Confidence Classic: How to Drive More Traffic & Turn Visibility Into Sales with Stacy Tuschl

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1:43I hope you love this one as much as I do. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet Stacey Tushel. She's made a name for herself as an expert in growing small businesses. Let's put it this way. She started her own business at the age of 18 in her parents' backyard, turned that company into a multi-million dollar business. She still runs it today. In addition to being a small business growth coach, Stacey is a best-selling author, founder of the Foot Traffic Formula, helping small businesses around the world get more customers in the door, more profit in their pocket, and more happiness in their homes.

2:18I mean, she's the 2019 Wisconsin Small Business Person of the Year. This woman is on fire. She's featured in Inc. Magazine as one of the top 10 podcasts for moms looking to grow a thriving business. She's been featured in Forbes, Fox, Happy New Post, the list goes on and on. Stacey, thanks so much for being here today. Hi, Heather. Thanks for having me. Oh my gosh. All right. So let's get to it. It's interesting. As you know, my background's in corporate America and running large companies. Now I run my own small. And here's what's funny or a question to you, I guess. There's so much that I take from corporate America and it's business acumen, right?

2:51And I apply it to my business life every day. However, some of the challenges for those of us that are solo entrepreneurs is this idea of trial and error and not having the ability to forecast out like we used to in a business built out that we had 20 years in and I knew the cadence and I knew the pipelines, right? So when I talk about conversions now and sales funnels, this stuff is like live and die type conversation versus, you know, when it was so predictable before throw in a global pandemic to completely upset business deal flow. And here I am not only having you on, cause I want everyone here who's listening to gain value, but I need your help.

3:32I need to find ways, Stacey, how can I improve my sales funnel? How can I improve my conversion rates? Yeah. Oh, so good. And just so you know, my opposite background is zero corporate, like started a business right out of high school. So I love when I talk to corporate people because there's things, you know, that I'm like, teach me, teach me everything. Like I'm just winging stuff over here and you really have to get good at using your past data. But you've got to use the most recent history. When you have corporate, you can go back however many years and go forward. And it's just like plug it in.

4:05Oh, here's what's going to happen. Not here. And when people are talking about funnels from a year ago or launches from a year ago, I need to say to my clients, I don't care about any of that stuff. Because if you haven't launched something in six months, or you have just started running Facebook ads, now it is a whole different ballgame. So I think you have to really ask yourself, like, I think there's a couple of things, but you've got to get really good at finding like, what is that new wave? And not just riding one wave at a time, because anything, like you said, can all of a sudden stop. If you're relying on Facebook ads, or you're relying on one funnel or one product, and all of a sudden something shifts, your business is just gone overnight and you're trying to figure out what to do next.

4:45So I think the biggest thing is when I teach people how to work their sales funnel, how to track all of that, it really is just as simple as you're not really predicting as much as you're seeing what happens. And then you're using that data to start to predict and scale and grow. Does that make sense? It seems more like you're living in that moment and allowing that moment to help project that. Yeah. I mean, I'm setting goals of what I want to happen and what I want to see, but I'm kind of just guessing like people will say, well, what number should I put out there? I'm like, honestly, you throw whatever number you want out there, but you better start to take the actions that you think you're going to be able to do to create that success.

5:22And once you actually get the real data, the conversion rates, the open rates, the click through rates, now we've got something to say, okay, well, I want that better. If I want more results, what does my pipeline look like? And where is the problem, right? I had somebody, a client was working with, and she had this whole funnel set up and she was like fixing email number seven. I'm like, listen, they're not even getting to email number seven, right? We've got to start at the beginning, go in order, fix like the first thing they see. And that's probably what we call like driving traffic, getting that visibility.

