How to build a community of fans for your business

In today’s episode of the podcast I talk about building a community and how you can build a community that loves you and wants to buy from you.

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

 

Be authentic – Be yourself. The way you are online should be the same as how you are in real life. You can’t be anyone else.Not everyone is going to like you and that is OK!By being authentic you will attract the right people for you.Be inclusive – everyone is welcome. Be proactive about showing this.Be consistent – people need to know you are there. Inconsistency can put doubt in your community’s mind.Earn trust – if someone is going to invest time and energy into you, they need to trust you. To earn trust, you need to show up in your community.Don’t let people down – if you say you are going to do something, you need to make sure you do it.Add value to your community – you are going to have to give away some information/support for free.Give your community a reason to engage.Listen to what your community has to say and ask lots of questions.When you have an audience – do things to delight them! Make them feel special and make it exclusive.

 

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

 

Love your community because they are choosing to support you and keep coming back. They deserve to be made to feel special.

 

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN’T MISS

 

Why building a community is so important 05:13How to build your community 07:25

 

RESOURCES MENTIONED

 

Create Your Dream Business Bootcamp

Inclusivity in marketing podcast episode

 

Transcript

 

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? So I am batching ahead again. Someone asked me the other day, how I've managed to do all the things like the podcast and the emails.

And this is how, cause I batch ahead because I sit and do a number of podcasts at once and then they're all ready for the upcoming weeks. And obviously, I have an amazing team that helps me and as I speak, it's actually a Sunday. I don't normally work on a Sunday if I can help it. Although I don't mind working on a weekend, it's actually quite nice when no one needs you or you haven't got to speak to anybody. You can just sit down and crack on. But I'm going away hopefully next week, uh, for a break, which honestly, I cannot wait. I just, I'm praying nothing happens between now and then, like COVID stuff, but yes, I'm hoping that by the time you're listening to this, which is in a couple of weeks, I might still be on a beach somewhere.

Fingers crossed. Anyway, this week, I want to tell you about a couple of things. First thing is the bootcamp is back. I am very excited about the bootcamp. I love doing it last time. I've made some tweaks and improvements added a few different things, shortened it up a little bit, and it's going to be awesome.

It's going to be so so good. So basically the bootcamp is a four-day session with me. That sounds like we're literally going to do it at four days solid as in we'll meet every day, four days, day one, we're going to do a workshop about what does your dream business look like? Because when we talk about creating your dream business, I'm I kind of hate saying it, cause it sounds a bit like, "Oh so I can work on a beach with my laptop." And actually not everyone wants that.

Not everyone wants a six figure launch. Not everyone wants an online business. Not...

In today’s episode of the podcast I talk about building a community and how you can build a community that loves you and wants to buy from you.

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

 

Be authentic – Be yourself. The way you are online should be the same as how you are in real life. You can’t be anyone else.Not everyone is going to like you and that is OK!By being authentic you will attract the right people for you.Be inclusive – everyone is welcome. Be proactive about showing this.Be consistent – people need to know you are there. Inconsistency can put doubt in your community’s mind.Earn trust – if someone is going to invest time and energy into you, they need to trust you. To earn trust, you need to show up in your community.Don’t let people down – if you say you are going to do something, you need to make sure you do it.Add value to your community – you are going to have to give away some information/support for free.Give your community a reason to engage.Listen to what your community has to say and ask lots of questions.When you have an audience – do things to delight them! Make them feel special and make it exclusive.

 

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

 

Love your community because they are choosing to support you and keep coming back. They deserve to be made to feel special.

 

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN’T MISS

 

Why building a community is so important 05:13How to build your community 07:25

 

RESOURCES MENTIONED

 

Create Your Dream Business Bootcamp

Inclusivity in marketing podcast episode

 

Transcript

 

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? So I am batching ahead again. Someone asked me the other day, how I've managed to do all the things like the podcast and the emails.

And this is how, cause I batch ahead because I sit and do a number of podcasts at once and then they're all ready for the upcoming weeks. And obviously, I have an amazing team that helps me and as I speak, it's actually a Sunday. I don't normally work on a Sunday if I can help it. Although I don't mind working on a weekend, it's actually quite nice when no one needs you or you haven't got to speak to anybody. You can just sit down and crack on. But I'm going away hopefully next week, uh, for a break, which honestly, I cannot wait. I just, I'm praying nothing happens between now and then, like COVID stuff, but yes, I'm hoping that by the time you're listening to this, which is in a couple of weeks, I might still be on a beach somewhere.

