Getting Your Customers to Say "Yes" - Neuroscience and Business with Natalie Franke of Rising Tide Society
Episode 001: Show Notes
Natalie Franke, the founder of Rising Tide Society is joining us today on The Strategy Hour Podcast. Many of you may be surprised to find out that Natalie is a huge neuroscience nerd and uses this background to strategically make decisions in her business. She sharing how you can take cues from neuroscience and psychology to communicate with your clients and customers, form your message on your website and social media, grow your audience and more.
Natalie also shares why Rising Tide Society was built, how quickly it grew and how Natalie even became interested in the nerdy stuff. We’re super excited for you to see an entirely new part of Natalie and take these strategies that she shares to tweak some pieces in your business.
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The Rising Tide Mission
The Rising Tide Society was born out of a dinner conversation and a glass of wine. However, not many know the secret that it wasn’t quite so much a glass of wine as it was a bottle of tequila! But, as Natalie says, we will just leave that bit in the past where it belongs. In conversations with entrepreneurial friends, she found that they often ended up discussing the loneliness of entrepreneurship and started sharing about the struggles that they faced as small business owners and talking about how hard it could be at times. They quickly realized that if they felt this way, surely other people did as well, and so Rising Tide Society was born.
The Science of How People Work
Natalie is the daughter of a nurse practitioner and a nuclear engineer, and recently found out that she is actually a total nerd at heart — nerd alert! She feels that neuroscience has a huge influence on your abilities as a communicator, and can literally be boiled down to the science of how people work. While Natalie was in the Visual Studies Program at Penn, she also decided to focus on the Science of Seeing to study how our brains interpret the world around us and how our experiences impact what we feel when we see art or experience imagery. Natalie started implementing the strategies and techniques that she’d learned about at Penn in her own business, and saw some pretty radical results.
Using Neuroscience to Grow Your Business
Applying neuromarketing tactics in your business isn’t exactly rocket science, though it may sound that way. One of the simplest things you can do is to show your face. Having a clear and distinct profile image that you use across all of your media channels and on your website can help others recognize your brand using their fusiform face area of the brain, which is dedicated to recognizing faces. In a sea of saturation, where there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers, photographers, writers, and creatives, the one thing that will distinguish you is who you are. The more clients and customers see your face, the more their trust and recognition is built, and suddenly you are no longer just a brand, you are a person.
Marketing to the Female Brain
The female brain and the male brain are distinctly different on a biological level. Because of the corpus callosum, the female brain has four times more connections between the two hemispheres than the male brain. This plays a large part in everything from multitasking to ultimately how women make decisions. Natalie shares how the female brain makes decisions not just rationally, but also emotionally. So, instead of using just one hemisphere of the brain to determine something, women use both. Your marketing should reflect this difference.
Knowing When To Grow Your Business
As a business owner, when you are first starting out, there are many hats to be worn. So how do you know when it is time to grow the team? Well, Natalie feels that most business owners just know, and that it is an instinct that kicks in. When you start hitting a point where you are no longer the best fit for any given role and your business requires something different for that role, then it is time. The minute you go above your turning point, you will start to see that if you do not make the appropriate changes, you will burn out! When it comes to building a community, the same thing applies. You recognize the needs of your community, and once they exceed what you are able to offer, you have to figure out a solution — often, this means bringing somebody else on to help.
Automation Hacks For Your Business
One of Natalie’s top favorite hacks for automating your business is to bring contributors on to help create blogging content. Running the blog full-time was a big pain point for the RTS, so they started using Submittable to get external blog content creators to add to the team. Her next tip is to schedule social media posts in advance. Although this may seem inauthentic, you can keep your brand transparent by connecting with your audience through Snapchat or Instagram stories to give them the raw, real, behind-the-scenes relationship.
The Motivation Behind Transparency
Natalie and her team at RTS have often opened their social media accounts up to members of the community to “take over” for the day. The first question that comes to mind is, how do they prevent this from going terribly wrong? Well, the honest answer is that, at some point, it WILL go terribly wrong. When something bad happens, the best strategy is to just own the situation and step into it. Next, recognize that in five minutes everyone will have already forgotten the mishap. It all comes down to being willing to learn lessons in growth, and to continue to be a trailblazer because it is in our blood as entrepreneurs and creatives.
Quote This
Community over competition isn’t just a hashtag, we need to actually live it.
—Natalie Franke
Highlights
Discover how The Rising Tide Society was started, and their mission behind the community. [0:03:18.3]
Find out how Natalie uses neuroscience to understand how people work, in her business. [0:05:55.4]
Learn about the neuromarketing strategies you can implement today to grow your business. [0:08:44.5]
Understand what it means to market to the female brain, and how it is different from a male’s brain. [0:12:33.7]
Discover how to recognize the tipping point in knowing when to start expanding your business. [0:20:28.5]
Learn Natalie’s top automation hacks to implement in your business today. [0:23:35.1]
What is RTS’s motivation behind business transparency, and how have they navigated through the challenges? [0:27:03.6]
Learn how to manage the physical limitations of the technology and social media. [0:30:06.6]
#TalkStrategyToMe:
Strategically, make sure you’re in alignment with your business. So that means taking the time to really identify who you’re building this for, who your ideal customer is, and then strategically aligning everything from how you communicate to them, what imagery you select.
Fail quickly. Just do it, fail fast.
Have the courage to step forward and do what you want with your life.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Natalie Franke Hayes
Rising Tide Society & HoneyBook
Website | Instagram | Facebook
Natalie Franke Hayes is a photographer, educator, speaker, and Founder of the Rising Tide Society. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Visual Studies and a concentration in Visual Neuroscience and the Psychology of Seeing. Natalie lives in San Francisco, CA with her high school sweetheart and serves as the Head of Community for HoneyBook.
KEY TOPICS
Neuroscience, Align with your customer, Rising Tide Society, Team communication, Having a “what if” attitude about your business, Failing, Competition, Innovation, Helping others
