In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner explains why the sequence of actions in your marketing—specifically, the awareness stage—is more important than the strategies you use.
Are you struggling to get your marketing to connect with the right people? It might be time to shift your focus from strategy to sequence! In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner explains why the sequence of actions in your marketing—specifically, the awareness stage—is more important than the strategies you use. She breaks down how to build impactful relationships with your audience by focusing on three key components: what you say, who you say it to, and the strength of the trust transfer. By mastering these, you can create a powerful awareness strategy that sets the stage for long-term success in relationship marketing.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. In the 15 years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, and what they need to be centering is sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy.
So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. As you know, in every episode of this show, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business.
And this week, I'm going to break down for all of you the most important stage of any relationship marketing strategy, and that is the awareness stage. I get this question often, specifically, hey, Michelle, how do you think about relationship marketing? How do you start to put together a relationship marketing funnel? What's the difference between relationship marketing and traffic marketing when it comes down to strategy? And I've answered it in so many different places and in so many different pieces that I thought it was about time to dedicate an episode to it so that we have it all in one place. So let's start with definitions.
Relationship marketing. We've talked about this a lot on the show, but let's just make sure we're clear. A relationship marketing strategy means that you are focusing on building relationships with your customers before they buy something. So the most extreme version of this is a referral. There's a relationship that's really built there when you're talking about a referral that comes in. There's a lot of trust. Somebody feels like they know you. Somebody's had a great experience with you to even send a person your way. That's a relationship. And this is the opposite of what I call traffic marketing. Traffic marketing is mass marketing. It's getting a bunch of emails, getting a lot of social content.
There's not a real relationship there. Yes, of course, we do things to help it feel like more of a relationship, but there's not a relationship in place. So when I'm talking about how to build a relationship marketing strategy, I am talking about how do you piece together in the correct sequence some strategies that are going to allow you to build a real relationship with the people that you may be working with, people who may be buying your products and services. And how do we think about that? We think about that and understand how to build that strategy by breaking down what an actual marketing flow is. And when I do that, I think about three stages that happen in marketing.
And I think about the awareness stage, the engagement stage, and the sales stage, by which I mean awareness is how people meet you. Engagement is how they're going to learn to trust you. And sales is when they're going to buy something from you. And so in this episode, we're going to focus on that awareness stage, that first stage of a marketing sequence, right? Sequence over strategy. So of a marketing sequence, when you're trying to build a relationship, that first stage is awareness.
And the reason we're going to focus on that, the reason I want to put all of my awareness information into one episode is that it's the most critical stage when we're talking about relationship marketing. And why is that? Well, that's true because in relationship marketing, remember the most extreme version of that is a referral. So if we think about what a referral lead looks like, and I'm sure you've all had referrals come to you, think about how that lead acts when they come and make themselves known to you. They've already been introduced to you in some way. Somebody has said something wonderful about you.
And frankly, you're probably going to have to screw up a little bit to not have the work advance, right? So as soon as they meet you, as soon as they become aware of you, there's already a lot of trust, there's already a lot of buy-in, there is already a whole lot of momentum working in the direction of you doing business together. Maybe it ends up closing, maybe it doesn't, but there's a lot of momentum there. And so when we think about creating leads that are going to act like that, what do we have to do? We have to think really critically about the awareness stage because how people meet you is incredibly important in relationship marketing. They can't just meet you on the fly.
They need to meet you under conditions that look like how somebody would meet you if they were referred to you, meaning they have to really, really like you. And we have to get them, we have to have enough impact so that they come into that relationship already thinking about working with you and already being pretty far down the line of making that a serious consideration. And that means having a whole lot of impact at the awareness stage and thinking really hard about doing that stage very, very well because you can't blow it off.
In traffic marketing, you can kind of blow off the awareness stage because you need so many bodies that you almost have to blow it off. You can't try to have a ton of impact because when you have a ton of impact, what does that mean? It means inherently that you're pretty niched down and you can't do that in traffic because you need so many different leads. But in relationship, it's the opposite. And so you need to work really hard and you need to have a ton of impact at that awareness stage in order to really kick off the relationship so that you can get your relationship strategy working correctly. And so I get this question all the time because I very commonly talk about how you have to work really hard at the awareness stage and you have to have a lot of impact when you meet people if you're gonna relationship market.
And so of course I get the question of, Michelle, how do you do that? And again, I answer this in so many different ways, but I thought let's do an episode where I just spell it out for you exactly how you meet people with this impact so that you can kick off that relationship marketing effort with as much impact as you possibly can. Let me introduce you to something called the awareness pie.
I'm gonna need you to visualize this with me and as a visual learner, it's kind of sending me to not be able to show you a slide and show you a visual right here, but I'm gonna have to ask you to picture this in your mind and picture a good old pie chart, right? So just a circular pie chart. And when we think about awareness and when we think about what I call the awareness pie, this is how we answer how do you have enough impact at the awareness stage in order to really kick off relationship marketing.
