How Your Values Shape Your Business Strategy with Lindsay Hotmire
Episode 442: Show Notes
Today on the podcast we have Lindsay Hotmire. She loves to work with female creatives, entrepreneurs, and CEOs to help them discover a non-formulaic version of authenticity. She’s helped over 200 clients and counting ditch the one-size-fits-all formulas and frameworks and helps them genuinely align with their message. In this episode with Lindsay, we break down what being authentic actually means and how to be authentic in a way that feels good for you and with your audience.
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We talk a lot about business values, your core values as a person, and how to not only identify them but then use the results in marketing, branding, messaging, and in your overall strategy to grow your business and sell your product, offer, or service. There are so many examples we talk about today, everything from messaging and Instagram presence to how you build community; so many different ideas! It’s a really good one and we hope you love it!
Figuring Out Who You Are Before Deciding What to Sell and How to Sell It
When it comes to selling your brand online, the words you use carry weight. It feels easy to screw up when you’re looking at that blank page and thus looking for formulas for how to do things is tempting! But Lindsay’s whole approach is about the value of a non-formulaic approach so we get into where that comes from and how it works. She talks about the original purpose of becoming a school teacher in the first place and how it stopped fitting as she gave birth to more of her own children and began to look for another field. She wanted to empower people through language and began to see that this could be done in other fields such as marketing. She discovered copywriting, and in 2014 found herself doing marketing for a small university; in 2016, she decided to go at things alone! This evolved into her focus on the foundational role of identity in marketing. You have to know who you are before you decide what to sell! This is not to say that formulas are not effective, but Lindsay simply believes they should not be the first step. We can see this dynamic of formulaic approaches especially now since the pandemic where everybody seems to have tacked their messaging onto the topic of the fight against coronavirus, and how flat it all seems. Conversely, those whose messaging is still coming from the place where their offering was originally centered around, seem far more real and easy to trust.
Finding Your Worldview: The First Step to Authentic Marketing
We hear about some conversations Emylee has been seeing on her Instagram that feel relevant to what is happening right now around the faux authenticity of beautifully crafted PR versus messaging that is truly from the heart. Chances are if your messaging falls into the first category then it will be falling flat, especially now, and messaging in the latter category should be put to work not just in your stance on human rights or COVID but in how you sell your product too. People find it hard to actually identify their values, let alone how to apply it to their product. Sometimes you might be afraid your core values will deter the types of customers you want if they knew them. So, how do you start finding your values and aligning them with your messaging? Lindsay holds that we all have values and while we might not acknowledge or even be aware of them, they nevertheless direct all we do. We find ourselves living on autopilot where our values are directing us subconsciously. While working with her clients to help them be more authentic, Lindsay begins by helping them drill down on their worldview using three questions: why am I here/where did I come from, what has gone wrong in this respect and how can I fix it? These questions help to flesh out your deeper values and give your worldview clarity. The benefit of having a clear worldview is that it becomes your north star that filters and guides your decisions from a personal and business point of view!
Applying Worldview to Marketing by Experimenting with Strategies Underlined by Values
Abagail shares a great story about how it is OK for a person’s values to change as they grow which leads Lindsay into a great discourse on the difference between strategies and values. This teaching of Lindsay’s also starts to answer the question of how to begin actually applying worldview to marketing once it has been discovered. People often get concerned that they can’t continue to do a certain type of work because it doesn't align with their values but Lindsay’s strategy that distinguishes between values and strategies can be of great help. Jim Collins distinguishes similarly between strategies and values in his book, Good to Great, where values are the anchor underneath everything, and they don’t change. Conversely, strategies are the multiple experiments of trying to play out ways of expressing or living in line with values, and they can change all the time. For Lindsay, authenticity is about defining your values, and then giving yourself the space to experience some tension between values and the strategies that express them, because growth is about experimenting with new strategies to express core values in the hope of finding the best ones. As a coach, being authentic is also about giving students the space to live in this tension, trusting that each strategy is a new experiment in living out core values.
