Episode 236: Test That Marketing Tactic to Accelerate Your Business With Nikki Nash
If you are running an online business today you know how painful it can be to try out a new marketing tactic and have it bomb. Maybe you tried to launch a webinar, or that email campaign just didn’t work. What if it didn’t actual fail? There’s a good chance you’re receiving extraordinary data that could turn your business around.
Today’s guest is Nikki Nash, who approaches the testing of marketing with her M.A.A.D Scientist Framework. She’s going to help you alleviate the pressure to be amazing at marketing or get instant results – but she’ll still help you get there!
Prior to entrepreneurship, she spent a decade helping Fortune 100 companies and tech startups build powerful brands and attract dream clients and customers. She is the best-selling Hay House author of the book Market Your Genius and host of the podcast with the same name.
Journey to marketing
Nikki has always been the person that followed their gut with what decision to make – and her journey to marketing started when she got really frustrated with where her career was going. She started out as a journalist, working in magazines and ended up in advertising.
Our brains are constantly scanning for information to keep us safe and information to keep us like moving ahead, because that's how we stay alive as human beings. Christine notes that Taylor Swift is not only great at meeting her listeners with her stories, but also, she has controlled her own narrative in a way that is pretty much unprecedented for a female artist.
At the same time, her aunt was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Nikki’s grandmother had died of it, and her mother had tested positive for the BRCA 2 gene. Nikki remembers being in her car driving to the geneticist when the story broke about Angelina Jolie getting preventative surgery.
“I may never meet Angelina Jolie in my life, but she had such a profound impact on me because I realized that, like, I wasn't alone,” says Nikki. “It really showed me that within all of us, our stories, our experiences, our knowledge, like they can have a profound difference in somebody else's life.”
Nikki and her sister tested negative for the gene. She decided to quit her job. She knew she didn’t want to work in a cubicle, and says she wanted to do something that would contribute and pour into other people.
She decided to take her holistic view of what it took to build a brand and acquire clients to become a consultant. She decided to work for a startup.
“What I learned at startups is nobody knows what the heck they're doing, and they're really just testing and figuring stuff out, she says. “Like there's some educated guesses. There's guidance for sure, but there's no predetermined, mapped out, guaranteed pathway to success. Period. Like that does not exist for any business. Because at the end of the day, even if you follow exactly what somebody else did, you're in a different you're a different person, you're different team. You have different resources. It's a different time period.”
Five essentials to accelerate your business
Nikki says most people overcomplicate their business and that ends up slowing it down. She says when she started, she didn’t have a website – she had a Google Doc with some information, but she still had money and clients coming in. Here are her five essential pieces:
1. Power of singularity: You have one offer that you focus on. You don’t need a million offers or adjust to someone who has turned down your offer (e.g. if the price point was too high for one person, that doesn’t mean create a new offer at a lower price point).
2. Identify one buyer: In marketing, this is sometimes referred to as a client avatar. Get clear on the person you are selling to. It's often a version of you in the past or a friend that you know, who could so use your help.
3. Customer journey or marketing game plan: This takes someone from “I've never heard of you before” to “now I know that you exist and I have everything I need to know, understand, believe to say yes or no” to your offer.
4. Sales process: What is your process to help someone decide if they're working with you or not? This includes your process to receive payment have that mapped out and easy to do so that you can grow your business.
5. Test and validate the plan: Create a plan and test and validate it over and over and over again so that you're making decision driven or decision data driven decisions.
M.A.A.D Scientist Framework as marketing strategy
Nikki developed the M.A.A.D Scientist Framework when she was teaching marketing as a side hustle. She was trying to explain to people how to collect data from their marketing.
What tends to happen is people will jump from marketing tactic to tactic.
“People get so hung up on minute tactics that they don't actually sit back and think, my ideal buyer. I'm trying to get them to buy this specific offering. What is the best way to find them, connect with them, build a relationship with them, and invite them to buy from me?” says Nikki.
Attention spans have also shrunk significantly and people aren’t as kind to themselves or as patient with their businesses. Nikki urges people to come up with a hypothesis that will help them reach their one buyer, activate that plan, and then adjust the plan based on the results.
For example, if you commit to webinars as a tactic, that doesn’t mean you shift to podcasting – you would adjust and tweak the webinar. Maybe that means finding a new way to drive traffic on advertising the webinar. Maybe it means adjusting the titles of the webinar, or how you invite people to them.
The point is to do it again. This is the basis of test marketing. Experiment in cycles with your hypothesis of how you’re going to reach your buyers and pitch to them. She says setting up the experiment cycle can take the pressure off. For example, if you know you will launch a program eight times in a year, you have more room to reach your target and do the tweaks to help you reach your sales goal.
“There's often this belief … where people think, ‘oh, when I get to this level, everything will be different. Things will be better.’” Says Nikki. “What I think a lot of folks don't realize is the bigger your business gets, the more money it takes to actually grow, run and operate that business.”
As the business grows there are more things to manage and take care of. Nikki says what’s not spoken about enough is how much the business owner actually takes from their business. For Nikki, the larger her business got, the smaller the percentage she took home.
The best part of running a business is you get to choose. You can do an incremental increase in your income if you feel like you're going to have a bigger impact. You can say no. You can choose to travel or be location independent. You can choose to have flexibility for your family or yourself. You choose what to do with the money.
Free gift for listeners
Connect with Nikki on Instagram for a free blueprint to help grow your business.
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