IAM2295 – Gresh Highlights the Significance of Authenticity in Engaging with Your Audience

Gresham Harkless discusses the importance of knowing your target market, their evolving needs, and outlines key questions that define business success and resource allocation.

He emphasizes the importance of market research, understanding ideal clients, and explores strategies for creating content that resonates with your audience.

In addition, he highlights the importance of focusing on one or two platforms for effective content delivery and highlights the significance of authenticity in engaging with your audience.

Podcast Link: Mission Matters Marketing with Adam Torres

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Transcription:

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Gresham Harkless Teaser 00:00 

So don't forget about like drilling down to the whole psychology of your avatar, of your target market, what's keeping them up at night, what transformation are you truly providing?

And the reason I bring that up is because the more information that you know about that, and you continue to learn that information, it's going to evolve and change.

Intro 00:18

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. And I wanted to share with you one of the episodes that I was a guest on for someone else's podcast.

I always talk about how important it is to build a media company. One of the next best things you can do is be on somebody else's media company.

So I had the pleasure of being a guest on this podcast and I want to share a little snippet with you because it would help support the 8 business pillars we've really been trying to focus on with a lot more of our content, a lot more of the solo episodes that I'm doing.

So make sure of course that you subscribe to our podcast, but of course you take some time out, check out the show notes to subscribe to the podcast that I've been featured on as well too.

And get to learn about some of those 8 business pillars and how you can continue to kind of leverage and build that up so you can go from builder to architect to a course at Rockstar and Luminary. So this is Gresh signing out. I hope you enjoyed this I AM CEO special episode.

Adam Torres 01:10 

What are some of the foundational elements or as you call them ingredients that every business should integrate the function effectively as a media company. And how do these components change the way that you approach marketing?

Gresham Harkless 01:24

Yeah, I think before I usually say you even get started, you start to pop in and look at the ingredients. The first thing I say you want to do is answer 3 questions.

These 3 questions are impactful because they do help you as the quote unquote ingredients evolve, they change, they add additional things into what they're doing.

And those 3 foundational questions, I should say, really revolve around your target market. Your target market can be the age, the location, if they have 2 and a half dogs or 4 and a half kids or whatever that might be, painting the picture of who that is that you're trying to target, but understand that you can drill down a lot more.

At the heart of what we try to do as quote-unquote entrepreneurs and business owners is to try to provide transformation and support and solve a problem for the audience and the avatar of the people that you're trying to serve.

So don't forget about like drilling down to the whole psychology of your avatar, of your target market, what's keeping them up at night, what transformation are you truly providing?

And the reason I bring that up is because the more information that you know about that and continue to learn that information, it's gonna evolve and change.

Especially if you have an ideal client that you're working with, and as you're working with 10, 15 years sometimes, if you're a financial planner, for example, their needs are going to evolve and change.

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So you wanna make sure that when you're creating media, creating content, you're using and leveraging the ingredients, you're really paying attention to that.

So that's why you wanna, of course, know that now as much as you can, but you wanna continue to know more and more about it because it can ultimately evolve and change.

The next question I would say, make sure you know ultimately what and how you define success.

If you're an e-commerce brand, you're gonna define success in a completely different way than if you have a home improvement company and you're trying to serve your local community.

So you might want people to continue to kind of come through your door virtually and buy your product or service and not necessarily have a conversation with you. Or you might have a chat bot or something like that where you're answering all those questions, that may not work for your local home improvement contractor.

That may not work for your local plumber where they have an emergency and they want to talk to somebody immediately.

So understanding like how you define success, what that looks like is going to evolve depending on how you structure your business, what you want to do, and ultimately what that looks like.

So make sure that you understand and are clear about how exactly you define that success. And then one of the other really big impactful things you want to know is the resources.

And so many times resources people flock to what's my budget, how much money am I spending and so on and so forth.

But also don't forget about how important time is. Time could be your most valuable resource.

So I use a time and money, and depending on where you are in the journey, you might be in more startup mode where you're doing more, you're using more quote unquote sweat equity to be able to get things going versus later on in the business.

So I think those 3 foundational questions are huge because even that question, as you answer it, as you start to get clients and customers, you might have more within your budget so you are able to hire an expert.

So it might determine what ingredients you end up choosing for that. So I think those are really impactful questions to ask and answer and to continue to kind of check it on.

Adam Torres 04:49 

So what are some of the, are there some tools or some ways that we can uncover those 3 questions to help us with research? I mean, it's a lot easier to find out information about everyone. Privacy is out the window these days.

But there are some really great tools and strategies that you can use to mine that information to inform your decisions. What are some of those?

