Listen to the full episode here: Apple, Spotify, and Amazon.
2024 B2B Marketing Strategies: How Female Founders Can Achieve Peace, Profit, and Play
In Season 2, Episode 22 of Your Conversation Pit™, we delve into what’s *actually* working for B2B marketing in 2024. Your communities are more savvy and discerning than ever when they’re approaching their investments – especially if you’re working with a high caliber clientele. They’ve been burned too often by high-ticket masterminds.
This episode provides a high-level overview of tactics to insert into your fall launches for more profit, peace, productivity, and play than ever before.
In the words of our client @the.lyndseychambers, she’s feeling more peaceful and playful and has more clarity than ever as she moves towards her fall launches (and all to come with her refined service suite!)
🎧 NEW PODCAST EPISODE ALERT 🎧
The Non-Launch Launch: Might trademark that one. It’s time for you to lean into skills that do not require a ton of cash upfront (ads), a ton of educated guesses (funnels), or affiliate launches (because their sales *also might be down* and why would they focus more on your bottom line than theirs)?
In the Society of More, Here’s What’s Working: Less with more integration. We’re diving deep on this one, but it’ll lighten your marketing and tech load which, of course, reflects your bottom line.
Personal Brand POVs with PURPOSE: We may not be interested in your breakfast every morning, unless you have a reason. We may not care about your sauna if you don’t explain why it connects to your entrepreneurial prowess. We may not care about the animals you’re befriending in your backyard unless there’s a specific reason why we *should* care. Vlogs with a real reason is the name of the game.
Overcoming Content Saturation: It starts with aggregating data in one place based on what potential clients (and current/past clients) are actually saying instead of just the numeric data in the midst of content saturation. Less than 100 likes on your last post, but you have 20k+ followers? You’re not alone.
Deeper Touchpoints Meets Community: We’re exploring the importance of building the right support systems and communities to foster sustainable growth and impact WHILE being the “familiar” and known-one that gets referred to. The focus first: community > cash
This episode is perfect for female founders who are juggling multiple responsibilities, contemplating which problem in their business should be the most attention late Q3 & early Q4 while settling in for the rest of the year to be playful, profitable, purposeful, and productive af. Tune in for actionable strategies and inspiring stories that will help you redefine success on your own terms since the algorithms may not be pushing your content out as much as you’d like. This episode is for you (and all of your business friends that also need a little TLC and real support right now!)
Mastering Fall Launches: Practical Tactics for High-Caliber Entrepreneurs
I will always relate back to our clients and their real stories, real strategies. We’ve served 200+ clients since 2019 with business consulting, coaching, and education with key focus areas of marketing, sales, leadership and community-building. Top female founders are going to be thriving in Q4 because they’re not going to be breathless at the finish line, chasing their worth at the bottom of a 44-point to-do list, or “proving” themselves constantly through the wild strategies we’ve seen come out in 2024 around authority building, especially in PR spaces.
Referring back to our cheetahlicious clients that have accelerated their business growth by being expertly focused on holistic harmony in life and business®, our methodology for approaching life and business to be more profitable, playful, peaceful, and productive. We have several episodes on that topic if you’d like to delve deeper into what helps our clients feel supported year-round regardless of how busy of a push season it is – they’re never dancing with burnout, but supporting themselves day in and day out.
Find episodes about holistic harmony in life and business® in the following Your Conversation Pit episodes: Business Strategy is a Small Fraction of Your Business Success as a Female Founder, Balance is a Myth: Embrace Holistic Harmony Instead, and 10 Signs that You’re Evolving & Expanding in Your Life and Business.
One of our clients has three babies, a husband, two dogs, a household to run, several group programs and 1:1 spaces to support her clients, an active social life, is present with her children’s lives, and loves to travel and explore. Her fall is already looking ripe for harvest as we’ve been working through the summer to build her lead list with ready-to-go clientele for fall launches, while strengthening profitability in the summer. She didn’t run a bunch of free challenges for freebie-lovers; we focused on low-ticket opportunities that could lead to her signature programs while still calling in high-caliber clients for private coaching as we went. She partnered with a close friend and network/referral partner to increase visibility; for reference, our client has just over 7k followers on Instagram while her referral partner has 150k followers on Instagram.
We worked smarter, not harder, to increase the potential for visibility, connection, and conversion.
