In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner emphasizes the pivotal role of engagement strategies in effective marketing.
Have you ever wondered why some marketing campaigns capture attention but fail to convert that interest into sales or lasting relationships? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner emphasizes the pivotal role of engagement strategies in effective marketing. She discusses how businesses often excel at creating awareness but falter when it comes to engaging their audience, which is essential for converting interest into action. Michelle introduces her framework that prioritizes a clear marketing sequence: awareness, engagement, and then sales, stressing that each stage is interconnected.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. And 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, when they need to be centering 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. 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.
In every episode of this show, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business. And today's was a fun one for me. It was submitted by someone asking specifically about engagement strategies.
And when I say engagement strategies, what I mean is the second stage of marketing as I define it. And we'll talk about those definitions in a second. But it's specifically about a strategy I choose to implement in my business, the tiny and strong Q&A roundtable.
So the question is a very direct one. The question was, would you talk a little bit more about what the goal of engagement is and why you use the roundtable format and also how you structure your roundtables? Absolutely. Let's get into it.
So first, let's back all the way up and remind you how I think of marketing. I think of marketing as consisting of three stages. First stage is awareness.
People need to know that you exist. Second stage is engagement. That's the one we'll talk about today specifically.
And that is where folks learn to trust you. And then the third stage is sales. They need to buy something from you.
Now, the interesting thing about engagement and why I think about marketing in these three steps is that engagement is often skipped. And that's why, again, I think it's so important to break it down into step one, step two, step three, and think about the flow that you are bringing somebody through in your marketing. Because I know that there are other marketing ways of thinking, like you need to establish know, like, and trust, or you need to understand when someone is problem aware and solution aware, et cetera.
And those are best practices for a reason. They're not incorrect. But in my 20 plus year career in marketing, they've not helped me figure out what to do and when.
They've not helped me figure out the sequence of things. They've not helped me understand what job to give to my different marketing strategies. And maybe that's just my brain, but I think better when I think in steps, when I think about creating motion, when I think about creating flow. And so instead of what I call kind of an amorphous blob of thinking about, I need to create know, like, and trust. That is true. But again, I don't know in what order to do that. I don't know how to really build that into a flow. It's there. I understand it.
Like there is a flow. Obviously someone know, likes, and trusts you. There's a flow there, but it makes more sense to me to think about it in terms of awareness, engagement, and sales. And then assign tasks to those stages because I can understand what we're trying to accomplish then. So let's talk specifically about this engagement step. Before we get into how I run my engagement strategies, let's talk about what engagement is and why it's a special one to me, especially if you are somebody who is running a relationship funnel.
And the reason it's special to me is because it's one that's often overlooked. When we have kind of this, again, amorphous blob that I like to call marketing, when you're not thinking sequence first, when you are just thinking strategies, we just end up with this cloud of marketing strategies that are somehow supposed to accomplish a know, like, and trust just by somehow the combination of them will somehow magically create that. If people just kind of see you all over the place and then all of a sudden one day they're going to magically know, like, and trust you and be ready to buy from you.
Again, that doesn't work for me. And so we need to separate these things. And when we separate them, because what happens if you're just doing a bunch of strategies is you tend to miss a step, right? You tend to miss the middle.
And a lot of businesses that I work on when the marketing is breaking down, I realize there's no transition. There's no real thoughtful bridge between when somebody meets you and when you're asking somebody to buy from you. There is just more that happens in the middle.
So if they happen to meet you through you speaking to them, or they happen to see a social media post of yours, or however they happen to meet you, then we're just hoping they see more of that. And that somehow bridges the gap to the sale. Instead of specifically saying, okay, what job, what experience do they need in the middle? That's a little bit different than when they met me.
So in order to bridge them, how do we bridge the gap between them meeting me and getting to the sale? And so this is where I think about in terms of engagement is let's think about what needs to happen. What experience do people need to have in order to move from meeting you to being ready to buy from you? And that's just thinking in sequence first, right? How do I start to assign my different marketing strategies, different jobs? And here's the thing about engagement and why you want to think about it separately, is that in that middle step, in order to bridge people, especially if you are running a relationship funnel, is you don't need to give people more information. In fact, that's one of the worst things that you can do.
Instead, you want to help them apply information. So let me give you an example or an analogy, I suppose, of how I think about this. I'm a backpacker and hiker, so I spend a lot of times with trail maps and trying to figure out where I am and making sure I know the route ahead of me.