And so your awareness pie is made up of three equal slices. So if we're visualizing this in our minds, we're gonna get out that circular pie shape and we're gonna split it into thirds and those are equal thirds. And each one of those thirds has an important component in it that we need to do really, really well during awareness. And together, those components add up to 100% of the pie. And I'm gonna describe each of those components to you in a minute, but first I want you to understand and get this visual in your head that in order to have the awareness impact that you need to have, you need to be thinking about all three of these equal components because they are equal and they add up to 100%. So each of them get, what, 33.3334% of the pie. And so you need, when you are enacting an awareness strategy, you need to grab as much of that 33% that you can out of each one of these components so that your total effort can add up to as close to 100% as possible. None of these are ever gonna be a perfect 100%, but we want this visual in your mind and I want this pie in your mind because then when you are looking at different opportunities, you're able to gauge, hey, is this a good idea for an awareness strategy or not? How many theoretical points can I score from this opportunity?
That's what we're going through with this awareness pipe. Since awareness is so important and you have to have so much impact, we want to be able to have a gauge of is this a good idea or not, this thing that I'm about to do to try to go and meet people. And if you understand these three equal components, then you have a way of grading this out when you're making decisions about what you're gonna do for your marketing.
So let's talk about the three equal components. I'm gonna tell you what they are first so that we can build that pie together in our minds, and then I'm gonna break down each one individually and talk to you a little bit about it. So if we're looking at our visual and we have these empty three equal buckets, what are we gonna fill them with? The first one is gonna be what you say. And remember, I'm gonna break these down for you individually, but first we're just gonna fill in the buckets. So of our awareness pie, the first piece is what you say.
Second piece, who you say it to. And the third piece is going to be something I call the strength of the trust transfer. And those are the three buckets that we need to care for each of those three components, again, has 33.3334% of the pie and you want to maximize your take of each of these three buckets when you are doing any kind of awareness activity. So let's break down what they mean. The first bucket, what you say. This sounds simple enough, but when you are enacting a relationship marketing strategy, how you meet people and what you say when you meet them is really important.
And why it's important is because you need to say something that's gonna have an impact on them. You cannot be generally useful. That's the comparison I always use. A lot of traffic marketing is generally useful. It's the top 10 lists or think about these things or it's just information that you can quickly Google. It doesn't maybe present a point of view. It just describes something and it's generally useful information. You do not want to do that. You want to say something that's gonna have some impact.
How do I think of something having some impact? I think of something that's going to productively haunt people. And what do I mean by productively haunt people? I mean you want something that people aren't gonna be able to get out of their minds and if they don't act on it right away, you want them to come back and remember it every time they're doing the opposite of what you want them to do. For example, when I'm out relationship marketing and I'm talking about relationship marketing, what am I gonna do? I'm going to productively haunt people about the fact that relationship marketing exists because it is likely when they meet me that they have never heard of that concept.
And they are probably off traffic marketing not knowing that there's anything else that they should be doing but they're very frustrated that their traffic marketing isn't working. So I'm gonna show up and I'm gonna say, hi, did you know that relationship marketing is a thing? And I'm gonna describe it and I'm gonna talk about why it's aligned for service providers and creatives and other businesses whose business models are aligned with relationship marketing. And then I'm gonna say, and so if you have been churning out a bunch of content and you have been frustrated because you have been seeing diminishing returns from that, guess what, it's probably because your business model is aligned with relationship marketing and you should consider using relationship marketing instead. That is saying something that is not generally useful. That is saying something that is going to productively haunt folks because I promise you that if they leave that room having not quite bought in yet, the next week they're gonna be churning out their content and churning out their traffic marketing and they're gonna not get any results from it and guess who they're gonna remember?
They're gonna remember me talking about relationship marketing. Every time they don't take action on relationship marketing and go back to their traffic marketing habits and it doesn't work, they're gonna remember me and that's what we need you to do when we're talking about what you say. It needs to be something that's gonna productively haunt folks. So that is bucket number one, what you say. Bucket number two, who you say it to. This sounds obvious.
Obviously you need to say it to people who would be interested in your services. However, easier said than done. It can be really easy to not actually do this and it can be easy to get sloppy and to go on any podcast that's out there or to go speak to any group who might have you. But instead, if you're relationship marketing and you are looking to have an impact, you need to be very intentional, aggressively intentional with your actions and making sure you're getting in front of audiences who really need your information and not just any audience that is available to you. We do this. I talk about this in the Networking That Pays course.
This is why I'm so adamant about building a great network of the people who already have access to your audience members of building things I call ideal connection avatars because that allows you to make sure you are getting in front of the right people that who you are saying it to is correct. And that is, again, so, so, so important when we're looking at this relationship and this awareness pie that we're trying to fill in. So who you say it to is the second component. Third component, strength of the trust transfer. What the heck does this mean? I've talked about it before here, but let's talk about it again.