The Non-Launch Launch: Profitable Marketing Without Ads, Funnels, or Affiliates
Might trademark that one! We all need a good non-launch launch strategy because marketing campaigns require resources from your bottom line profits. Though, it’s necessary at times depending on the season you’re in with your brands, it’s still time for you to lean into skills that do not require a ton of cash upfront (ads), a ton of educated guesses (funnels), or affiliate launches (because their sales *also might be down* and why would they focus more on your bottom line than theirs?)
Profitable marketing without ads, funnels, or affiliates will require for you to delve into the world of sales psychology, direct connection, relational marketing, and networking. Though it might *seem* easier to create a funnel, an ad, or garner attention from affiliates’ markets, I want to drop into reasons why this might take you through a scenic route instead of the direct highway to profitability.
B2B/B2C Advertisements in 2024’s Economy:
From OnAudience:
“The projected global advertising expenditure for 2024 is estimated at a staggering 754.4 billion U.S. dollars, with digital ad spending taking the lead, capturing 59.6% of the global spend.”
From TikTok and Market Research from Comments:
“TikTok is the new QVC.”
From Instagram:
From FoundationInc:
“71% Of US Businesses Say They Use Instagram Given Instagram’s popularity, it should be no surprise that an estimated 71% of US businesses are using it to push their brand and in 2020 there were over 8 million business accounts. Like I said earlier, Instagram is a platform that cannot be ignored.”
Yet, another stat that we have to take into account from FoundationInc: “88% Of Instagram Users Live Outside The United States. Brands outside the U.S. will be happy to know the app has users around the world. In fact, Instagram reported that 88% of its users live outside the United States. This data shows the popularity of the app and the interest in visual content across many language barriers.”
And another from FoundationInc:, “Users Spend 30 Minutes Per Day On Instagram. People spend almost as much time on Instagram as they do on the Facebook app— Instagram’s daily use grew by 13.8% from 2019 to 2020, whereas Facebook’s daily use only grew 4.3% or 1.4 minutes. The more time users spend on Instagram, the more ads they see—and the more likely they are to notice your B2B business.”
B2B/B2C Funnels in 2024’s Economy:
As a marketer of a decade+, I will never advise a client to create several funnels for their service suite without current marketing and sales data that clearly communicates WHAT we can use as applicable information to insert into said funnels instead of cannon fodder that we *hope* will make landfall towards the area we’re seeking to connect with.
Cannon fodder isn’t a great use of connection, right? Not an immediate “let’s go out and be friends now that you’ve shot a cannon my way” which is why I’m keen to stick away from tactics that wouldn’t create direct connection.
If you have an established brand, this is still relevant for you because the 2024 market is different than we’ve seen in the online business space, but it’s pretty on brand for marketing at large when we’re looking down the barrel of an election year, potential recession, the highest inflation since the early 1980s (starting in 2022 at 8% and continuing to decline into 2024, while the market is aiming to recalibrate!)
Working with a seasoned marketing professional is key in this market and we’d love to partner with you if you’re seeking support.
B2B/B2C Affiliate Marketing in 2024’s Economy:
After gathering data in late 2023 to August of 2024, we’ve noticed that affiliate launches are lower than ever and the correlation between the affiliate’s need to increase their own bottom line versus their affiliate partner’s bottom line is more distinct than ever.
The scenic route MAY increase your bottom line in any of these areas, but with higher spend per click-rate for ads, updated data needed for funnel optimization from 2024 versus 5 years ago, and an affiliate partner’s need to focus on their bottom line, wouldn’t it be time to go the direct route?
Building Community Over Cash: The Key to Sustainable Business Growth in 2024
The direct route is two-pronged in 2024 to increase your bottom line as a female founder in 2024 and beyond: community connection and the optimization of less in your product suite. High-caliber entrepreneurs are used to doing so much more in their day-to-days: 88-point to-do lists, breathless breakfasts, lunches, and dinners to keep going, HIIT workouts and too much cardio without the proper amount of refueling to feel good throughout the day, buying another course on metabolism and another health trend to add to their 12-point nightly routine that includes red light masks, saunas, and cold showers.
Are you breathless yet?
The direct route to increasing your profitability, peace, play, and productivity in your business portfolio will be meeting sales psychology to sustainable business growth.
