I Lost Every Client Overnight. Here Is What I Did Next. With Liz Slade

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Welcome to the Visual Marketing Podcast brought to you by CI Marketing, where we explore how to show up consistently, be more visible, and connect with the right people through your marketing.
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I'm your host, Liz.
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Hi everyone.
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Today I'm going to be talking about how you can reinvent or rebuild your business if you need to, whether that's been a crisis, whether they're something that has changed internally with your business or externally or something personally, or you're just wanting to go in a new direction.
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I have got a few tips from doing it myself a couple of times now.
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And also just talking about the experience that I have had over the last 15 years of owning my own businesses.
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And I want to share that with you today.
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So I hope this is going to be super helpful.
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And please do reach out if you have any questions at all.
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In the show notes, you will find all of my details.
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So please feel free to get in touch.
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I would just love to chat with people.
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When I started CI marketing, it was 2011, and Christchurch in Canterbury were recovering from having incredibly devastating earthquakes.
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We'd had a couple of really big earthquakes, one out in the rural area of Canterbury, which was a really large earthquake and caused a huge amount of damage to the economy and obviously to property.
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And then we also had another earthquake several months later, which was actually centered in Christchurch City itself.
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And unfortunately, that resulted in a huge amount of devastation, including not only the loss of property and buildings, but also the loss of a huge number of lives in our city.
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It was a very, very tough time for Christchurch in Canterbury.
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And I was working in the area of tourism at the time, which was my absolute passion.
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I studied it at university, I went to Lincoln University, I did a degree in tourism management and I majored in marketing.
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And I was in my total dream job.
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I was promoting Christchurch in Canterbury as a location for business tourism.
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I had been in the role for a whole five weeks.
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And unfortunately, that's when the earthquake hit.
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And obviously, um not a lot of tourism going on in Christchurch at that moment.
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So I unfortunately lost my job, understandably, and was in a position where a bit of a long story short, I ended up starting CI marketing.
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And some people thought I was absolutely mad starting a business specializing in tourism marketing when the area that I lived in was totally devastated.
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But I actually found a niche in an area where people really needed help.
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And I thought I had the help that they needed.
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And it worked.
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And I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how that worked and what I did.
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So I found myself in a position out in the rural area of Canterbury working for a district council who were wanting some help, some consultancy help, specifically in the area of tourism marketing, on how to promote their area to both domestic and international tourists.
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And obviously, um we were having a lot of issues with getting international tourists to actually visit Christchurch.
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But it did present an opportunity for areas outside of Christchurch to be able to uh utilize that that chance of people still wanting to pass through the South Island and and head down to Queenstown and needing to fly into an international airport such as Christchurch, but not wanting to go into the city.
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So I was able to build a strategy and give them marketing tools on how they could promote to international tourists and domestic tourists visiting the South Island and not wanting to head into the city, but still wanting to pass through the area as they headed down south or or up north, as we're located in the central South Island.
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From that role, I saw that there was an opportunity for me to take those skills that I had in helping businesses or organizations who were in a situation where things were a little bit tricky, but there was a way, that I could then take that and build that into a business that could help others.
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And so CI marketing was born from that essentially.
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And then Emily came on board with me.
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She still works alongside me today, and we have been working together for 15 years, which is absolutely fantastic, and I'm so grateful to have her on our team.
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And together we helped create the basis of what CI marketing is.
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Building a business right in the midst of a crisis was certainly no main feat.
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I'd never run a business before.
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I had no idea what I was doing, but I made it work.
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I took everything that I knew about marketing as well as practical common sense and turned that into something that became really exciting and really successful.
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And we became really well known as tourism marketers, especially in Canterbury and actually even New Zealand wide.
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And as that time went on, we reinvented little bits and pieces here and there.
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You have to keep looking at your offer, looking at the way, looking at your visibility, looking at the way you serve your customers, um, what they need from you.
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And we would tweak things as we went along.
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But when COVID hit in 2020, that is when reinvention went to a whole new level.
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At that moment, in New Zealand, the country was shut down.
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There were no tourists coming in or out, and there was no movement around the country either.
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So domestic tourism was gone, and international tourism was most definitely gone for the unforeseeable future.
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I stupidly had put all of our eggs in one basket.
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We were almost entirely based off a tourism marketing model.
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So all of our clients were tourism or tourism connected or tourism related.
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There was no way any of us had ever thought that this would happen.
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Obviously, nobody thought that this would happen.
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And it was quite a shock to the system.
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Now, by now in 2020, we have staff, not just myself and Emily, we have other staff as well.
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And we're in an office in Christchurch, so suddenly we're all having to work from home, and all of our customers had disappeared overnight.
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At that point, it would have been really easy for me to just shut down the business and just say, you know what, guys, we can't do this.
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It's impossible.
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I don't have customers, we don't have any money coming in, we don't have any services we can sell because we've got no one to sell to, and I can't pay you.
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But that's not who I am, and it is absolutely not what I wanted to do.
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If anybody knows me well, or if not, if you're learning who I am, I love a challenge.