5:55Is your visibility converting into leads? Are your leads actually can like, are they, are they becoming consults? Are they becoming that next person to raise their hand? And from there, are they converting into sales? Look at what's happening and figure out where your funnel is broken, right? And even if you've got a great converting funnel, there's still places that could be massively improved and we've got to get good at refining. But if you're anything like me, we don't want to be doing the boring refining stuff. We're like, create this new and new product over here, a new platform and new, new, new.

6:27And you've got to get good at the boring stuff of just the little tweak here and the little tweak there. And how do we get them to open more and click more and all of the things. So when you're working with these companies, you know, no matter what size they are, what are some of the biggest challenges people have that you have a pretty straightforward fix for? Yeah. So for me in my foot traffic formula, it's driving traffic, getting that touch point, which are leads in a transaction, but the secret sauce is tracking. So you really have to track your traffic. You have to track your touch points, track your transactions, right?

7:00So the data determines what you do next. You've got to get the drama out of it. A lot of people, we've got big goals. We think this thing's going to blow us up. And then it doesn't, right? Or at least not right away. And we're like, well, only two people bought. But when I look at the data, and I look at, well, what is the percentage? What is the conversion rate, right? And I try to give people benchmarks, not to say, try to hit it, but just to say, you're in the pretty normal range, right? So when you're not happy, like people will say to me, it's not working. I'm like, well, give me numbers.

7:35Like give me, don't tell me it's not working. Tell me what the conversions are, right? So we start to see, well, this was their opt-in rate and it was 32%, which is not bad for a free opt-in, let's say. And then the next page had something for sale and they converted at 2.5%. Like, well, the standard is two to 5%. And if you convert it at 2.5, you're in there. So it's not that you have a broken funnel. It's just you want more, which means we've got to fill the top of the funnel, right? And sometimes people just don't have the traffic to even see, do you have enough data to decide if this is good or not, right?

8:09If you started running ads yesterday and you're not happy with what the funnel's doing, we don't even have enough information, most likely to see if enough people even saw it to get us the conversion rate we're looking for.

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11:59In the day and age we're living in, what are you seeing as some of the best ways to drive that top of funnel? So I think back when, you know, like even a year ago, it was all about the freebie. And then it was all about the low ticket offer, right? I honestly think both still work, but it has to be valuable and it has to really stand out. So I'm friends with a lot of people in the online space and I know who's doing well and who's not doing well. And I will tell you the people that are giving something tangible, right? They are walking away with something versus like just pitching digital and online courses and all the things, right?

12:39It's like, how can you give a system or a template or something they're actually going to want? So one of the big things that I do, and if you go stalk my Instagram, you'll see this, but I do reels. And in my reels, I'm just talking. I'm not dancing or doing anything crazy. I just talk. I give an objection or I give something that I hook them with something, right? And it could be something silly. I'm just going to make this up. But it could be something silly about like, you're losing money if you don't have an EA. Like, it's like attention CEO. You're losing money if you don't have an EA. So I've hooked you into being like, wait, I don't have an EA.

13:11I want to listen to this, right? So now you start listening. And I'm like, listen, every CEO needs an EA. Here's why. And I give you value where you are thinking, okay, I need to hire an EA. And then maybe at the end of it, I say, and if you want my EA job description completely free, just comment below the word EA and I'll send it to you. This is blowing up my business. Because here's the deal. It's not some stupid freebie that you're never going to do anything with. You're actually thinking, she just convinced me I need an EA. and now she's going to give me her job description for free. So what do you do?

13:41You come in EA and like we just did one of these posts on Monday and today's Tuesday as we're recording this. And we had a hundred posts like that morning, a hundred comments from that one post. It wasn't the EA one, but something else. And we have all these people literally raising their hand of like, I want that thing. But we only talk about the things that we can go even deeper with and help you on, right? So now you've raised your hand. I'm passing you over the template. it you asked for, right? And now I can go like, so do you have any, are you trying to make it better? Are you trying to hire somebody new?

