Today we are talking about the art of the follow-up. You’ve pitched your service and the potential client is either ghosting you, being passive-aggressive, or fighting against the process you want to put them through. This can be a very strange experience and sometimes prospects convert with quite a lot of resistance. Closing a prospective client happens in the follow-up process, and a lot of us struggle with that phase. Today’s episode gives you some examples of what you can say and do to confidently and effectively follow up with your leads. We’re tackling what a proper follow-up is and how to handle hearing ‘no’.

We’ve been alluding to all of our secret projects in the works for months now but haven’t yet spilled. We are simply dying to talk about the behind-the-scenes projects we’ve been working on, and you can expect an official announcement before this month’s end! Because we’re so close to announcing it, we thought we’d go ahead and let you in on a few of our secrets.

We’ve been working with clients for seven years now, and the past year has seen a bit of a shift. As you know, we’ve been banging on about refocusing on working with fewer clients and dipping our toes back into the service side of things, and now that we have an accountable team of individuals with their own niche set of superpowers, we can! For the first time ever, we have a team that is not just there to support us in project management or client communication, but on deliverables, and it’s truly expanded the scope of what we can offer.

In this episode, you’ll hear about our evolution over the past seven years and get some insights into what we finally have the bandwidth to offer. If you’re looking to build a stable foundation for years to come and 10x your investment, you’ve come to the right place. We’re here to help you!

The current market is shifting. There’s no doubt about it. What do you think the future of marketing looks like online? Maybe we’re at the next stage of marketing, and the next iteration hasn’t revealed itself yet. A lot of the things that people consider ‘marketing’ may not even be helpful for the majority of service-based business owners. For the majority of you, marketing is a huge distraction! It’s also an ego-killer.

If you’ve been dipping your toe into the ad space lately, you would have been hearing that a lot has changed. Although people say that every year and the changes are usually not so significant, this year is different; because of some really big Apple changes, the game kind of did change, and we now have to think about a whole lot of new things when it comes to paid advertising. In this episode, we are joined by Tony Rulli, co-founder of the digital marketing agency, Intentional Spark.

Today, Tony is going to be going over what those changes actually mean for marketers and advertisers, and he’s going to share his best recommendations for how to not necessarily combat those changes (because you can’t really) but how to still get the information that you need to sell your product or service.

We have the best thing since sliced bread to share with you. Big, big, big news. We are beyond excited. For the first time ever (note the sarcasm), we are giving more value to our members and our students because we love you and are obsessed with your success. It should come as no surprise to anyone that we just want to continue to see you improve your results. We are constantly looking at our programs and our offers to identify how we can help you be more successful, how we can arm you with the tools, strategies, and systems to be the most effective you can be. And we have been taking a good, long, hard look at everything we have done inside The Creative Template Shop, and we love it. It's not changing. All of that is staying AND it's growing and becoming even better!

We run ads for everything under the sun, and we have for a long time. Something we did very early on was make a conscious decision to not look at the comments on ads because sometimes there are just troll-type comments, and we don’t need to leave our headspace there. Funnily enough, Abagail’s husband is our ad comment moderator, so it is very rare for us to see a negative comment. But, for some reason, the other day, Emylee was scrolling one of our new Creative Template Shop ads, which is so beautiful and cute. The ad contains our slogan which we have been using for over a year. Emylee was compelled to look at the comment, which was along the lines of, “Oh, so that’s all that marketing is, is beautiful graphics? That's not all that marketing is, so it’s weird that you say that.” The specifics of the comment aren’t that important, but we do want to have a conversation not only about what marketing is, but what marketing means to two visual artists, and why we have our Creative Template Shop slogan, which was very intentional. We believe that it’s something that really makes our business stand out from anything else that we see out there.

Today on the show, we have Monica Schrock, who is cautiously optimistic and is an introverted copywriter who works as a marketing consultant. She has a mean coffee habit and a serious nerd streak. She revels at the intersection between intention and strategy, hoping to make the world a better place one word at a time. Monica has spent the last 14 years navigating the extroverted field of marketing, helping 200 clients craft their brand message and increase their sales from double to over ten times. We are talking about all the tips and tricks she has learned on that journey on the show today.

So, if you resonate as a fellow introverted entrepreneur, who started their business to maybe escape ever having to talk to anyone again, and then realizing that you have to do that in order to make sales, put your offer out there, and grow your business, this episode is for you. We are talking about how to set boundaries, how to schedule (or not schedule) your week in a way that fits your personality so that you can actually get stuff done without feeling guilty and feel like you’re putting marketing and sales messaging out there that doesn’t make you feel icky.

Today on the show we have Dr. Lindsay Padilla, Founder of Hello Audio, a SaaS product that lets users easily create private audio feeds their customers can listen to anywhere, anytime! She has been building this SaaS product from the ground up. It has been fascinating to watch from the sidelines and we are excited for you guys to dive in. For the first half of this episode, Lindsay gives us a true, honest, behind-the-scenes look at everything it takes both mentally and logistically to build a software. Everything that she wanted to create from the hole she saw in the market of audio and how course creators can deliver amazing content to their students and how Lindsay could make that happen.

She talks about breaking down barriers in a male-dominated space, learning things in the tech space, raising money, deciding to bootstrap or not, and everything in between. And then at the end of the episode, we talk about what Hello Audio actually is and how you as a service-based business owner, online course creator, educator, could use this platform to better your customer experience and to add more value. You get a peek into the stuff that Abagail and Emylee have been thinking about doing in their business and ideas for what you can use in your own one to help you grow and create an amazing experience for the people you already have.

Today our guest is Jennifer Turner, the founder of Gemini where she helps online business owners improve their copywriting and design to create higher conversion rates. Gemini is an online branding and education platform and Jennifer is the rare combination of a trained copywriter and designer! Their MO is unifying a business' voice in the copy and design to tell a stronger story. We love it! Today we will be focussing solely on the copy side of things and how to get your up to scratch!

We are super excited for Jennifer to dive into her four-step formula for high converting copy and it is honestly one of the best formulas we have found in a long time! These kinds of frameworks can sometimes put you in a box or make you sound a bit robotic and this one is a really cool way to insert your story and your audience's story while coming up with something that gets your conversion rate all the way up! This can be used for freebies, opt-ins or paid services and programs, it can be applied in those areas just as effectively, that's how versatile it is, so get your notes ready and let's get into some strategy!