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I'm an only child and put a challenge in front of me.
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I will absolutely do everything I possibly can to conquer that challenge, and that's exactly what I did.
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So reinvention version two started again for CI marketing.
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During this time, we weren't the only business who was struggling.
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Obviously, this was a worldwide pandemic, but especially in New Zealand, we certainly saw a huge number of businesses who really struggled, and a lot of them didn't make it either.
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Where businesses get it wrong is that when times get tough, they start to disappear.
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Visibility feels like an unobtainable luxury.
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But that's actually the time where you need to show up more than you ever have before.
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Because silence feels like absence.
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And absence feels like you're not trustworthy.
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And those customers that may be on the fence thinking about working with you, they're going to look at the people who are showing up.
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And that could be your competition.
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And they're probably going to quietly just disappear over to them.
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And that is not what you want.
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So keep listening.
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I'm about to share with you three tips of how you can keep your visibility, show up, and hopefully keep those customers.
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Tip number one is visibility over volume.
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When you can't afford to do everything, or maybe you don't have the time to do everything, do less, but do it consistently.
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A business who posts three times a week for say six months is always going to outperform a business who posts every single day for three weeks.
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If you struggle with keeping up with posting, I highly recommend looking into using some kind of scheduling software.
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Now you've got options with Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram.
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You can actually use their free inbuilt scheduler.
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That's super easy.
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Or if you want to use something that goes across multiple different platforms that are not just Meta, you can look at other scheduling software that's like an external company.
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Here at Cigar Marketing, we actually use Metrical, but there are plenty of different options out there.
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I would highly recommend looking into what's the best for you and what's the best for your budget.
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For us, metrical works really well.
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Our whole team can use it, we can schedule draft posts, we can go and check it, then someone else can pop in and put the imagery with it or the visual with it.
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We can move the posts around to suit our schedule if something else changes that we need to post.
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So there's lots of options there, and it keeps us up to date and keeps us regular with what we're posting as well.
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And my second tip is talk to your existing customers before you start going to chase some new ones.
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Your existing customers know more about you than you realize.
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They have worked with you for a period of time, and the reason that they maybe don't use you before.
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My second tip is talk to your existing customers or your previous customers, even.
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They know more about you than you realize, and it may be that you can just pull out a little bit of information from just a simple conversation.
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So either write a personalized email to each one completely individually, do not send a bulk email.
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Nobody will read that, and it just makes them feel so unloved.
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Send them a personalized email reaching out.
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If you've got specific questions you'd like to know from them, like, hey, how's your business going?
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Is there anything else we can help with?
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Is there maybe a different way that you can tweak your offer for them?
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Is did their offer change and what you were doing for them didn't fit anymore?
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Maybe their budget changed.
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And I'm not saying change your budget or change what you charge for things, but understanding the reason why maybe they don't work with you anymore, or maybe why you can't push them to use you more than they already do, that's going to give you so much amazing data for you to then put into a sales pitch to take to other customers in the future.
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The other way you can do it, of course, is pick up the phone.
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And I think a lot of people really miss that opportunity these days.
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I think they really hide behind written word, and there is really something to say for an old-fashioned phone call.
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Now I'm not saying pick up the phone and do a sales pitch.
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I don't think that's the right way to do it.
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I actually think genuinely caring about people is such a big deal.
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Picking up the phone and really caring about people and having a genuine personalized conversation with them goes such a long way to building relationships with your customers.
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So give them a call, ask them how they're doing.
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Actually care about it.
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Ask them about their staff, about their kids, about their mother, about what's going well for them in their business, about what isn't going so well for them in their business.
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That information is not only actually a really lovely thing for you to be involved with with your customers, but also it does help you in understanding them better, understanding the types of people that you could be working with in the future as well.
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And another option you can do to really just keep top of mind with people is send them a wee gift.
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So something we do here, at actually both of my businesses, is we send people Christmas gifts, and depending on the business, we either personalize it to the actual customer, so we'll put together something that's very specific to them.
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If they have staff, we'll make sure it's something that they can share amongst the office.
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Or uh for our my other business, the um lift component business, um, we do something that is very targeted to the types of people that it's being sent to.
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And honestly, the amount of feedback we get from people is incredible.
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It actually blows us away every single year.
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And to the to this point, like even to this day, people will actually phone us or email us months later, even years later, and say, Hey, do you have any more of those cooler bags?
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Because like we've used it so many times and you know, we've worn it out, or or my daughter, you know, she took it and she hasn't bought it back, and I really would love another one.
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Or um, you know, whatever it is that you've given them.
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People absolutely remember the gifts that you've given them if it's memorable and if it's been targeted to them.
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So that's another really cool thing that you can do for people.
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And my third tip about being visible in front of your customers is to show them a little bit of behind the scenes.
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People love to see the stuff that they think they're not meant to see.
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I bet you'd love to see behind the scenes of this right now.
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I can tell you right now, I'm sitting in a double garage in the bottom of our office.
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We have a two-story office.
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I converted this garage into a combination space.