The Authenticity Flywheel and Other Tools for Authentic Marketing
In your efforts to find your values and align strategies to them, it’s important to remember the process won’t happen overnight! This is a gradual process and Lindsay shares some tools to help trust it as it progresses, set it into smaller steps, and compartmentalize it into distinguishable pieces that can be dealt with separately. The first is using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Before the pandemic, many of us were working on the higher segments of this hierarchy because, thanks to the state of the market, the lower bases were covered. Now things are different and understanding that lower needs in the hierarchy are more prevalent can help you on your road to authenticity as well as understand how to fit your product into the needs of your audience without feeling icky about trying to sell it to people who might be looking to fill more fundamental needs. The second tool is Lindsay's authenticity flywheel that breaks authenticity down into four principles. These are finding your values, aligning actions with these values, being honest about the assumptions and biases that your business is based on, and inviting open and honest relationships with your community.
Getting into the Weeds of the Authenticity Flywheel: Community, Honesty, and Reactions vs Responses
Abagail, Emylee, and Lindsay drill down on a few of the implications of the flywheel next, talking about building a community as you scale, being honest with ourselves, and messaging based on response versus reaction. Being authentic and open with your community is easy when your business is still small, but as you grow it becomes harder to devote the time needed to each of your members. Coaching larger numbers at once can help this and as a community member, the job is also partially on you to reach out and show up at the times a business leader or CEO has set aside to connect with their community. Surprisingly few members do this meaning these sessions can be very intimate. Regarding honesty and staying aligned with values, Abagail and Emylee have a good system in place for keeping each other accountable, and it is super important for you to have something like this for yourself. If you don’t ask yourself the tough questions now, somebody might at a later stage and this could be far more disruptive! When it comes to being truly honest, Lindsay recommends asking yourself who you are when nobody else is looking. This can be very revealing and also implies that authenticity doesn’t equate to goodness. Authenticity also doesn’t equate to being completely open on all channels. It is ok to hold back on revealing everything depending on the situation! For the reaction versus response piece, Lindsay defines response as the more appropriate place to deliver messaging from than reaction. The former is a deeper source of lifelong values whereas the latter can feel like something that got conceived in the moment, and this doesn’t come across as being something that was created by someone that was comfortable in their values.
Quote This
Let’s figure out who you are before you can figure out what you can sell.
—Lindsay Hotmire
Highlights
Figuring Out Who You Are Before Deciding What to Sell and How to Sell It. [0:04:48.1]
Finding Your Worldview: The First Step to Authentic Marketing. [0:10:19.4]
Applying Worldview to Marketing by Experimenting with Strategies Underlined by Values. [0:17:53.4]
The Authenticity Flywheel and Other Tools for Authentic Marketing. [0:23:47.4]
Getting into the Weeds of the Authenticity Flywheel: Community, Honesty, and Reactions VS Responses. [0:34:36.4]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:51:46.6]
Slow down and think about what commits you to your world and your market.
Be honest about the way that you’re living out your why versus the way that you conceptualize it.
Learning one’s weaknesses, gifts, and calling by looking at recurring themes in one’s life’s arch.
Immerse yourself in marketing by understanding how the audience sees themselves versus how you imagine them.
Zooming in and zooming out: switching between the big picture of your business and the micro aspects of achieving it authentically.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Lindsay Hotmire
Master message coach and copy expert Lindsay Hotmire loves to work with female creatives, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who know there's nothing formulaic about authenticity. To date, Lindsay has helped 200+ clients (and counting) ditch one-size-fits-all frameworks and formulas – so they can simply and genuinely align their message with their beliefs, their values, and (ever-so-importantly) their audience. Once upon a time (before Google changed the world), Lindsay was a high school English teacher. And while she still gets a bit nerdy over sentence diagrams, she adamantly refuses to take sides on the Oxford comma. These days, she unapologetically geeks out over introducing a little bit of woo to a whole lot of science, and she’s used her intuition, creativity, and slightly dusty math skills to help her clients create $10,000 to $1 M campaigns – all without losing sight of their true, authentic selves. Find her at lindsayhotmire.com or connect with her on Instagram @lindsayhotmire.
KEY TOPICS
Authentic messaging, Business values, Personal core values, Hierarchies of needs, Values and strategies, Value-based actions, Honesty, Community