And this is what I think about when I think about engagement, is that it is a tool that I use or a goal I want to accomplish to help people understand what is the map in front of them. Because in awareness, the first stage of marketing, if I meet people in an impactful way, I am hopefully saying something that is going to stick with them, right? As my friend Tamsyn Webster might say, I'm going to say something that they can't unhear and can't unsee. And if you accomplish that, if you have delivered some sort of aha, when people have met you and that's why you have caught their eye, an instinct might be, especially if you don't separate your marketing strategies, an instinct might be to keep adding information to that.
Whereas instead, what you want to do is help them take a breath. Because if you've just delivered something that they can't unsee and can't unhear, they need to take a breath and go back to that backpacking example and figure out where they are, right? With the gold star on a hiking map or the gold star when you're in Disneyland and says, you are here. We need to help them understand where they are in relation to the information they were just given.
And that is more valuable than adding more information to their plate. So let's use an example from my business. Obviously, I talk about the differences between relationship and traffic marketing a lot.
And I try to bring awareness to the fact that there are different philosophies that you can follow when it comes to marketing. You can be a relationship marketer, you can be a traffic marketer, you can be somewhere in between. Depending on who you're selling to and what you're selling, there are different points that you should be.
When I share this with people who have not heard this concept before, so when I meet people and I share the concept that there's relationship marketing, there's traffic marketing, I tend to get a lot of people for whom that's a big aha. It is a big moment for them to have this understanding and to realize that maybe they have been marketing in the wrong way. And so what could I choose to do? That's the awareness moment.
So then what could I choose to do in engagement? I could choose to just keep talking at them and giving them more information. But you can imagine if you were just delivered a big aha, that's actually overwhelming. You're not ready for more information.
Instead, your brain is trying to process this new information that has just reoriented your world, right? If you've never heard of relationship or traffic marketing, and some of you listening may be able to remember the first time you heard me talking about this and the aha that you had. If you are just hearing that, I don't need to add more to your plate because now your brain is spinning.
And what are you trying to do? You're trying to figure out, wait, have I been screwing this up? Have I been marketing the wrong way? Where am I? How can I reorient myself and understand in this new world, in this new world that includes both relationship and traffic marketing, how can I reorient myself and understand where I'm at and what changes I might want to make? And that's the job of the engagement stage.
The job of the engagement stage is to draw a map to find reality for folks so that they can process the information you delivered to them at the awareness stage. It is not to start launching into solutions for them. It is not about adding more information that's just going to muddy the waters even more while they're trying to process this thing.
It is to help them stop and breathe at the trailhead or in the middle of Disneyland or wherever you are when you're a little overwhelmed and you're not sure where you're at, and to say, you are here. Let's stop and pause and help you figure out where to put your star. Let's help you figure out how to say, you know, you are here.
And so in a strict world where I'm only talking to people who have just had an aha about relationship or traffic marketing, what will I do in engagement? I will bring them in and I'll get out the continuum of relationship versus traffic marketing and we'll talk through it. And I'll have everybody plot the marketing strategies they're using on that continuum so that they can see, are they relationship or traffic marketing right now and what should they be doing? And if they plot all of their strategies and they realize they have a bunch of them on the traffic side, but their product mix and their customer are better aligned with the relationship side. Now they understand that there is something that they can do.
They have a project in front of them. They can see what they need to create. Maybe they can see what they need help with in that they need to shift their marketing strategies over to the relationship side.
And this, by the way, is what happens when you don't center a sequence over strategy, right? Is you just choose a bunch of marketing strategies without considering where they are on continuums first. And so you end up with a bunch that may be incorrect and maybe on the wrong place between relationship and traffic. So if I can take you in the engagement stage and say, okay, you just learned about the existence of this continuum between relationship and traffic marketing.
Let's pause and plot where you're at right now and think about whether that is right for your business or not. That is very valuable because I've just drawn them a map. I've just defined their reality.
And so then if we need to have a sales conversation next about how I might help them change, they're very clear on what changes they might need to make. If they just plotted a graph and they plotted on the continuum that their business is aligned with relationship marketing and all their marketing strategies are currently traffic, that becomes an easier sales conversation for me because they understand where they're at. They can see it visually.
And that is the job of engagement is to help everybody pause, process the information that they learned at awareness and figure out in some visual way to plot that and to understand their reality, understand what their next steps are so that we can talk about whether you are a solution for that or not. So it is not adding more information. I don't start telling people how to do things and it's not because I'm trying to hold back information.
It's because I know that that's overwhelming and that's not serving anyone in the sequence. The steps we need to take are first we need to have an aha. Then we need to breathe and understand how that aha fits with the current reality.