14:13Like fill me in. And I can now start conversations in DMs. So how do you serve where people actually want it? Like nobody wants a boring freebie that is not helpful, but what they do want is something that's going to get them results, get them fast tracked. Right. And I think that's how you can create a better experience, at least in today's market. Well, for those of you who don't know what an EA is, and it's an executive assistant. So just in case anybody didn't know what that was, when I'm hearing you describe that, it's reminding me of a strategy that I have been developing over the last year to drive downloads for my podcast.

14:48And so we've done a ton of different things on LinkedIn where I have the largest, most engaged following. And so we did this DM strategy where my team was in the background testing and trying different copy that they would reach out around. Some around, oh, we saw that you liked Heather's quotes if you wanna hear her talk about this topic. Click on the link and she'll speak to you about it. And it's a podcast, right? That one didn't do that well. Then we tried, oh, saw that you like Sarah Blakely's post because they commented on it or whatever. And thought you might want to see this amazing interview she did with Heather Monaghan.

15:20There's some great takeaways. That one is the highest convert. Wow. Insane, Stacey. Why did that work versus all these other ones? I have no idea. But the only thing I do know for sure is that you have to constantly be testing and trying, even if it sounds like it's a crazy idea. I don't know. I just have to test and try. And like you said, look back at that data to steer us to make better decisions. And what's really weird is we're testing these and then we're picking our winners and we're running them as a Facebook ad, like a real ad, right? And the ones that are winning organically are not winning on Facebook.

15:56So we'll have different winners organically than we do with paid traffic. So you've just got, you can't just assume, like, oh, we should run that as an ad with Sarah Blakely. You can try and then you have to test it and see if it actually does well. Because just because you split test it over here on one platform does not mean that's the thing that's gonna work on the other platform or in paid versus organic. So that's why I say like tracking is the secret sauce. It is everything you need to be doing on a daily basis. And so what are your thoughts on paid versus organic growth for anyone in business?

16:25Yeah, so right now, really, I mean, we are spending 80 % of our time organically. And when we're doing it organically, we are then looking at what are the winners coming from our organic traffic. We then go to Facebook and Instagram, and we are having a very, very small budget because we're doing mostly video views and getting people warmed up to us. So I'm not spending, I mean, I used to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on Facebook ads. We do not do that anymore. It is just a different ballgame, which is great because our expenses dropped drastically, right? So we're really just warming them up, getting people to watch our videos.

17:01And then from there, we can do that same, you know, executive assistant posting. And if people comment, all of a sudden now we're driving paid traffic to that post and can do the same thing with DMs. That's so interesting. Tell me about automation and what your thoughts are on that, because I have gotten some terrible feedback from some of my automation strategies I've implemented. And then I have some that are working OK. I am a big believer in automate anything you can. But when it comes to clients and potential clients, right, sometimes it's just not as effective, right? You have to really weigh the pros and cons and you also have to test.

17:34So do something manual, see what your results are, and then do it automated. Maybe it doesn't convert as well, but the volume is there that the outcome that you're looking for is higher than your manual, right? Are some people going to hate that it's automated? Yes. But what you're looking for is that end result. Where were you able to serve at your highest level? So I love automations. I'm all in. Somebody had said, why aren't you using? I mean, I'm using myself and real people in my DMs. And people are like, well, just use ManyChat or just use automations. It's like, well, then it's not custom.

18:06And we have custom conversations in our DMs, right? We're really helping people and coaching them. And you can only do so much with like ManyChat and places like that, right? So because I'm a big tracker and I can see my results, I don't try to fix something that's not broken, right? I am leaning in to what is working for me at this moment. And to me, it's that manual strategy. Will at some point it become a lot less effective? I'm sure. Because as you know, in this online world, you've got to ride waves as they're happening. And then once everybody starts ruining the wave, you've got to fix something and go someplace else.