Gresham Harkless 05:14 

Yeah, absolutely. And I often say, even on my show, I say, don't forget about the human part of business and the human part of life at that.

I think you made such a powerful point where sometimes we're looking for who's our ideal client or customer. Who do we want to work with? And if you have had that ideal client or customer, maybe you start there.

Maybe you start to mine the information and start to survey for lack of a better term and do research into understanding your ideal clients and who they are that you've already been working with because you may start to create that avatar specifically for the clients you worked with.

But I say, even if you're just getting started and you don't have a client, you don't have an idea of who exactly that is, maybe you have an idea of who you worked with well in the past or who you would want to work well with in the past.

I think one of the things about the journey that you go on for entrepreneurship and definitely in marketing is you start to refine exactly who you want to work with.

And it sometimes, unfortunately, happens by trial and error where you make those mistakes and you're like, I shouldn't have worked with that person. And sometimes you might've already known that, but you continue to refine that.

So you know exactly, you know what and who that work, who that looks like, but don't neglect the opportunity to be able to send out surveys to send out, get a net performance promoter score for your ideal clients and customers that you're working with or potentially want to work with.

Because the more information you have, the more information it's going to help out. But that market research is such a huge thing that you want to make sure you leverage.

But I think it becomes really difficult depending on where you are on the stage because when you say yes to something, you're automatically saying no to something else, as you said so well.

So you want to make sure that you are having your ideal clients and customers coming through as much as possible.

So you want to drill down and learn as much as you can about who they are, what makes them tick, what might be keeping them up at night so that you can ultimately provide those services for them.

Adam Torres 07:15 

Right. And that leads me to the idea of content. So if you're going to create content, we talked about that. You had an ideal at 10, you had an idea, you had the ideal audience.

In fact, you knew everything about them because you were part of that family. And sometimes you are your ideal client, which is really, really handy.

But you are creating content that aligns well with what their interests were. So can you talk about some of the strategies that you would use for content creation that would help you stay in your lane and attract those ideal clients?

Gresham Harkless 07:51

Yeah, a lot of what you do kind of goes back to those 3 questions. So you've answered those questions.

And anytime I say you're trying to determine what platforms, what content you're trying to create.

Make sure you're going back to those 3 questions because you're always gonna be able to test and experiment with different options, but you wanna be really dialed in with your ideal client and customer.

If you know this keeps them up at night, then you know that providing a solution to that, even just in your content, it's going to help make their lives better.

So you want to make sure you gear on that. A lot of times I compare building your media company to figuring out whatever your favorite dish is.

And I always go to my mom's sweet potato pie, because it's one of my absolute favorites, but there's chocolate cake, there's pineapple cake, there's so many different things.

So kind of just envision what that is and what that looks like. And you go to the grocery store and you figure out what ingredients are going to help you to build that ultimate dessert that you want to have.

That's the way that you want to approach your marketing. You, when you want to approach your content you're thinking of, okay, everybody's listening to the same station, which is what's in it for me WI-FM.

So you want to make sure that you're coming into their lives so that you can provide value for them.

And the reason that you want to kind of go to the grocery store and get those ingredients and look at what they are.

And by ingredients, I mean, literally the platforms that you're using, to be able to get that content out there.

That there's pros and cons of each. Like we were just talking about if you're going to use a platform like TikTok, like as we're talking now, that may be a little bit more kind of risky to use versus using YouTube or using or optimizing your website with Google.

So you want to kind of understand like what all the ingredients are. And then you wanna kind of start to say, okay, I know this platform. I know it is its own kind of language.

So this is how I'm gonna communicate on that platform. But you never ever wanna lose sight of why you're doing that, which is to provide value for your ideal clients and customers.

So as you start to develop that content strategy and what that looks like, make sure that you're keeping top of mind exactly like what it is that is going to improve their lives.

For me at 10, it was like, how can I get the juiciest information about what's going on in the family so that I can get more subscriptions? So you want to approach it in the exact same way.

Adam Torres 10:09

Yeah. And you had me at pie. When you said sweet potato pie, I was going, huh? Yeah. So, I think another thing that I like to know a little bit more about is that when you create content.

You need to create it for people who are ready to buy, who don't even know you yet, and who are maybe deciding, or they might not even know that they have a problem yet.

And they might have sort of been searching out there. So you have to have a kind of a wide net.

And with all the options that are available, and you mentioned knowing the platform, isn't it smart to know to stick with one platform and get something that works and then expand from there with that content?