And then we can start talking solutions. So that's what the engagement stage is all about. And that brings me back to the question of, hey, why do you do roundtables and how do you structure them the way that you do and what are you doing there? Well, first off, if you're not familiar with my roundtables, every month I run what I call a tiny and strong Q&A roundtable.
And that's totally free. And I invite anybody in my audience to register for it and to come hang out for an hour. And usually I will present for maybe 10 or 15 minutes on a topic that I see a lot of people struggling with or on a topic that I see is changing in the market.
Just some sort of relevant current event that I think will help everybody. And then we open it up for questions. And those questions, the reason I do it this way is because this is kind of my fully public engagement event.
So people have had different ahas, have had different experiences with me. And so if they are trying to process some of those things, they can come into the roundtable and they can say, help me understand this more. Help me plot where I'm at.
Help me understand what this means for your business. Right. We'll have people come in there and say, I heard this podcast episode.
Help me understand. So they will come in to hear something that I said and they'll come in and ask me to help them apply it to their business. And so even though that's not a specific group of specific people, you know, who just heard me talk about relationship versus traffic marketing. So we may not do that continuum exercise in each of these table talks because I do have a wide range of folks who come. All the folks who come to that table talk are in that engagement stage of interacting with me where they're trying to figure out how to apply what I'm talking about to their business. They're trying to understand what it means for their business.
And that's why I do that, because I don't want people to hear one of these podcast episodes and then be trying to figure out what it means or how to apply it to their business all on their own. I don't want them to hear me talk. I don't want them to hear me interviewed on another podcast and then be left hanging and not have any resources.
And so every month we do that roundtable to make sure that people can come and people can figure out how to apply anything that they may have heard me talking about to their business. So if you come to one of those like, yeah, we'll talk a little bit about strategies and how to do things. But primarily we're talking about getting people back in the right sequence and making sure that they're defining things correctly and making sure that they are, you know, plotting things and defining their reality in the best way possible.
And again, that's why I have the roundtable. There are other ways that you can do this. You know, if I am teaching or I'm speaking to a specific group about a specific thing, I may have a private roundtable just as a follow up to that group.
So, for example, if I'm speaking to a large group about relationship and traffic marketing and I know that they're all going to have that aha and they're going to leave there with their head spinning, trying to figure out how that might apply to them. I will schedule a follow up that looks kind of like my public roundtables, but in this case is just a private follow up for that group. And I'll say, hey, come by next week and let's talk about what this means for your business.
And in that case, I will have a group that is only thinking about relationship versus traffic things. So it won't be an open Q&A about anything and everything I may have talked about, but it will be a specific to relationship and traffic marketing. And we will get out the continuum and we will do an exercise where everybody plots what marketing they're currently doing and what they should be doing so that they can see that delta.
And that's what I'm trying to accomplish in anything that's happening in an engagement event around my business is I am trying to help people apply. I am not trying to add information. The only information that I'm adding is within the context of getting people in a place where they can apply some information and start understanding what it means to their business.
And that's a really key differential again. And at the beginning, I said, hey, people are forgetting to add engagement strategies. And so if you realize that any newsletters that you're writing or anything that you're doing that is talking to people who already know you, if you're realizing that everything that you're doing in those is, you know, adding more content.
We live in a content obsessed world, right? So there's this information sharing that we feel like we need to do and constantly give new information, new information, new information. And if you're realizing right now that that's all you're doing and you're not providing any type of strategies, whether they be, you know, they don't have to be live roundtables like I do. Engagement strategies come in so many different formats.
But if you're not specifically thinking about what are people hearing from you at awareness, and then how am I offering something as the next step to help them apply that and understand that before we get ready for a sales conversation? Then that is something I would challenge you to think about, right? Let's get back to sequence over strategy. Let's throw your marketing strategies out the window right now, or at least just put them to the side. And instead of thinking about how do you do strategy strategy and which strategy should you add? I want you to think about what jobs you're giving those strategies.
So think about which of those strategies you are currently using are accomplishing that awareness. How many of them are getting you in front of new people? Which ones have that job? Then ask yourself the same for engagement. Which of the strategies you are currently using are helping people apply the information that you gave them in awareness? And my guess is a lot of you are going to have a lot of awareness strategies.
And when you think about engagement through this very specific lens of how am I helping people apply that information? It's probably going to be a really big drop. And a lot of you may find that you're not doing anything specifically for engagement. And then it'll bounce back up.
I'll say, what strategies are you using to sell to people? And you'll have a whole bunch of those again. So it's almost like we have a dip curve, right? We have a whole lot of awareness strategies. When I ask you, what are you doing to meet people? You're going to have a bunch for me. Then I'm going to ask you, what are you doing to help people process that information and draw their maps and put their you are here stickers on? You're going to give me a little bit of a blank. Then I'm going to ask you, what are you doing for sales? And you're going to have a whole list for me again. So when we look at those marketing strategies you're currently using, we can't just look at the strategies.
