Coaching Corner: How to Juggle Business and Life as a Single Mom with Podcast Listener Shyrome Hardmon Part 2

On Part 2 of my coaching call with Shyrome, we talk about marketing her business and where she’s stuck in a rut and needs a little guidance.

Shyrome shares: “I know sometimes I get distracted by everything that’s going on on my Instagram, and I’m looking at everybody else, and I’m feeling like I need to be at a certain speed. And so I decided to go in and unfollow people. I did hear that from your podcast a while ago. And I just never got to it.”

Stop Keeping Up With the Joneses

We only have so much energy and time and resources to give in a day. Protecting where your head is-that is the most important thing you can do. You might think that who you follow on instagram doesn’t matter, but I want you to really think about it. It’s interesting if you really get present and intentional and ask yourself, “Why do I follow these accounts?” A lot of times it’s either you think you want what they have, or they’re your competitors and you tell yourself-“I need to know what they’re doing”.

Biggest crock of shit. It’s so not helpful. I follow very few lash accounts, very few. Why? Because I practice what I preach, but also because I used to follow people that I would perceive as competitors, and I didn’t recognize what it was doing until I had a team. I’d be like, ‘Oh, look what they’re doing, we should be doing that too.’ And I’d bring it to my team, but we’d already be on a very specific path that was aligned with the goals I had for the business. Now all of a sudden, I’m throwing a wrench in it and upsetting my team who was already on this path and be like, ‘No, we’re shifting’. And it’s so not helpful.

No matter who you follow or who you look up to-even if you had their same exact business, you probably wouldn’t be happy. Because it’s not what you chose for YOU. Following accounts that don’t excite you, entertain you, motivate you, or leave you feeling positive is the biggest waste of time on social media. This is the difference between utilizing social media for business and using social media as a consumer. When you’re on it for business, it has a very clear purpose, you are there to get customers to know you, like you and trust you. That’s it.

The most common thing that happens with business owners, especially in our industry, is FOMO-the fear of missing out. ‘Oh, she’s running a special. Oh, she says she’s fully booked.” A lot of lash artists go in and they start looking at what everyone else is doing and they think that’s the way to go. No, you can actually change it up a little bit, you can (and should) make it what you want it to be.

I’ll give you an example. What is the number one thing any lash artist wants to be? Fully booked. But let me ask you this-if you’re only working four days a week, isn’t your fully booked different than five days a week? A lot of people want to be fully booked, so they look at everybody else’s fully booked. But realize, if you only work three days a week, two hours a day, you can be fully booked within like a month. So even the goal of being fully booked,which is the goal that most lash artists have when they start their own business, is so different because we each determine success differently.

The Goal of Your Marketing

When it comes to social media marketing, lash artists often struggle with knowing what to post or what to write in their captions. Take a quick look at other lash artists’ pages and you’ll probably see a range of these long captions, random stuff, “book now”, or captions they probably stole from someone else.

When you’re deciding what to post, you have to look at the intention in your posting. What is the goal when you create a social media post?

Even if the goal is to get new clients, each individual post is not necessarily trying to get a client off of that post. Each post however should have a “call to action” or what we call CTA in the marketing world. The CTA is the action we tell the viewer of that post to take. If it’s to book an appointment, then that’s considered a sales post. It’s directly speaking to what we sell, we’re trying to get them to take action and become a customer. If you’re posting five days a week, one of those should be a sales post.

In The Lashpreneur Society we teach on building out your marketing funnel. Social media is in the interest level, it’s in the middle of the funnel, and it’s where the relationship is built. So really, the content you have on your social media is more so for building the relationship and the trust. Yes, some of it will be selling and trying to get them to your website, but that’s the bottom part of the funnel that they move into FROM social media. The core purpose of your social media marketing is to build that trusting relationship so that they want you to be their service provider. It would be naive to think that they’re not considering anybody else. So how can they learn to trust you that you’re their go-to person through a platform like Instagram?

Show your face. Share that you’re a mom, or a dog lover. Share that you specialize in natural lash health. If they’re comparing you to Jenny down the street or Fantastic Lashes, they all of a sudden know you. Whether you and Jenny charge the same or not, they’re going to start to prioritize you. It’s all of a sudden more of a personalized experience, because they’re getting to know you and recognize you.

There’s inherent trust that’s built through that.

So when you’re preparing to create a post and write your caption, think about WHO is the type of person that you want in your business. Inside of The Lashpreneur Society, we call it the MFC-my most favorite client type. Get clear on who this person is and that will determine what you write and the marketing content you put out. So the example I usually give for the target market is the Kris Jenner types versus the Kylie Jenner types. They have very different pain points-one wants to look older, one wants to look younger. We speak to them differently. They have different needs, different desired solutions, different results. So it wouldn’t make sense for us to try and target BOTH of them.

Most people that are willing to invest or spend more money on a service like eyelash extensions, want an expert or a specialist. They want somebody who knows their pain point and can help them solve it. Because, more than likely, eyelash extensions are not the only thing they’ve considered. They’ve probably done strip lashes, volumizing mascara, the Tick Tock mascara, lash lift and tint. They may have tried a bunch of different other solutions, but they are looking to your services for a very specific solution. So the more specific you can speak to their pain points, and how your service is the solution, the more effective your marketing will be.

Writing Killer Captions

When it comes to writing captions, each caption should have 3 parts: a Hook, 1-3 teaching points and a CTA. The goal of the Hook is to get a potential customer to “stop the scroll” and make them want to read the rest of your caption. Questions are great hooks because it creates curiosity. After the Hook, you’ll want to add 1-3 lines of teaching points. This is where you can educate them on lash health, or the benefits of getting lash extensions over say, botox. Lastly, each caption should include a CTA or call to action. It doesn’t always have to be “book now”. Again, we’re trying to build a relationship. It could be as simple as “like this post”, “tag a friend”, or “comment below if you have any questions”.

This will increase your engagement, and as your engagement grows-your posts will get pushed out to more people. That is how you build your following and grow your platform.

Do you enjoy these coaching corner episodes? Send me a DM on Instagram and let me know!

Episode Highlights: