solidified. You've got your message mining, which is that foundation. So you know exactly what words to use and you've made it so easy for yourself now to break it down by quarter by month and now by week to know exactly what you need to do. So you just did that for your social media. You're going to do this for every single aspect of marketing that you've chosen to focus on for the next quarter or month or, or, or not month, quarter quarters or year, however long you want to do it. Um, based on the time you've got available, right? So you did it for social media. You're going to then go and do it for email marketing, and you're going to do it for collaborations. This is what's going to happen. You're then going to add all of this to your planner of choice. So this is an example in Trello of plugging it all into every single month, the social media, email marketing collaborations, what exactly you're going to do when here's what it looks like. You guys are you ready?

Speaker 3: Drum roll, please.

Bree Pair: This is magic because then when you view things by calendar, and so again, whatever planning tool you want to use use it, but then you're able to see things and maybe you just plug it in directly into a calendar you're able to see, Oh my gosh, I know exactly what's happening. I know that every Tuesday on social media, I'm going to post an Instagram reel. Or I know that every Wednesday an email marketing newsletter is going to go out. I know when a flash sale is going to happen. I know when I'm going to go in clubhouse and do a collaboration with friends, I know when I'm going to go live all of these things, this is why it's so magical to plan by quarter and then month and then week and plan it all out and schedule it. So you can see, because then I look at this and I just see relief.

Bree Pair: I feel so relieved when I can see our marketing plan just planned out. And all I've got to do is now we implement our strategy and we reach our goals. You did it literally that's it, it didn't take long. I'm checking. I keep checking my watch to make sure 30 minutes. And I was able to show you guys some mistakes. We were making how to do the message mining. So that way, you know exactly what to say to your audience. So that way all the work you're doing to put into your content, into your marketing strategy, actually performs actually works, actually gets you more sales, more dollars in your bank account, and then how to create that marketing strategy. What to focus on choosing what to focus on based on the time you have available and then breaking it down by quarter, month week, and doing that for every piece of marketing, every tool that you want to use to create that beautiful calendar.

Bree Pair: I am so excited for you guys. I hope you had some aha moments. I obviously am very passionate about this and get very excited about it because it has changed the game for myself, for my clients, for all of the bloggers that are in my mentorship program. It is game changing. So don't forget, breepair.com/audit to get your marketing strategy. Audit includes that page to help you with the message mining tag me on Instagram with your biggest takeaway. Let me know if you had an aha moment or even a question about this and want to dive in a little bit further. I love sending voice messages back and forth, and I want to send one of you guys a Starbucks gift card as a thank you for hanging out and for taking the time to watch this session to better your marketing strategy. I cannot wait to see you explode. That's why I want you to tag me so I can follow along and see how you implementing this helps your business. All right, you guys are amazing. I'm so grateful to be here with you. Um,

Bree Pair: Thanks for watching.