We have to look at the sequence. First question you ask is what jobs am I giving these strategies and what holes in the process, what holes are there in the flow? Because if I don't have enough going on in engagement, I'm going to lose a lot of people. A lot of people won't successfully bridge from that awareness to that sales moment.
And so that's going to be my challenge for you is if a roundtable is right for you, go for it. Play around with that, run one of those. It works really well for me.
But if it's not, the bigger question, the more perfect question, the better question when we talk about sequence over strategy is simply what are you doing for engagement? If I just sat here and taught you how to run a roundtable, well, I would be a hypocrite because what do I say? Sequence over strategy. So it's not about learning how to run a roundtable. If you determine that that is the right strategy, then by all means, go for it.
But the first question you ask is, you know, what are my awareness strategies? What are my engagement strategy? What are my sales strategies? And after this discussion, if you realize you are low in engagement strategies, you are low in opportunities for people to learn how to apply the information that you are teaching them. Well, guess what? There's your challenge. It's your challenge now to think about how you might rethink your marketing in order to add some stronger engagement in there.
Are you up for it? I would love to see it. And listen, if this is leaving you confused, guess what? I would love to see you at the next tiny and strong roundtable. Bring your questions over. Let's help you apply this. Let's help you think through where might there be holes in your strategies. And you can see that free registration will put it in the show notes.
And it's also right on my homepage. You can click on the box that says, you know, register for the free monthly roundtables. Come on over and let's talk this through because it is so important. I don't want you losing leads just because you haven't filled in that middle step. That's no good.
So my friends, to sum up, engagement is a really important piece of your marketing strategy. And if you are just running a bunch of marketing strategies, I need you to stop and pause and get back in your sequence over strategy mindset and say, what are my awareness strategies? What are my engagement strategies? What are my sales strategies? And if your engagement strategies are lacking, I need you to think of ways to add in some tools, whether they be roundtables or something else that are going to help people process the information they gleaned from you during the awareness stage. And by the way, the same is true. If you realize that you're low on awareness strategies or low on sales strategies, we have to fill up those buckets as well. But this question was specifically about engagement. So I wanted to focus here because it is the one that I see folks miss the most. That is the one that is usually an empty bucket when we look at what strategies are in place.
Or if you do feel like you have engagement strategies in place, but now you're realizing that maybe they're just adding information to people instead of helping them apply. How can you tweak those strategies so that you are doing less information overwhelm and more meeting people where they're at, which is usually a little bit of head spinning and a little bit of, oh, whoa, that was a big deal. I don't completely know how it relates to my business, but I need to figure that out.
Be with them in that moment. Help them breathe. Help them figure out how to process that for their business and come up with some ways, some strategies.
Again, maybe it's a roundtable. Maybe it's something else where you can help them process that information so they can draw their map and they can find their you are here sticker to put on their piece of paper, understand where they're at, and then understand where they need to be. And now that's going to be a really interesting, pleasant sales conversation for you to have because everybody's on the exact same page.
You no longer have to try to explain to them the work that they need to do. It's right there on the page for them. And they understand where they're trying to get.
They understand where their deficits are. And you can have a really straightforward conversation about how you may be able to help them. Or maybe you're not a match for them.
Either way, we're fine. But either way, we are seeing that engagement stage do its job for you by filling in that missing hole of helping people process new information as it comes in. And when you can do that, then you're going to have a complete marketing flow.
And again, for me, thinking about that in terms of awareness, engagement, sales makes it so clear and so much easier. The other ones just feel a little ambiguous to me. And if they don't feel ambiguous to you, awesome.
Roll with them. But for me and my clients, it seems to help if we think about awareness, engagement, sales. It just makes the jobs that need to be done so much clearer. All right. So with that, I challenge you again. Go take a look.
Do a little audit of your marketing. Take a look at it. Do your own engagement section right here. Right? Now we've talked through this. Take a stab at it. Assign your marketing strategies to awareness, engagement, sales and let me know what you find.
In the meantime, thank you as always for being here. If you haven't yet done it, please subscribe and even rate the show wherever you're listening because it makes a huge difference in others being able to find it. You can always find me at themichellewarner.com. And again, right there on the homepage, you will see a button to register for the next roundtable.
So if you want to come and talk through your engagement strategies, you want to come and help me help you talk that down to size, please do so. We would love to see you. In the meantime, I will see you back here in two weeks.