Fingers crossed. Anyway, this week, I want to tell you about a couple of things. First thing is the bootcamp is back. I am very excited about the bootcamp. I love doing it last time. I've made some tweaks and improvements added a few different things, shortened it up a little bit, and it's going to be awesome.

It's going to be so so good. So basically the bootcamp is a four-day session with me. That sounds like we're literally going to do it at four days solid as in we'll meet every day, four days, day one, we're going to do a workshop about what does your dream business look like? Because when we talk about creating your dream business, I'm I kind of hate saying it, cause it sounds a bit like, "Oh so I can work on a beach with my laptop." And actually not everyone wants that.

Not everyone wants a six figure launch. Not everyone wants an online business. Not everyone wants a huge team. The first workshop we do is to really work out. What is it you want for your business? How do you want your business to look? Because then what you can do is you can kind of get off that rat race of trying to compete with other people or think your business isn't good enough if you don't have X, Y, Z, when actually that might be important to them, but that's not important to you.

That's the first thing we're going to do on workshop one on the first day. The next day on the Tuesday, we're going to be doing workshop two, which is looking at how do you get to that dream business. Now we know what you want. What steps can you start to take to get you there? And what plan do you need to put in place then on the Wednesday, we're going to have a coaching call.

So these are the calls I do within my Academy. And it's when anybody can join me and they can ask me anything about their business. And if I was to ask my Academy members, what was the best thing about the Academy? They would probably say a coaching call. You get to literally pick my brains. You get to ask me a question, I'll give you a direct answer back and we do this on Zoom and we do this via a conversation because the fact that normally if you come to me and any good person coaching mentoring. You should be the same. If you come to me and said, "Teresa, should I do this?" I've got about five questions back at you before I can give you the advice that I think is the most suitable. So we've got that on the Wednesday. And then on the Thursday, we're going to finish off with a workshop session on mindset.

Because great if you know what you want to do, know where you want to go, but if your mindset is not in the right place, it's so, so key. If you just think I can't do this, who do I think I am? And all those other horrible things that kind of eat away at us, then basically, you know, that's not going to help you. You could have the best plan and blessed best strategy in the world.

You're never going to do it. That's what we're doing on Thursday. We'll have a celebration party. There's going to be competitions or the prize is worth over $1,400. So it's a great prize. There's going to be other amazing things along the way. We always have a great sense of community in that. So it's going to be awesome.

So if you've not already signed up, please do so it's teresaheathwareing.com/bootcamp. And I will see you in there. I'm very excited. Okay. So this is kind of like fits well with today's discussion because today we're going to be talking about building a community. And how you build a community that loves you or a community that wants to hear from you or wants to buy from you or gives you something. Like how many people have had a Facebook group where no one talks, no one ever says nothing and he feels like you're pulling teeth. So today I want to talk about how do we build a great community. And it's really nice.

Like I said, we're talking about the bootcamp and then I'm talking about this because one of the things I am complimented on a lot is how amazing my members are. Every time we have a guest speaker come in. When we do our online events SOAR and the lovely Biz Paul presents it. He has said to me on so many occasions, he can't get over what an amazing community we have. How amazing the people are. How supportive they are. How genuine they are. How there's no, like sometimes there's yeah, I've been in communities where it feels either clicky or it feels like not engaging. No one's bothered everyone's out for themselves. And honestly like it, I am just in awe that my community is so amazing. And I was really lucky the other day that I was talking to someone about it, who who's in the community.

And I was like, how amazing, how like these people are phenomenal. And she turned right into me. She went "Teresa you do know it's because of you, don't you." And I was just like, no, whatever. She was like, no, seriously, the reason you have a great community is because of you. And I just thought, and I was completely touched, but, but honestly, in everything we do, so last time we ran the bootcamp, I was looking back at some of the kind of comments in the group and it was all like, this is amazing.

These people are amazing. Love this group, love this community. Build my list whenever we do that, again, loads of amazing comments about the community and whatever, and it's brilliant. I love it. So I thought let's kind of pull apart why I think I've got a nice community and how you can build that community too for your business.

