Guest Blog by Agatha Brewer | Business Coach + Marketing Mentor

Every budding entrepreneur knows you need to have a strong marketing foundation to attract clients.

But only some realize there’s more to it than just posting on social media a few times a week talking about your offer.

You need to build a real strategy if you’re going to attract new people to your audience and use your marketing to convert them into paying customers.

Attraction is the easy part. Just look at influencers who have amassed thousands of followers because they like to take sexy photos of themselves or make funny dog videos. 

The hard part is getting people to take the next step and buying something from you. There are tons of influencers out there who have a substantial following but nothing to show for it.

In this article, I will share how you can close the gap and attract people to you while making the sale, too. 

Let me start by addressing the elephant in the room: Why would you not want to use social media to build your business and find clients?

Because it takes a ton of effort to churn out content daily.

Because you have to be “on” all the time, sharing content from your daily life and looking camera-ready 24/7. I know I don’t want to have to do that!

Because it lacks depth. There, I said it. Depth is important when you want someone to make a big purchase decision (i.e., work with you). 

Because you don’t really own your audience on any social platforms, if they decide to make a sudden change one day, you can’t just download your list and contact your quote-unquote audience.

Finally, it’s hard to keep up with the constant changes in the platform and algorithm, and unless you’re a full-time content creator, you have better things to do with your time.

Now that that’s out of the way, there is one very positive thing about social media—you can easily promote your existing content to a broad audience who may not be looking for you on other channels.

That’s why I still have an Instagram profile and occasionally use it to promote my business. But it’s not one of my main marketing channels, and that’s intentional.

My main channels are my writing (guest blogging and on my own site), my podcast, and email marketing. These allow me to attract people to my business, nurture them over time, and then turn them into clients.

I’m going to walk you through how I built a nurture strategy that has allowed me to sign clients while working only part-time on my business, while on vacation, and even while asleep! (I’m not kidding!) This strategy has helped me keep my sanity while working full-time, building a business on the side, and tending to my hobbies like taking care of an organic garden and baking.

But before I get into it, you have to understand the basic premise of a funnel. This framework, called the AIDA model, was created over one hundred years ago by E. St. Elmo Lewis, an American advertising pioneer. It’s the foundation of B2B marketing, and every smart corporation uses it to nurture its cold audience into clients, since it’s been proven to work time and time again.

While I’m not claiming to have invented this process, I know a thing or two about implementing it. (I have eighteen years of experience in the corporate marketing world building complex nurture strategies for tech companies, and I coach new business owners on the side around their marketing.)

Attract a cold audience

First off, you have to get people’s attention on you and your business. In the marketing world, we call these “eyeballs.” The more eyeballs you have, the more likely you are to make sales, because you have more shots at goal. The attract stage is your primary marketing channel or how you get your message out to the world.

The critical thing to remember here is that everyone has a different marketing superpower – the marketing style most aligned with our personality and strengths. One person may be a great communicator of ideas, so they would naturally be good at speaking to groups of people in their business. Another person might be a strong writer and more interested in working from home instead of presenting. That’s totally fine, as they can lean into writing and stay behind the scenes while still promoting themselves.

If you align with your natural strengths, you’re going to get better results. So, skip social media if that’s not your cup of tea! And pick something that you genuinely enjoy doing.

Want to learn your marketing superpower? Click here to take my two-minute quiz and get three custom strategies aligned with your personality and strengths!

Engage with them on a deeper level

Once you’ve attracted someone’s attention, you need to get them to engage with you on a deeper level. Think of dating: initial attraction is great, but you only get into a relationship after first going on a date (or two)! In online marketing, what you’re essentially doing is building a relationship with someone digitally rather than in person. So, you have to replicate the steps that you would otherwise do if you were trying to do business offline.

To automate your marketing, you can create a freebie or lead magnet, which is a piece of valuable content that you share with your audience in exchange for their email address. 

There are many examples of freebies out there, but the best ones aren’t just a simple PDF guide or a checklist. They go a level deeper and help you get to know the person who sent it to you and understand their business and process. A video series or an online workshop comes to mind.

The key here is sharing helpful content with your audience and getting them to opt into your email list, which will be used in the next stage.

Nurture them into hot prospects who are ready to buy

Now, we enter the nurture phase. Think of this as a steady relationship. You’re seeing each other, spending nights and weekends together watching your favorite movies and learning about each other’s quirks. That’s what you’re doing in the nurture phase. 

You’re educating your audience about what you do and how you can help them. 

You do this by sharing content via email. Remember the primary marketing channel I mentioned before? That’s where this comes in. 

I like sharing long-form content with my email audience, like new blog posts and podcast episodes I’ve hosted or been on. The beauty of long-form content is that it takes a bit longer for people to digest it, and that’s actually a good thing. It means they’re getting to know you on a deeper level. 

It’s also great for building search engine optimization (SEO) to help your website rank higher in search engines. In other words, it’s helping people find you!

Sell to your audience

In the final phase, we pitch our offer (or sell) to our audience. This can be either a soft sell or a hard sell. Soft selling might look like putting a little promo copy on the bottom of your email with a call-to-action (CTA) going to a link to your sales page. A hard sell would be using the entire email to pitch your offer. Both strategies have a time and a place, and it’s up to you how you want to do it.

A final word here: Selling doesn’t have to be so hard. And you can get over any hang-ups you might have about coming across as “too salesy” if you set up your email and schedule it in advance. Know that your people want to hear from you, and they want to know how you can help them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t follow you and sign up for your newsletter!

In Closing

The real flex in setting up a funnel is that you don’t have to market all the time anymore. Of course, it takes work to plan and build, but once it’s running, you can step away a bit and focus on the most important part of your business: serving your customers. 

And it lets you get a lot more strategic with all the marketing you already do. Because once you’ve built something like this, you’ll naturally filter out marketing activities that don’t support it. You’ll feed it new content every once in a while to keep it fresh, but it essentially runs itself, allowing you to relax and focus on what you’re good at.

The best part is you don’t have to have thousands of followers to make this happen, either. I like to say “quality over quantity” when it comes to marketing and creating content. You should be successful if you have a system in place and strive to create meaningful content. 

About The Author

Agatha Brewer is the founder of Agatha Brewer Coaching, where she works with new business owners to help them launch and grow businesses that make a bigger impact on the world. She combines 15+ years of digital marketing experience and her coach training (Whole Person Certified Coach®, ICF ACC, TIC) to help new business owners move their ideas out of their heads and into reality—getting them clarity around what they want to create, helping them set the right strategic foundations, and unraveling any mindset blocks that are standing in their way.

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