Sales psychology is the main reason we’ve continued to be successful as a multi-six figure company, alongside our clients that range from pre-revenue startups successfully closing their first clients alongside us to $30-350k launches for established businesses.
If you haven’t delved into sales psychology yet, we have a full course on it that will allow you to dive deeply into our knowledge and methodologies to ensure that you have a 360 view of how to implement these strategies into every aspect of your business from client experience to business suite development to daily activities for PR and sales growth. Find The Timeless Sales Method® Course here to increase your sales psychology knowledge and implement strategies into your business before the fall rush of 2024.
Ways to Build Community On & Offline As a High-Caliber Entrepreneur:
- Engage with a community nurture list of your current and past clients – involve yourself in their media and their comment sections to create threads of connection and conversation
- Engage with potential clients that you’ve found through your current and past clients’ comments, likes, followers, following, and your competitors’ likes and comments
- Engage in conversations on platforms that your potential clients are on: Facebook groups, Linkedin groups, and the like
- Engage on advertisements of parallel audiences with thought-leadership conversations that put that advertiser on a pedestal of their own thought-leadership while standing out in the crowd while potential clients are looking at the ad opportunity
- Engage with those that are engaging with you: open and click-through rates via email list, stories and posts on your social media platforms, and the like
- Engage in direct conversations with ideal clients by signing up for their email lists, filtering their emails to one label in your inbox, spending 10-15 minutes per week reviewing those emails and replying to them with your degree of encouragement and engagement that increases connection, community, and opportunity for an everlasting relationship
- Host a challenge with a thought-leader of a parallel audience, on and offline
- Organize an in-person event with a small focus from one of your signature offers to give a significant taste of the offering and increase sensory marketing with an in-person activation
- Participate in industry conferences and tradeshows
- Support local initiatives and charities that connect you to your ideal clients or referral partners
- Host a pop-up experience at a place your ideal clients may frequently visit like a coffee shop
- Collaborate with local businesses to create events, promotions, and projects
- Join curated rooms of ideal referral partners like group programs, mastermind groups, and summits
Unsure how to create an in-person activation or desiring support to create a powerful online challenge in 2024? We’d love to support you through a business consultation; an intensive would be a perfect opportunity for us to connect in this way! Inquire via the application and note that you’re interested in an intensive.
Unsure of how to engage with ideal clients, past, and current clients without feeling pushy and sales-y? We’d love to support you in our sales psychology course that marries your weekly actions to your business vision alongside supportive marketing materials to subconsciously speak to your ideal clients. Find The Timeless Sales Method® Course here and make your conversations less stop-and-start and more connective, communicative, and converting.
Unsure of which business problem is your biggest profit-leak? Business consulting for 6-12 months would be a perfect way for us to diagnose, re-evaluate, reposition, and re-negotiate your value in the marketplace. Inquire via the application and note that you’re interested in long term consulting.
The Society of More: Integrating Purpose into Your Business for Greater Impact
We’re diving deep into this topic because female founders deserve more peace, profit, and play in their lives and businesses. Our goal is to lighten your marketing and tech load which, of course, reflects your bottom line to increase and sustain business growth and profitability.
In the society of more, do you really want more?
I’ve personally had to sit with this question over 2023 and 2024 as a female founder that runs three businesses alongside her husband and has an active health, social, and creative life outside of business. As one of our favorite clients, Lyndsey Chambers, always says, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”
From burnout to balance, as a female founder I love sharing my secrets to peaceful productivity and have since the beginning of our brand because I believe that we can have a profitable business that looks different than the high-rise, high-functioning, constantly-burning-out business lifestyle. We’re redefining success and providing reasons why less is more in your 2024 marketing strategy.
If we take a look back at the data we shared earlier in this blog, we can see statistically that folks ARE spending time on social media, but there’s an astronomical amount of advertisements popping in and around your ideal clients brains and eyes all day long. We see around 10,000 ads per day, per a study in 2007 by market research firm Yankelovich, but it’s now 2024… how many advertisements do you think your ideal client is seeing a day now?
If we turn our focus away from the society of more to integrating purpose into your business for greater impact, we’re turning towards having one main service focus at the front of your marketing funnel that leads to all other programs.
We’ve seen the most successful clients from The Cheetah Company walk into a powerful and purposeful era of peace, play, profit, and productivity when their front-end marketing and sales vehicles could focus on one signature product or offering that then leads to a slew of a secret-menu that can only be sold to those that have gone through the signature offering or product.