The trust transfer is how you are introduced to the folks, right? So that you can say the thing that has impact because in awareness, if you may have noticed, I want you to get off of your platforms. I don't want people to meet you by coming across your content somewhere. I want you out in the world speaking or getting interviewed or being introduced to people. I want there to be an intermediary in the mix. I want there to be somebody who already has a relationship with the audience that you're looking for to be introducing you to that audience. Because what happens when that happens? There's a trust transfer.
What is a trust transfer? A trust transfer is when whoever the audience already trusts says, hey, look at this person. They're really smart and they're about to tell you something important. Listen up. Because what happens then? The trust that the audience already has in that person or that institution transfers to you. And you don't have to earn it on your own. You get the benefit of the doubt. You can lose it on your own, but you're going to get the benefit of the doubt. There's going to be some trust that's transferred over to you initially that you can build on.
So an example of this would be if you go on a podcast, you want to build a relationship with that podcast host so that when the podcast host introduces you, they don't just rattle off some generic introduction and instead they say, hey, listen, Michelle Warner is about to come on this show and she is going to say something that is going to rattle your brain and you're just going to be amazed by it. It's going to be such a great insight for you. And then the audience is going to be bought in because they already trust the podcast host and the podcast host just told them to trust you. So that's the trust transfer. We want a trust transfer to happen so that when you say the thing that you need to say, they're listening to you and they're giving you the benefit of the doubt and they're trusting it. So those are our three pieces of the pie when we're talking about how do you pull off a relationship marketing awareness strategy?
How do you do a good job of meeting people with enough impact to kick off a successful relationship marketing funnel? That's how you do it. You fill in as many points as you can in the awareness pie. And again, what are the pieces of the awareness pie? There are three equal pieces. Number one is what you say.
You need to say something that's going to productively haunt folks. Number two is who you say it to. You need to be ruthless in making sure you are saying it to the right audience. And you need to make sure that that audience is not one that you've gathered. You want to go get in front of an audience that is already gathered somewhere so that you can gain a trust transfer from whoever has gathered that audience. Who does that audience already trust?
And that is how you pull off an awareness pie. And so when you have an opportunity that comes in front of you, you can use this to your benefit. And you can get out your awareness pie and you can say, hey, how many theoretical points is this opportunity going to get me? And you can tally them up. You can say, how much trust transfer am I going to get? Am I going to get 31 points of a trust transfer out of 33 or am I going to get 20? How good is the audience? Again, am I going to get 15 points because it's just an okay audience or is this an amazing audience and I'm going to get 32 points? How good is my message for them? How much do I know that I have a message that has impact? Do I get 20 points for my message or do I get 28 points? And then you can add those points up and you can have a hypothetical idea of how good of an opportunity this is.
And yeah, I wish that the math could be perfect, but this is still a really great gut check that you can use to make sure that you're looking at an opportunity that has some potential. And I can tell you that if you can score something with 70 theoretical points out of those 100, it's probably going to be a really great opportunity for you. If you can find 50 to 70 points, it's going to be an opportunity that's probably worth it, especially if you're in experimentation mode. And if it's under 50 points, it's probably not worth your time. And that's how we think about kicking off a relationship funnel and having awareness with impact is we play with this awareness pie and we say, what are we going to say and spend a lot of time figuring that out, right? Again, you can't say something that's just generally useful.
You need to take the time to understand how to say that something that is going to have that impact is going to productively haunt folks. Who exactly needs to hear it? That's the who you say it to. And then the strength of the trust transfer. How can you network? How can you build relationships with folks who are already talking to, already own audiences full of the people that you have just identified that you need to be saying this message to?
That's how you do it. It's no mistake once you hear this awareness pie, it's no mistake that I offer networking that pays because networking that pays is a skill set that you can learn so that you have that trust transfer and you can build access to these audiences that you need, right? This is why I care so much about networking.
This is also why I run the relationship funnel boot camp of designing that relationship funnel because we spend a good half of that boot camp on this awareness stage because the other stages of marketing that come after it, the engagement stage and the sales stage, those are important but they're not nearly as important as getting this awareness right. So my friends, that is how you piece together an awareness strategy for your relationship marketing funnel. And if you couldn't tell and I have no idea how you wouldn't be able to, this is one of my main goals as my business is to get the word out about relationship marketing because I just think so many people need to know about it.
So if you are someone who is ready to get serious about building your relationship marketing strategy and you want to get your hands dirty with me and figuring out what you should say and who you should say it to and how you're going to build relationships that build trust transfers, I highly encourage you to check out my build your relationship funnel boot camp. You can read more about that at https://www.themichellewarner.com/relationshipbootcamp.com. I've been teaching it for over two years now and we have so many folks who have turned their businesses around by diving in with me and really understanding the nuances of this awareness strategy along with the engagement and the sales strategies and really understanding how to piece together this relationship funnel in a way that works for their business.
So please check it out again at https://www.themichellewarner.com/relationshipbootcamp.com and you can even jump on the wait list there so I can let you know when the next session is open for registration because if you want to get into relationship marketing and really understand how it works, I would absolutely love to work with you on it.