Gresham Harkless 10:56 

Yeah, absolutely. I'm gonna continue with the pie analogy since you loved it. And I think if you're making sweet potato pie, I always say, you don't want to go to the grocery store and get ketchup at that time. At least not for that specific dish. I don't want ketchup in my sweet potato pie.

I don't know about you, but that's not necessarily going to be good for me. So I think it's so important to kind of have that understanding of what exactly you're trying to create because you are going to pick one, maybe 2 other platforms to own deeply, to know deeply and to make sure that you're always abreast of those changes, those opportunities.

And I feel like that's even the case if you do decide to hire an outside consultant or an agency or whatever that looks like, because it's going to give you that opportunity to go a little bit deeper, to make a little bit more of a transformation.

And as noisy as these platforms are, as noisy as it is in the world. To go further, a lot of times you go that extra mile and going that extra mile means you're not focusing on all the things, you're focusing on that one thing because you know it's gonna provide that transformation and opportunity for your clients and customers.

The reason I usually say 2 max 3 is because you never ever want to stop experimenting. Just because, just I'll go back to the catch up analogy, just because I say that I don't want to catch up.

It doesn't mean that there might be some type of catch up that might work well in that pie. So all that means is that, hey, this is a platform that your idea clients are not on, they're not using, but it doesn't mean that they won't be using it in a year.

It doesn't mean they won't be using it in 5 years. So as you start to kind of spend time there, you start to know it, experiment a little bit, not spend all your time, but some of your time.

You can be what they a lot of times call on social media platforms, first movers. And there's a lot of advantage to being the first mover on certain platforms because there's people that were on platforms like Vine that are still enjoying the fruits of those platforms.

Because they move first and they move to other platforms first and they built that community and that connection over time. So, don't hesitate or be a resistance to experimenting as well too.

Adam Torres 13:01

Yeah, and TikTok is one of those platforms that's really very popular with younger people. And I just had a guest on earlier that he's 51 and people were, the younger people who follow him and the companies that he is speaking with and teaching, they are saying, hey, you need to be on this platform.

And finally, after about a year and a half, he finally is out there and sharing content. And it's working. So that's important. Now, you mentioned the sweet potato pie. Let's go back to that.

When you're creating a sweet potato pie, I believe that the more fresh and authentic and maybe organic even clean foods that you use in that recipe make it so much better.

And so how is authenticity and transparency, is that important in your content creation these days or are we trying to trick our audience into becoming clients?

Gresham Harkless 14:05

No, and I think that you're right on. I love that. You know, I agree with you 110,000% that the more fresh and kind of you that you are within your content, the more you're going to be able to resonate with people.

And that's why I said, you never want to forget about the part that you're kind of just transferring content and information to somebody.

Ultimately, these all are conversational tools, the way that you can help to get that media out there, talk about what it is that you do.

So I feel like another great way, like you said, to know the platform is a really great opportunity, but to be yourself, I often say if you run your own race, you can't lose.

And that means you have to know what your race is. You have to know what is your secret sauce, what sets you apart, what is your superpower.

And the more you show up is that the less likely people are to try to emulate. They might try to, but they are not going to do it successfully because they're not yourself.

And I think that it wasn't so much the case, you know, in years prior, but it's becoming more and more evident where people are craving this opportunity for that human connection.

They're craving the content that can actually help them on a day-to-day basis. They want to know somebody, they want to know they're not the only person that's going through this issue or this problem.

So the more that we share that, the more that we share our journey and what that looks like, the opportunity for connection is going to be tremendous.

But I think you have to really do that from an authentic standpoint, because in this day and age, it's getting harder and harder to quote unquote, hide behind, facades or hide behind things that aren't real.

And people will find you out as we see that sometimes online, that authenticity is going to be such a huge thing.

And, it always goes back to the quote, it's like, be yourself because everybody else has already taken. So why not do that? Because everybody wants you to be who you are.

Adam Torres 15:50

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's super important. And after the, after the pandemic, when we started, we went to the remote work and, and having conversations like we're having, it's so much easier to connect with people.

And it's, and you, I might have a background behind me and so do you, but everything, the way we talk, the way we stutter, or we're not perfect.

And I think people, that curtain has been pulled back and I think people do crave it and they really do wanna have a human connection.

Outro 16:24

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh again and I hope you enjoyed that special episode of the I AM CEO Podcast. Just Like I mentioned in the beginning, we're really trying to laser focus on these 8 pillars and show you as a builder how you can leverage these 8 pillars and really level up there so it helps to level up your business and organization.

So hope you enjoyed this episode and definitely please check out the show notes so you can learn more about the pillar, learn more about the person that I guested on, their episode, and of course learn more, a little bit more about us as well too. This is Gresh signing out. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.<

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