And, and you may be thinking, well, I don't want to build a membership or I don't want to build a Facebook group and that's fine. A community isn't that. A community, I'm part of the Apple community. Cause I love everything Apple have to sell me and I buy pretty much everything Apple has to sell me. It's not just a community when you're trying to build like a membership or a Facebook group, it's about your customers.

It's about what are you putting out there? It's about you. Like, you're listening to my podcast. You may not have even ever followed me on social media. You might not have even opted into one of my emails. It just might be that you are listening to the podcast, but you're part of my community. So what are some of the things that we can do and and how you do it?

So I've got a little list of things that I think are important to me and how I build my communities. Firstly, I think I ever in my intention was never like, oh, I'm going to build this great community. I'm doing this kind of afterwards. I've managed to put together this phenomenal group of people in every kind of, part of my business that I have.

And now I'm looking back to think, "Well, what did I do? And how did I do that?" So it wasn't I ever set out to be amazing at this. Um, and I'm definitely not saying I'm amazing at it. You know, I'm doing all right. So I thought I'd share it. So the first thing I think that I've done is I've been entirely authentic.

I have people meet me and they're like, oh my God, you're just the same. And it's like, yeah, I'm just me. Like, this is who I am, how I am on the podcast, how I am on my bootcamp when I'm doing free training. When I'm in the academy, when I'm at an event, I'm exactly the same. And the reason is so important to be completely yourself is because you can't be anybody else and not everyone's going to like you and that's okay.

And do you know what, that was a really hard thing for me to get my head round, like I'm a people pleaser. I like to be liked. I mean, who kind of doesn't really, but, and so for me in the early days, I wanted everybody to like me. I wanted everyone to want to be part of what I did or be a client or recommend me or whatever it was.

But the truth is they're not going to, like, you could be the most amazingly beautiful person in the world and kind and generous, and someone is still going to go "You're not for me." So that's okay. But the reason being authentic is so important is because you're only going to attract the right people.

When I look at all my members, my students, people listen to the podcast. There is definitely a theme of the type of person I attract. And that's because I am being authentically me. Now, there are people, like I said, who will listen to a podcast, who will hear me on someone else's and think "This woman is an idiot. Not for me." And that's all right. That's okay. I'm not for them. But then there are people that listen to it and go, "Oh yeah, I love this. I love how she talks about it. I love what she does." So being you and do not apologize for it, don't try and hide it. Don't try and match yourself to someone else. Just turn up as you.

And I think that's so, so important. I don't ever think, you know, when I talk about community again, it's not just in the group. It's not just in my Academy. It's on every single thing I do. I am just me and I act like me. Um, the next thing is be inclusive. Okay. So it's never been a case of these types of people are welcome in my community.

Not at all. Everybody's welcome. And when I talk about being inclusive, there's some great episodes I've done about inclusivity and marketing. So if you haven't heard them go and listen to them, but it's simple as things like, you know, make sure that every type of person you deal with is represented, is seen on your marketing, on your social media, make sure that you are really, really kind of proactive about showing that about showing that anybody in any walk of life is welcome in your world. Again, you know, cause I don't want to trap people who don't want to be inclusive, so that's fine. So as long as I am inclusive to people who are quite frankly, not for me, uh, will not join my community.

And that is absolutely fine. So being inclusive is really important, authentic the other kind of key one and then I've got some other good ones to, to talk more specifically about the community and building that is being consistent. Like, people need to know that you are there. So if one day they come to your social media and you're like, I'm on stories.

I'm talking in the DMS, I'm doing all this stuff. And then suddenly three weeks later, there's nothing. And you haven't been around for two weeks. That inconsistency is going to put some doubt in their mind that you can not be trusted. That's not the right word, but if they're going to invest time in, you know, their time in you and their energy in you, are you going to be there.

Also, the other thing that I find and I've seen happen a lot is people pivots. I'm not a big fan of the word pivot. Like if you look back, I have done marketing forever and the flipping day. But don't get me wrong I have tweaked my offering. I have tweaked what I talk about on the podcast. I talk about mindset as well as the marketing side, because I've realized how important that is.

I talk about building a business, running a team because I do all those things. And I know my audience might find that useful. But suddenly I'm not Teresa that is a HR expert or Teresa that that's the tech queen, like I'm just marketing and have always been marketing and business for a long time. And I think sometimes when you see people pivot, so I'm trying to think of a good example, but there's been loads of them and I've seen it so many times where, "Oh, I'm the online course expert."