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So I have this podcast studio set up, this set up specifically for my solo episodes, and also when I have a remote remote guest, and also for when I have a remote guest from not in Christchurch, whether they be around New Zealand or internationally.
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Behind me I have the in-house guest studio set up.
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So either somebody from our office who's joining me, or um, if we have somebody who is based in Christchurch and can come in and be recorded, they can go there.
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And then to my left, I have our studio portrait set up as well for um headshots.
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So we do corporate headshots for people.
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In amongst all of that, all around the outside, I also have a whole lot of cupboards built in, and that is for storage for the lift component business.
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I also have all of our cables, all of our camera gear, all of our lighting, all of our sound equipment, microphones.
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Um, and I built in my favourite part, which is my charging drawer.
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So I have this massive drawer, it's over a meter wide, it's probably a meter and a half wide, and I can pull it out, it has all of my charging units all in there, so I can pop all of our batteries on charge, all of our lights on charge, everything that I need, and everything's in the one place.
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Because we have multiple photographers and videographers on staff here and contractors as well, everybody knows where everything is when I keep it tidy, which is most of the time, although my staff may argue that.
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And so it's super handy to have all of that in one spot.
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So we really utilize that space.
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I bet you found that interesting.
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So why not tell that story about your business too?
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In fact, even better, why not show it?
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If you go ahead and take a photo or get someone to take a photo of you doing your job, it doesn't even have to be your face if you're nervous about that.
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It could be your hands doing something that you do, if you're a builder, for example.
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It could be um over the shoulder from behind you.
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It could be even driving your car.
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Now I'm not saying use your phone when you're driving your car, but hey, hands free or have a passenger.
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Think outside the square.
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Think about the other sort of things you could do.
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Set it up on if you don't have a tripod, set your phone up, you know, against some bricks on site, or if you're a hairdresser, you know, have it propped up on a shelf somewhere if you've got a store, put it in a corner on a shelf, uh, on some stock, whatever you have to do just to keep your phone steady, pop it onto a time-lapse mode, even, or pop it onto a video or a timer for your photos, and get some behind-the-scenes shots of what you do or what your staff do.
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People just absolutely love seeing that.
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So, your homework for this week is to go away and get yourself either a photo or a Wii video and post it onto at least one of your social media platforms.
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I don't care if you do this personally, put it on LinkedIn, or if you do it on your business page, on any of your platforms, give it a go.
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What have you got to lose?
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I want to tell you a really quick story.
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I've been doing a bit of testing with our social media lately, with my personal social media and with our CI marketing social media.
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We always test everything here before we roll it out to anybody else.
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And I thought I would do something I've never done before a couple of weeks ago.
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So I put out a picture of myself not looking the way I am.
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If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see the way I look right now.
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Um, if you're listening to it, I am in corporate clothes, I have my hair done, I have makeup on.
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I'm wearing lipstick.
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I I don't wear lipstick generally.
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I put up a picture of myself sitting at my desk upstairs in our building here.
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It was later at night, I was by myself, I was editing this very podcast.
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So in the background on my screen was an image that looks very much like what I'm recording right now.
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But I was in an old t-shirt, I didn't have shoes on, I was sitting at my desk, which has a cat bed on it.
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The cat wasn't there, but sometimes the cats are in our office.
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We do bring our animals in on occasion.
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I had curly, scruffy hair, I had absolutely zero makeup on, not even a drop of foundation.
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The lighting was atrocious.
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And I'm a photographer, and I don't like atrocious lighting.
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I took a gamble, I took a gamble, and I took a selfie.
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So you could see myself in my absolute raw form and in the background my screen of what I was editing.
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And I put that on LinkedIn.
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Here's what shocked me.
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That is one of the most successful posts I have ever done.
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So if I can do it, you can do it.
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When my business had to go through reinvention, absolutely no fault of my own, I was tempted to wait until I was ready, or until the business was polished and the brand was perfect and we were all sorted and ready to go.
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But I didn't, and that was the best decision I could have made.
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Because turning up, even if it's not perfect, even if it's messy, even if it's unpolished, is actually the very best thing you can do to be visible in front of your customers and your potential customers.
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So my top tip for you is just get out there.
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Push through how hard it feels right now, whether you're reinventing completely because you have to, or whether you've decided to take a sidestep and change what you do, change your offer, change who you market to.
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Just get out there and put yourself out there.
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Because if you're not out there, no one can find you.
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But if you are, you've got absolutely nothing to lose.
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Visibility isn't something you earn when things are going well.
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It's something that you should be practicing all of the time, even when things aren't going well.
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So when those things do happen, your audience can still find you.
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Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about anything in this podcast or any of our other episodes, or if there's something you'd like us to talk about on future episodes too.
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I will put all of my contact details in the show notes.
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Feel free to go and check out that LinkedIn post and see how it performed.
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You are more than welcome to connect with me.
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I would love to connect with you.
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Thanks again for listening.
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See you next time.
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Thanks so much for joining the Visual Marketing podcast brought to you by CI Marketing.
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I'm your host, Liz, and I can't wait to share more episodes with you.