18:43So we're just really trying to diversify and be smart about it. Like when you say you love LinkedIn, I'm like, okay, I should be on LinkedIn more. Like, why am I not doing that, right? And I just know that little by little, we've got to keep adding on. So we're not just one platform with one product, with one strategy, because we just don't want to be that fragile. Guys, for anyone listening right now, if you are not on LinkedIn, five years ago is the right time to get on. Today is the only time. Get on there today, Stacey. This includes you. It is the only algorithm. But show up every day. It's the only algorithm that you can grow organically so fast.

19:21I coached this woman last year and she had no presence on LinkedIn at all. She now has as engaged following as I do. I think she has maybe 80 ,000 followers. And I mean, her engagement is off the charts and she does it all herself. So it really does not take a lot of time. If you want to grow quickly in a community where business is getting done and people are talking about business, get on LinkedIn now. And LinkedIn also has a great feature. If you're saying, oh, I don't want to go pay to use automation to test it. One of the ways that you can do it for free on LinkedIn is, and I've done this before, if I change my title, right?

19:57I do this strategically. Whenever I have a new product launch or something, I change from author to, you know, whatever. I launched a candle line. So then I put, you know, oh, co-creator of blah, blah, blah. Immediately, a notice goes out to your entire community saying, hey, Heather just changed her job. Do you want to say congrats to Heather? And so what happens is a large percentage of people will go to your DMs to find out like, oh, what's this all about, Heather? Or like, I want to have a conversation or I want to buy or whatever. You can set up, there's a feature in LinkedIn that says set away message.

20:30And so you can go in there and set, you know, for the next seven days, I want to put this notice out. Hey, I'm swamped right now with the new candle business. If you'd like to order your own custom candle, here's an opportunity for you to do that with a 20 % off coupon. no, this isn't me. This is automation because I am producing candles for you. I'll get back to you soon. And now here you, you know, presented an opportunity for a conversion without 100 % to you. Okay. I'm obsessed. I love it. I will go stock your LinkedIn when we're done. Okay. All right. So to that point and with social media, it doesn't have to just be LinkedIn.

21:02One of the things that I noticed in my business, the majority of my needs come from social media, which then my goal is to try to convert them into my email list so that I can have some level of ownership, right? Is that the correct process, Stacey? Yeah, that's, I mean, that's what, not that there's not more than one right way to do it, but that is what we are doing as well. Okay. So that's my goal. Well, I started looking at, oh yeah, my numbers are growing and I get more shares and likes and followers than anyone. Yay. Okay. But what does that mean to my bottom line? So I had to sit down with my social media team and, you know, every month they're cheering, oh, we're growing, we're growing.

21:36Great. But here's what is important to me. I need to drive more revenue. I need better prospects, better leads. I don't just want anybody anymore. I'd rather get less likes, less followers and get the right ones that might convert. So we've started to your point, massive tracking on everything. And for anyone who's ever had a post go viral, one of our new strategies we implemented is on every viral post. Once it hits the couple hundred thousand likes, we go in and alter the post because it's already being picked up on the algorithm and we include a conversion link right in front of everybody's eyes.

22:10Okay. I love that so much. And when you bring up about the social media, it's not about likes and followers. One time we have like a record week and our Instagram following went down and I had to show the team. Do you see that growing Instagram does not mean growing our bank account? In fact, we shrunk for some reason last week, but we made more money than we've ever made in a week. Right? So we have KPIs, key performance indicators for every role. And social media, a lot of times people will have Instagram following, like the growth, right? The likes, the comments. For us, what we're looking at is first engagement, right?

22:45I'm not looking at likes and followers, but I'm looking at engagement because you do want people to engage with your content. I'm looking for number of comments under what we call our CTA posts. So when I do those reels and I say comment the word this, those are leads, potential leads. So to me, I do count comments when they're literally raising their hand to say, I want your thing. And then from there, I look at how many of those people that raised their hand booked a consult. Because once they book a consult, it's out of social media's hands. Like they have done everything they could to get to draw you, draw you in and get you on your way to booking a consult.