I recently purchased a 7-in-1 Dirt Devil Steamer. If you’re on TikTok and you personally haven’t received targeted ads about this steamer in the last 4 months then our FYPs are not the same and that’s totally okay. I consistently have “saved” videos from different creators about the steamer, promising myself I’d return and review more information about the product soon.
Repeating this cycle for 4 months, I finally purchased it two weeks ago and let it sit in my living room on the floor until I was prepared to go through the instructions to use it.
Last night, I fired it up after reading the instructions extensively, and rapidly my life changed. I’m steaming the bathtub, our sinks, preparing to cancel an order for something in our refrigerator because I know the steamer will be able to get it off before we make our home a short-term rental via Airbnb.
But, you see the sales cycle, right?
Sales Cycle Details:
- Countless targeted ads (at least 50, not even a hyperbole here)
- Saved at least 20 of those ads
- Meant to return back to one of those videos and didn’t
- Finally got *the video* for me that showed my dominant buying motive
- Purchased on-site from Amazon (not even from the creator because Prime, you know?)
- Received it in X amount of days
- Steamer sat for 2 weeks in living room
- Just started using last night
- Now obsessed and have told three friends about it and showed my husband the difference it’s made in cleaning the bathroom
Now, let’s apply your brand to this. How long will it take for you to see a sale from what could be a scenic route instead of a direct route?
When you’re taking a direct route with one signature offer being your mainstay in your marketing, all of your marketing efforts can point to that one offering while you’re still calling in the higher-caliber clients that might be able to bypass that offer to your secret menu.
Which you will be able to invite them into through conversational connection, engagement, and sales psychology because you’ll be having DIRECT conversations with ideal clients instead of hoping your visuals and messaging for your ads and funnels are hitting the market or your affiliate plan is keen enough to influence audiences that may or may not be hot and ready for your offering.
Personal Branding with Purpose: How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market
If you’re not into make-up, hairstyling, and your clients aren’t either, then having a get-ready-with-me style vlog as you talk about current brand design strategies in 2024 and upcoming trends for 2025 will not be applicable to your ideal client.
There’s been a rise of vlogs that point to longer form content since late 2022, early 2023, and we predict it will only steadily rise because folks are craving personality from creatives, businesses, influencers, personal brands, and the like.
However, the key to finding your sweet spot is knowing how to spot your potential client’s habits, values, and interests. We discussed this recently on a podcast episode that we can’t wait for you to hear. Take a listen to “Marketing Strategies That Are Working in 2024, The Current State of Online Businesses, and What To Do About It.”
Overcoming Content Saturation: What Your Clients Really Want from Your Brand
Overcoming content saturation starts with aggregating data in one place based on what potential clients (and current/past clients) are actually saying instead of just the numeric data in the midst of content saturation.
Less than 100 likes on your last post, but you have 20k+ followers? You’re not alone.
Less than 500 likes on a post that used to garner thousands and you have 150k+ followers? You’re not alone.
Email open-rates less than ever, even with 10k+ on your email list? You’re not alone.
What your clients truly want will always be the words they’re saying in their direct comments, messages, on your competitors’ content, and in their own messaging. Listening to their words is just as important as listening to their social media and email list behaviors of opening, clicking, liking, saving, sharing, and the like.
Resources:
Listen to the full episode here: Apple, Spotify, and Amazon.
Business Strategy is a Small Fraction of Your Business Success as a Female Founder
Balance is a Myth: Embrace Holistic Harmony Instead
10 Signs that You’re Evolving & Expanding in Your Life and Business
Bio:
Ashleigh Henry has been in marketing, sales, and leadership positions for the last decade and it was exhilarating for Ashleigh to climb the retail, corporate, higher education, and start-up ladder holding positions such as Marketing Strategist, Copywriter, Social Media Strategist, Manager, Editor, Co-Editor…until it wasn’t. Alongside her degree, Ashleigh decided to bring all of her experience into the freelancing world until it became clear that she didn’t just want to pay the bills – she wanted to create a company that was foundationally built on cheetah print, legacy-minded marketing, and sexy sales structures that could stand the test of trend and time. The Cheetah Company, founded by Ashleigh, does this for female entrepreneurs through their education, coaching, and consulting services. Learn more about Ashleigh here.