"Oh, now I tell you how to build a group." "Oh, now I'm doing coaching." "Oh, now I'm doing something else." And like they'll open a group and then they'll close it and they'll start a podcast and then they'll stop it. Like, it just doesn't sit nice. It just makes you think, what are you? Who are you? What are you doing?

And I've seen it so many times. I've seen it so many times where people start something, they don't, they're not consistent at it. They're not kind of, you know, tenacious with thinking, okay, no, one's showing up right now. No, one's paying attention, but I'll just keep going. They then go, this isn't working pivot.

And then those people that they started to attract they're like "Oh, you're not doing that anymore." And they lose that community. That kind of consistency is so, so important. Not only from a turning up point of view, but also consistency of message and what you do. Okay. So one of the other things you need to do when you start building that community, so those are kind of like your baseline stuff, if you like, and this is when you start building in you're, you're getting people into your world is you need to earn their trust.

Now people sometimes think about money when they think about this. It's not that it's like. I don't want to hang around or give my time and energy to people who I don't trust. And when I say I don't trust, it's not like, oh, you're a liar. It's just the fact of, okay, this is what I'm coming for. Is this what I'm getting?

So in order to earn their trust, you need to do things like you need to show up. Again, if I've committed into your community and you stop showing up or you stop engaging, then that kind of eats away at that trust I've bet. Um, and I remember, um, I think it was, uh, Uh, Stephen Covey. I can remember his name then.

Uh, Stephen Covey. I was watching one of his YouTube stuff from ages ago of him doing a talk. And he talked about trust as in like a jar of pebbles. And he basically said, or water or whatever you want to put in the jar. But he basically said like, everyone starts off at a certain level. And the more trust you give them, the more you add, the more you add, the more you add when you take it, you like take double amounts.

So for one pebble, you put in, when some, when you do something that makes you feel that you can trust someone, when I do something that loses your trust, I take out like two, three pebbles, or you'll take out two, three pebbles. So the, every time you do something where you break someone's trust, you remove more of that trust.

And then what happens is you hit a deficit and then basically before they can even trust you again, they need to build back up to a level where was their kind of baseline level. I've probably done a terrible job of explaining it. It's really important to build that trust. Gosh, I didn't know how you guys cope with the enlightingness I give you in these podcast episodes. Hilarious. Okay. So show up. Do, as you say, you're going to do so if you tell people like, again, I had an example the other day where someone was like, they needed some customers, they needed their audience to kind of be, you know, buying from them. So they decided to do a live and then literally hours before they thought, no, I'm not gonna do it.

And it's like, no, you've told people, that's what you're going to do. Now you need to do it. Things like when you set a price. So the Academy, when it opens next week, I think. It's going to open again at $59. And when I closed the doors, the next time it opens next year, it's $97. That's what it's going up to.

Now if I said to you, you can join now for 59 and it will grandfather in ie you'll never pay more than that a month. And then next year when I opened the doors again, it's down at 49. Your trust is lost completely. So I'd never do that. So when I say it's going to go up to 97, it's going up to 97. Whether people buy at that price or not, that's the price it's going to be because I am being completely kind of transparent and honest and open.

So you can trust what I say. It's the same. Whereas like, you know, some people, you just think only if I wait a bit, I'm going to get a deal. That's not building the trust. That's not helping you. Okay. And then don't let people down. Again. Unfortunately. You know, more often than I would like where people say they're going to do something and they don't do it, or they don't get back to you.

So if for me, if you are pitching a client or trying to bring someone new into your community, that needs to be fast as anything. So if I've had an email, if I email someone saying, "Yes I'd like to go ahead with your service." And three weeks later, they haven't emailed me. They're not, I'm not using their service. Because that's a brand new, I'm a brand new client.

I want it to be taken seriously. I want to know that you are going to do what you say you're going to do. So don't let people down. Show up and do, as you say. Okay. The other thing you need to do in this kind of earn trust or the way that you can earn trust is add value. So if people think you are holding back all your information, holding back the best bits, not supporting them, not helping them unless they pay, then that's not going to feel like I can trust you very well.

So at that value, give them that information, support them. So again, I'm just...